Who's that girl?
The next morning, the atmosphere in The Veil’s clubroom was different. The usual teasing and chaotic banter were replaced with something heavier—an unspoken tension that settled over the group like a dense fog. The laughter from last night’s glitter fiasco had long since faded, replaced by the weight of the mystery that had landed—quite literally—on their doorstep.
The group gathered, armed with laptops, notebooks, and a shared sense of unease. Sunlight filtered through the dusty windows, illuminating the glitter still stubbornly clinging to the furniture from last night’s fiasco. But today, they had a more pressing mystery. The polaroid sat at the center of the table like an unspoken challenge, the nameless girl’s smirk seeming to mock them. Surrounding it were the scattered newspapers and bulletins, all carrying the same tragic tale of a vanished girl, lost to time.
Aiah sat at the center of the room, fingers drumming against the surface of her laptop, eyes sharp and calculating as she scanned through article after article. Colet was beside her, muttering under her breath as she ran searches through multiple databases, trying to find anything about the girl in the ID. The others were gathered around, notebooks and phones in hand, each of them attempting to piece together the puzzle with whatever information they could scrape up.
“Alright,” Colet adjusted her glasses, pulling up her laptop. “Let’s start with the obvious. We need a name.”
“That would be nice,” Stacey muttered, rubbing her temples. “Except someone clearly went through the effort of making sure we don’t have that.”
Gwen, who had been eerily quiet until now, spoke up. "Maybe we can still get something from the ID. The name’s scratched off, yeah, but not completely. If we can make out even a few letters—"
"I already tried enhancing the image," Colet interrupted, adjusting her glasses. "I played with the contrast and used some deblurring tools, but the scratch marks are deep. It was intentional, like someone really didn’t want this name to be readable."
Mikha leaned over, peering at the damaged ID card. “Okay, but we can still make out some letters, right? Look at the first name. If you angle it under the light—” She tilted the polaroid slightly. “J… O… N… A?”
“Jona?” Gwen suggested. “Jonah? Jonathan?”
Sheena gave her a flat look. “Jonathan? Really?”
“Hey, I’m just throwing ideas out there.”
“Let’s focus on what we actually have,” Aiah interrupted. “The surname—what can we see?”
They all squinted at the image, the aggressive scratches making it difficult to make out the letters. But after a few moments, Maloi spoke up.
“R… M… I?”
“Jona RMI?” Sheena wrinkled her nose. “That’s not a name. That’s a bad Scrabble hand.”
“No, but it’s something,” Aiah mused, fingers tapping against the table. She shifted her gaze back to the ID, and that’s when she noticed it—the department label. The small text at the bottom of the ID, though faded, was still legible.
“Journalism,” she murmured.
Mikha straightened. “So, she was in the Journalism Department?”
“That’s a start, we can try cross-referencing it with archived student records," Colet suggested, already typing away. "I’ll run a search for any student from four years ago with ‘J-O-N-A’ somewhere in their name. Maybe we can find a matching name from four years ago.”
"And I’ll check the forums and student gossip sites," Maloi said, pulling out her phone. "Someone had to have talked about this back then when it happened, right?”
Minutes passed. Then an hour. The only sounds in the room were the rapid clicking of keys and the occasional frustrated sighs. Colet scanned the university’s digital archives, while Maloi scoured every social media platform, every forgotten forum post, every late-night gossip thread. But every search, every attempt to dig up something on the missing girl, led to nothing.
“No way,” Maloi muttered under her breath, scrolling furiously through her phone. “This makes no sense.”
“What?” Stacey leaned over.
“I’m checking old student blogs, anonymous gossip pages, even old university scandals. It’s like she doesn’t exist. No mentions, no rumors, no ‘oh, remember that missing girl?’ posts. It’s weird.”
Gwen, who had been quietly flipping through the old newspapers, finally spoke. "That doesn’t make sense. A student vanished without a trace, and there’s no online footprint? No speculation? No urban legends?"
"Exactly," Maloi said, leaning back with a scowl. "Even stupid rumors get documented somewhere. People love to talk. But with her? It’s like she was just… wiped away."
Colet frowned, glancing up from her laptop. “I’m getting the same thing. The digital archives from four years ago have gaps, missing files. It’s like someone scrubbed her clean from history.”
A cold silence fell over them.
Sheena, flipping through the newspapers, let out a small, sharp breath. "The articles," she muttered. "Check the articles again. Maybe they mention her name somewhere?"
Aiah exhaled. “Good idea. Look for anything with initials too.”
They spread out, each grabbing different pieces of old media. But as they flipped through the yellowed pages, their initial determination began to morph into something eerier.
There was nothing.
No names. No initials. No student records.
Just vague, ominous headlines: “Mystery Deepens as SAU Student Remains Missing” or “No New Leads in Disappearance of SAU Undergrad.”
“It’s not just the ID,” Colet muttered, a flicker of something uneasy in her voice. “Her name… it’s been erased everywhere.”
The names were gone. Scratched out, blurred, or conveniently missing from the paragraphs where they should have been. The only things left were the eerie, gaping spaces where the missing girl’s identity should have been.
Mikha frowned, picking up one of the old newspapers. "It’s weird, though. If she went missing, why aren’t there more articles? These are just a handful of reports, and none of them go into much detail."
Sheena nodded. "Even small rumors spread like wildfire in this school. If a girl vanished, someone would have made theories about it."
Stacey, who had been flipping through another stack of articles, tapped a finger against one of the papers. "And look at this. The way these articles are written feels… off. They’re too vague. No mention of how she disappeared, what she was doing last, or even her close friends. Just ‘missing.’ It’s like they wanted people to forget her."
Mikha chewed on her lip. "Maybe she was… erased?"
"Not just erased," Gwen murmured, rubbing her temple. "It’s like every trace of her was deliberately wiped out. The articles exist, but they’re hollow. There’s no weight behind them, no real substance. No witnesses, no family statements, no theories."
Silence fell over the room.
Mikha slowly sat back in her chair. “Guys… this is creeping me out.”
“Same,” Gwen muttered, flipping the newspaper around as if the missing information would suddenly appear. “How do you just delete a person from history? Even if the school tried to cover it up, there’d still be something left behind.”
Sheena glanced warily at the polaroid again. The girl’s smirk, once playful, now looked almost… knowing. “What if—” she hesitated, then shook her head. “Never mind. It’s dumb.”
“What if what?” Aiah pressed, her gaze sharp.
Sheena sighed. “What if she was never real?”
Silence fell over the room.
“That’s ridiculous,” Stacey scoffed. “She was real. She’s in the articles. The fact that we’re even reading about her proves that.”
“But why can’t we find a single mention of her name?” Sheena countered. “No records, no old social media accounts, no classmates posting about her—nothing. It’s like… like someone doesn’t want her to be remembered.”
A heavy silence settled over them. The weight of the situation was sinking in, thick and suffocating. The name, the erased records, the deliberate scrubbing of her identity—it all felt intentional. But why?
Aiah stared at the polaroid again, at the girl’s mischievous smirk frozen in time. "Then we start from scratch. We need to find someone who was here four years ago. A professor, an old student, anyone who might remember her. If no record exists, we’ll have to make our own."
Stacey nodded. "If someone wanted her erased, that means she was important. And if she was important… then we’re asking the right questions."
The room was silent, but a new determination burned in their eyes. Whoever this girl was, wherever she had gone, they were going to find her.
--------
The campus library had always been Aiah’s haven, but tonight, it felt different. The usual quiet no longer felt peaceful—it was thick, heavy, the kind that settled deep into the bones and made her hyper-aware of every creak in the wooden shelves, every flicker of the overhead lights. Aiah had been here for hours, her textbooks spread out in front of her, but no matter how hard she tried to focus on her coursework, her mind kept drifting back to the mystery of the missing girl.
She tapped her pen against her notebook, staring at the notes she had scribbled earlier that day:
- J O N A R M I (partial name?)
- Journalism Department
- No digital records
- Erased from history??
The last line made her uneasy.
A student going missing was already strange, but someone actively removing all traces of them? That was unsettling. People didn’t just vanish without a trace. Even when the university tried to hush up incidents, there were always whispers, traces left behind in forgotten corners of the internet or old records. But this girl? It was as if someone had ripped her out of existence.
That thought sent a chill up Aiah’s spine.
She exhaled, shaking her head.
And if no online records existed, maybe the answer lay somewhere less… digital.
Her gaze shifted toward the farthest corner of the library—the archives section.
It was an old, dimly lit part of the library, filled with yellowing newspapers, bound student publications, and—most importantly—yearbooks. If this girl really had been a student here, her face had to be somewhere in the past records.
Aiah pushed back her chair, her sneakers barely making a sound against the polished floor as she made her way across the rows of bookshelves. The overhead lights flickered slightly, casting a brief shadow as she reached the aged wooden cabinets that held decades' worth of school history. The smell of old paper and ink filled her nose as she carefully opened the glass-paneled case, and for a split second, she hesitated. The air in this part of the library felt different, heavier.
She swallowed the unease and ran her fingers along the cracked spines of the yearbooks, searching for the right year.
“Alright, four years ago…” she muttered to herself, running her fingers along the cracked spines of the yearbooks until she found the one she was looking for—San Antonio University Yearbook 2021.
The book was heavier than she expected, its pages stiff with age. Aiah carried it to a nearby desk and slowly flipped through, scanning through the pages of smiling faces and bold-printed names.
“Come on… if she was really a student here, she has to be in this.”
She flipped through the Journalism Department section, trailing her finger down each row of photos. Page after page, line after line—
And then she froze.
A familiar face stared back at her.
There she was.
The girl from the polaroid.
That same mischievous smirk, the sharp glint in her eyes—like she knew something no one else did. Aiah’s breath hitched. Seeing her here, perfectly preserved in ink and paper, made it real. She had been a student. She had existed.
But where the other students had neat labels beneath their photos, her name was—
Scratched out.
Every other name on the page was intact. But hers—jagged, blacked out, erased.
Aiah’s stomach twisted. She reached out, fingertips grazing the jagged remnants of where her name had been, the ink violently obliterated by something sharp. Someone had made sure that even in the permanent pages of history—she remained nameless.
“Okay, this is insane…” Aiah whispered, tracing the ruined letters with her fingertip. Someone really didn’t want this girl to be remembered. But why? What happened to her?
A sudden prickle crept up Aiah’s neck. That eerie sensation of being watched.
Her pulse quickened. Slowly, subtly, she peered through the narrow gap between the bookshelves in front of her.
A pair of eyes stared back.
Aiah’s breath caught in her throat. Her heart slammed against her ribs as she jerked back instinctively, her chair scraping against the floor.
She turned to run—
“BOO!”
Aiah yelped, nearly toppling over the desk. Her pulse was still racing as she whipped around to see—
A girl, leaning casually against the bookshelf, grinning at her like she had just told the funniest joke in the world.
Aiah’s breath hitched. Because she knew that face. She had just seen it in the yearbook.
“What are you doing?”
The voice was casual. Amused.
Aiah could barely process what was happening. The dim lighting, the way the girl’s figure seemed almost too still, too perfect—something about it didn’t feel… real.
Standing right in front of her was the girl.
Not the yearbook version. Not a faded photograph.
The real girl.
Except… she wasn’t entirely solid.
Aiah’s breath caught as she took in the faint transparency of her figure, the way the dim library lights seemed to pass through her ever so slightly. Her heart pounded in her ears. This isn’t real. It can’t be real.
The girl tilted her head, her smirk deepening. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
Aiah opened her mouth, but all that came out was a strangled, incoherent noise. Her brain was short-circuiting between fear, shock, and sheer disbelief.
She struggled to form words. “I—wha—how…?”
The girl folded her arms. “You’re not that talkative are you?” she mused.
The girl’s eyes flickered with amusement. She casually reached over, plucked the yearbook from Aiah’s hands, and flipped through the pages as if searching for something specific. Then, with an almost too-pleased expression, she tapped a finger against one of the photos.
“Oh,” she said brightly, beaming. “That’s me.”
Aiah’s blood ran cold.
She stared, mouth slightly open, brain scrambling to catch up. The girl—the ghost—stood there, smirking at her own scratched-out name in the yearbook, looking almost amused at Aiah’s shock. The air between them felt thick, charged, as if the universe itself was holding its breath.
Aiah couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Ghosts weren’t real. They weren’t. She did not believe in ghosts.
And yet—
Here she was, standing in front of her. Talking. Existing. Looking way too smug for a dead girl.
Aiah barely had time to formulate a response before—
Footsteps.
A faint but distinct sound echoed from somewhere deeper within the library.
Aiah’s entire body tensed. The ghost, however, reacted instantly—her head snapping toward the sound. Her form flickered, the dim library light seeming to waver through her.
Then, just like that—she vanished.
Aiah’s heart slammed into her ribs. “What the—”
Her voice died in her throat as the footsteps grew closer.
Aiah jerked backward, her breath coming out in short, uneven gasps.
She twisted in her seat, scanning the empty rows between the shelves. The air where the ghost had been standing moments ago felt heavy, charged, as if something unnatural had just brushed against reality and disappeared. A cold sweat broke out on the back of her neck.
Had that actually just happened? Had she really just seen a ghost?
No. No way. She didn’t believe in ghosts.
She snapped the yearbook shut; hands clammy against the worn leather cover. Her mind reeled. What the hell just happened? Her entire body was still brimming with the aftershocks of adrenaline.
She must have imagined it.
Right?
It was the exhaustion. The stress. The countless hours spent poring over missing records and dead ends. Maybe she had wanted to find something so badly that her mind filled in the blanks.
But the image of the girl—smirking, talking, existing—was burned into her mind. She could still hear her voice, as real as the sound of her own heartbeat pounding in her ears. That’s me.
A shadow stretched against the aisle ahead.
“Still here this late?”
Aiah nearly jumped out of her skin.
It was just the librarian. An older woman, peering at her over the rims of her glasses, her voice laced with mild disapproval.
Aiah swallowed hard, forcing a small, nervous laugh. “Uh—yeah. Just… studying.”
The librarian hummed, clearly unconvinced. “The library closes soon. Wrap up.”
Aiah nodded stiffly, gripping the yearbook like a lifeline. The librarian lingered for a moment longer before shuffling away, her footsteps fading into the distance.
Only when she was sure she was alone again did Aiah dare to exhale fully. Her whole body was tense, her mind still stuck on what just happened.
She looked down at the yearbook, fingers tracing over the scratched-out name beneath the ghost’s picture.
Could a hallucination feel this real?
Had she imagined it?
Every rational part of her was screaming that she must have. That ghosts weren’t real. That she had just been staring at that cursed yearbook for too long, willing a clue to appear, and her overtired brain had conjured one up to mess with her.
Aiah wet her lips, her thoughts racing. The ghost had been right there, talking to her, and now she was gone.
What the hell was happening?
One thing was certain—
Aiah was in far deeper than she ever intended to be.