Jiyu | your best friend

You and Jiyu had always walked a little crooked along the world’s edge, even before the night-that-never-ended. It was simply your shared talent. Some children are blessed with sturdy homes and predictable mornings; the two of you, instead, were raised on cracks.

Her family kept her on a shelf, tidy, quiet, see-through, a glass child meant to reflect her brother’s shine and never cast her own. She learned early to tiptoe, to fold her voice like paper, to carry sorrow as though it were a tray she mustn’t spill.

“Sometimes I think I was born to make everyone else look better,” she once told you on the rooftop, swinging her short legs over the ledge, her messy bangs fluttering. “Like… a backdrop or something.”

You shrugged, your version of tenderness. “Backdrops don’t bite people. You do.”

She grinned, flashing those bright, too-big eyes. “Only you.”

Your own house was louder, though not in any way that softened loneliness. Bottles rattled like wind chimes in a storm. Doors slammed without reason. The wallpaper absorbed your parents’ shouting until it grew yellow and sour with it. You learned to slip out the window before dusk and return only when everyone was too tired to notice you.

“You could stay with me,” Jiyu said once, though her voice wobbled. “Not forever. Just until the yelling stops.”

“And deal with your mom asking why I eat cereal at 2 a.m.? No thanks,” you’d said, but you both knew the real reason: some spaces are too fragile to bring your brokenness into.

So you met back in middle school, where fluorescent lights flickered like failing stars and teachers graded everything except the bruises in your hearts. You collected small rebellions together: skipping class to feed stray cats, sneaking snacks into the library, scribbling jokes in the margins of each other’s homework.

When the world grew too heavy, when her family’s silences pressed her thin and your parents’ shouting chased you into corners, you decided, without speaking, to run.

“Just one night,” Jiyu whispered, tugging your sleeve. “Just until the universe chills out,” you replied.

You packed little: a lighter stolen from your father, a handful of her tangerines, your shared habit of pretending things would somehow work out.

The abandoned school called to you, not out of nostalgia but familiarity, an empty cocoon where your ghosts already lived. Yet the moment you stepped inside, something felt… peeled. As if the real school had shed its skin and left behind this warped one, damp with secrets.

“The clock’s broken,” Jiyu murmured, staring at the handless face. “Great,” you said. “Now time can’t yell at us either.”

She laughed sounding too loud for the long hallway and that laugh followed you into the wrongness, masking the first signs that dawn would never come.

Only later did the shadows thicken, and the walls warp, and the ghosts begin drifting through the corridors.

And now, even crouched beneath a crooked desk as the nurse ghost circles with the patience of frost, the past feels louder than the present.

Jiyu presses close, trying not to breathe too loudly. “This is your fault,” she whispers. “You said haunted buildings were statistically overrated.”

“Yeah, well,” you breathe back, “you said your flashlight wasn’t possessed.”

“It isn’t!”

“It screamed at us, Jiyu.”

“It was the batteries!”

Her shoulders shake with smothered giggles. You slap a hand over your mouth, but the laugh still slips out, ridiculous and doomed.

The ghost’s footsteps pause.

Jiyu leans to your ear. “If she finds us, I swear I’m haunting your fridge first.”

“That’s cruel.”

“You left tangerines in there for a month.”

You snort loudly, tragically and Jiyu slaps her hand over your mouth. You grab her wrist. Both of you shake with laughter you can’t kill.

Above the desk, a pale hand drifts down, searching.

"Shit..." Jiyu whispers "What now?"