The morning sun cast long shadows across the paths crisscrossing Lakeview's beautifully manicured grounds. Students hurried along, backpacks slung over shoulders, iced coffees and energy drinks in hand, bracing themselves against the crush of the 8AM rush hour.

Amidst this ocean of hurried sleep-deprived students, Kel drifted unseen and unnoticed. No longer bound by physical form, he was adjusting to his new insubstantial reality. He trodded the cemented walkfoot path, surrounded by an ocean of lush green carpet grass that his ghostly feet could never again enjoy the sensation of brushing against.

Kel had spent the early morning hours practicing teleportation - an ability both wondrous and frustrating in its difficulty to master. One moment he was there, the next...hopefully somewhere else intentional rather than random.

As students streamed by, their solid bodies passed through his ghostly form like he was little more than an illusion or capricious wisp of fog. Their lack of reaction, of any flicker of acknowledgment that he existed at all, still made Kel's insubstantial heart ache.

Twelve days. Just twelve revolutions around the sun since the accident, since Kel's tenuous grasp on this human existence was abruptly severed. A fleeting moment in the cosmic calendar, and yet it felt like eons ago in the swirling whirlwind of grief.

There had been the memorial, of course. A ceremony to acknowledge the newfound hole torn in the fabric of their lives. Anthony had taken the podium, red-rimmed eyes swimming in unshed tears, to pay tribute to his best friend. The words he managed to choke out between ragged breaths simultaneously seared into memories and echoed hollowly - a feeble attempt to encapsulate the enormity of the loss.

Funi couldn't even marshal that much. She had come undone, collapsed into a vortex of wails and unending tears. Marie had rushed to enfold her in desperately ineffectual consolation as the storm raged.

And then, just like that, it was over. The memorial ended and the cavalcade of daily life rolled on imperviously. Classes resumed, assignments came due, social engagements upheld - as if a black hole hadn't ripped open in their realities, endlessly consuming their senses of normalcy.

Funi remained isolated in her room for days on end, venturing out only under cloak of darkness if necessity demanded it. Whether waking or sleeping, her mind whirred relentlessly, the broken record on repeat: "This was all my fault"

Anthony's coping mechanisms were more destructive. He painted the town red - and sometimes himself as well when the whiskey courage wore thin and fists started flying in whatever sleazy bar would have him. Dull physical pain at least offered visceral confirmation that he could still feel something in this hollowed-out existence.

To the rest of the campus, to the rest of the world, Kel's light had been abruptly snuffed out, barely leaving a flicker of memory. But for those few whose orbits he had inhabited, the torch of his existence would never be allowed to extinguish completely.

Kel's trod halted as the old Justice statue stood there like a caffeinated borrower who'd just snorted a line of Adderall, staring him down with her blind eyes as if to say, "Look alive, kid. The high seas of jurisprudence await." Kel slumped onto the nearest bench, wondering if the pigeon defecating through his head was some kind of cosmic practical joke.

Around him, future lawyers swarmed like extras in a low-budget zombie movie about the walking underemployed. Their future screamed at them from the pretentious Greco-Roman arches of the law building - "One day you too can overcharge for simple paperwork!"

Maybe he never had what it took to be a lawyer. Maybe he was more of a "loves conspiracy theories and eating cornflakes for dinner" kind of guy. Either way, the pooping pigeon seemed to be getting its money's worth. Kel probably deserved it for trying to pronounce "jurisprudence" in his head on his own.

It was Tuesday - Kel knew Funi's schedule as intimately as the contours of her face that haunted his newly immaterial form. Her first class wasn't until 10:30am, providing the excuse she so desperately clung to in order to remain barricaded in her room, isolated, cloaked in solitary sorrow.

Marie likely had an early anatomy class dissecting life's mysteries and intricacies while her friend's world lay disassembled beyond recognition or repair. As for Anthony...who could divine his wayward whereabouts and self-destructive meandererings in the harsh light of day?

Kel willed himself to Funi's door, a translocation that should have been as simple as reassigning location coordinates. But his mastery over this ghostly mode of existence remained fragile, the ability refusing to spark into existence simply through need or desire alone.

So instead he drifted, aimless, like a fleeting spirit slipping through the boundary between planes, at last arriving at the door behind which Funi's lightless reality now unfolded.

How he yearned to gather her up, to enfold her in the embrace his ghostly arms could no longer provide. To reassure her that though he had shuffled off this life on earth, the essence of his love for her still persisted, unextinguished. But all he could offer now were feeble raps upon the door that her senses would never detect.

Through the door, he detected mumblings that sounded like reassuring tones of Marie intermingling with Funi's muffled complaints of cramps and period pains.

While such matters may have once caused a teenage boy's face to heat up with embarrassment, now Kel simply felt a pang of relief.

Funi was not entirely alone in her sorrow - Marie was there to offer sisterly commiseration and likely fetch the necessary pharmaceutical remedies from the corner pharmacy.

With Funi in caring hands, Kel's purposeless form drifted away from the door, an untethered balloon cast adrift by the whims of the air. What occupied the consciousness of a ghost when temporal attachments no longer anchored him to routines or responsibilities? A crushing sense of despair settled over him, its familiar numbness now tinged with a disquieting intensity of feeling.

He was...bored.

The universe, it seemed, had a sick sense of humor. 'A bored ghost?' he thought to himself, shaking his head in disbelief. 'That's the cosmic equivalent of a dad joke.'

But as he pondered his fate, he realized that this might be his new reality - a never-ending meander through the remnants of his old life, seemingly purpose filled but without colour. It was a bleak prospect, like being trapped in a never-ending loop of existential crisis.

Sigh.

On an impulsive whim, Kel willed his energy toward the lecture halls, gliding effortlessly through closed doors to settle unseen at the back of a freshman Philosophy 101 class. The tenured lecturer, Professor Adeyemi shielded behind cyberpunk glasses and a graying lineup of home-distillation remedies for male pattern baldness, held mesmerizing power. Kel allowed the familiar sleepy academic oration to wash over him as the students dutifully transcribed the existence-untangling pearls of wisdom.

Professor Adeyemi's unmistakable garbled delivery that had made him unintentionally infamous in Kel's social circles continued. Contradictory statements flowed freely, conclusions drawn that defied the preceding logic.

An amused smirk played across Kel's insubstantial features as he watched the beet-faced academic dig himself deeper into rhetorical pits of his own making.

Unable to rein in his impulsive amusement, a burst of laughter erupted from Kel. "How did this guy even get his doctorate, let alone tenure?" he goaded brazenly between guffaws, not forgetting his words now failed to register on mortal planes of existence.

Except...several rows ahead, a young woman's head whipped around, her eyes instinctively locking onto the source of the disturbance. "Do you mind?" she hissed, all narrow squints and indignant daggered glares. "Some of us actually take this course seriously!"

The words hung in the air, ionized, as realization crashed across Kel's consciousness in a tsunami. This living, breathing, snarkily studious co-ed had not just heard him - she had seen him.

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