Again she stood there where she stood yesterday and she will until she finds him.
The school buzzed with chatter as the final bell rang, but Harper barely heard it. She stood outside Section C, watching the students spill out—none of them Jamie. Not a single face even looked like his.
He'd vanished.
She had asked around quietly during lunch, hoping someone might say, "Jamie? Yeah, he's in my class." Or even just give her a confused look and ask, "Who?" But there was nothing. Just blank expressions, pitying glances, and whispers behind her back like she was the new ghost story of Bellridge.
Even the roster outside section C had no "Jamie Lorne." His name had been scrubbed clean from every corner of the school.
But Harper remembered his voice. The way he said her name like it still mattered. The way he had remembered her when no one else did.
She wasn't letting him disappear. Not like this.
Harper's sneakers squeaked against the polished floor of the administration wing. She pushed open the door to the front dean office, smiling tightly at Mrs. Bellamy, the secretary.
"I was just wondering if I could see the student records," Harper said, faking nervousness. "I forgot someone's name from last year. They were in my class."
Mrs. Bellamy blinked. "Oh honey, students aren't allowed to-"
Harper leaned in. "It's really important. His name was Jamie. Jamie Lorne."
Mrs. Bellamy frowned. Her fingers hovered over the keyboard. "That doesn't sound familiar, dear. Are you sure he went here?"
Harper bit the inside of her cheek. "Yes. I sat next to him in Literature. He always had ink on his cuffs. He doodled when he was bored."
Mrs. Bellamy gave her a careful look. "You said his last name was Lorne?"
"Yes. L-O-R-N-E."
Mrs. Bellamy sighed, typing. "No record. I'm sorry."
Harper's hands balled into fists. "But he existed. I'm not making him up!"
The secretary blinked, slightly startled. "No one's accusing you of that, sweetheart. Maybe you're mixing him up with someone else from a different school?"
Harper forced herself to breathe. "Thanks anyway."
She walked out, eyes burning.
The bell tower struck five as Harper sat in the quad, notebook open in her lap, names scribbled and circled. She went through every person she knew last year who might've interacted with Jamie—library partners, project groups, even people he bumped into in the hallway.
She tried two classmates she vaguely remembered from Chemistry.
"Jamie?" one girl said, tilting her head. "Sorry, I think you've got the wrong school."
Another guy just laughed. "You're weird."
It was like he'd been erased twice now.
Harper wasn't losing this. Not again.
She opened her notebook and began rewriting the timeline of the last few days.
The whispers.
The flickering lights.
The burned map.
The duplicate journal page.
And Jamie—his voice, the photograph in the library, the note about Room 13A.
There had to be something left behind.
That night, Harper sat cross-legged on her bed, flipping through her things.
She'd slipped Jamie's note into the back of her binder—about the Katherine Quinn journal. She re-read it again.
"I remember you. That's what matters. You were in Room 13A, just like her. Don't let them make you forget again. I'm going back to where it started."
*Where it started.*
She ran her fingers along the sentence, pausing. That couldn't be the school. He already knew the school forgot. This meant somewhere before the forgetting.
And then it hit her.
The West Hall.
That's where she first saw the other map—the one with 13A on it. The sealed wing. The broken corridor.
He had gone back there.
Harper stood, pacing. She needed to find him. To prove he existed before this place took even more. But if the West Hall was off-limits… she'd need to sneak in. Again.
She glanced at her alarm clock: 11:12 p.m.
She couldn't wait until morning. What if this place did to her what it did to Jamie?
She shoved the notebook in her backpack, grabbed her flashlight, and pulled on her hoodie.
There was no room left for caution.
Just her, the dark, and the truth.