(Fiction) The Glitch In Her Reality – Chapter 8 – Static in the Silence

Chapter 8: Static in the Silence

The next day, Norah walked through school like her body had arrived but her mind was somewhere two blocks behind, trying to catch up. Everything felt louder and sharper and slower all at once, like her brain was buffering reality in low resolution. Nobody else seemed to notice the lag except her, and maybe Joshua, who kept glancing at her like she was glitching in real time.

She did not tell him about the message. Not yet. She was not sure if she was ready for the sound of it to exist outside her head, because once you say something out loud it becomes real. And she was not sure she wanted this to be real. What kind of person wants their reality rewritten by some anonymous cosmic text alert? Like, surprise, your life is a science fiction novel now. Good luck.

During lunch, she zoned out so hard that when Joshua said, “Pass the ketchup,” she handed him her phone instead. They both stared at it and laughed, but Norah was not laughing inside. The message kept echoing like a drumbeat: I saw it too. I saw it too. I saw it too. She did not know who saw what, or why, or how they found her. It made her feel both hunted and chosen at the same time, which is a strange thing to feel when you are just trying to eat a bagel.

After school, she walked home alone. She went straight back to her room, where she pulled out the phone and stared at the message as if it might do something else. She half-expected it to blink, vanish, or say, Just kidding. Go back to your regularly scheduled life. But it didn’t. It just sat there, still and silent and heavy, like it was daring her to respond.

So she did. She typed, Who are you? and hit send before her brain could talk her out of it. The message went blue, marked as delivered, and then nothing. Just nothing for hours. It felt like being stood up by a ghost.

That night, Norah could not sleep. She turned on every light in her room and sat cross-legged in the middle of her bed, surrounded by her old notebooks, half-dead pens, and questions she did not know how to ask.

At some point around two in the morning, when the world was so quiet it sounded fake, her phone buzzed again. The new message said, You’re not crazy. She laughed a wild, tired laugh that sounded more like crying, because she had never said she was crazy, yet somehow they knew she was afraid of that word.

Another message came almost right after, like a whisper trying to outrun itself. It said, Meet me, and below it was a pin drop location, not too far from the mural building. She stared at it for a long time, wondering if this was how people in horror stories felt before they went into the woods and never came back. Except she was not scared. Not exactly. She was curious, and alive in a way she had not been in years.

She picked up her shoes, did not even tie the laces properly, and slipped out of the house without a sound. The truth was, she no longer cared if this was real, fake, staged, or divine. She just needed to see who else was awake in this sleeping world.

And in the quiet that followed, as she walked toward the location with her heart beating like it had its own secret to tell, she whispered to the night, “Okay then. Show me everything.”