I never believed a person could disappear without leaving a single trace. Missing people always had clues: a fight, a message, a last-seen location—something. But when Aadhya went missing, everything about it felt wrong from the very first second.
She wasn't my best friend. She wasn't even someone I spoke to often. She was just the quiet girl in my class who hardly ever raised her hand, always sat in the last row, and kept her hair tied in a neat braid like she was trying to occupy as little space as possible.
But that morning, our classroom felt empty without her.
It started with the attendance.
Aadhya… absent.
No one reacted. Not even our class teacher. People were too busy laughing over reels or copying homework. But I noticed something strange—her bag wasn't there. Normally when someone skips class, some stuff remains behind: books, water bottles, something. But her desk was completely clean.
By lunch break, the rumour had spread across the school:
"Aadhya is missing."
Nobody knew if it was true, but someone said her parents had gone to the police station. Someone else said she ran away. Another person swore she saw a man speaking to her outside the school gate yesterday.
I didn't believe any of them.
That's when the second strange thing happened.
At 10:43 PM that night, while I was scrolling through WhatsApp instead of studying, I saw a notification:
Aadhya is online.
I froze.
I clicked on her profile. Her last seen changed. Then again.
She was online… offline… online… for almost thirty minutes.
But she wasn't replying to anyone. Not to her friends. Not to her parents. Not to the class group that was spamming her name.
Her DP was the same. Her status untouched.
But someone was using her phone.
Or pretending to.
I didn't know what to do, so I took a screenshot. A useless move, I know, but it made me feel like I had proof that something was happening. I kept watching her profile flicker green.
At 11:14 PM, her online status went off completely.
And that was it.
The next day at school, things got creepier. Our teacher officially confirmed she was missing. The police had already begun investigating.
But nobody believed me when I said her profile was active.
They told me it was a glitch.
A glitch doesn't come online for half an hour.
That's when I realised something that made my stomach twist:
The only way someone could be online from her account…
was if they had her phone.
And Aadhya never went anywhere without it.
For the first time in my life, I felt scared.
Not of ghosts.
Not of horror stories.
But of something real.
Someone had Aadhya's phone.
And that someone was online.
Watching us.