This is the story of someone who discovered that, to be seen, she needed to make sure no gaze dared look away.
Hana Ikeda
October 18, 2004
Classroom 3-A was far too clean to be the setting for a tragic death.
Wherever you looked, the floor gleamed, the desks were so perfect they seemed freshly arranged, and even the blackboard didn't have a single mark out of place. Everything screamed normality, and that was precisely what irritated me.
The smell of disinfectant mixed with old dust in the window frames to create a thick layer in the air, the kind that scratches your throat from the inside. Every morning, as soon as I crossed the threshold, my body reacted on autopilot: my nose twitched, my eyes stung, and taking a step back always seemed more logical than walking in.
Over time, my body got used to it. The rest of me didn't.
My desk was in the back, pressed against the window, right at the spot where the sun reached the wooden surface. The light hit my face every day in the late afternoon, but the warmth never reached me.
One day, arriving before everyone else, I decided to test whether I was actually going insane.
I ran my hand over all the other desks. Their surfaces held traces of warmth, invisible marks left by the people who had occupied those seats.
Mine, meanwhile, felt like it came straight from an infirmary: the surface kept the temperature of a metal tray, and the iron frame devoured any warmth my body tried to offer.
At home, the skin on my hands was always peeling in thin strips. The doctors' explanations varied between dry weather, hot water, lack of moisturizer. Deep down, I knew that cold clinging to my body followed its own logic and didn't care about whatever the dermatologists said.
Still, that was the least of my problems.
Two years at that school. Two years acting as a bulletin board for anyone who wanted to take out their frustrations on someone who just lowered her head and took it.
"Silence, please. I want you to organize into groups," the teacher said, spinning the chalk between his fingers. His nail carried a white crust from writing so much. "Today's essay is about the future: if your group had to choose the same university, which one would it be?"
He turned his back and began writing today's date on the board. The letters ran slanted, hurried, betraying the exhaustion of someone who just wanted to finish the task and return to a class that gave less trouble.
Everyone was tired. The class was counting the days until break, the teachers were counting the days until final grades, and I was counting all of that mixed with the hours still separating me from home and the end of everything.
Two more months and I'll be free.
While I clung to that final promise of freedom, I noticed something change in the teacher's face. He was smiling... But his lips stretched far beyond what a human body could manage, the skin at the corners of his mouth cracking until it tore through his cheek.
What the... This can't be real!
I blinked, took a deep breath, counted to three in my head.
When my eyes opened again, the teacher had returned to his usual face. Sweat on his forehead, neutral expression, no new scars.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
I already knew this kind of visual "glitch." But it was impossible to get used to.
After so many nights patched together with twenty-minute naps, the world had started showing me things only I could see. Shadows standing still at the end of the hallway, shapes crossing through doors, someone sitting beside me who vanished the instant I turned my head.
My aunt was truly frightened the first time she heard me talk about it. She saved up, booked an appointment, took me to the doctor.
He talked about hormones, anxiety, teenage stress. He explained that an exhausted brain can create hallucinations, that I didn't need to worry because none of it was real. I left with a prescription for pills that made my thoughts even heavier, slower.
I felt locked inside an aquarium full of voices tearing through my head.
The first week, I even tried to follow the prescription. The second, I started holding the pills under my tongue to spit them down the bathroom drain later. I'd rather deal with shadows than be suffocated from the inside.
At least the shadows were part of me.
Sometimes I wondered if it was a family thing. Maybe my parents saw things too.
I never got to ask. They existed in two faded photographs in the dresser drawer, and I only opened that drawer when the fear of forgetting the shape of their faces pressed harder than the guilt of prying there.
The sound of chairs scraping pulled me back to reality. Metal grinding against the floor, voices tangling together, a map of alliances being redrawn in seconds.
Groups formed across the room with the same ease water finds a crack to flow through. A bit of noise at first, then everything settled.
Everyone was with their usual groups.
I was with no one.
One group preferred to stay a member short rather than look in my direction. I saw one of the boys point discreetly toward my desk. The leader refused with a short shake of his head, the gesture of someone declining spoiled goods.
My eyes wandered across the room searching for any face that might hesitate. A smile of acceptance, a raised eyebrow, anything.
Nothing.
I could spend my entire life searching for humanity in those faces and never find it.
I lowered my gaze to my notebook. The blank page returned a kind of silence that hurt as much as the stifled laughter around me. For a second, I considered leaving it like that and handing in the empty sheet.
How am I supposed to do a group assignment alone?
My hand refused to act, but the pen touched the paper, and sentences emerged before I decided if they were worth it: ballerinas, a stage, blinding spotlights, an audience staring straight at the center where I would stand.
I wrote about how much I wanted to get into a dance program, so much that I had a name in mind: Ochanomizu. I wrote down theater as a second option, in case my body couldn't handle it and I needed to stay on stage another way.
On paper, everything sounded simple. On paper, I didn't stumble.
On paper, there was hope.
"Well, look who it is, the stuck-up little witch. You must think you're so much better than everyone here, right? Sitting there all alone."
The voice cut through my thoughts with the same delicacy as a truck plowing through people in a public square.
Mark.
His accent invaded my ear with those hard consonants and irritating vowels, dragged across an ocean without asking my opinion. He had arrived at school months before, looked around, and chosen a target.
Of course, from the very first day, that target was me.
No logical reason. Nothing funny to justify it, no previous fight. Sometimes certain types just need to smell blood in the water.
His fingers landed on the edge of my desk, drumming an impatient rhythm. Nails bitten to the limit, the skin around his cuticles red and raw. The smell of strong deodorant mixed with sweat hit me next. It managed to be worse than the classroom.
I kept writing, pressing the pen against the paper until my handwriting lost its shape.
Please, go away. That's all.
Drop Dead!
He seemed to grow with every movement I shrank. The more I retreated, the brighter his eyes gleamed. One could easily imagine a younger version of him holding a magnifying glass with a spider trapped underneath.
Our eyes met, and the memory of what he did to me unfolded entirely in my head.
⁂
It had been raining that day too. Thin, insistent rain that made it difficult to see. My uniform blouse clung to my arms, the air smelled of wet earth, and each step home weighed more than the last.
I always came back from school with burning eyes. I had already cried enough for my head to throb, and yet something remained stuck in my throat.
My aunt had given up on helping me a long time ago.
Every now and then, she let her gaze linger in my direction—the look of someone pressing their hand against glass and sensing a presence on the other side, but not knowing how to reach it.
But none of that mattered when I passed through the central park.
Petty was waiting for me in the same corner where I found her the first time. A gray cat, too small for her own bones. When she stretched, her spine traced every vertebra.
Her mother had disappeared with the rest of the litter and left her behind. I heard the park staff talking about deformities, bone problems, a lost cause. For them, case closed. For me, she was the first creature that ever ran toward me at the sound of my footsteps.
I carried a bit of kibble in my pocket, stolen from the neighbors' dog food bag. She ate hunched over, focused, breathing fast, with the posture of someone expecting their plate to be snatched away at any moment. I sat on the curb, watching her jaw move, the rise and fall of her thin chest. For a few minutes, the day lost its taste of solitary confinement.
She purred even when hungry, even weak, even when stamped as defective by people who only knew how to count what she lacked. In that sound, I found a truce.
But my mistake was believing anything could last in my hands.
A few weeks later, they found out. I don't know who saw, who told, who decided to turn it into afternoon entertainment. I only know I left home that morning believing I still had something that was mine alone.
I came back with nothing.
Mark got there first. The way he held Petty by the neck surprised me almost as much as the fact that he had found our place. His fingers wrapped around her small body, lifting her off the ground without effort. Her paws flailed in the air, and the meow she let out didn't sound like any other noise I knew from her. It was short, broken.
"Let her go!" The sentence came out unfiltered. "Let her go, please! Hit me, but let her go!"
My voice escaped thin, shrill, the volume of a mosquito screaming in the middle of an airport runway.
They had already formed a circle around us. Tight, close enough to block every exit. If I lunged forward, I'd crash into one. If I tried the side, another. Some laughed with their mouths wide open, others just watched, two held their phones raised, ready to capture the best angle.
Mark threw Petty to the ground with calculated force. Hard enough to tear out a scream, soft enough not to end it there.
She tried to get up. Her legs failed once, twice, her body foreign to herself. When she finally managed to find her footing, Mark's sneaker came down on her chest.
Everything happened fast, but inside me, the scene seemed to replay seventy-eight times in two seconds.
I tried to rush forward. I used my arms, shoulders, my whole weight. Hands pulled me back, someone lifted me by the waist, another shoved me to the ground. My chin hit the asphalt, the taste of blood rising instantly.
I raised my head just in time to see his foot press harder.
Petty's hind legs jerked upward in a reflex with no destination. She looked in my direction. It wasn't a human gaze, it carried no clear accusation, but it locked onto me anyway. Her body contracted twice in a final attempt.
On the third, it stopped.
Her eyes stayed open. That was the detail that kept coming back afterward. In that instant, I was everything she had in the world.
And I couldn't save her. I couldn't do anything.
"I didn't even mean to kill it," Mark commented, wiping his sole on the grass. "But it was weak like its owner."
The laughter returned, loose. The phone stayed raised, steady, filming a scene that would be worth comments.
When they left, they took the laughs, the jokes, the rain stuck to their uniforms, the video. They left Petty lying on the ground, same size as always, just without sound.
I buried her in the lot behind the gazebo, using only my hands. At first the earth resisted, compact, then gave way and came up dark, damp. I dug as far as my body could manage. Nails scraping against stone, skin splitting open, blood mixing with mud.
I laid her body in the shallow grave with the delayed care of someone trying not to wake a heavy sleeper. The first handful of earth fell softly over the gray fur, light enough for a part of me to believe I could still pull everything out of there. The handfuls that followed decided otherwise.
Eventually, the color disappeared. All that remained was the sign of disturbed soil.
I stayed until the sky darkened completely. My hands stiffened with the cold, my face dried and burned again, in an unstoppable cycle. Many people passed by, some slowed for a moment, but no one asked if I needed help.
In that scene, I was just part of the scenery.
That was when an idea appeared for the first time: not a dramatic death, no cut wrists, no letter, no spectacle. Just disappearing. Ceasing to take up space on roll calls, lists, an aunt's worries.
I couldn't even manage that.
⁂
The sound of paper tearing dragged me back to the classroom a second time after being violated by that memory.
Mark yanked my notebook away so fast the cover stayed in my hand. The pages split into strips that fell around my feet. The paragraphs about universities and stages turned into dirty confetti on the cold floor.
"Freak."
"Disgusting."
"Why don't you just kill yourself already?"
The phrases came from all sides, mixed with giggles that echoed louder than any teacher's command.
I looked at the teacher and he seemed completely oblivious to the scene.
So I turned my gaze to the window. I saw the sky had closed into thick clouds. The wind moved the branches of the courtyard trees, and part of me calmly considered the idea of lightning crossing through the glass and ending everything right there. Me, them, teacher, board, desk.
We would all explode and vanish in less than a second.
But the universe wouldn't grant me that mercy.
The rage rose first like the pain of a burn that flares again when someone bumps it. In a few seconds, it grew so much it became impossible to stuff back into its usual place.
Keeping my head down no longer made sense.
I stood up. I felt my movement pull every gaze. I pressed my fingers against the desk to disguise the trembling, straightened my body, and faced Mark.
For a heartbeat, something different appeared on his face. It wasn't fear, nor guilt. It was pure surprise, the reaction of someone seeing a motionless toy gain breath and start to move.
"Oh, she's mad now," he shouted too close. His hot breath hit my face. "What are you gonna do, freak? Cry like in the park? 'Don't kill my little black kitty! I'm a little witch and I need her for my magicaaal spells!'"
He shoved my shoulder. It wasn't enough force to knock me down; it was the exact measure to throw me one step back.
Right onto the spot where someone had poured water mixed with urine on the floor.
The smell rose fast.
The classroom's laughter came before I could recover my balance.
This time, the rage took up all the space. No fear, no shame, nothing. Just the raw impulse, condensed fury to end these two years of suffering in a single movement.
I.
Will.
Kill.
You!
I threw my body forward, aiming at his face, nails ready to leave a mark.
Physics did not cooperate.
When I planted my foot in that puddle, there was no traction. My sneaker slid forward, my legs lost support, and my torso was thrown backward with force.
The world spun. Ceiling and floor switched places. I saw Mark's smile dissolve into shock as I was already falling out of reach. At the edges of my vision, a circle of arms retreated instead of trying to catch me, while mine searched for support in the void.
The fall took little time, but delivered every detail. The corner of the desk rose toward my nape. The unpainted metal showed the spot where the paint had chipped away over the years.
I tried to turn my head. Too late.
The impact at the base of my neck came with a dull crack that I would recognize later in other places. Heat shot through the area, and the sensation of support vanished. My neck became something soft, wrong.
The sound in the room became muffled. Voices started arriving distorted, distant, and the edges of the frame darkened. My tongue lost its weight but also stopped obeying.
"Shit... No... Wake up, Hana..." Mark's voice now sounded younger than he was. "This wasn't supposed to... I didn't mean to..."
Other voices trampled over his.
"Call someone!"
"It was an accident, you all saw!
"She's convulsing!"
"Call 119, quick!"
I wanted to answer. To let them know I was still there, that something could still be done. No sound came out. There was no air, no body that would obey.
A single thought gained clarity.
Petty fought until the end. I just slipped.
Apparently, I was pathetic even in the moment of dying, before I could get my revenge.
⁂
Dying hurt less than living.
There was no special light, no beautiful sensation, no reunion. One moment I felt the floor against my body; the next, the room had shifted angles. I was near the ceiling, looking down.
Where no human gaze could reach me.
From above, my body looked smaller. My neck was bent at a wrong angle, hard to fit into any idea of "maybe she can be saved." Blood trickled down, forming trails that followed the cracks in the floor.
Mark was the first to run. He skidded in the blood, spreading red footprints to the door. The others came behind, shoving each other, tripping over backpacks, knocking over chairs.
They would all have time to rehearse the most comfortable version of the story.
The teacher didn't leave. But his hands trembled so much the phone almost slipped. He tried to dial the emergency number, made a mistake, deleted it, tried again. His face was pale, dripping sweat. Each breath came shorter.
He wasn't thinking about me. He was afraid of losing his job, of being held responsible for negligence, of facing a lawsuit. The panic was all his own.
In that moment, everything around me changed.
It wasn't wind or a new sound. His fear took over the room and became palpable, stronger than the disinfectant, more present than the blood.
It had a color, a texture, looking like a pool forming from the remains of garbage.
But contrary to what I imagined, when that sensation passed through the place where I floated, everything else shut off for a few seconds. Pain, rage, exhaustion. Everything went silent.
For the first time in a long while, existing didn't hurt.
It wasn't happiness, wasn't relief... it was something more like the silence of a hospital. A clean internal space, without noise. A few seconds immersed in that sensation were enough for me to understand I needed to feel it more often.
When the teacher finally managed to complete the call, he bolted out of the room, taking his own panic with him.
And just like that, that new feeling vanished along with him.
The reasoning came whole, easy, almost automatic: I had drained his fear.
If I could do that with one, I could do it with others. If fear fed me, I just needed to provoke it.
I soon noticed that questions, thought, and answers came to me much faster than when I had a physical body.
So the question I really wanted to answer was:
How far could this hunger take me?
⁂
The years passed quickly on the calendar wall and slowly inside the sealed room. I noticed the change of seasons by the color of the light and the time the sun reached the window. The rest stayed the same.
In the first days after my death, I still insisted. I screamed, pounded on desk surfaces, lunged at anyone who entered. I tried to push forensic equipment, knock over clipboards, make anything move out of place.
Nothing happened. I watched the scene like an audience without a seat.
The forensic team photographed, measured, noted. When they finished, the room received a strip of isolation tape on the door and a key that only the school's innermost staff possessed.
Every now and then, someone connected to some weird religion arrived with water, incense, rehearsed prayers. I observed the entire ritual with all the attention in the world.
I never imagined I'd be the target of extermination like a roach.
It was strange watching people who claimed to be able to guide souls walking in the same space as me without even sensing my presence. They spoke to entities, asked for protection, talked about "light and paths and cycles".
But not even those entities found me. I could clearly hear them whispering to those mediums:
The aura of death is in this place, but there is no one here.
Sitting in my chair, I made mental notes about them, after all, it was what I did best. I began recognizing patterns. Living people had a certain kind of energy stuck to their bodies, and it changed in size when fear, guilt, or desire increased.
Entities that passed through the school also carried their own marks. And there was a difference between ordinary human auras, awakened ones, and spirits like me.
Without realizing it, I started testing whether I could do the same things those spiritual guardians did. Like a child learning to speak, I became more malleable, faster...
More lethal.
All those exorcism attempts, seventeen in total, ended up opening some wonderful doors for me.
One night in particular, still in the first year, something truly interesting happened. The principal came to Classroom 3-A alone, at an hour when no student should have been at school. He carried a leather folder, secrets, and a tangled fear in his chest he pretended not to feel.
He didn't choose the wrong room. He came to negotiate with the monster he had helped create.
He simply opened the right door to the wrong place.
It was the last mistake of his life.
⁂
Years after the "tragedy" with the principal, the school continued avoiding that room. However, on a certain early morning, when three months remained before they would officially touch the room again, voices strange for that hour echoed in the hallway.
Young voices. Loud. Too excited for the size of the darkness that held me.
The building should have been empty. My room had become an extra forbidden zone, destination of rumors and fractured stories. Even so, the metallic sound of a crowbar struck the doorknob.
The lock gave way. The door opened with a crack I recognized from far away.
Five boys entered laughing, each with a phone in hand. The flashlights carved through the space I knew better than any other place.
"This is it. The room where the principal slipped," said one, doing air quotes.
"Slipped, sure. They say he saw the ghost of the girl who killed herself and dropped dead."
"Nonsense. Word is he tripped drunk, and the school made up this restricted-area story just to avoid a lawsuit."
"By the way, what's the story with that girl anyway?" asked the one holding the light, looking around with boredom.
"Who cares how she died? What matters is this place is off-limits for a reason, and off-limits means views."
The crowbar hit the door again.
"Come on, open it already. The battery won't last until five!"
Who cares.
Thirteen years later, my death fit into two words tossed out without thought.
One of them set up a tripod in the center of the room, adjusted the framing, fixed his hair, and smiled at his own reflection on the screen.
"What's up, everyone! Three in the morning, we broke into a school in this small, out-of-the-way town. That means... We're now in the official haunted classroom! If you like our content, subscribe and hit that noti bell!"
Laughter filled the rest of the speech. Their shadows grew on the walls, distorted by the flashlights.
One boy threw himself onto my desk with exaggeration, nearly toppling the chair. He lay with his head on the edge of the surface and stuck out his tongue.
"Behold, the death scene of the new Carrie!" he said, dramatizing. Then he let his body slide to the floor, reenacting the head hitting the exact point where my neck had actually broken.
The others could barely keep a straight face to film.
Another kicked my chair hard, making the metal screech. A third pretended to be strangled with a backpack strap, while the one with the camera rolled his eyes and imitated a poorly rehearsed possession.
They posed for selfies near the dark bloodstain that still marked the floor. The color had faded, but anyone who knew where to look could find it. In one photo, they flashed peace signs, smiling over the mark.
They turned my death into a carnival ride.
At the end of it all, they even placed one of those "Boxes" that emit random radio frequencies.
I didn't know the name of that thing, but it was something well-known.
When they left, they took videos, jokes, and that box. They left the door open until the school staff noticed the break-in and rushed to pretend nothing had happened.
I didn't touch any of them. I let them leave alive, talking about cursed rooms, ghosts, accidents.
Because that night, something caught my attention more than those "people."
While they were putting on that whole spectacle, I noticed another taste clinging to the air besides fear. Their excitement over their own cruelty, the desire to play with someone else's suffering, also had its own texture.
That also fed me. Apparently, I could grow stronger from more than panic and terror.
Human malice worked too.
The conclusion couldn't have been better: I wasn't truly trapped, without hope. As they say: When one door closes, a window opens!
⁂
After some more time, I started receiving a third type of visitor, which made the first two, mediums and stupid humans, feel kind of irrelevant.
The shadows in the corner began to move with coordinates I recognized. First, two red points at floor level appeared in the darkness, like embers.
The outline came next.
Petty emerged from the dark almost exactly as I remembered. Small, delicate body. Her eyes, though, had changed. They glowed an impossible red, and her fur was now black, without a single gray strand.
Right behind her, a girl holding a rag doll stopped beside my desk. The girl's eyes carried too much darkness for her age, a sign that someone had turned off the previous light and put another in its place.
Yuki.
I didn't need introductions. The dead recognize each other in a thought; our stories intertwined.
Hers came in loose fragments in my mind, as wrong as mine, trapped between two sides of life. Daughter of the principal I had "taken care of," but there was no anger in her eyes.
Only reverence.
"Petty, Yuki... I'm glad you're here with me," I spoke, looking at each one. "Keep bringing people to my room. Soon, we'll begin a world of our own."
⁂
Then, I heard the key working in the door again. It wasn't the sound of a break-in. It was a rehearsed, confident movement. Something that reminded me of class time.
When the door opened, the light from the hallway cut through the gloom. The new principal entered first, followed by a teacher and a group of girls.
They came neatly dressed, backpacks on shoulders, smelling of cheap perfume, sharpened pencils, quiet conversations about homework, boys, exams...
I just listened.
Classroom 3-A would be used again. Not as I had expected at first: I thought they would finally turn the scene of my death into a proper classroom.
Instead, they made it the headquarters of one of those extracurricular clubs I had always wanted to join.
It was called "Creative Writing Club".
It took me a few seconds to decide whether that irritated or amused me. Turning the place where my story had been torn in half into a space for inventing new stories was an irony I wouldn't have dared write in an essay.
The girls started appearing after school hours. They sat in a circle, opened notebooks, spread out books. They wrote poetry, horror stories, romance scenes. Some were still searching for their voice; others spoke like people certain they would be read by crowds.
I observed them all. It became a habit to try to guess who was there just to accompany a friend, who actually wanted to write, who used the club to delay going home.
None held my attention for long.
Except the leader, Emi Shimizu.
She was beautiful, but that didn't explain everything. The way she occupied space drew attention. Black hair, straight, falling below her shoulders, uniform always adjusted.
Movements so practiced they seemed like those of a princess from a fairy tale.
Her green eyes stole any side conversation. She suggested topics, organized everything to the best of her abilities, even called the group back when the conversation strayed.
With the weeks, I realized that, among all the voices, hers was the one I followed without drifting. The way she bit her lip when she didn't like what she was reading, the habit of spinning her pen until she found the phrase she wanted, the sharp claps she used to call for attention.
Then the visions began.
At first, her past. A tidy room, parents from the countryside, teachers pointing at her scores in front of the class. Moments when she shone. Moments when she failed and swallowed the pain.
Then came smaller details. The quiet pride of helping a classmate with an essay, the hidden frustration every time someone got more attention than her.
The future appeared shortly after.
I saw stages, awards, friends, a life studying across the Pacific. A whole life that didn't end on the dirty floor of a classroom with the edge of a desk piercing her neck.
That was her "good" future.
Another path appeared at the same time and made me smile inside, even without a face. It was the bad ending to her story.
And that ending...
Made me feel alive!
One afternoon when she stayed behind to organize her things, I approached as far as my presence could reach. Whispering in her ear, almost touching her shoulders.
"Hello, Emi Shimizu," I whispered, knowing she wouldn't hear yet. "That body, that voice, that life... You take such good care of all of it. I'm going to tear out your eyes and put mine in their place."
Not that day, not the next. Forcing roots too early kills the whole tree, and I didn't intend to waste the first real chance I'd had.
With her body and my will, I wouldn't pass invisible through any hallway. I wouldn't be the girl who slips, breaks her neck, and vanishes in two lines of a urban legend.
If they decided that Hana Ikeda didn't deserve to exist, I would use another name to remind everyone of the mistake they made.
That's why we're going to have so much fun here, you and I.