The world spun around Kat’s head as she fell to her knees in the toilets. Every atom in her body seemed to be in open rebellion, trying to shake loose its bonds. The smell of bleach scorched her nose, stinging eyes already raw with tears. The contents of her bag had spilled across the grimy tiles.
‘Stop crying,’ she whispered, forcing herself back onto her feet.
Before she could catch sight of herself in the mirror above the sinks she clenched her eyes shut. For a bizarre moment back in the classroom she had thought herself to be disappearing. She was sure she had seen through her hands, through skin and flesh and bone, and had gripped the desk in a last-ditch attempt to anchor herself to the world. A trick of the light, surely, caused by tears blurring her vision.
So why was she so frightened to face herself now?
Kat wiped her face with trembling fingers, and she could feel them, solid matter against her skin. It gave her the courage she needed to open her eyes.
A ghost looked back. Her reflection was exactly where it should be, but it was spectral; a sunblind afterimage. Her body had faded, just a little. Haltingly, she turned her head side-to-side, and the reflection mimicked her as it should. Through herself she could see the toilet stalls behind and the crinkled cleaning notices fixed on their doors, but she retained enough substance to render their words indecipherable.
The panic caged inside her chest was a feral creature, and now it threw its body against the bars. Whenever it tried to claw its way out Kat tried to imagine her breathing as a moustachioed tamer jabbing at it with a kitchen chair. Now the beast caught it in its jaws and splintered the wood into matchsticks.
Irrationally, she spun around, expecting to find her body splayed on the tiles. She had died and become a wayward spirit. It was the only rational – ha! – explanation. But there was nothing there.
‘That was Backwash season one, episode five,’ she told herself, trying to keep calm. ‘“Zenon’s Temporary Demise”.’
A sob split her open. Despair and horror poured out in a scream, long and dreadful, resounding around the toilet walls.
It only stopped when a boy pushed through the door.
Wesley tried to stay in his seat. If something was wrong, if she was upset, he wasn’t supposed to care. Everybody else in the room had seen it too. Let them play the white knight.
Except they continued with their work, Buttercliff his game, the session continuing as if it had all been the most natural thing in the world. They had seen the picture. They had looked right at her as she turned transparent, like a chameleon excusing itself from a threat. The period would be over in minutes, but he couldn’t wait. He needed to debunk what his eyes had told him – that was the only reason he was going. It wasn’t because he cared. He swore under his breath and hurried out.
Wesley followed the corridor, peering into classrooms, sure she would have looked for somewhere to hide. Every vacant room on the floor was dark and empty. It was only when he reached the stairs that he heard the scream from the girls’ toilet. He rushed to the door, hesitating to cross the boundary. The agonising cry, its seemingly endless keening, pulled him inside.
‘Is everything o—?’
He cut himself off mid-sentence.
Nobody was there.
At the sight of him, Kat tried to tear herself into three: one to gather up her laptop and bag, one to stand straight, wipe the snot from her face and smile as if everything was okay, and one to hide, hide, hide.
She held her breath as the boy stared in bafflement. Kat searched her mind for an excuse, a reasonable answer to his unfinished question.
‘I don’t know what’s happened,’ she said, the only truth she knew.
The boy didn’t answer, instead peering around the room as if there might be somebody else hiding there.
The parts of Kat’s mind scattered by panic began to draw back together. She knew this boy – Wesley, from her year. They had met before, seen each other around school. He must have seen the photo along with everybody else. She swallowed her shame. Regardless of why he was here now, she needed help.
‘I have to get home,’ she said.
Wesley stepped closer and she flinched away, only for him to move past her and check the stalls. Why didn’t he say anything? She reached for his arm, craving its fixedness and desperate despite everything for his attention. The sight of her translucent hand, like paper held to light, made her snatch it away before she could make contact.
When he finally turned back they were close enough to waltz, but no sooner had his eyes found Kat than they grew large and unfocused, sliding away to look somewhere else. Anywhere else.
Although her reflection showed she had faded but a little, he was unable to see her at all.
The scream had come from inside the toilets. There was nowhere else. It had cut off sharply as if disturbed when Wesley opened the door. And there was her bag, discarded, MacBook and make-up scattered.
It felt like a trick, as if somebody was watching and recording his reaction. Twice when he turned his head he thought somebody stood at the edges of his vision, only to vanish if he tried to focus. He was sure he could feel another person in the room. Something like vertigo, a sense that the rules of the universe were unravelling, lurched inside him.
Quickly, before anybody could catch him there, Wesley scooped the contents of her bag back inside and gathered it up. It was a lifeline, an excuse to find her again. A chance, perhaps, to sate the guilt that was beginning to gnaw at his heart.
Kat followed a few paces behind as he returned to the corridor, only dimly aware that he had taken her bag. Keeping up with Wesley as he hurried down the stairs offered a linear future, one she didn’t need to decide for herself, if only for a few minutes. Long enough to get out of there.
At the bottom floor, Wesley turned a corner and came to a halt. Kat huddled against the wall as a familiar imperious voice rang along the corridor.
‘If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were heading for the exit.’
Kat peeked around the corner. The way out was blocked by Miss Jalloh, hands on her abundant hips, hunkered low in a way that suggested she was perfectly willing to tackle him bodily if necessary.
‘I was, uh . . .’ Wesley stammered, and Kat saw him push her bag out of sight behind his back.
‘Mr Graham, you realise there’s no excuse I’ll accept from you right now?’
‘I do now, miss.’
‘You know that I know you don’t have final period free today, so there’s no reason in the world you should be heading outside right now.’
‘I know, miss, but I was just looking for—’
Miss Jalloh held up a hand to silence him, fingers splayed, before counting them off one by one. Kat had seen her perform this trick before: the moment she folded her little finger into her palm the bell rang, electronic pips repeating throughout the building.
‘How do you do that?’ said Wesley.
Miss Jalloh smiled sweetly and answered by pointing him back along the corridor. ‘To final period, if you please.’
The school had stirred to life, chairs scraping and voices tumbling over each other, the shouts of teachers’ final instructions competing with the excited babble of their students. Kat fought the urge to run. Stepping out from the wall, Miss Jalloh’s all-seeing eyes flicked to her, and Kat braced herself for punishment or fright. Neither came – almost at once the teacher’s attention reverted to Wesley.
‘Sorry, miss,’ he said, and turned around to pass Kat without so much as a glance.
The classrooms behind her boiled over into the corridor. Kat waited for somebody to notice. She would almost have welcomed a gasp or scream, anything but the vacant tide that broke around her, as if she were a boulder in the flow of a river, unworthy of attention. Smothering her rising panic, she hurried past the unseeing Miss Jalloh and out of the building.
Then she ran across the car park to swipe her pass at the gate. Ran towards home until her lungs burned and a sharp pain in her side pulled her up short. Doubled over, she tried not to see the pavement through her ankles, the thread of her jeans embroidered in her hands.
A breeze made something rustle on her back. Kat reached under her arm to find a piece of paper stuck to her blouse with chewing gum. It was folded in half once, and inside was a scrawled, smudged message.
I see you.
[email protected]
Kat clutched the message to her chest. Somebody had seen what had happened.
Somebody had seen her.