"It's going to hurt, now ... Anything dead coming back to life hurts."

          The next time Hina bubbles up the courage to enter the abandoned school will be a week after spying the suspicious looking figure. Jessica is worried that Hina is slowly losing her mind because how can she see something that isn’t even there? Yet Hina still points at an empty space over the awning of the opposite building, pleading for her to believe that there is a boy sitting right on it. But Jessica cannot see anyone, and either fumes over the fact that Hina is trying to make a fool out of her again or doubts her sanity. Hina almost believes the last part, but she remembers last evening and the mop-haired boy, the loud bone-crushing crunch and that odd clean spot on the mahogany floor. She recalls Shin Hye’s worrisome expression and the resulting questions of “are you okay?” and “you look like you’ve seen a ghost” with Hina almost asking her if she had seen one to know. Almost, laughingly, so.

          A week from now, Hina will be standing before the all-too-familiar gates that look like they’ve been waiting for her because they are already open. But then she’s back to that same day of Jessica questioning her sanity and how Hina, in a bid to make sure she truly hadn’t imagined those emotions, walks towards these very same gates only to stop at the corner of the street when she sees someone - a boy who looks to be her age, standing before the haunted school, looking up at a window with a wistfulness about him that leaves Hina breathless. Hina knows this boy, or rather, she is aware of his existence from the countless photos she has been forced to see on the stalker phones of her classmates. The countless photos taken by mesmerized school girls on the very day this boy had arrived, which is today, Hina reminds herself. Hina does not want to bump into a schoolmate while she’s on her mission; does not want to see him especially, the popular boy of the school, due to the possibility of (knowing her own bad luck) someone seeing them together; and the last thing Hina wants is attention, much less the hostile kind.

          So Hina waits.

          And