ELEVEN MONTHS AGO 

Maria J. Westwood Library
Lockwood, Pennsylvania
October 28, 2017

┈┈

For nearly one year, Bianca Hawthorne had been haunted by the dead girl in the library.

It started when Bianca was a junior, not long after she began dating Maria J. Westwood's resident bad boy, Cole Bradford. The first night Bianca saw the spirit, the young couple had been making out in the eastward library hallway, tucked between two mahogany shelves. Their fingers were tangled in one another's hair—teeth nipping lips, hands exploring. Just as Cole pushed her against the bookshelf, one of the hardcover tomes fell to the ground.

The thunk against the marble tiles caused Bianca to open her eyes, just to make sure no one heard the sound. 

To her horror, a young student stood at the end of the hallway, waves of curly blonde hair veiling her face. 

"Stop," Bianca whispered to Cole. "Someone's watching."

"Let 'em watch," he said, smiling into the flesh of her neck before marking it with a kiss. His ash brown hair was longer back then, nearly brushing his ears. Cole dipped his hand into the opening of Bianca's blouse, right where the breast-buttons had just come undone.

Gently, and still wary, Bianca nudged him away; when she did, she discovered the blonde girl had disappeared. "Where'd she go?" Bianca scanned the passageway. She was still trying to figure out how the girl could have traveled so quickly, but Cole was trying to pull her into another kiss.

"Come on, I don't see anyone," he mumbled, lacing his fingers into her hair and drawing her close.

Bianca melted in his arms. What student would've had the balls to report them anyway? No one would dare cross Cole Bradford and any who did would live to regret it later; that was one of the many wicked things she loved about him.

It was thirty minutes before curfew, and technically, the library was already closed. The only light was that of the moon, slipping through barred windows and pouring over their skin. Bianca found herself lost in the spell of his lips, the eternality of his embrace. She pulled back, breathless, as she began buttoning down his white Oxford shirt.

"He's coming to get you," someone hissed.

Bianca looked up.

The blonde student was standing behind Cole now, resting her chin on his shoulder, five inches from Bianca's face. In the empty sockets where eyes should have been, there were only two black voids; blood pooled out of them, spilling down pallid gray cheeks and onto Cole's dress shirt. The eyeless girl opened her mouth, and more blood gushed over her lips as they twisted into a droll grimace; she screamed, "Run!"

Panic seized Bianca's heart. She shrieked and jumped backward, hitting the shelves and scrambling to her left.

 Cole quickly caught her forearms. "Whoa! B, what's wrong?" 

The weight of her fear pulled them both to the floor as she tried to scurry away. The eyeless girl towered over them, a bloody cross carved into the center of her torso. Tears burned Bianca's cheeks. Cole stood and extended his hand, but as Bianca kicked her feet, inching further down the hallway, her eyes were trained on the blonde specter alone.

"B, what the hell! What is it?" Cole looked backward, then faced Bianca. "What's wrong?"

How could he not know?

Bianca lost track of the blonde girl's whereabouts and stared up at Cole with dread. There was a waterfall of crimson staining the left shoulder of his dress shirt, and as a single stream riddled downward, Bianca pointed, whispering, "Y-y-your shirt."

Cole looked down. "What about it? What is it?"

"You don't see it . . ."

"B, you're freaking me out. What's going on?"

Just then, a frosty breeze caressed Bianca's left earlobe.

She trembled.

Slowly, Bianca turned her head.

She came face to face with the blonde's obsidian eyeless voids.

"Got you." 

◢✥◣ 

PRESENT DAY

┈┈ 

Nearly a year later, Bianca still had nightmares.

She woke early Wednesday morning with sweat-sopped hair pasted to the side of her face. Dreams of the eyeless girl stirred her to wake throughout the night, which was disenchanting, to say the least. Bianca had foolishly presumed the girl was gone; it'd been three months since she saw her last after all, just before summer vacation.

Within minutes of meeting the new girl, however, the ghastly apparition had appeared before her once more.

It happened during homeroom. Bianca had been giving Rayne Foster a hard time, as she'd been known to do with all the new girls on campus. But when Lucas Abbott told her to shut up and turn around, the eyeless girl materialized out of nowhere. Bianca saw the girl's slender, sallow fingers first, slipping over the edge of Lucas's desk. When Bianca looked down, she found the eyeless girl squatting between his legs beneath the table, blood pooling on the whites of his Air Jordans.

Three months, she thought.

The eyeless girl had left her alone for three months . . . and now, she was back.

Bianca blamed Rayne Foster.

Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knew it was irrational, the kind of twisted thinking many teenagers would've reached for in her position—a last-ditch effort to latch onto something when slipping down the edge of a cliff. But Bianca needed an explanation, however far-fetched, to make sense of the horror that had started up again so suddenly. And Rayne's arrival coinciding with the eyeless girl's return felt too significant to ignore.

Living day to day facing the horrific unknown was so much easier when there was someone other than herself to blame.

The eyeless girl followed Bianca everywhere now, and the only thing that could abolish the apparition was to surround herself with friends at all times and stay as far away from Cole Bradford as humanly possible. Right now, she was oh-for-two. Her best friends, Hillary and Jacqueline, were not early risers like she was, and as she waited for them, standing alone in the second-floor launderette, Cole Bradford crossed the threshold, his now-short brown hair slicked back with a berry-scented mousse.

"Cole," Bianca gasped, stepping back and surveying her surroundings. She'd been folding a load of whites from the dryer, but she stopped, dropping a warm blouse to the floor.

"Still don't trust the attendants to wash your clothes?" he asked, and she loathed the nonchalance in his timbre, the friendliness of his smile—as if it hadn't been six months since they last spoke to one another.

"This is the girl's laundry room, Cole," she snapped. "You shouldn't be here."

"I just wanted to talk." He wandered the room, seeming to observe the soaps and detergents on the counter. "It's been a while . . ."

"We have nothing to talk about." Bianca lifted the blouse off the floor and tried to fold her clothes a little faster, hoping she could exit the room before the eyeless girl showed up.

She always appeared when he was around . . .

As Bianca placed a pile of folded clothing into her silver laundry basket, a cool breeze fluttered the back of her neck, raising the hairs. She refused to turn around. "Cole. Please leave."

"B, this is important," he insisted. "You're gonna hate me for this, but . . . I really need you to leave that new girl alone."

The nickname roused a spell of rage, and mention of the new girl doubled it. "Excuse me?" Bianca whirled around, and when she did, her eyes immediately focused on the entrance behind him.

Waves of blonde hair peeked around the doorway.

"You heard me," Cole said, but the irony of it was that she hadn't. She hadn't heard a thing.

Bianca simply stared at the launderette entrance.

One might've presumed that countless encounters would've calloused Bianca to visions of the girl, that perhaps, she would've become accustomed to the bottomless voids of her sockets, to the foul odor of blood and decay. Yet each sighting was more traumatizing than the next, as if, each visitation managed to cut into the fabric of being that made Bianca Hawthorne human and slowly stole more patches of her soul.

She studied the streams of blonde curls falling over the edge of the door frame.

Bianca waited for them to move.

"Did our breakup affect you that badly?" Cole asked softly. He must have noticed the terror stirring Bianca's eyes, lips, and fingers. She sealed those eyes shut and felt Cole take her trembling hands in his. "I never wanted you to be afraid of me . . ."

She suddenly felt the blonde girl's ghostly breath hit her ears, the same breath that woke her from nightmares. Bianca didn't dare open her eyes.

"Lucas mentioned you seemed pretty scared of him yesterday, too. Why is that?" Cole asked. When she said nothing, he calmly intoned, "Look, I'm sorry if you can't get over that whole Spencer-fiasco, but whatever this is . . . this fear, this hatred you have for me . . . it's not gonna affect your reputation, I promise you. You don't have to try so hard." His subsequent chuckle was breathy and sorrowful. "Everyone already knows you're the baddest bitch in this place, so please . . . I'm asking as a friend: just leave Rayne alone. Okay?"

Last year, Cole had accused Bianca of sleeping with Spencer Callaghan, and the entire week that followed was one that put significant strain on their relationship. Seeing how badly Cole and Pierce pummeled the poor kid was a sight she still struggled to forget, but that wasn't why she broke up with him.

It was the eyeless girl.

"He's gonna get you," the blonde whispered in her ear, and Bianca cringed, lifting her shoulder to block the icy breath from assaulting her skin.

Quickly, and without opening her eyes, Bianca bent down, picked up her laundry basket, and shoved her way past him, pushing her shoulder into his so hard that he stumbled backward. "I'll do whatever I want, and you're just gonna have to learn to deal with it," she said. His protests fell on muted ears as she fled the room without daring to look back.

◢✥◣

Lucas Abbott could not remember the last time he felt any semblance of excitement. Sure, he experienced occasional bouts of happiness with his friends. Sometimes Pierce and Cole played soccer with him in the courtyard, and once a week, Lucas had a pleasurable phone call with his grandmother back in California. But absolutely none of that compared to the blissful elation Lucas Abbott felt as he ran up to Rayne Foster.

Her expression, usually guarded with a veneer of flirtation or sarcasm, was now open and bright—alive. It startled him. Gone were the scowls and smug smiles that normally graced her lips, and as Rayne's excitement rubified her heart-shaped cheeks, Lucas felt something stir in his chest, like some long-lost part of himself slowly flickering back to life. 

They met in the third-floor dormitory hallway, just before classes were set to begin. He half-expected her to throw some sharp remark his way, but instead, her gaze held him, her lips parted in something close to wonder.

"You see them," Rayne whispered. "How long? How long have you been able to see them?"

"Three years," he replied breathless, meeting the joyful sparkle in her eye. For a moment, time seemed to slow. The shadows that had always lurked at the edges of his world felt so much less suffocating now. "All this time, I thought no one else could see them," he whispered, but his voice faltered. 

Was it wise to tell her so much so soon?

But all the loneliness he had experienced at Maria J. Westwood—scratch that, his whole life!—had been weighing down on him for far too long. He couldn't help it. "I thought I was going insane," he murmured.

"What about the blue-eyed man? Do you see him, too?"

"No, just shadows. Sometimes flames, flickers of something almost human, students who fade like they were never even there. But the shadow people . . . they're a different breed entirely. They don't have eyes, but I know they can see. It's like they look straight through you, piercing beyond the surface, like they can see everything inside." Her disappointment surprised him. "Did I say something wrong?"

"No, no," she said quickly. "Honestly, I'm . . . relieved. I thought I was all alone."

"Imagine feeling that way for three years . . ." 

Rayne's lips curled into a teasing smile, the light returning to her eyes. "You know," she mused, her voice lilting like silk, "I think I like this side of you."

Lucas blinked, caught off guard. "What side?"

"The side that's . . . not holding back." Her gaze lingered on him, almost playful. "It suits you."

The words sent a thrill through him, one he wasn't prepared for. Instinctively, his fingers brushed the back of his neck, as if he could scratch away the feeling of being seen. He didn't know what to say. And for some reason, he found himself searching for any sign of Cole over his shoulder.

Rayne tilted her head, eyes narrowing slightly. "So that's all it takes to get you to be nice to me, huh? Just had to see some shadows in the dark?"

Lucas wouldn't have been able to stop the smile that pulled his lips, even if he'd tried. "Just who said I was being nice?"

Rayne leaned in, her voice dropping to a soft whisper. "You're not hiding it very well."

His cheeks felt warm then, and he watched her turn away, a slight pep in her step, feeling both invigorated and slightly confused by her easy charm. 

"Hey, wait," he called, catching her sleeve and pulling her gaze back to him, "would you like to . . . meet me at the shack later?"

"Are the guys gonna be there?"

"No. I was hoping it'd be just you and me." Another smile tugged his lips, and the feeling was somehow genuine, strange, and new—all at once. "I mean, now that I know there's someone who understands, I kind of don't want to—"

"Ever stop talking about it?" she finished in a rush. "Same." Looking over her shoulder, Rayne said, "Okay. Let's meet at the shack. Tonight."

"Sweet. I guess I'll, uh, see you then."

"You'll see me in homeroom first," she replied with a wink, and again, that smile of hers just kept surprising him. Lucas returned the youthful grin, an unexpected blaze of exhilaration igniting his chest and climbing his neck.

Just as he considered walking with Rayne to their first class, Lucas swiftly turned around. His best friend, Cole, drew nearer down the hallway, his tall frame and confident stride unmistakable, even as the light from the barred windows silhouetted him. Lucas was not prepared. They weren't doing anything wrong, but Cole had a proven track record of pulling the trigger first and asking questions later, and Lucas didn't want him to get the wrong idea.

As he hurried toward the opposite stairwell, Lucas suddenly gripped his abdomen.

He was unsure as to whether or not the fluttery feeling in his stomach stemmed from the joy of this newfound friendship, the apprehension he felt toward Cole's approach, or perhaps, it was the fact that a shadow person had just crawled along the walls, following him down the flight of steps as he headed toward homeroom.

◢✥◣ 

Rayne Foster watched Lucas slip into the stairwell and gasped when a shadowy figure had followed him on all fours, its limbs bending unnaturally as it scuttled along the floor and walls with a predatory grace. A chill ran down her spine. She gasped again when she felt a hand on her shoulder and whirled around to see Cole Bradford scowling.

He was wearing his uniform, a white undershirt beneath an open, untucked button-down; Rayne was surprised to see no evidence of a hangover. At his touch, she relived the moment when he kissed her the night before. If history served her well, that meant Cole was imagining the moment right then, too.

"Wanna tell me what that was all about?" he asked, nodding toward the doors Lucas just stepped through.

She wracked her brain for a believable lie. "Oh, Lucas was just telling me about the Legacy Gathering next week."

"Why? His parents are dead. Lucas hates the Legacy Gathering."

She nearly smacked herself in the face. Of course. Lucas was the Abbott heir. How could she have forgotten that? The image of his somber childlike face on her television screen, perpetually shadowed by grief, stayed with her even after all these years. And this Legacy Gathering, a grand celebration of familial achievements, would obviously be a painful reminder of what he had lost.

She needed a better lie, fast. "I mean, he knows I'm new here and doesn't want me to feel left out. Said he felt bad for being rude yesterday. Did you tell him to be nicer to me?"

Rayne held her breath, praying that Cole would take the bait. After a tense moment, he finally cracked his signature smile. "Glad he's finally coming around."

Rayne exhaled, but quickly breathed in again when Cole stepped closer.

"The Legacy Gathering is boring news though," he said. "Have you heard about Homecoming?"

She tried not to laugh. "You have dances here?"

"Of course. What, a bunch of murderers can't dress up and have a good time?"

Perhaps it shouldn't have, but the word "murderer" raised the hairs on her bruised arms.

"You know," she began slowly, taking a step back, "you never really told me what it is you did that landed you here in the first place."

"You never told me either." He took another step forward, and a sly smile lifted those chiseled cheeks. "How 'bout we share on the count of three?"

"How 'bout no," she replied, but as he grabbed her hand, insisting she at least let him walk her to homeroom, Rayne saw it:

A flash of silver, flicking open a Zippo lighter, a burning cigarette resting on chapped lips, ash tumbling to the ground; then a house, built of gray and white bricks, flames falling out of its third-story windows like flickering eyelashes on a young girl's face. Now, a prepubescent Cole was seated in the front of a silver BMW, and as he put the vehicle into drive, he snapped at the toddler crying in the back seat booster; he told her that she'd better shut up, or he'd kill her, too.