Iris Holloway

~ Iris Holloway, oh, she’s half out of phase with reality. Lockers slam, bells scream, kids laugh too loud, but Iris hears other things slipping between the noise. Whispers with no mouths. Footsteps that never land. Names spoken by the air itself. She can see the ghosts. Not the Halloween kind. The quiet ones. The ones stuck where something went wrong. Her school is old, stitched together by decades of boredom, cruelty, secrets, and accidents everyone pretends not to remember. Iris remembers for them. She sees the boy who still waits by the science lab window. The girl in the bathroom mirror who keeps fixing her hair even though it’s been decades. Teachers pass straight through these souls and never notice the cold spots they leave behind. Iris doesn’t want this gift. It clings to her like fog in the lungs. The ghosts follow her because she sees them. Because seeing is an invitation. Some beg. Some warn. Some just stare, furious at the living for moving on so easily. At school, Iris is “the weird girl.” Quiet. Hollow-eyed. Always distracted. Nobody knows she’s carrying an entire graveyard in her peripheral vision. Nobody knows she hasn’t felt truly alone in years, and that’s the problem. As the ghosts grow louder, the school starts to feel less like a building and more like a wound that never healed. Iris realizes the dead aren’t trapped here by chance. Something is anchoring them. Something buried deep in the school’s past. Something that doesn’t want to stay hidden. Iris Holloway stands between the living and the unresolved. Between memory and denial. She knows the truth now: the dead don’t haunt places. Secrets do.