That night, I could not sleep.
I lay in my bed in the dark apartment, the ceiling above me a pale, featureless grey in the absence of light, and I stared at it for a long time. Somewhere in the city outside, a dog was barking , one of those long, desolate, middle-of-the-night barks that sounds less like alarm and more like grief. Like an animal calling out to something that cannot answer. I listened to it for a while, and then it stopped, and the silence that replaced it felt somehow worse.
I kept seeing the photograph.
Not the edited one, the one Mira had made deliberately, her face mapped over the mummy's features in a display of cheerful irreverence. I had made a kind of uneasy peace with that image, filed it under Mira being Mira, her particular brand of fearless, thoughtless boldness.
No.
It was the other one that stayed with me.
The original selfie. Mira in the foreground, bright-eyed and smiling, her blue shirt catching the dim light of the room. And behind her, in the coffin on the ancient black stone table, the mummified body of a woman one thousand years dead, her desiccated lips curved upward at the corners, her sunken face arranged into an expression that no decay, no settling of tissue, no trick of camera flash could have produced.
A smile.
A deliberate, specific, intentional smile.
I told myself, not for the first time since we had left the museum, that it was the light. The shadows in that room had been unstable, shifting, old light fixtures on old wiring, nothing more. I told myself that the human brain is exceptionally good at finding faces, finding expressions, finding the architecture of emotion in surfaces where none exists. Clouds. Wood grain. The patterns of damp on an old wall. A thousand-year-old mummified face in a poorly lit museum room.
I told myself all of this, lying in the dark, listening to the silence the dog had left behind.
And then I turned onto my side, away from the ceiling, and tried to sleep.
I don't think I managed it until well past three in the morning. And when I did, I dreamed of a woman with pale yellow skin and no expression standing in the doorway of a room I did not recognise, watching me with flat, reddish eyes.
When I woke, I could not remember her face.
But I remembered her smile.
*******************************************************
Monday arrived with the ordinary, slightly aggressive cheerfulness that Mondays always have. Bright morning light, the smell of tea from the kitchen, my mother's voice from the other room reminding me not to forget my water bottle. The world carried on, indifferent to what I had seen or imagined or dreamed.
I got dressed, ate breakfast with my parents, without much appetite, gathered my college bag, and left.
The morning commute was its usual self, crowded and warm and full of the particular noise of a city waking up. By the time I reached the college gate, I had almost managed to settle the residue of the previous evening into the back of my mind, into the place where uncomfortable things go to be quietly ignored.
And then I saw Mira.
She was waiting at the college gate, standing with her bag over one shoulder, her face turned in the direction I always came from. The moment she spotted me, her arm shot up in a wave.
"Kiara! Hey!"
She was luminous. That is the only word for it. She was wearing a white blouse and a red pleated skirt. The clothes hugged her slim, curvy figure gracefully. Her hair loose, her eyes lit from within with a brightness I hadn't seen in her face in a while, not the ordinary brightness of a good mood, but something amplified, something almost feverish in its intensity. She looked like someone who had received extraordinary news and was barely containing the need to share it.
It was, I thought, the happiness of someone whose social media post had done unexpectedly, thrillingly well overnight.
"Good morning, Mira," I said, smiling despite myself. Her energy was always contagious.
She fell into step beside me immediately, already buzzing.
"Guess what happened with me?"
"What?"
"Come. Let's get to our seats first. I want to show you on my phone."
We moved through the college gate and into the campus, which was already alive with the comfortable Monday morning chaos. Groups of students clustered near the steps and along the wide corridor, chatting, comparing assignments, laughing at things from over the weekend. Teachers moved through the crowds with the purposeful air of people who had done this a thousand times. The smell of chalk dust and canteen food drifted from different directions.
Our classroom was buzzing when we arrived, a good half hour before lectures were set to begin. Several of our classmates had settled in, and the noise of their conversations filled the room in overlapping, cheerful waves.
We slid into our usual seats, second row from the back, left side, the seats we had claimed without discussion in the first week of first year and never relinquished.
Mira dropped her bag, pulled out her phone, and turned the screen toward me with the unrestrained pride of someone presenting something magnificent.
Her Instagram account was open.
The photograph filled the screen. The edited one, her face transformed into the pale, hollowed, mummified image of the woman in the coffin. The photo she had taken with obvious delight and posted before we had even left the museum's neighbourhood.
I looked at the numbers beside it.
Thirty thousand followers. In one day. The likes alone numbered in the thousands. And the views—
"See?" Mira said, her voice rich with satisfaction. "Thirty thousand followers. In one day, Kiara. One."
I stared at the screen. "That's... a lot," I said carefully.
"Isn't it incredible?" She scrolled upward with her thumb, showing me the exponential curve of the numbers. "I posted it yesterday afternoon and by the time I went to sleep last night, it was already at twenty-two thousand. I woke up this morning and it had crossed thirty."
I said nothing. I was watching the photograph as she held the phone, the edited image of her face. Her living, laughing face, mapped over the features of something dead. Even reduced to a small screen, viewed in the ordinary brightness of a Monday morning classroom, something about the image made the air in my chest feel dense.
"Look at the comments too," she said, and scrolled down.
The comments section was enormous. Ffteen thousand and climbing, the numbers still incrementing visibly as new ones arrived. I scanned them. Most were compliments: incredible editing, how did you do this, this is so creative, you're beautiful, this is haunting and gorgeous. Some were questions about the location, the app she had used. Some were simply the language of social media appreciation: strings of fire emojis, heart emojis, the particular vocabulary of an online audience reacting to something that had caught their attention.
I was skimming through them when Mira's thumb stopped scrolling.
"Wait," she said, not quite to me.
I looked at the comment she had paused on.
The account name was printed in small grey letters above the comment text: L'esprit_d'un_mort.
I stared at it. The name was in French. My French was not fluent, barely school-level, but I knew enough. L'esprit. The spirit. D'un mort. Of a dead person. The account's name, translated simply and without drama, was: The spirit of a dead person.
The comment itself was written in red.
Not the ordinary black or dark grey of a standard comment. Red. The specific, dark, arterial red of the warning sign in front of the museum room, the sign in blood-coloured ink that said,
DO NOT ENTER AFTER 5 PM.
The comment read:
Taking pictures with the dead means inviting bad omen. You should delete the picture.
I read it twice. The words were not threatening on their face. They were almost gentle. A warning, simply stated. And yet something about the combination of elements, the French account name, the red letters, the precise, knowing reference to what Mira had done, made the warmth go out of the classroom around me, made the chatter of our classmates feel very far away.
Mira, beside me, laughed.
"See?" she said, her tone amused, indulgent. "There's someone else out there who believes in the bad omen and death stuff. Like you. How silly." She shook her head, still smiling. "And what a completely bizarre account name. Let me see who this person actually is."
She tapped the account name.
The screen changed. For a brief moment, it loaded. The small circular loading symbol, the brief pause of a page about to appear. And then:
A blank white page.
A single line of text in the centre:
This account is no longer available.
Mira blinked at the screen.
The smile on her face didn't disappear entirely, but it shifted. It became slightly uncertain, the way a smile does when something small and inexplicable briefly interrupts the brain's interpretation of events.
"Strange," she said, still looking at the blank page.
The classroom around us chattered on. Someone two rows behind us was laughing loudly at something. Outside the window, I could hear the distant call of a college announcement over the PA system.
And then Mira burst out laughing. Fully, freely, her head tilting back, her shoulders shaking with it.
"Hahahaha! Someone made a fake account just to comment on my photo and then deleted it! What kind of prank is that? That's terrible!" She wiped the corner of her eye. "Imagine having so much free time."
I did not laugh.
I was looking at my own hands, resting flat on the desk in front of me, and I became aware that they were very slightly cold. Not the cold of a chilly morning, but the cold of something internal, something that had drained from the surface inward.
"Mira," I said, and I placed my hand on her shoulder, gently, carefully, the way you place your hand on something fragile. "Please delete the post. And the photos. All of them."
She turned to look at me. The laughter faded from her face.
"I'm serious," I continued, keeping my voice low. "I have a bad feeling about this. I've had it since yesterday. Since the room, since the guard who disappeared, since the..."
"Kiara." Her voice had changed. The warmth had not left it, exactly, but something had entered alongside it. A sharpness, a hardening.
"Please," I said. "Just delete...."
"Absolutely not."
The words landed flat and final.
And then she said the other thing.
Her voice dropped. Not dramatically, not loudly. It dropped into something quieter and more cutting, a tone I had never heard from her before, a tone that did not belong in the register of our friendship. Like finding a stone inside something soft.
"Besides," she said, and her eyes met mine with a directness that felt almost clinical, "you're jealous. That's what this is. You're jealous of the attention the photo is getting, and you're dressing it up as concern."
The classroom around me continued to exist. The chatter, the laughter, the scraping of chair legs. But it felt suddenly very distant, as though it was happening behind thick glass.
I looked at Mira's face. I looked for the flicker of uncertainty, the sign that she knew she had gone too far, the small wince that friends give when they've said something they immediately regret. It was not there. Her expression was calm. Closed.
Jealous.
The word sat inside my chest, small and sharp and very cold.
She knew me. She had known me for three years. She knew how little I cared about social media, how infrequently I even opened Instagram, how the entire architecture of followers and likes and reach existed in a dimension I barely registered. She knew that. She knew I was not, had never been, that kind of person.
And yet she had looked at me and said it. Plainly. Without hesitation.
I removed my hand from her shoulder.
I said nothing.
There are moments in friendships when the wrong response to silence is to fill it. This was one of those moments, and I knew it, and so I sat with the silence and let it be what it was. The rest of the morning passed around us. Our professor arrived, the room settled, lectures began, pages turned. Mira sat directly beside me, as she always had, in the seat she had always occupied.
But she did not speak to me.
She did not look at me.
Not once, across the full length of the morning. Not when our professor asked a question that I answered and she would usually have caught my eye to make a face. Not during the break between the second and third periods, when we would normally have gone together to buy pepsi from the canteen. She went alone. Or didn't go at all. I didn't track her movements. I sat in my seat and looked at my notebook and felt the particular, specific ache of a friendship being held at arm's length.
I don't try to speak to her either. The fault was entirely hers. I was only concerned and what i only did was to care. But she accused me of being jealous right on my face. So why would I care to even try to talk to her? But to be honest.... Her silence hurt more than her cold accusation.
By the afternoon, when the last lecture ended and the classroom emptied in the usual tide of gathered bags and pushed-back chairs, Mira simply left. She gathered her things without looking in my direction, slipped the strap of her bag over her shoulder, and walked out of the room and down the corridor and out of the college building.
No goodbye.
I stood at the classroom door and watched the corridor she had disappeared down, and I felt a slow, heavy feeling settle into the space below my ribs. Not quite sadness. Something adjacent to it. Something more solitary.
I was aware, in a way that I almost never allowed myself to be aware, of how very alone I was in this place. In this college. In this particular chapter of my life. Mira had never been loud about being my only friend here. She had simply been present, reliably, consistently present, and I had allowed myself to stop noticing the absence of everyone else because she was enough. She had always been enough.
Without her talking to me, without even that single thread, the campus felt very large and very indifferent.
I felt alone. Very alone.
But I could do nothing about it. So with the feeling of deep uncertainty and loneliness in my heart, I went home.
*******************************************************
Tuesday arrived.
I walked to the college gate in the early morning with the specific emotional wariness of someone who doesn't know what version of a situation they are going to encounter. The conversation from Monday sat in my chest like a stone I was trying to carry naturally, without letting it show.
I rounded the corner of the main road and saw the college gate.
Mira was standing at it.
She was facing in my direction, and the moment she saw me, her face broke into a smile. Bright, easy, immediate. Her arm went up.
"Kiara! Good morning!"
I slowed for just a moment, almost involuntarily. Then I kept walking.
"Good morning," I said, reaching her.
She fell into step beside me as naturally as breathing, as she had done every morning for three years, swinging her bag strap over one shoulder and launching immediately into conversation, something about a film she had been watching the previous evening, something funny that had happened on her commute, a question about whether I had done the reading for our first lecture.
I answered. I walked. I matched her rhythm.
And I waited.
I waited for the small, slightly awkward moment that would come. The brief pause, the sidelong glance, the words that would acknowledge what had happened on Monday, however obliquely. Sorry I was short with you. Or even just, hey, sorry about yesterday. The minimal, lowest-effort version of an apology that would at least confirm she understood that something had needed repairing.
It didn't come.
We reached our classroom. We sat in our usual seats. Our classmates arrived, the room filled, the first lecture began. During the break, Mira nudged me with her elbow and showed me something mildly funny on her phone and laughed, and I laughed too, and it looked, from the outside, exactly like it always looked.
But I was listening for it. Underneath the conversation. In the pauses between sentences. The acknowledgement.
It didn't come in the morning. It didn't come during lunch, when we sat together in the canteen and she talked about an upcoming college event. It didn't come during the afternoon, in the spaces between lectures, or on the walk back toward the gate at the end of the day.
By three o'clock I had stopped waiting for the apology and had started paying attention to something else.
Something more troubling.
It was not that Mira was pretending nothing had happened. That was what I had initially assumed, that she was performing normalcy, the way people sometimes do after an argument when they want to move forward without the vulnerability of a formal reconciliation. I knew that pattern. I had seen it before. The studied casualness, the slight overcompensation in cheerfulness, the invisible seam where something had been stitched back together.
This was different.
There was no seam.
I became certain of it gradually, across the small evidence of the day. She mentioned her Instagram twice in conversation. Both times she referenced the number of followers the photo had gotten, with exactly the same slightly breathless pride as she had shown me on Monday morning, as though sharing the information for the first time. She laughed about the viral spread in the exact same register, with the exact same specific words she had used the day before. When I listened carefully, it was not the tone of someone revisiting a topic. It was the tone of someone encountering it fresh.
I steered the conversation, carefully, toward Monday afternoon. I said something vague about the college gate, about waiting for her. She responded naturally, without any flicker of unusual feeling, and I realised she was talking about Tuesday morning.
She thought I meant today.
I tried again, more directly. "Did you see anything strange in your Instagram comments yesterday?" I asked.
She looked at me with an open, curious expression, the expression of someone encountering a question with no emotional charge attached to it. "Strange like what?"
"A comment," I said. "From an account with a French name. The letters were red."
She thought about it. Genuinely thought about it, the thinking of someone searching their actual memory and not finding the thing I was describing.
"No," she said, slowly. "I don't think so. Why?"
I looked at her face for a long time.
"Nothing," I said. "Never mind."
She had forgotten Monday. Not pushed it aside, not chosen not to address it. she had forgotten it. The argument. The comment from l'esprit_d'un_mort and the blank page it had opened to. The sharp, cold thing she had said to me. The way she had left without saying goodbye.
Gone. All of it, entirely and cleanly gone, as though it had never occurred.
As though a single day had been quietly removed from the sequence of her memory, the way a page can be removed from a book, and if it is done carefully enough, if the binding is not disturbed, you might turn through the book for a long time before you noticed that something was missing.
I sat in the late afternoon classroom, the sounds of the campus fading as the last students filtered out, and I felt the realisation settle through me. Not dramatically. Not all at once. The way cold settles when evening comes, gradually, inescapably, until you can no longer pretend it isn't there.
Something was wrong.
Not Instagram-comment wrong. Not mysterious-disappearing-guard wrong. Not the wrongness of a too-quiet museum room and a mummy's smile in a photograph.
This was different.
This was inside Mira.
And as I gathered my bag and walked out of the empty classroom into the corridor, into the cooling late afternoon, I knew, with a certainty that lived below reason, in the animal part of me that had been quietly trying to get my attention since the moment I first set foot in that dim room with the ancient black stone table, that what had started in the museum two days ago....
Had not finished.
......................