Episode 3: A Date in the Haunted Wing
The old wing of Northbridge High had been officially closed for eleven years, which meant, in practice, that it had been unofficially explored by roughly every graduating class since, in defiance of a padlock that everyone agreed was more decorative than functional. Rumor said it still had half its original wiring. Rumor also said it was where June Vale had once hidden files belonging to a club called Red Eye, back before "Red Eye" became a symbol scratched under folding tables and etched onto silver keychains that showed up via crow.
I brought a flashlight, a printed floor plan I'd found in the school archives online, and a folded contingency plan in my back pocket that covered four separate scenarios, none of which, it turned out, would be the one that actually happened.
"We need cover," Iris said, the Tuesday after the keychain, staring at the padlocked doors from across the courtyard like she was casing a bank. "If anyone asks, we're doing inventory for the drama club prop closet. Simple story. Easy to remember."
"Easy for you to remember. You forget your own locker combination twice a week."
"That's different. This is important."
It was not, in the end, easy for either of us to remember, because the moment Mr. Finch, the evening security guard, rounded the corner of the science building and asked what exactly two students were doing lurking outside a condemned wing after hours, Iris opened her mouth and said, with total conviction:
"We're investigating a suspicious noise."
Not drama club inventory. Not the story we'd agreed on forty minutes earlier, word for word, with me making her repeat it back to me twice. A suspicious noise, delivered in a tone that implied she was doing Mr. Finch a personal favor by handling it herself.
Mr. Finch, to my genuine astonishment, nodded slowly and said, "Yeah, actually, I've been hearing something in there too. Go on, then. Radio me if it's rats," and walked off, leaving me standing there with my mouth slightly open, recalculating everything I thought I understood about the effectiveness of confident lying versus careful planning.
"How," I said, once he was out of earshot, "did that work?"
"People believe things said with certainty," Iris said, already working the padlock loose with a bent paperclip. "You should try it sometime instead of writing me a rulebook about it."
Inside, the old wing smelled like dust and time and something faintly electrical, the kind of smell that makes the back of your neck prickle even before anything happens. The overhead lights didn't work, obviously, but a few emergency fixtures near the ceiling flickered on erratic timers, throwing everything into intervals of orange half-light and sudden dark that did nothing good for my nervous system.
Somewhere above us, fabric shifted — old stage curtains, probably, disturbed by a draft — and I very nearly took Iris's hand out of pure reflex before remembering that would require me to first admit I was scared, which felt like a line I wasn't ready to cross yet.
"You're doing the thing," Iris said, without turning around.
"What thing?"
"The thing where you breathe like you're narrating a documentary about your own death. It's loud."
"I'm not—" A curtain shifted again. I may have made a small, undignified noise. "I'm processing the environment."
Iris stopped walking, reached into one of her jacket's many pockets, and produced a pair of small wireless earbuds, which she held out to me without comment.
"What are these for?"
"White noise. Rain sounds. Put one in. It helps." She said this the way she said everything — flat, practical, no visible tenderness attached to the gesture at all — but she'd clearly had these on hand for exactly this purpose, which meant she'd planned for the possibility that I'd be scared and had quietly solved for it before I even opened my mouth.
I put one earbud in. The soft static hiss of recorded rain filled half my head, cutting the dark hallway down to something almost manageable, and I found myself considerably more unsettled by that small act of preparedness than by anything the building itself had thrown at us so far.
We found the records room at the end of the east corridor — a narrow office that had clearly once belonged to a guidance counselor, filing cabinets still standing in neat, dust-caked rows along one wall. The drawer marked with a faded strip of red tape, hand-lettered in a slanting, familiar hand, read simply: RED EYE.
Inside were old complaint forms, photocopied and stapled, dating back at least three years — student council budget discrepancies, unanswered questions about a missing chunk of festival funding, a whole paper trail of the kind of quiet institutional rot that nobody in charge particularly wanted looked at too closely. One folder near the back had a page torn cleanly out, leaving only a jagged edge and, at the very margin, a signature fragment that survived the tear.
N. Pr—
"Nolan," I said, running my thumb along the torn edge. "This isn't just about you and me. This funding thing goes back years."
Iris didn't answer. She was very still, looking at something else entirely — an old desktop computer shoved into the corner of the room, its screen dark, a webcam perched on top like it had been left running mid-conversation and simply forgotten.
She crouched in front of it and, after a moment's hesitation that told me more than anything she could have said, hit the space bar.
The screen flickered to life. Not a login prompt. A paused video call, saved in some queue, the little timestamp reading three years old almost to the day. A face filled the frame — sharper cheekbones than Iris's, the same amber-brown eyes, dark hair pulled back in a way that made her look older, tireder, like someone who'd spent a long time being disbelieved.
"June," Iris said, so quietly I almost missed it under the rain sound still hissing faintly in my ear.
The recording started to play on its own, some auto-loop function kicking in the moment the cursor moved. June's recorded voice was steady, controlled in the specific way people are controlled right before they stop being able to hold it together.
"—don't trust anyone on the council, Iris, not even the ones who seem like they're on your side. Especially not the ones who seem like they're on your side. If you're watching this, it means someone found the room, which means it's already worse than I thought it would get. Don't let them make you the story instead of the—"
The recording cut out. Not naturally — the screen went black mid-sentence, then immediately flared back to life with a live indicator light blinking beside the webcam lens, and June's face reappeared, no longer paused, no longer three years old. Live. Present. Looking directly at the camera with an expression that shifted, in half a second, from confusion to alarm.
"Iris? Iris, is that — how are you even in that room, that computer shouldn't still be—" June's eyes flicked, just briefly, toward me, and something in her expression sharpened into something close to fear. "Who is that. Who's with you."
"This is Evan," Iris said. "He's—"
"Don't tell anyone what you found in there. Not the boyfriend, not the teachers, not anyone in student council, do you understand me? Especially not anyone in student council. I have to go, someone's—"
The call dropped. Not politely, not with a goodbye — just gone, the screen returning to the same three-year-old paused frame it had shown before, June's face frozen mid-sentence again, as if the last thirty seconds had never happened at all.
I became aware, very suddenly, of footsteps in the corridor outside. Real ones this time, close, unhurried in the specific way that suggested whoever it was already knew exactly where they were going.
Iris moved fast — she always moved fast, I was learning, the kind of fast that came from a childhood of needing to move fast for reasons she hadn't explained yet — grabbing my sleeve and pulling me behind a stack of old set flats leaned against the far wall, the kind painted with a faded forest backdrop from some ancient production, the two of us pressed into a gap barely wide enough for one person, let alone two.
Which is how I ended up with my back against a wooden support beam, Iris's shoulder against my chest, her face tilted up toward mine in the dark, both of us breathing as quietly as two people who have just watched a three-year-old ghost video turn suddenly, terrifyingly alive can manage to breathe.
"Don't move," she whispered, so close I felt it more than heard it.
"I wasn't planning to."
"You're breathing loud again."
"You're extremely close to my face, Iris, forgive me for—"
The footsteps stopped, just outside the doorway. A beam of flashlight swept once across the gap in the flats, close enough that I saw dust motes spinning in it, close enough that I stopped breathing entirely for a two-count that felt considerably longer. Then, apparently satisfied, whoever it was moved on, footsteps retreating back down the corridor at the same unhurried pace they'd arrived with.
Neither of us moved for a long moment after the sound faded. I was aware, in a way I hadn't fully let myself be aware of until that exact second, of how close her face actually was — close enough that the orange emergency light caught the edge of her cheek, close enough that I could see her pulse jumping visibly at her throat, close enough that some small, reckless, entirely undocumented part of me leaned in, just slightly, without any input from the rational planning committee that usually ran my decisions.
Iris's breath caught. Her hand, still fisted in my sleeve from pulling me into the gap, tightened.
"BACKSTAGE INTRUDER ALERT," announced a voice, extremely loudly, in what was unmistakably a passable impression of Principal Whitfield, from somewhere directly above our heads.
We both jumped so hard I cracked my elbow against the support beam. Pickle, perched smugly on top of the set flats, ruffled his feathers with the satisfaction of a creature who had timed his intervention with surgical precision, and let out a second, slightly less accurate impression of a school fire bell for good measure.
Whatever had almost happened evaporated instantly into a scramble of stifled laughter and shushing, Iris clapping a hand over her own mouth to keep from making noise, me pressing my forehead against the beam and shaking with the specific kind of laughter that comes from nearly getting caught, nearly being scared to death, and nearly — almost, possibly, I genuinely could not be sure — being about to kiss someone, all within the same ninety seconds.
"Your crow," I said, once I could speak again, "has the worst timing of any living creature I have ever encountered."
"He has the best timing," Iris said, but she wasn't looking at me anymore. She was looking at the dead computer screen, at June's paused, frozen face, at whatever had just genuinely frightened her cousin enough to cut a call short mid-warning.
"Iris. What did she mean, don't trust anyone on the council?"
Iris was quiet for a long moment, tucking the loose strand of purple-streaked hair behind her ear, her earlier flatness sliding back over her expression like a door closing.
"I don't know," she said. "But I know June doesn't scare easy. And she looked scared."
We left the way we came, Mr. Finch waving us off with an absent "no rats, then?" that neither of us corrected, and I walked Iris to the end of her street in a silence that felt heavier than any silence we'd shared before, both of us turning over the same unanswered question from opposite directions.
Especially not anyone in student council.
I thought about Nolan. I thought about the torn page with his signature fragment. And for the first time, walking home alone under streetlights that buzzed the same erratic rhythm as the old wing's emergency fixtures, I found myself wondering whether the person orchestrating all of this was someone whose name I hadn't even considered yet.
End of Episode 3.