Chapter 2 (continued): You’re Not Lushomo. You’re Weird.

Everything seemed off. Maybe I was just overthinking. New body. New school. New planet, probably. Obviously my brain was playing catch-up. But the air—it was wrong. It tasted like static. The kind you get when you’ve annoyed the universe one too many times. I was trailing behind Bucket Hat Guy as we climbed the dim stairs. Our footsteps echoed weirdly—like they weren’t just bouncing off walls, but whispering back at us. “Maybe I’m being paranoid,” I muttered under my breath. “It’s just a school. A totally normal school.” Pause. I looked to my left. And there it was. Confirmation. A blur of motion—a figure falling from the upper staircase in silent, dreamlike slow-motion. My eyes locked with hers. She was one of the students from the lecture. A quiet girl. I remembered her sitting three rows ahead of me, tapping her pen nervously. Our eyes met—wide, terrified, confused. She knew. I knew. This wasn’t normal. Time seemed to freeze. Her limbs flailed helplessly, and her mouth formed a silent scream that never reached the air. Unpause. The world snapped back to brutal reality. CRACK! She hit the steel bars of the railing mid-fall—body folding, bouncing, then dropping again with a sickening thud onto the concrete floor below. Silence. Screams. Blood. The hallway was suddenly chaos. People rushing from lecture rooms, panicked footsteps everywhere. Bucket Hat Guy shouted, “EH! CALL THE NURSES!” His voice trembled like mine would if it had the courage to come out. I just stood there. Frozen. Eyes wide. Mind racing. This couldn’t be happening. It was just a fall, right? Just a freak accident? Right? But no. Something inside me whispered the truth. This place is wrong. ---