The whispers didn't stop. They metastasized.
Walking the hallway with Synthia, I felt it-eyes tracking, following. Not us. Him.
"Okay," Synthia muttered, leaning closer. "Something weird is definitely happening."
"You noticed?"
She gave me a look. "Half the school turned into detectives the moment that guy walked in."
I frowned. The image replayed: his movement, the crowd's reaction, the wrongness in my chest. Familiar. Too familiar. "Who is he?"
Synthia shrugged. "No clue. But everyone else clearly knows."
A cluster of girls rushed past.
"Did you hear?"
"Transferred this morning."
"Used to go here."
"Yeah... before everything happened."
My steps slowed.
Before everything happened?
"What happened?" Synthia called after them.
Silence. They didn't even turn. My stomach twisted. The phrase felt wrong-not new, but remembered , like déjà vu with teeth.
We slipped into class as the bell screamed. I sat, opened my notebook, tried to anchor myself in normalcy. The pen left marks. That was all I managed.
"Don't look now," Synthia whispered.
I looked.
He stood in the doorway. Up close, he was worse. Dark hair, deliberately unkempt. Features cut sharp enough to wound. But his eyes-they didn't scan the room. They inhabited it. Cold. Assessing. As if everyone present were furniture he might discard.
The room silenced. The teacher's hand hovered mid-gesture, forgotten. Then his gaze found me.
My breath stopped. My thoughts stopped. The ambient noise of forty students-stopped. He stared. Not at me. Through me. Into something he expected to find and clearly had. My chest constricted, a fist closing around my ribs.
Something shifted in his expression. A crack in the ice. Darker. Hungrier. Then he looked away. The room exhaled. Whispers surged back, hungry and afraid.
"That's him..."
"Expelled, I heard."
"No-worse."
"Okay," Synthia breathed. "That guy is terrifying."
"You're being dramatic." My heart thundered against my sternum.
The teacher cleared her throat. "Class, this isn't a spectacle. Introduce yourself?"
Every student leaned forward. He didn't move.
"Not much to say." Low. Calm. The voice of someone who had never needed to convince anyone of anything.
The teacher's mouth tightened. "Back row."
He moved. Slowly, deliberately, as if the attention bored him. As he passed my desk, his stride hitched-barely, fractionally. I felt it in my pulse. Then he glanced back.
Right at me.
And for a second, the mask slipped. Recognition. Something raw and unwelcome. Then-nothing. Erased so completely I wondered if I'd imagined it.
He sat. The lesson began. I heard none of it.
Because the longer I looked at him-the set of his shoulders, the particular angle of his jaw-the louder the voice became. He looks exactly like him.
The boy I knew at fifteen. The boy I loved at fifteen. The boy who'd held my hand and promised-Dead. Gone. Funeral, closed casket, promised.
But now the boy who couldn't exist sat three rows behind me, breathing the same air, and every instinct screamed that the lie had just walked into the room.