LIGHTHOUSE ° you . kth

four

ʽ PARANOIA ʼ ˑ ₄
━━━━━ 〈 死 〉 ━
「 present day ▴ rainy 」

THERE was something wrong with you. Within the muddled confines of your brain, no matter how much you begged your mind to recall the entirety of your field trip, all you had was half a story. Pages were inked with foggy memories of your prologue and crescendo, and yet the ending was nowhere to be found. The conclusion became a perpetual cliffhanger, stuck in the haze of your cognition, as you tried to remember what you could've done to aggravate the confusing Kim Taehyung.

"Did I sleep talk and say something mean?" You grumbled and your voice could barely escape the tangle of arms that you had buried your head in. It seemed like your body had spent more time agonizing over Taehyung compared to actually studying in the fine institution you called a school. Then again, it wasn't as if you were the epitome of a model student anyway. You blamed it on Taehyung and his attention-stealing good looks.

A small group of girls surrounded your desk and it seemed like an impromptu pity-party had convened in the back corner of the room as Minah patted your back comfortingly whilst the other girls played with the ends of your hair - splayed and disheveled over the wooden surface of your desk.

"Taehyung's just being a jerk. Forget him." Your best friend scoffed, on the verge of taking up arms against the dismissive male. Of course, trust Jang Minah to be the leader of the wolf pack. The other girls, subservient in nature, summoned their inner lemmings as they nodded in unison.

You would've participated in the little smear campaign your friend had begun, knowing how easy it would've been to just start hating the boy. Knowing how cathartic a good rant felt on your dejected spirit. But it was those gaps in your memories that reigned in what was left of your teenage composure. Those blanks left unaccounted that told you whatever was missing was more than just an issue with Taehyung.

"Hey, what happened the day we left the lighthouse?" You asked, absentmindedly, giving into your passivity as you prayed that Minah or someone else would just conveniently fill in the blanks of your memories.

But instead of sharing in the awkward laugh that tumbled from your lips, the girls stopped moving and a thick silence enveloped the classroom. One by one, each student stopped what they were doing as your question slowly lingered in the unsettling calm of the building.

The raucous chattering that once filled the room drowned behind the shrill whistling of the wind pulling dried leaves against concrete. The atmosphere - now heavy with an unspoken secret - felt like a weathered rope tightening around your neck, one small tug away from choking you completely. And you could feel it; the tense pressure that thickened between unmoving bodies as a set of thirty eyes slowly crept in on you.

Narrowed black orbs creaked against rigid muscles, and they burned into your skin as the faces of your peers contorted into ominous wide smiles. Pink lips stretched from corner to corner, and they stared at you - still, lifeless, foreboding.

"W h y d o y o u w a n t t o  k n o w ?" A voice from your left tore through the dense silence, and as you stared into Jang Minah's hollowed eyes, you saw nothing behind them.

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AUTHOR'S NOTE

i like genre shifts lol x')
i think this was my fav
chapter to write haha.

♡