Added

Priya got added to the group chat at 11:48 on a Thursday night, and she knew immediately that it was a mistake, because the first message after her name appeared said *who added priya* and the second one said *not me* and the third one was just a single full stop, from somebody called Dom, and somehow the full stop was the scariest of the three. She had been at Halloway High for nine days. Nine days was not enough time to be added to anything on purpose. Priya knew the math of being new; she had done it twice before, in two other towns, and she had a whole quiet system for it. You did not expect to be added to things. You expected, at best, to be tolerated near things, and you were grateful for the toleration, and you did not make it weird. So when the notification lit up her phone — *You were added to "the inner ring (do not screenshot)"* — Priya's first feeling was not happiness. It was the specific cold drop of knowing you have walked into a room you were not invited to and the room has gone quiet. She lay in bed and watched the chat decide what to do with her. There were seven of them, she worked out, scrolling up as fast as she dared. Seven names, and they had been talking in this chat for what looked like years — the scroll went up forever, a wall of inside jokes and half-sentences and reactions to things Priya would never have the context to understand. It was like being handed the four hundredth page of a book and asked to follow along. *who added priya* — that was a girl called Steph. *not me* — Dom again, before the full stop. Then nothing, for four whole minutes, which on a phone at midnight is a geological age. Priya watched the little *typing...* dots appear and vanish and appear and vanish, three different times, three different people starting to say something and deciding not to. She could feel the chat conferring around her, the way you can feel a group of people in a hallway talking about you without hearing a word. Then a message came through from someone called Eli, and it was: *leave her in. it's funnier.* And the chat moved on. That was it. That was the whole verdict. *Leave her in, it's funnier.* Nobody welcomed her. Nobody asked her a single thing. The seven of them simply resumed their endless private conversation as though Priya were a piece of furniture that had appeared in the room — present, noted, not addressed. Priya lay there and read along, an uninvited eighth, and told herself it was fine, it was honestly fine, being furniture in a popular group's chat was a strange kind of promotion for a nine-day-old new kid and she should take what she could get. But she kept scrolling up. She couldn't help it. And the more she read, the more she started to notice the thing that would, although she didn't know it yet, change everything about her time at Halloway High. There were seven people in the chat. But only six of them ever really talked. The seventh name was Marisol, and Marisol was *in* every conversation — added to every thread, present for every joke — and Marisol almost never said anything, and on the rare times she did, the chat had a particular way of responding to her. Priya read it three times before she let herself believe it. When Marisol spoke, the others didn't answer her. They answered *around* her. They would pick up the topic she'd raised and run with it to each other, brightly, like she hadn't spoken at all, and Marisol would go quiet again, and the pattern was so smooth and so practiced that Priya understood it had been happening for a long, long time. Six people. One ghost. And a brand-new eighth, lying in the dark with her phone going hot in her hand, who was the only person in the chat with no history, no loyalties, and no reason yet not to notice.