Arin was fifteen the first time he noticed the silence.
Not the ordinary kind, like when a room is empty or when the night grows still. No, this was the silence that follows you, the kind that waits for you to speak just so it can remember the sound of your voice.
The house was full—his parents in the kitchen, the faint hum of the television, the neighbor's dog barking somewhere outside—but beneath it all, that silence pressed against him. It wasn't absence. It was attention.
He told himself it was nothing. Just his imagination, just the stress of exams. And yet, when he opened his notebook that night, his handwriting had already filled three pages. He didn't remember writing any of it. Each sentence ended the same way:
"Don't tell them you've noticed."
The next morning, his mother smiled too quickly, as if rehearsed. His father asked questions but never waited for answers. And his best friend at school… his laugh was wrong. Too sharp. Like he'd practiced being human but hadn't quite mastered it.
Arin didn't say anything. He pretended, because the words in his notebook had told him to. But when he glanced at the window during class, he saw his own reflection staring back—except it wasn't copying him. It was waiting, pen in hand, writing something down.
That night, another page appeared in the notebook. Different ink. Same handwriting.
"Keep pretending. They're watching how long it takes you to break."
Arin closed the notebook, pressing his palm hard against the cover as if weight alone could stop the words from appearing again. He told himself it was a prank. That maybe he had written it half-asleep, maybe his memory was slipping. He told himself a lot of things that sounded convincing, until he looked too closely.
The pen marks weren't fresh, yet the ink was darker than it should have been. The letters weren't shaky or rushed, but deliberate—like someone had all the time in the world to write them.
The silence followed him into school. It wasn't loud, not enough to notice at first. But in the middle of class, when thirty voices buzzed around him, Arin realized none of them were saying anything real. His classmates spoke in fragments. Words that looped. Repeated phrases that should have been different.
"Homework was… homework was… homework was…""Did you see… did you see… did you see…"
He rubbed his ears, blinked hard, and suddenly the sentences smoothed out, as though nothing strange had happened. The girl next to him leaned over, smiled like nothing was wrong, and asked if he was okay.
Her smile didn't fade. Not even when the teacher called her name. Not even when she stopped breathing between words.
At lunch, he checked the notebook again. Another page. The words were too neat to be his, though the handwriting said otherwise.
"They don't notice themselves repeating. Only you do. That's why you're here."
He looked up quickly. The cafeteria was filled with sound—trays clattering, chatter, laughter. Normal. Too normal. And yet every person he glanced at froze for just a second, eyes flicking toward him before continuing what they were doing.
As though they'd been caught.
Arin shut the notebook and told himself not to look again. But the words on the last line had already burned into him.
"You've never met them before today. Not your parents. Not your friends. Not anyone."
And as he sat there, tray untouched, he realized he couldn't remember what his best friend's laugh used to sound like—before it went wrong.
That night, Arin lay in bed, staring at the ceiling. The notebook was closed on his desk, but he could feel it watching. Not physically—something heavier than sight, heavier than sound.
He thought he heard the pages turn. Softly. Slowly. Each turn like a heartbeat, dragging across the room.
He told himself it was the wind. That he was imagining it. That tomorrow would be normal.
But when he blinked, the words appeared on the wall.
"You can't unsee what you've already noticed."
And in the dark, Arin realized something terrifying.
It wasn't the world that was broken. It was him.