• The halls were filled to bursting, students and teachers erupting from classrooms to swarm like ants in the sluggish flows of the halls. Chatter filled the air, the rustles of clothes and backpacks and the thunk of someone dropping a book, a cacophony of sounds that washed over Rory and left him reeling. Never before had Rory experienced something this disorienting, this wild and unfeeling. No one cared about anyone else. Smaller children were shoved through the halls without notice. Over there, someone was shoved into a locker by a passing student, someone tripped and knocked three people into each other. It was chaos.
    Rory staggered through the crowds, nearly getting mown down by a flash of red that might have been a student, that might have been a train. Suddenly, a bell rang, and the bodies packed into the hallway vanished almost as quickly as they had appeared. Rory was left alone, clinging to a wall for support, gasping in the wake of tide that had passed him by at last.
    The halls, emptied, looked haunted. A world of pale blue and off-white tiles, covered with scraps of paper left behind, draped with pale blue lockers, impersonal metal boxes that only identified with you as a gleaming silver number above a spinning black dial. The same wooden doors lined the walls, the same patterns in the bricks led the eye to follow the endless pathways of the school, paths that split and turned and all became one again, here.
    Rory stood in the center of the intersection of these hallways, a great hole, filled with bulletin boards decorated with faded piece of paper denoting the goings on of the school, scattered with pencils and litter, dotted with trash cans that were as battered as he felt himself.
    He had not felt this way yesterday, when he came to this school. Yesterday, he had shoved his way along these halls like everyone else had. Yesterday, he had ducked his head and walked to his class like a freight train on a mission. But that was yesterday. Today, he could not find anything of who he had been in these sterile, unfeeling halls. He could find no connections to this blank wooden door with the gleaming black numbers above it, could find no way to connect himself to the bustling mass that had been his friends. Overnight, his eyes had opened. Or perhaps they had closed. He couldn’t tell.
    What was this place he wandered in? East County High School? He was a figure here, a set-in-stone, a for sure. He had never missed a day. He was a junior now, prowling these halls between classes, skipping out on something, some lecture he would hear but not listen to, some teacher he would see but not focus on. There was something wrong. Was he supposed to be here still, after this? Was he supposed to go to classes and see the world just as he always had? A vital presence was missing from these things he looked at, a presence he could not identify.
    He crouched over the water fountain that he had almost passed by, lapping at the water like a dog, wondering if that was the connection he was supposed to make to drinking water. Do the schools want us to feel like dogs by making us drink hunched over these things? Do they want us to feel like cattle in the hallways and like robots in the classrooms? He shook his head, wiped his face. His feet continued to move, carrying him on a ceaseless journey, an epic trek through these halls. There was a need, a drive, to find the missing presence, to identify it. There was a feeling that this could only be done by this wandering.
    Rory followed his feet into a bathroom, stood staring at the figure in the grime-infested mirror for a moment. This was supposed to be him. A thin, scraggly figure of a boy, of a young man, with black hair and a red cap, with a black sweater over a red t-shirt and jeans, with the blue eyes that had sparkled once, but now looked like hungry gray pools, absorbing everything they saw, digesting it, consuming it.
    He stared into those eyes, wondering if he himself could be consumed by them, even through this mirror. The backdrop of the light blue doors of the toilet stalls, the off-white tiles of the walls, the frightening glittering of the urinals, distracted him. He shuddered and moved on.
    These halls were large, now, now that they were empty. Large. Unfeeling. Disconnected. These halls and Rory were disconnected. But yesterday, hadn’t there been some connection? Hadn’t there been some way that had allowed Rory to ignore the world like everyone else, to move through these crowds and sit in those classes like everyone else? What had changed? What had severed his connection?
    Or perhaps there was no change. Perhaps this was meant to happen, a switch with a timer, set to flip off at the exact time that his had, a switch in his brain or in the school, a switch to isolate him, to do this to him, to leave him wandering these halls.
    The bell rang. Once more, the halls were flooded. Rory, lost in thought, wandered these halls, stayed in the exact center of these halls, as people pushed past him, around him, and through him. He did not feel them jostling him, shoving him, or tossing him around like a leaf in a gale. He felt them passing through him as he walked. He was disconnected from these people. They passed right through him.
    On and on he walked, as the halls emptied and filled and emptied again. When the halls had emptied for the last time that day, Rory still wandered, running his fingers along a wall here, scuffing his feet on this blue tile here. No teachers came and told him to leave. All the teachers were gone. No janitors came his way. They had already gone. He was alone, wandering.
    In his pocket, his cell phone lay, unmoving, silent as the grave. No one was waiting for him, not anymore. This was part of the disconnect. The hollow halls and the echoing vastness of the emptiness of the school gave him an odd feeling. The tension, the impersonal feelings the school radiated, grew stronger. It was almost as if Rory could reach out and brush his fingers across the taut threads that seemed to be forming, brush against the silk cloth that was this presence that was missing. He was closer now, he felt, to discovering what that presence was.
    What was missing from this school, or from him, that kept him so far away? He continued to wander, venturing finally towards that hole where he had began, where he had started to wander this morning, the intersection of all the corridors. He had not gone to it all day, he had avoided it. But now, he felt, he had to go there.
    Fingers brushing along the wall, gliding across the chill metal of the lockers, made a quiet thrum-thrum-thrum sound the entire way, a sound that filled the halls and echoed back to Rory’s ears. He smiled in appreciation as he continued his slow, steady stride back. His feet made a quiet click-scuff-click-scuff. His heart was a muffled tha-thunk…tha-thunk…
    On he walked. The corridor seemed to stretch and become more narrow, growing in the silvered light from the moon. Ahead, continuous, the hall flowed. But still, Rory walked, accompanied by the music of his breathing. An inhale on a huuh. An exhale on a wuuh. Thump-thump-thump. Click-scuff-click-scuff. Tha-thunk…Tha-thunk.
    He was growing excited now, as he walked down the hall. Ahead, he could see where the halls connected. He could see the hole left by the intersections of many tiled hallways.
    He could see an odd, shadowed silhouette ahead. That would tell him, would let him know what had changed. He stepped towards it eagerly now, his fingers leaving the lockers behind. He walked to the center of the hole, stood in the circle formed by the blue tiles on the floor, and waited for his eyes to reveal to him what this thing before him was.
    A line at the top began to fade into white, with unintelligible letters beginning to appear, letters Rory could not yet read. Around them, the lumpy shapes began to resolve into black vases, tied with white ribbons and filled with white flowers. Rory frowned, confused, as the letters began to appear, and a picture of himself, dressed just as he was today.
    “Rory…Linden…” He read slowly, “Born April 25, 1991. Died…March 30, 2008…In a house fire…at 7 pm.”
    He brought a hand up to his face, shock written across his features. The presence. He knew what it was now. He felt his skin growing warm beneath his chilled fingers, felt his heart gaining speed as his skin grew too warm. He pulled his hands away from his face and fell to his knees. Slowly, slowly, he faded, faded away. He had been lost, lost in transit, but now…
    Now he was going home.