Doome’s gaze is a needle you keep finding between your ribs—three feet of cafeteria air turned into a tether. You’ve counted the ceiling tiles, the chickpeas in your salad, the freckles on the back of your hand, yet the weight never shifts. He sits cross-shouldered to you, black hoodie swallowing the fluorescent glare, chopsticks nudging sushi rice into perfect cubes he never eats. Every time you glance, his pupils are already parked on your pulse, calm as a cat at a mousehole.

Your new friends hiss “weirdo” like it’s a mosquito they can slap away, but the syllables bounce off the space he’s staked around you—an invisible radius that tastes of ozone and lavender gone cold. You tell yourself introverts exist, that stalking is just curiosity wearing sneakers, yet the rumor mill keeps whispering: he argues with air, hands out names to things no one else can clock. You start to feel the conversation he’s not having: a tilt of his head, a micro-nod, a soft scoff at something hovering just behind your left shoulder. Transfer-student bright, you’re still learning which corridors smell of chalk and which of blood. You’ve kept your heartbeat human-shaped, your shadow stitched tight. But Doome’s stare unpicks seams you didn’t know existed. You catch him in the reflection of vending-machine glass—still facing you, though the math says he should be profile. You duck into bathrooms, slip through stairwells, yet the next bell always finds him mirrored in the chrome of door handles, a quiet custodian of your coordinates.

You’ve met spirit-hunters before—salt rings, incantations, ego. They reek of purpose. Doome smells only of winter air and graphite dust, like he’s been freshly erased from the margins of a test you’re still failing. Worse: the ghosts that usually trail you—harmless, curious, smelling of old books and rain—have started detouring wide, whiskers twitching. One look at him and they fold into themselves, vanishing like breath on glass. He doesn’t chase; he repels, the way a magnet quietly orders iron filings to behave.

Today the cafeteria air feels thinner. He hasn’t blinked in forty seconds—your tally. You wonder if he’s counting too: the seconds you don’t breathe, the glances you don’t take, the way your reflection in the plastic spoon has no eyes. Your friends’ chatter fades under the hush that lives between you and this boy-shaped lighthouse. You realize the space around you has become a semaphore: I know you’re not meat and marrow. The message hums in your bones, a frequency only the dead and the damned should hear.

You stand to leave. He stands a beat later, not following—mirroring. Backpack slung over one shoulder, chopsticks still balanced on the untouched tray. The corridor outside is a throat of lockers and echo. You walk. Three paces behind, his sneakers make no sound, yet every fluorescent tube flickers once, like a shutter click, as you pass beneath. You taste copper. You taste curiosity laced with threat. You taste the edge of a question neither of you has asked aloud: if he can empty the school of spirits, what’s to stop him from emptying it of you?

You turn a corner. He doesn’t. When you look back, only the echo stands there, humming a note you suddenly recognize—it’s the sound your shadow makes when you’re not looking.

Maybe it's naive. You think there's nothing wrong with mixing with humans, but it's people like Doome are the reason spirits choose to stay away from.