The beginning of the new semester felt strangely off-kilter—too normal, too polished, like a perfect stage hiding something rotten behind the curtains. The sunlight still filtered neatly through the library windows, and the cafeteria still smelled like cheap spaghetti and disinfectant. Teachers still handed out syllabi with half-hearted enthusiasm. But beneath all that, we knew better.
Henry, Ethan, and I had returned with a quiet agreement: this semester wouldn't be like the others.
It started over the summer—finding James Bennett's name in a forgotten storage room was the moment everything shifted. That old ID card was more than a relic of my past. It was a reminder that the lies and corruption we thought we'd left behind were still breathing. Still hidden somewhere inside this very school.
And so we started watching.
We never said the word "investigation" out loud. Not in public. We didn't need to. Henry called it "hunting the hidden," like we were still playing the same game we always had—skipping class, sneaking into off-limits buildings, pretending we were just bored teenagers. But it wasn't a game anymore. Not this time.
Ethan was the most meticulous. He had a growing notebook filled with sketches of keys, routines, hallway patrol routes, and snippets of overheard conversation. Henry, ever the talker, was good at slipping into places and walking out with a thumb drive or a copied file without anyone noticing. And me?
I had the fire. The reason. The memory of James Bennett's betrayal that still scraped at my chest like broken glass.
The school, on the surface, remained untouched—students rushing between classes, varsity athletes preparing for fall tournaments, student council plastering motivational posters all over the bulletin boards. But behind the announcements and pep rallies, we started to see patterns. Inconsistencies. Loose threads.
We pulled on those threads.
It began with the janitor who didn't match any staff list. He carried no ID badge and yet had master keys to more buildings than even the assistant principal. Ethan followed him discreetly, noting that he often entered rooms no one ever used—archive rooms, maintenance access points, faculty-only stairwells. We never saw him clean a single floor.
Then there was the IT department. Henry stumbled onto something strange when he borrowed a laptop in the library. A hidden folder—deep in the drive—encrypted, but labeled with numbers and a red underscore. He copied the entire thing to a USB and brought it to me without even looking inside.
"I didn't touch it," he said, tossing it on my desk. "It felt like one of those things you either ignore forever or end up in real trouble for opening."
We opened it.
Most files were junk—code fragments, redacted PDFs, audio recordings with no context—but one folder stood out: "RED LIST." We couldn't open it. Yet.
At night, I often found myself lying awake, eyes fixed on the ceiling, that name echoing in my head. James Bennett. Was he a one-off monster, or just the first face in something bigger? That folder, those encrypted files, the strange staff members—we were uncovering something. But it was too early to say what. Or how deep it went.
The scariest part? No one else seemed to notice.
Students laughed in the courtyard. Teachers hosted club orientations. The school newsletter raved about our national rankings. Everything was exactly the same as before—except us.
We weren't the same.
And as much as I tried to act like everything was normal, it wasn't. Not after what happened last year. Not after everything I lost.
Sometimes, when I looked at myself in the mirror, I barely recognized the face staring back. I used to believe in things like logic, effort, honesty. That was before I learned how easily the world could twist those things into weapons.
Now, every smile from a teacher felt suspect. Every locked door looked like a lie. Every clipboard could be hiding something we weren't meant to see.
Henry joked often, but even he was quieter now. Ethan said little, but his eyes were sharper than ever. And me—I carried the weight of the past like a shadow.
One afternoon, the three of us stood behind the general building, half-hidden in a patch of trees we used to call our "base camp." Henry handed me a folded list—names, dates, building codes. Some were teachers. Some weren't.
"Some of these people," Henry said slowly, "don't belong here."
Ethan didn't say anything, but he didn't have to. His silence was agreement.
As I stared at the list, a strange calm settled over me. We were already in too deep to back out. This wasn't just curiosity anymore. This was personal. For me, for all of us.
I folded the paper, slipped it into my pocket, and looked at them both. "We keep going."
No one disagreed.
Because we all knew the truth: there was something rotten at the core of this school. We could feel it. And if we didn't bring it to the surface—
It would pull us under.