Chapter 7: Things That Shouldn’t Be Real
The next morning started like every other but with this low buzz in Norah’s bones. It was like her body had tuned into a different frequency overnight, and now the world felt slightly off. It felt like she was watching a pirated version of reality, and every now and then the frame glitched, but only for her and nobody else noticed.
She sat through the first few classes like a zombie. She still had a sense of humor as she scribbling jokes in the margins of her notebook. Like, what if god was just a customer support chatbot that hasn’t replied yet.
She passed that note to Joshua under the table and he shook with laughter in that silent breathless way where the shoulders move but no sound comes out. She thought wow maybe we’re both losing it but at least we’re losing it together.
At lunch, he asked her what was up because he noticed the difference, like how she kept looking at her phone as if she expected the ghost of Steve Jobs to send her a message or something. She almost told him about the door but stopped right at the edge of the sentence, as if her mouth knew this story was not ready to breathe yet.
Instead, she said, “Have you ever seen something you cannot explain?” He nodded immediately, like he did not even need context, and he told her about a time when he was ten and saw a woman standing in the middle of a traffic jam, not moving, not blinking, just staring straight ahead as if time had forgotten her.
He said everyone else walked around her like she did not exist, and Norah felt that same elevator drop in her stomach, as if maybe they were both collecting the same strange puzzle pieces from different corners of the universe.
That evening, she went back to the building with the mural. This time, she did not just take a photo. She touched the wall gently, as if it might open or burn or hum under her fingers. For a second, she felt warmth from the concrete, as if the painting was alive and waiting.
Then a pigeon screamed right above her, breaking the moment, and she stumbled back as if she had been caught doing something illegal in a universe that did not have laws for this kind of thing.
At home, she kept refreshing her phone gallery, hoping the photo of the door might reappear if she stared hard enough. She even tried drawing the door from memory in her notebook, but it looked different every time. That scared her more than anything, because it meant the door was not staying still; it was changing, or she was, or both.
Later that night, while brushing her teeth with that same mirror face looking back at her, she whispered to herself, “I think the world is hiding something.” For the first time, the reflection did not look confused, it just looked like it agreed.
That was when her phone buzzed with a message from an unknown number that simply said, “I saw it too.” She dropped the phone so hard it bounced under her bed, and for five whole minutes, she just stared at the floor, wondering if she had finally slipped or finally woken up.
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