Out of all the things I was prepared to deal with in high school, the floor disappearing was not one of them.

Jack and I are making our way up to the third floor hallway where we share Advanced American History together when we turn a corner and I feel my foot give way into nothingness.

For a moment I'm too stunned to process it, thankfully, instinct kicks into the gear and I dive out of the way, just missing the rim of the dark hole in the ground, which lies like a perfectly rectangular pit of tar to my left.

Jack starts and almost falls himself, not into the void, but over me lying in the hallway. "Dude, what was that?" he exclaims, which only attracts more attention.

I struggle back to my feet, still hyperventilating. "What was that? Are you kidding me, didn't you just see-"

Jack's standing on top of the panel of darkness, like the hole isn't even there. "Yeah, I saw it. Were you trying to trip me or something? I've never seen anyone fall diagonally before."

"Shit, I-" I pause, "I guess I'm a little klutzy today."

I watch him walk across and back onto solid ground, and step closer to the edge myself. I lower a foot in, and once again, it goes right through the 'floor'. Jack is giving me an incredulous look, then he asks, "Adam, did you get enough sleep last night?"

A dark pressure builds against my ribcage, like I'm suffocating from the inside. I couldn't have imagined that. I couldn't be imagining this. "Three hours," I lie. "I think I almost fell back asleep right there."

Two days into high school and it's already getting to my head- I walk a little faster.

Luckily, the third floor seems to be unaffected by my sudden bout of disconnect with reality, which doesn't stop Jack from recounting how I managed to trip sideways to everyone at our table. "Seriously, Adam, I love you, but you need to take better care of yourself." Jack laughs.

"Says the boy who used to stay up past midnight playing online MMOs," I reply.

"Roasted!" yells one of the other kids at our table, much too loudly, and our teacher turns around like an owl.

She snaps, "Boys in the back, if I hear you again, I'm going to ask you to move," which promptly ends that discussion.

Jack and some of the other guys from my old group in middle school walk downstairs to P.E. together, though I'm not following the discussion. I purposefully steer us away from the hallway where I 'tripped', feeling the same uneasy dread like ice down my spine.

The gymnasium is large enough to fit five classes of freshmen, which the teachers have taken advantage of. The uproar is nearly as bad as that of the cafeteria and while most people are clinging to the bleachers, sitting in clusters, there's enough movement to maintain a perpetual state of chaos.

From the roost atop the bleachers where my squad has camped out, I can see Will's bleached-blonde hair across the gym. He's talking eagerly with a group of girls I don't recognize, and clearly having a time of it, too.

My friends are talking about their schedules, so I get mine out, but end up slumped against the back of the bleachers, inattentive. The sensation of my foot lapsing into nothingness is at the forefront of my mind, playing on repeat at the front of my head.

The hand on my backpack grows warmer. I can feel my fingers heating up, throbbing like I just slammed them in a door.

On the edge of my vision I catch a stranger watching me from the other side of the gymnasium, his dark eyes intent on mine. His hair is dark and messy, and his skin is just too dark to be a tan. He has his fingers clasped around something. He looks down to survey it, tossing it in the air once, and then looks back to me again.

"What's that guy doing?" I ask, aloud, hoping I can use one of the fifty other idiot teenagers running around as an excuse if no one can see him, either. "Over there?"

"The guy standing alone? Yeah, what about him?" asks Joey, from the back, in one of the rare instances he looks up from playing on his phone.

"Nothing." I breathe a sigh of relief. He puts on his earbuds and ascends the bleachers to sit in the corner opposite us, on the other side of the gym, gazing off into space. The heat subsides, but my pulse keeps up, waiting on something. Someone. It's like standing in the center of a storm, waiting for the rain to kick in.

The bell rings not long after.

I'm relieved when English rolls around. Just being in the building is making me claustrophobic. When I walk into the room on the fourth floor, I'm surprised to find that Ms. McKennick's room is covered, no lie, wall to wall in posters. Inspirational quotes, grammar tutorials, and previous student work intermingle to coat the entire room, down to about three inches above the ground. I think she'd cover the ceilings if the school system would let her, too.

"Welcome to Advanced English 9," she tells us when we've all settled. I'm close to the middle, though there's no one in the class I know, so it's more for cover than to talk to anyone in particular. Most of the kids in the class are quiet, too, so there's a distinct possibility no one knows anyone. Ms. McKennick must have planned for this, because she continues, "We'll spend the first half of class reviewing the syllabus, but after that, we'll be spending time getting to know each other. Of course, most of the syllabus is rules that should be familiar to you all already but it also contains a list of books we'll be reading this year. We'll also be doing a lot of discussion and collaborative work in this class, so you should all be prepared for seminars and other participation-graded activities. Now, to begin on class expectations..."

Her narration is too well rehearsed to be spontaneous, and her voice has a sing-song optimism that comes from patience and practice. I've given up on math already, so I let my eyes wander around the classroom, taking in the posters, and notice one of the girls in the far left corner of the room is watching me with the same intensity as the stranger behind by the bleachers during Physical Education. She's light-skinned, with dusty brown hair, and she has the tip of her pencil on her teeth, pensively. Her wide glasses only serve to intensify her stare. Her lips are pursed and she has her hand on a light blue jewel, bright and distracting.

I sense the heat from gym class again, and run my hand back along the backpack. Upon unzipping the back pocket, I see within a deep red stone, hot to the touch. The girl's eyes widen, and she points to the stone, mouthing something.

I... didn't put this in there.

"Excuse me, can you pass these back?" The student in front of me slings his entire elbow over my desk with a thump, depositing a stack of syllabi and a bingo sheets onto my desk. The stone clatters and hits the ground, which doesn't faze him in the slightest. I nod, dumbfounded, and pass them back, before going to pick up and slip the stone back in my pocket.

"You have the remaining time in class to fill out the sheet. Hopefully, you can learn something about your new classmates." Ms. McKennick finishes.

I lift up the bingo sheet, which has prompts such as "someone with the same birthday month as you" or "someone who left the country over the summer". Before I can fill anything else, the girl with the jewel speedwalks over and slides into the now-vacant seat next to me.

"Megan Briggs." she holds out her hand. "Shake."

I shake her hand.

"Do I ... know you from somewhere?" she asks.
"I don't think so. You might have met my twin, Will. He's a little shorter than me? Messier hair? Any of this ringing a bell?"

"Oh, him! Well this is super awkward. I've been having kind of a weird week-" She's leading into it.

"Same. This has to be the craziest day of my life."

Our eyes meet and we've said everything the other needs to hear before we've opened our mouths. She runs her hands through her hair, spinning a strand of it around a finger. "Oh, thank God. First there was that hole in my bathroom wall, then this stone, and- I can talk to you," she says, like this is a stunning revelation. She places a hand to her chest, eyes still wide, and then peers around the room. No one's watching us. I don't know anyone in this class, and instinctively I come to the same conclusion about her.

"Looks like we're not going to finish the assignment." I joke.

"Does that really matter right now?" she asks, then she presses the paper down against her desk, scribbles something on it, rips off the edge of her paper, and places it in my hand. "We're not in this alone."

"Twenty more minutes," announces Ms. Blue.

"We could at least attempt to get this finished, though." she says before disappearing back into the mess of people, stopping to stand by a red-haired girl. Megan's smile is so natural I can't believe this is the same, serious girl who I just spoke with.

I watch her leave when the bell rings, watch as she steps around a hole in the floor with easy grace and disappears into the mob of her friends.

I unfurl the paper slip and enter the number into my phone before turning back to my locker.

Will's doodling when I approach again, his leg swinging over the edge. He's got this dreamy expression, like the one he has when he's zoning out, but his eyes are focused. "Hey, Will."
"Oh. Hey." Will says, perking up and tucking away his sketchbook. He lurches onto his feet, slinging his bag up with him, and asks, "How was your day?"
"Fine," I tell him, "I got my first number." It's not... completely false, I guess, but it's a little harder to keep a neutral expression after lying straight to his face.

"Really? I got ten." Will smiles, flashing me two finger pistols, "And you said I was bad at networking."

"Gym girls?"
"They're all from the same middle school. They were talking about their plans to remake this club they had at their school- something about popular media, or art, or something? From what I can tell, they had this huge conglomerate back at their old school that started as a 'book club' and went haywire from there. It's crazy. What about you? Going to do sports again this year?"

I hadn't been thinking about extracurriculars, but if the teachers are any indication, I'm going to have a lot of free time this year I didn't expect to have. "I might join some academic clubs."

Will murmurs, "You're such a tryhard."

"If you think I'm a tryhard, you should meet the girl in my math class. We went over summer math packet questions and I don't think there was a single question where her hand didn't shoot up with the answer. It was ridiculous. Most people don't even do summer math." I stop short of adding, my brother included.

"That's what you get for signing up for smart people math. You get to be surrounded by people who are just as obnoxious as you are."

"Yeah," I say, trailing off, and neither of us picks the conversation back up. Instead, I watch the trees shift overhead, Megan's crumpled number in my hand. The sun is hot on my exposed arms and face, and the violent light overhead seems to stalk us from between the branches.

We round the next turn towards our neighborhood, and to my shock, the entire front of Canterbury Baptist Church is gone, and in its place is a dark, startling void. It's like someone forgot to fill in that part of the map while rendering the universe, but I know what should be there. I've been to that church before, walked through the halls. I had a concert there in seventh grade.

"Will," I say. "Remember our band performance," I point to the gaping hole in reality, "over there?"

"Oh yeah," Will says, peering over. He continues, "I'm so glad I quit baritone. Never again. Kind of a weird time to bring that up, though- please don't tell me you're going back to band."

"If I never touch another woodwind again, it'll be too soon." I promise him. "Just reminiscing." Or hoping twin ESP would kick in on this one.

"True," Will says, with his signature, bubbly laugh. I try to smile along, but it's hard to veil the panic rising in my chest.

Even knowing I have Megan on my side, I've never felt so alone. 

(A/N: Thank you for the lovely comments thus far! This project has been a huge, huge deal for me since October and while it's been a slow start I'm still just as excited as ever to really get this ball rolling. Your support is so very appreciated <3)