T’s ears ring. He stares at the slab of cold stone pressed up against the side of his face, and his ears ring. But it’s not his ears. He reaches up a shaky hand and pulls off his hearing aids one at a time. The world immediately becomes quieter, but the ringing stops.

T’S EARS RING. He stares at the slab of cold stone pressed up against the side of his face, and his ears ring. But it’s not his ears. He reaches up a shaky hand and pulls off his hearing aids one at a time. The world immediately becomes quieter, but the ringing stops.

A hand comes down and grips his wrist. Long, painted fingernails dig into his flesh painfully. He releases his grip on reflex, dropping his hearing aids to the floor. They bounce once on the stone tiles.

A shiny shoe descends just inches from his face, smashing the hearing aids to pieces beneath the heel. Pieces of shattered plastic scatter across the flagstone floor. T risks a glance up at his attackers, his vision only slightly impaired by the long fringe falling across his face. The girl standing over him is speaking—he can’t hear her properly; her quiet voice sounds more like white noise without his hearing aids. Zoe Monroe with her perfect black hair, her perfect soft face, her pretty blue eyes that stare right into your soul. T knows he is in love with her, has been for a while now; it’s one of the reasons she hates him so much.

He hears a soft sound—muffled laughter—from somewhere out of sight. She isn’t alone. There are three of them.

It hadn’t always been like this. For a while, they’d even been his friends.

T had been drawn to Zoe on his first day at St. Adelaide’s. He’d felt so lost and alone, sent off to a new boarding school in the middle of the semester. And there she’d been, sitting at an old wooden table in the middle of the common room, twirling a strand of glossy dark hair around her fingertip as she chatted with her friends. She’d looked up as he walked in, and their eyes had met briefly before T looked away.

T hadn’t started it. He’d never have the courage to approach a girl like her, but he kept finding himself in her vicinity, sitting near her at mealtimes and studying in the common room at the same time each evening. He didn’t understand it at first, this pull to be near her, but he couldn’t have resisted if he’d tried. Zoe had noticed, though, noticed the new girl who never talked and always looked away whenever they made eye contact. She’d been curious, T thought, or maybe she only pitied him always eating alone.

And what was he supposed to do when she approached him as he sat alone in the corner of the common room one evening? How could he have turned the beautiful, captivating girl away? She’d smiled and asked him his name. He wrote on a piece of scrap paper: “T.” That definitely wasn’t the name on his school ID, but Zoe hadn’t said anything, she’d just kept smiling. She invited him to her table, and his feet started to follow her before he’d even decided to go.

When her friends arrived at their usual table to find T had joined them, Zoe smiled and greeted them as if it was completely normal for him to be there. “This is T by the way,” she’d said as they sat down. Like it was no big deal. They glanced at each other, then smiled awkwardly at him and introduced themselves as Imogen and Evie. Introductions made, they got to work as usual—homework and revision. Imogen was struggling with her French, and Evie had a talent for biology. The whole time they studied together, T found himself glancing at Zoe. She was smart, worked hard. She was also not afraid to laugh and gossip with her friends. She had the brightest smile that seemed to light up the room.

It became a regular occurrence after that. Zoe invited him back to their table the next day and the next. As the weeks passed, T no longer sat in the corner alone, instead heading straight to Zoe, Imogen, and Evie’s table. The latter two still seemed to find him a bit weird, probably because he didn’t talk. And he regularly missed things in conversation—the combination of auditory processing disorder and hearing loss could not be underestimated—but they tried to include him in conversations. And Zoe—Zoe always led the way. She went out of her way to include him as much as possible, insisted the other girls repeat things so he could be included, always took the time to read whatever he wrote for them on his notepad, laughed at his jokes, and nodded at his insights.

One month into his time at St. Adelaide’s, Zoe invited him to a sleepover. They weren’t supposed to have sleepovers in the dorms. Each girl (and T) had her own room, and no one was allowed in someone else’s room after lights out. That didn’t stop them from happening though. Girls found ways to circumvent the rules in order to spend more time with their friends, and there were always some teachers who’d look the other way.

T had never been to a sleepover before; even at his old day school, he’d struggled to make friends and hadn’t been invited to those kinds of things. He’d always told himself he didn’t mind, but when Zoe approached him in the hallway in between classes one afternoon and invited him to join them in Imogen’s room that night, he’d been over the moon. He tried not to let his excitement show, putting all his effort into keeping his hands still instead of flapping around and his feet flat on the ground as he nodded his agreement. By the wide smile on Zoe’s face—wide enough that he could see the solitary dimple on her left cheek—he hadn’t completely hidden his feelings.

That night, he waited until after lights out before slipping out of his room and down the hallway. The school looked different at night. The long, narrow corridors felt everlasting and claustrophobic at once. The dormitory building had photos of previous students lining the walls, black and white going into sepia tone going into full colour. When he first arrived—before Zoe and her friends occupied his time—T had spent a lot of time looking at the photos and imagining what the girls were like (and wondering if they were all girls or if some of them might have been like him). Now, they seemed to watch him from the walls, looking down at him in judgement as he tiptoed down the corridor, making his way to Imogen’s room.

Imogen’s dorm room was on the floor above his, so he took the stairs at the end of the hall. The stairwell was cold, the stone-tiled steps leading up and down in a seemingly endless spiral. The steps always echoed any noise, enough so that T could hear it and was overwhelmed every time he had to take them when it was busy. That night, he’d planned ahead by wearing only his socks. It worked, but he didn’t like the feeling of cold stone beneath his toes with only a thin layer of fabric to protect them. Still, he continued on, knowing the girls were waiting for him, knowing Zoe was waiting for him.

The corridor leading to Imogen’s room was much the same as the one to T’s own. The doors were plain, apart from small stickers, each with a girl’s name on them. Zoe had told him Imogen’s room was near the end of the hall. So, on he went, trying not to slip in his bare socks on the hardwood floor. As he neared the end, he paid more attention to the names on the doors, looking for Imogen’s; otherwise, he might not have noticed the blank door. It was the only one without a sticker. He looked around to see if it had fallen off and was on the floor somewhere, but it was nowhere to be seen. T took a step toward the door. He didn’t know why, but he felt compelled to knock. He raised his hand to the wood and heard a hushed voice behind him.

T shot around to see who was there. Zoe. She wore her nightdress, her long, silky hair falling loose around her shoulders, and stood by an open door three down from the blank door. She was saying something but kept her voice low to avoid attention. T couldn’t hear her, but he figured he should probably go to her. He spared one last glance at the blank door before stepping into Imogen’s room.

All the dorm rooms at St. Adelaide’s were laid out exactly the same, with a single bed pressed up against one wall, a desk by the window, and a wardrobe and chest of drawers by the other wall. That said, the students were allowed to customise their rooms somewhat by choosing the sheets for their bed, what they displayed on the noticeboard above their bed, and the items decorating the surfaces around their room. T’s room was still rather a blank slate. He hadn’t brought much with him to St. Adelaide’s, and he’d yet to unpack most of it. Most of his things currently sat in boxes at the bottom of his wardrobe, and he had nothing he wanted to display on his noticeboard. Only his Superman bed sheets and the mess of pens and notebooks on his desk indicated that somebody actually lived there.

By contrast, Imogen had taken every opportunity to decorate her bedroom to her liking. Fairy lights were strung around the edges of the room, an assortment of ornaments decorated the surfaces, and the bed was piled high with brightly coloured cushions. Photographs covered the noticeboard. Most of them featured Imogen, and many of them also included Zoe and Evie and other girls he didn’t recognise. He was surprised to see one in the corner of himself sitting in the common room one evening with Imogen and Evie. He remembered Zoe had taken that one.

“T! You’re finally here!” Imogen smiled a saccharine smile. T smiled back, holding one hand up in greeting. Imogen turned and whispered something in Evie’s ear, and her friend giggled. Zoe rolled her eyes and took T by the hand, her soft fingers fitting gently in between his own like they were meant to be there, and led him to sit on the floor opposite the bed.

Evie and Imogen continued their gossiping, and Zoe joined in. T tried to follow as much of the conversation as possible, but it was hard for him when people spoke quickly and kept turning away. Instead, he found himself focusing more on more on Zoe, how her long black hair fell around her shoulders and the way her little pink nightdress fit around her frame. When he was younger, T might have thought he wanted to look like her, feeling inferior with his short brown hair, which never seemed to stay flat, and his oversized T-shirt and old pyjama bottoms doing anything but emphasising his figure. Now he knew better. Now he knew he was a “he,” even if he wasn’t sure if he was actually a boy or something else entirely. Now he knew the way he looked at Zoe wasn’t envy. He didn’t want to be her. He wanted to be with her.

“T?”

T startled at the sound of his name. He looked up to see all the girls looking at him. Imogen looked on the verge of rolling her eyes, but Zoe was smiling fondly at him.

“Did you space out, T?” she asked.

T nodded, heat rising in his cheeks. He desperately hoped none of them realised what he’d been imagining.

“We were thinking we could tell ghost stories, unless you’re too scared.” Imogen smirked at him from up on the bed.

T shook his head. He grabbed his notebook from his pyjama pocket. “I’m not scared,” he wrote.

“We know you’re not; she’s just teasing,” Zoe informed him.

T hadn’t heard many ghost stories before—one of the problems with never attending sleepovers. He’d read a lot of comics, though, including some spooky ones, and he was excited to hear some new scary stories.

Evie started them off, telling a story about a haunted doll. A shiver ran down T’s spine as she whispered, “Three steps coming to get you, two steps coming to get you, one step coming to get you…” as the doll climbed the stairs. They all giggled after she got to the end where the girl’s body was discovered with the doll lying next to her in bed.

Next, Zoe took a turn. This time, it was the story of a girl who saw a creepy clown standing outside her house as it got closer and closer. But when she called the neighbours, they couldn’t see it. T couldn’t help glancing behind him when it was revealed that the clown had been behind her the entire time, and she was just seeing the reflection. The girls laughed at him, and his face heated again with the embarrassment of it.

“All right, enough silly stories.” Imogen spoke up. “Now I’m going to tell you a true story.”

Zoe rolled her eyes again, and T was tempted to do the same. That was what everyone said about scary stories.

“It’s true,” Imogen insisted. “And not only is it true, but it happened in this school. This is the story of the ghost of St. Adelaide’s.

“Fifty years ago, a new girl came to St. Adelaide’s. She arrived in the middle of term, and she didn’t have any friends. She was a very religious girl, so she spent a lot of her time in the chapel praying. But bad things happen to girls who are on their own.”

“Imogen.” Zoe cut in, her voice sounding strained. T was glad he wasn’t the only one feeling uneasy about where this was going.

“The chaplain saw the girl kneeling to pray, all alone in the chapel, day after day.” Imogen continued as if Zoe hadn’t spoken. “And he became obsessed with her. One day, he approached her and tried to kiss her, but she pushed him away. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her to the baptism font. He held her face down beneath the water until the poor girl drowned.”

T felt sick. His body was so tense he wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d stopped breathing. He glanced at Zoe who seemed more disturbed than he did. She looked down, her hair falling across her face, but he still caught a glimpse of the tears in the corners of her bright blue eyes.

“They found the girl’s body the next day, lying in a pool of holy water. No one suspected the chaplain. One year later, he was setting things up for morning prayers when he heard a strange dripping sound. Drip. Drip. Drip. He turned and saw the girl he’d murdered. She was dripping wet, and her eyes were all black. She pointed at him, and he felt his lungs fill with water, and he drowned right there.”

“Imogen?” Evie whispered. “I know you were trying to scare us, but that might have been a bit much.”

Imogen shrugged her shoulders. “I told you; it’s true. Everything I said really happened. Afterward, they never let anyone use the girl’s old dorm room again. It’s just down the hall if you want proof. The one with no name on the door.”

T froze. The room down the hall? That room?

Evie got down from the bed and went to sit beside Zoe, then took her hand. “Imogen, I’m serious. You scared Zoe.”

“I’m fine,” Zoe whispered. She shook her head, running a hand through her hair, and when she looked up, she was back to her smiling self. She laughed. “It takes more than that to scare us. Right, T?”

T nodded slowly, surprised by the quick change in her demeanour. If she could hide her fear that well, how much else was she hiding from them?

THEY’D LEFT IMOGEN’S room in the early hours of the morning. It had still been dark, but they didn’t want to risk getting caught breaking school rules if they’d left when other people were awake. T glanced at the blank door as they walked by, but neither Zoe nor Evie looked that way. Evie and Zoe’s rooms were on the same floor as Imogen’s, so they didn’t have far to go, which left T to go back down the stairs alone.

Somehow, the stairwell seemed even darker now, colder and emptier than before. T glanced over the banister and found he couldn’t see the bottom. He took a breath to steady his nerves. They were just a bunch of silly ghost stories.

Still, as he took the steps one at a time, down into the darkness, he remembered Evie’s story (“one step coming to get you”). And his mind went back to Zoe’s story as he caught a glimpse of his pale-faced reflection in a window.

He got down to his landing. On one side of the landing was the corridor of dorm rooms that would take him back to his bedroom. On the other side was another door, this one leading to another long corridor and, at the end of that corridor, the school chapel.

It was just a story, T reminded himself, heading back to his room.

NO ONE TALKED about Imogen’s story after that night, and T told himself not to think about it. He was able to ignore it during the day, but sometimes at night, lying alone in the dark and the silence, his mind wandered back to that night. To the empty bedroom somewhere above him and to the chapel down the hall, across the landing, and at the end of the next hall. To the old stone font near the entrance, filled with holy water. And sometimes, even though he didn’t wear his hearing aids at night, he could swear he heard a drip, drip, drip getting louder and louder, closer and closer, from the chapel to just outside his door.

Zoe seemed completely unaffected after the sleepover. T had expected maybe she’d be a bit off when he saw her later that day, but she was as warm and smiley as ever.

The only difference was that now, Zoe wanted to hang out with T more. No, not quite. Zoe wanted to hang out with just T more. She would frequently ditch her other friends to be with T in one of their rooms rather than study in the common room with Imogen and Evie. T was more than happy to oblige her; he’d always liked Zoe more than the other two girls.

One day, Zoe was in T’s room when she remarked on how little stuff he had. He opened the wardrobe and gestured to the boxes tucked away at the bottom. She raised an eyebrow at him. “Don’t you wanna unpack?”

He shrugged.

“I can help you if you’d like?”

He didn’t care to unpack his stuff, but the idea of Zoe helping him made him smile. It took a whole evening’s work, but eventually, all his things were unpacked: comics and graphic novels lined up on top of the chest of drawers, his Lego Batmobile in pride of place on the windowsill, and his colouring pencils and sketchbooks organised neatly on his desk. He smiled at Zoe when they were done, but she wasn’t smiling back. Instead, she was looking at his noticeboard, still empty as ever with nothing he wanted to display.

“Don’t you have any photos?” Zoe asked, and T shook his head.

He did, technically—a few of his family and their pets sitting in the top drawer of his bedside table in his real bedroom back home. They might as well be in another world right now. He didn’t expect his family would welcome him back any time soon; they considered him more of a burden than a sibling or child.

“I’m sure we can get you something.” Zoe turned to him and smiled that warm smile, and he felt a matching smile spread across his own face.

The next day, Zoe approached him after registration and pushed something into his hand. He looked down to see a Polaroid picture she’d taken of them weeks ago. Her arm was around T’s shoulders, and he was blushing slightly as they both smiled at the camera.

“For your noticeboard,” she said before walking away.

T pinned it to the board as soon as he got back that evening.

IT WAS INEVITABLE, wasn’t it? T could only have continued to hide his feelings for so long. And Zoe? Zoe actually seemed like she might return them. She was spending more time with him than with any of her other friends, and she was always tactile with him in a way she never was with them, holding his hand, sitting closer to him on the bed. T knew he wasn’t imagining it.

They were sitting in T’s room. They’d planned to get some studying done there, but that had soon fallen away to sitting on the bed together chatting. T showed Zoe one of his favourite comics, and she asked questions and waited patiently for him to write out the answers. He loved it. He loved that someone showed an interest in the things he liked. He loved that she waited for him to write the answers out instead of growing inpatient. He loved her.

He loved her.

It was just them sitting on the bed with a comic book in between them. It was early evening. The curtains were shut, and the bedside lamps were the only light they had. Zoe’s hair fell across her face again, and T reached up to gently push it out of her eyes.

Zoe looked up, a faint pink blush colouring her pale cheeks. She’d leaned over, studying the comic, and when she looked up, her face was no more than an inch from his. He could see the shine of her pink lip gloss, feel her hot breath against his lips, smell the sweet scent of her strawberries-and-cream shampoo.

He leaned closer and kissed her. She stiffened, then relaxed a little, her lips giving way for T’s own. He pressed in, resting a hand on her forearm.

Then she was gone. As quickly as the kiss started, Zoe had pulled away.

She stood from the bed. T was too stunned to move. She gazed down at him, tears in the corners of her eyes.

“Why would you do that, T? Why would you ruin things by doing that?”

Before T could even think to answer, she pulled open the door and stormed out. T watched as the heavy wooden door fell shut behind her, leaving him alone.

THAT NIGHT, HE’D lain awake in bed thinking about Zoe, thinking about everything he’d done wrong, how he’d misread the signs. She just wanted a friend, and he’d tried to kiss her. What kind of asshole was he?

His hearing aids were on his bedside table. Everyone around him was asleep. It was impossible not to hear the sound breaking through the silence, the drip, drip, drip. Louder and louder, closer and closer. He shouldn’t be able to hear it without his hearing aids, but he does.

He listened as it stopped moving. A loud drip, drip, drip right outside his bedroom door. His eyes were fixed on the door. He watched as the knob slowly started to turn.

No. He wanted to scream, to call for help or yell at whoever it was to go away, but he couldn’t. He often felt frustrated that he was non-vocal, but never like this. The doorknob kept turning. The door started to move. T couldn’t move.

Then it stopped. The door fell closed once again, and the sound of dripping ended.

T DIDN’T KNOW when he fell asleep that night. After what had happened, he was shocked he was able to sleep at all.

When he woke up, his eyes heavy from exhaustion, he inspected the door, looking for any sign as to whether what had happened was real or a dream. Everything looked normal, but when he looked down, he saw it. A Polaroid picture.

T reached to pick it up. It was a picture of him and Zoe, different from the one on his noticeboard. He turned it over and saw there was something written on the back.

T. I’m sorry I freaked out. Can we talk? Meet me tonight after lights out in the chapel. Zoe.

It was her handwriting. He’d know it anywhere. Did this mean he had it right? She was interested in him in the same way he was interested in her? T’s heart did a flip in his chest, last night’s fears forgotten. Zoe wanted to see him.

He looked for her in class that day, but she was nowhere to be found. He passed a note to Evie in biology, asking her where Zoe was. She just shook her head in response. T didn’t know how to interpret that.

It didn’t matter though. He had Zoe’s note. He carried it all day in his blouse pocket, right next to his heart. She wanted to see him.

AFTER SCHOOL THAT day, he sat in his room, trying to fix his hair and wishing he had a proper mirror. Instead, he used his reflection in the window to check his appearance. He didn’t usually care much about how he looked, but it felt important that night. He wanted Zoe to like him; he didn’t want her to change her mind over something as stupid as his messy hair.

He waited, sitting on his bed, trying to focus on the reading he had to do for English. No matter how much he tried, the words didn’t go in, and his thoughts kept drifting back to Zoe. Zoe’s eyes. Zoe’s smile. Zoe’s perfect loopy handwriting on the back of a Polaroid picture.

At 10:00 p.m., he heard the matron walking down the hall calling “lights out.” When the corridor was silent again, he made his move.

He walked down the hallway, socks on hardwood, trying to ignore the feeling of eyes on him as the photos watched him from the wall. He braced himself for the cold as he stepped out onto the stairwell landing. It was so dark out there at night. Then he crossed the landing to the other corridor.

T hadn’t visited the chapel outside of mandatory prayers everybody had to attend once a week. It was an old building that they’d built the dormitories around at a later date. The hallway leading up to the chapel was much the same as the others around the dormitory building, long and narrow with hardwood floors and more old photographs on the walls. This time, the photos featured the various school chaplains over the years instead of the girls.

The chapel itself was large for a school chapel—probably because it had never been intended to be one. Large, uneven stone slabs made up its floor, some with letters carved into them, and the walls were carved stones broken up by stained-glass windows. At the entrance, an old stone font, filled with holy water, stood tall, a heavy wooden lid covering it. Rows of wooden pews led up to the altar on a raised dais at the front.

And there was Zoe, standing with her back to him, her long black hair braided neatly down her spine. She turned when he stepped into the empty chapel. It was cold, colder than the stairwell even, but T barely noticed; he was so fixated on Zoe.

“T, you came.” Zoe’s voice was soft.

T walked down the aisle toward where she was standing, smiling shyly.

Zoe frowned at him. “I was hoping you wouldn’t.”

T stopped in his tracks, taken aback by Zoe’s sudden iciness. Hadn’t she asked him to come here?

“I told you she would.”

T recognized the voice. He turned to see Imogen and Evie stepping out of the shadows.

“She thinks she’s in love with you. She can’t help herself.”

Evie giggled.

T glanced at Zoe, but she was looking away from him. What was this? Tears stung his eyes. Why invite him here just to humiliate him? Why would Zoe do this?

He turned to go, but Imogen stopped him in his tracks. She stood in front of him and grabbed him by the shoulders. A hand wrapped around his wrist, and he turned to Zoe behind him.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

T stared at her in shock. What was she talking about?

Before he could think what to do next, Imogen pushed him backward. His foot caught on the uneven stone, and he fell into Zoe. She shoved him off of her, and he hit the cold stone floor.

A hand, Zoe’s hand, comes down and grips his wrist. Long, painted fingernails dig into his flesh painfully. He releases his grip on reflex, dropping his hearing aids to the floor. They bounce once on the stone tiles.

He hears a soft sound—muffled laughter—from somewhere out of sight.

Another shoe appears in front of his face. Before he has time to react, it’s making contact with his nose. T gasps in pain, shutting his eyes tight.

Then come the hands. Two sets of hands grab him by the arms and drag him to the entrance of the chapel. He lets them. He just wants this to be over.

There’s a bang, loud enough that he can hear it even without his hearing aids. He opens his eyes to see that they’re in front of the font, and the lid has been pulled back. Why? He doesn’t understand.

Then the two girls holding his limbs drag him up to the side of the font, and he realises what’s about to happen right before Zoe takes him by the hair and pushes his face down into the water.

He gasps. He can’t help it. He gasps, and cold water floods into his mouth and his airways. He flails his limbs and tries to lift his head, but their grip on him is too tight. He can’t move, can’t get out. His lungs start to burn, unable to get enough air. He’s going to die here. T is going to die. Drowned in freaking holy water.

Just as he thinks he can’t take any more, they relent. The grip on his head releases, and he comes up for air, gasping and choking as he collapses to the floor. Water from his sopping-wet fringe drips into his eyes, and he barely sees three pairs of shiny black shoes walking away as he curls up on the floor.

He doesn’t know how long it’s been, but he hasn’t moved, and his lungs still burn painfully when the chapel doors open again.

T doesn’t have the energy to care as feet in shiny black shoes approach him again. But when he looks up, it’s not Zoe, Imogen, and Evie. It’s a man. One he vaguely recognises from school prayers. The chaplain.

He’s a young man, maybe in his early thirties. Blond with a few lines around his blue eyes but not enough to make him unattractive. He’s speaking; his lips move, but T never learned to lip read, so he has no idea what’s being said.

The chaplain kneels beside him and helps him to sit up. He speaks again, but he must pick up on something from the blank look on T’s face because he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small notepad and pencil.

“Can you hear me?” he writes.

T shakes his head.

“What happened? Are you all right?” he writes.

T just sits there shaking. The chaplain reaches out; callused fingers brush across T’s cheek as he pushes his fringe out of his eyes. The chaplain leans closer, his face right in front of T’s, and T flinches back, pulling away from him.

The man frowns, and T gets to his feet despite the way his legs shake. He never learned sign language, but he remembers one sign they used at his primary school sometimes. T holds up one hand, palm out flat. “Stop.”

The chaplain looks him up and down, then seems to come to some kind of conclusion because he turns and walks away, leaving T alone in the chapel once again.

T gasps out a shaky breath. He’s not okay. He stumbles down the aisle and finds himself before the altar, looking up at a crucifix that hangs above the room, watching everything.

T doesn’t know if he believes in any kind of God. His family are Catholics; that’s why they sent him to a Catholic school, but he’s never felt sure about any of that. Still, he finds something reassuring about the church and the altar and the kind eyes staring down at him. After everything that’s happened, he finds himself wanting to pray.

God—Father? I don’t know if you’re listening. I don’t know if you listen to people like me. I’m so tired. I’m tired of rejection, and I’m so scared of what they’ll do next. Take me away from here, God. Or…or get rid of them. Just don’t let them hurt me any more. Amen.

He stands to go, feeling somewhat calmer, then remembers what his mum always told him and makes the sign of the cross.

T WAKES UP with a pounding headache. He wants to roll over and go back to sleep when the sunlight slips through the gap in the curtains, but he can’t. They have mandatory morning prayers, and if T isn’t there, the matron will come looking for him.

He rolls out of bed. He doesn’t know how he’s going to manage without his hearing aids or what he’ll tell his teachers, but that feels like the least of his worries right now. The thought of seeing Zoe again makes him nauseous. He tries not to think about her as he puts on a clean uniform, ignoring the clothes he’d left on the floor after he’d gotten back to his room last night.

As he makes his way to the chapel, girls keep glancing at him. He wonders if Zoe, Imogen, and Evie have told everybody that he likes girls yet, or if he just looks as bad as he feels.

When he approaches the chapel, there is a crowd of girls standing outside, which is weird because he’s definitely late for morning prayers. A teacher stands in front of them stopping them from entering the chapel. T isn’t sure what’s happening. Some of the girls are turning back while others try to look around the teacher to see whatever is in the chapel.

Is this because of last night? Did he leave something behind?

He pushes his way through the crowd. Short and skinny as he is, it’s easier to slip through the mass of bodies, despite how much he hates being touched. When he gets to the front, he catches a glimpse at what’s behind the half-open chapel door. There’s a white sheet on the ground, but it’s not hard to see what it’s supposed to be concealing. A man lies on the chapel floor in a puddle of water. T doesn’t have to look any closer to recognise who it is.

He turns and flees.

IT’S ALL ANYBODY is talking about that day. The chaplain found dead—drowned. Gossip spreads like wildfire at St. Adelaide’s. By lunch, three girls have passed him notes asking him if he knows what’s happened.

He knows. He can’t get the image of the chaplain’s body out of his head (or the chaplain’s face so close to his that he can feel his breath). He feels sick.

He makes do as best he can without his hearing aids. He tells his form tutor he lost them, and she tuts and tells him not to be so careless, then passes him a note saying she’ll ask the matron to organise for some replacements to be sent straight to the school as soon as possible.

It’s not until that afternoon that T has a class with Zoe. He doesn’t have butterflies in his stomach. He has worms. Wriggling and squirming and making him want to throw up. As T gets to the classroom door, he braces himself, wondering if he’d be better off skipping. He steps through the door, and his eyes go straight to Zoe’s seat. She’s not there. Again.

Imogen is in this class though. She glares daggers at him as he enters the classroom, then pointedly looks away when he takes his usual seat next to Zoe’s empty place.

He doesn’t even try to pay attention in class. He can’t hear anything being said without his hearing aids, and his mind is elsewhere. He keeps glancing at Zoe’s empty seat.

The bell rings at the end of the lesson. Someone knocks into T as he gets up, and he turns to see Imogen behind him. She glares at him, then glances downward. He follows her gaze to a folded piece of paper at his feet. When he looks up again, she’s gone.

It’s a note. Not from Imogen. From Zoe.

Four words in Zoe’s familiar loopy handwriting.

Did you kill him?

AFTER LESSONS WERE finished for the day, T goes looking for them. He finds Imogen at her usual table in the common room. Evie and Zoe are notably absent.

He writes out what he wants to say to her before he approaches her, knowing she won’t have the patience to sit and wait for him in the moment.

She looks up when she sees him approaching. She opens her mouth and says something he can’t hear. Probably asking why he’s there or telling him to go away. Probably in less polite terms. He places the note on the table in front of her, and she glares down at it. Her eyes dart back and forth across the page, reading.

Why did you give me that note? Does Zoe really think I did something? I’ve never hurt anyone! You’re the ones who attacked me. She already hates me just like you clearly do. Why can’t you all just leave me ALONE?!

Imogen’s nose scrunches up in annoyance. She crushes his note into a ball and tosses it to one side before picking up her things and storming out.

THAT NIGHT HE hears it again. Lying awake in the dark. The drip. Drip. Drip.

Down the hall. Echoing in the stairwell. Then across to his hallway… No. Echoing. Getting farther away. Drip. Drip. Drip. Up the stairs.

T lies frozen. Listening.

The echoing stopped. He hears it going down the hall. One floor up.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

And then it stops. At the end of the hall.

T lies there in the silence. Waiting for something. Anything. But there is nothing else.

THE NEXT DAY, Imogen is gone. She isn’t in class. She isn’t in the common room or in the dining hall at mealtimes. T sees Zoe for the first time in days, sitting in the corner with Evie, her hair lank, her face a pallid shade of grey, her eyes red-rimmed.

T wants to approach her. To say something. To comfort her or confront her, he isn’t sure which. He doesn’t.

Instead, he leaves the common room and makes his way back to the dorms. When he gets to the stairwell, he doesn’t go down the hall to his room though. Something stops him. His legs seem to move by themselves with no input from his brain, and he starts walking up the stairs.

He heads down the corridor to Imogen’s room. The girls watch him from the photographs on the wall, their eyes cold and black. He doesn’t go to Imogen’s room. He stops outside the blank door again.

There’s a sound, quiet at first. Drip. Drip. Drip.

It’s coming from behind the door.

T’s hand shakes as he reaches for the door handle. It’s unlocked. He pulls it open.

She’s lying on the floor, long brown hair spread around her like a halo in a puddle of water. Her blue eyes are open, staring at the ceiling, not seeing anything.

Imogen.

T stumbles backward. He can’t look away. Someone else is in the hallway then. They’re saying something. T can’t hear them.

T SITS OUTSIDE the matron’s office. He can’t get the images out of his head. First, the chaplain, now, Imogen. Both dead. Both drowned. They still don’t know how exactly Imogen died, but T saw the puddle of water she was lying in. He has no doubt she drowned, even though that’s impossible.

After T was discovered standing over Imogen’s body, someone went to find a staff member. Rumour must have spread quickly because the hallway soon filled with girls, and T was ushered away by the matron.

He’s glad he doesn’t have his hearing aids. He can’t imagine how overwhelming it all would have been if he could actually hear everything.

The door opens, and the matron steps out, a painfully false close-lipped smile spread across her face. She holds an arm out toward T, and he walks into her office. He’s been in there a few times since he started at St. Adelaide’s. First, to deliver his paperwork on his first day and earlier in the term when he was running low on hearing aid batteries.

She passes him a note: “How are you feeling?”

He shrugs. He doesn’t have it in him to answer.

She picks up her pen and starts writing again. “You must be pretty shaken. If you know anything about what happened, please tell us.”

Shaken is an understatement. And maybe he doesn’t know anything, or maybe he was just imagining the drip, drip, drip, and the ghost story was just a ghost story. Either way, he shakes his head.

The matron hands him a final note. “If you think of anything, come see me. Your new hearing aids should arrive very soon. Get some rest.”

THAT NIGHT, T sits on his bed, reading a comic by torchlight. There’s no point trying to sleep when every time he closes his eyes all he sees are bodies.

He flips through the pages of the comic, trying to immerse himself in the story. It almost works. Well enough that he can pretend he doesn’t hear it at first. But he does.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

He stills.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Getting louder. Getting closer.

Down the hall. Echoing in the stairwell. Up the stairs.

No.

Not again.

T shuts his eyes and covers his ears, but he can still hear it. The dripping. The constant dripping.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Finally, it stops. The world is silent and still again.

T ISN’T THE one who finds her. He hates that he feels relieved when he hears Evie is dead, but at least he didn’t have to see the body.

That doesn’t stop his imagination though. His mind supplies him with images as horrifying as the real thing would have been. Evie in her crumpled school uniform or her purple pyjamas lying on the floor, her face pale, her eyes wide, her mouth open in a silent scream. Always lying in a pool of water just like Imogen and the chaplain.

He hears the news at morning prayers (now held in the assembly hall as the chapel is off limits). He skips classes the rest of the day, preferring to hide in his room under his Superman duvet. No one comes looking for him. He can’t even bring himself to read; all he can do is think of everything that has happened the past few days and wish it were nothing but a nightmare.

THAT NIGHT, HE hears it again. Wrapped in his duvet, his eyes red and sore from tears. And he hopes maybe, this time, it’s coming for him.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Down the chapel hall, across the echoing stairwell, down the hall to his room. Closer and closer. It stops just outside his door.

He refuses to look at first, but he catches a glimpse of the handle moving out of the corner of his eye. Finally.

The door opens, and he turns to see.

Zoe.

She stands in the doorway, shaking like a leaf. Her long black hair falls limply across her face, her blue eyes are red, and her face is the palest he’s ever seen. She wears the same pink nightdress as the night of the sleepover.

“T.”

He can’t hear her, but he can see the letter on her lips.

He slowly emerges from his duvet cocoon, getting up to stand before her.

She hands him a note. It shakes in her unsteady hands.

I know you’re a good person, T. I know you wouldn’t do this on purpose. But if you have done something, if you’re the reason this is happening, please, please, make it stop. My best friends are both dead, and I’m so scared.

T looks up when he’s read it to see fresh tears spilling down Zoe’s cheeks.

He shakes his head, then turns to his desk to grab a pen and some more paper. He writes, “I didn’t do anything, Zoe. Please believe me. I didn’t—”

He stops writing, hit all at once by a memory. Kneeling in the chapel, the stone pressed against his knees, cold through his thin pyjama trousers, his head throbbing, and his throat burning.

Get rid of them.

Did he do this?

Zoe watches him, fear and expectation written across her face.

“I don’t know,” he finally writes.

More tears fall as she reads his note. She sits heavily on the edge of the bed.

T cautiously approaches her. She reaches for the pen, and he gives it to her.

“What are we going to do?”

A part of T wants to ask what she means by “we.” Does she really think he wants to help her—wants anything to do with her—after what she and her friends did to him? But…he does. He sees the scared, tearful girl sitting on his bed, and he desperately wants to help her, to comfort the girl he loves. Because he does still love her. Whether he wants to or not.

He picks up a pen and writes hesitantly. “This started in the chapel.”

Zoe stands, suddenly motivated. She writes quickly, even with the tears still running down her cheeks. “Let’s go back there, then. We need to stop this somehow.”

T nods without hesitation. Even after everything, he can’t say no to her.

The halls are silent as they slip out of T’s room and make their way to the chapel. T’s certain that the girls in the photos are judging him for going with Zoe again, but she takes his hand, and all he can focus on is her fingers pressed against his own.

The stairwell seems even colder than usual tonight. T jumps when he feels something damp beneath his bare feet. He looks down and sees a puddle reflecting the moonlight through the window.

He shudders but continues walking, following Zoe’s lead.

They head down the next hall. The chaplain’s photo stares down at them from the walls. Zoe cringes and hurries past. A part of T is glad he’s dead now.

They push open the heavy wood doors and enter the chapel together.

T’s eyes dart to the spot on the floor where the chaplain’s body lay just days before. He’s gone. There’s no sign that someone died in here.

T didn’t come with a plan, but now that he’s here, he walks toward the front of the chapel to the altar and drops to his knees, just like he did that night. Zoe kneels beside him, and he watches her as she gazes up at the crucifix above the altar.

Her hair falls across her face, tangled and greasy. She bites her pink lips, now looking sore and cracked. She’s still beautiful. How is she still beautiful?

T turns to the crucifix himself and tries to pray, but he can’t get his mind to focus on words.

That’s when he hears it. Somewhere behind them, just out of view. The drip, drip, drip.

Zoe freezes. She hears it too.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

T wants to turn around, wants to look, but he’s too afraid of what he will see. Instead, he keeps his eyes on the crucifix. He reaches his fingers out and takes Zoe’s hand in his. She clutches at him, tightly, desperately.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

The dripping gets louder, closer. Then it stills, directly behind them, impossibly loud in T’s deaf ears.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

Maybe if he doesn’t look it’ll go away.

He doesn’t get to make that decision because Zoe turns around.

His eyes widen as she turns. He watches as her mouth opens in a scream he can’t hear. Then she’s choking.

Gasping, choking cuts off her scream. T watches in horror as she bends over, her hands flailing wildly as she tries to breathe.

She starts coughing, and T can’t look away as the first water hits the stone floor. Then more and more, Zoe vomiting water as she chokes, unable to breathe.

No.

No. No. No.

Make it stop!

Why won’t it stop?

It ends as quickly as it began. Zoe stills, no longer retching or convulsing. She falls motionless to the stone floor, landing in the puddle of water in front of her. Her fingers go limp, and T realises he’s still holding her hand.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

T stares at the water falling around him. The tears run freely down his cheeks and hit the stone floor, mixing with the water Zoe coughed up moments ago.

Drip. Drip. Drip.

T stands and turns.

Drip. Drip. Drip.