8Ep.. The Girl Nobody Knows

Ten days since the man in the emptied apartment, and Doha's phone had stayed quiet. Too quiet to ignore.

Sea pushed through the door of the consultancy and set a printout on the table in front of him.

"Seongil High. Third year." She hadn't even taken off her coat. "A student sent it to me. Asked me to fact-check her school's ghost story."

Doha didn't look at the paper. He pressed the lid of his instant noodles back down.

"Then go fact-check it. That's your field."

"Come with me."

His chopsticks stopped. He looked up at her. She had said it very briefly. The briefer it was, the longer she had rehearsed it.

"…You're asking me," he said. "Two weeks ago you had me by the collar."

"Back then I believed there was nothing I couldn't see." Sea took hold of the door again. "Not anymore. Let's go."

Doha sat there a moment longer. Then he picked up his coat, muttering.

"No salary, and now business trips."

"I'll cover the fare," Sea said.

A girl was waiting in the shadow of the wall by Seongil High's front gate—cardigan over her uniform, both hands clamped on her bag strap. She lifted her head before Sea reached her.

"Kang Yerin. I sent the email." No greeting. "Third year, class seven."

She pulled a photograph from her bag and held it out. Film, printed.

Sea took it and studied it for a moment.

"…You're alone in this."

Yerin's jaw set.

From beside her, Doha saw two people in that photograph. A classroom window, a girl with her arm slung around Yerin's shoulders. Even the curve of her smile was sharp—only the place where a name tag should have been was blank white.

"Park Seojin," Yerin said. "Third year, class seven. My deskmate. Up until three weeks ago we walked to school together every single day."

"Did you check with the school?" Sea asked.

"Of course I did." Her voice rose. Not tears—anger. "The homeroom teacher, the other kids, Seojin's own mother—they all say there's no such girl. Her mother. Her own daughter. She stood in her doorway and asked me who I was."

Sea started to say something and stopped.

"Why is everyone lying?" She snatched the photograph back. "They say I'm crazy. But if I'm crazy, does the photograph go crazy with me?"

"…What about the police," Doha said.

"A missing person report?" She looked at him with an expression no eighteen-year-old should be able to make. "A person who doesn't exist can't go missing."

Doha didn't answer. He tugged his sleeve down over the back of his hand instead. It wasn't a line a man who was dead on paper had any right to argue with.

A person who doesn't exist can't go missing. The reason nobody had come looking for him in seven years—he had just heard it, from an eighteen-year-old.

Sea turned to look at him. Doha was looking past Yerin's shoulder at a bare stretch of wall. He said nothing at all.

After hours, half the fluorescent lights in class seven were off. Every chair was stacked upside down on its desk except one—the back seat by the window, its chair still down on the floor. As if someone had just gotten up from it.

Eraser dust lay heaped on the desktop. Several days' worth, by the look of it. Doha ran his eyes over the surface. There was dust, but nothing that had been erased. No notebook. Not one sheet of paper.

"Doesn't anyone clean it?" Sea turned to the two students still in the room.

"Nobody touches that desk," said the boy with glasses.

"Why not."

The boy opened his mouth, closed it, and looked at the student beside him. That one shrugged.

"I don't know." He meant it, honestly. "It's just how it is."

"…Are you asking about the name tag box?" the other one ventured. "There's one tag left in there, for that seat. They say the name on it keeps changing. That's what people say. I've never seen it. Really."

Sea wrote something in her notebook. "Is there anyone who has seen it?"

The student thought about it, then shook his head. "I don't know. Everyone heard it from someone else."

The homeroom teacher came in from the corridor, glanced at the desk, and said, "Two years ago we lost a student who used this room. We leave it empty in their memory. That's how it's always been done."

"What was the name." Sea opened her notebook.

The teacher opened his mouth. And stayed that way for about three seconds.

"…Who was it, again."

The classroom went quiet. Doha looked at the seat by the window. A place where the rule had survived and the reason had died.

"Seojin sat there," Yerin said, low. "Three weeks ago. We drew lots for seats and she drew that one. There were just thirty-odd slips. Nobody remembered that seat was supposed to be left out." She steadied her breath. "People tried to stop her, but when she asked why not, nobody could answer. Seojin couldn't stand that. She wouldn't obey a rule with no reason. So she just sat down."

Yerin walked over to the desk and pulled the drawer open.

Things were still inside. A half-used tube of pencil lead, an eraser worn down to the size of a fingernail, one black hair tie. Three weeks of dust had settled over them, undisturbed.

Nobody had thrown any of it out. To throw it out you would have to ask whose it was, and there was no name left to ask about.

"Somebody offered to trade seats with her." Yerin picked the hair tie out and slid it onto her own wrist. "She said no. If a seat gets left empty because people are scared of it, she said, then somebody had better find out why. She said once she knew, she'd tell them."

The people she would have told no longer know Seojin.

"Did she find out?" Doha asked.

"I don't know." Yerin pushed the drawer shut. "She stopped talking about it the next day."

The faculty room. Doha perched on an empty chair.

"What does forensics do in a case like this."

"Cross-check three records or more." Sea dragged a folder toward her. "If even one disagrees, that's your thread."

"On my side we usually just get scared."

"Which is why nothing gets solved." Sea laid the attendance ledger, the student file, and the digital roster side by side.

All three were silent. There was no Park Seojin on the roll of class seven. Not even the trace of one.

"If all three records say no," Sea said, "then the person isn't there."

Having said it, she heard her own words a beat later. The line the girl had thrown at her by the gate was still caught in her. If I'm crazy, does the photograph go crazy with me?

"Here." Yerin pinned a line of the ledger with her fingernail. "She was right here. Under my name."

Sea looked at the empty line for a moment, then took out a ballpoint pen. In her own hand, she wrote the name into the blank, carefully. Park Seojin.

"There. Now she's in the record," she said.

Before Doha could say anything.

The ink faded.

It wasn't bleeding. It wasn't drying. The strokes thinned from the inside out, and the paper swallowed the ink back. It took less than ten seconds.

Sea's hand stopped. She wrote it again—harder, hard enough for the nib to score the paper. That one faded too.

She shoved the ledger away and pulled out her own notebook—the one she'd held ready for the teacher's answer, the one she had not let out of her hand in nearly ten years.

"That one's the school's." Her voice picked up speed. "This one is mine. It won't happen in my record."

She wrote it in the notebook. Park Seojin.

The strokes thinned from the inside out.

Reaching to write it a third time, she dropped the pen. It rolled across the desk.

"…Ink," Sea began. "Ink doesn't do this. The pigment—physically, this can't—"

She couldn't finish the sentence. This was a woman who had made her living writing expert opinions.

Doha said nothing. Because to his eyes the name was still there on the paper. Faintly, but plainly.

"You can see it?" Sea read his face and asked. Her voice had gone thin.

"…Yeah."

"I wrote it." She looked down at her own hand. "I wrote it with this hand, and I can't see it, and you can?"

It wasn't the face of a belief collapsing. It was the face of the floor giving way.

Out in the corridor, Doha's pocket buzzed.

The screen read: Number withheld.

He looked at it for about three seconds. What the man in the empty apartment had said came first: That wasn't us. So this was the other side. What frightened him was what the other side would say if he answered. He killed the screen and put the phone back in his pocket.

"You're not taking it?" Sea asked.

"Not today."

Then a ring came from Sea's bag.

Both of them looked at it at once. Sea pulled out her phone. The same words sat on the screen. Number withheld.

"Don't—" Doha reached for it.

She looked at him once and answered before he could stop her. It was the same hand that had grabbed his arm in the consultancy four months ago.

A long noise came out of the receiver. Noise that might have been rain. She said nothing. She only listened. In the light from the corridor window, the color drained slowly out of her face.

Sea hung up.

"What did it say," Doha asked.

She raised her head. And looked him straight in the eye.

"It was nothing."

Doha didn't press. She lowered her eyes when she read a document, and watched your hands when she argued. This was the first time she had looked him in the eye.

Past eight in the evening, Yerin still had not left through the school gate.

"Go home," Doha said.

"No."

"Your parents will come looking."

"My mom doesn't know Seojin either." She reset her grip on the bag strap. "If I stop looking, she really does become a girl who never existed. If even I stop, then who's left to see her?"

The black hair tie turned on her wrist as her hand moved. Doha saw it, and asked nothing.

Doha looked at Sea. Sea didn't stop the girl. She hadn't a single piece of logic left today to stop her with.

"…The stair landing at the end of the corridor," Doha said. "Don't move one step from there. I go into the classroom alone."

"Why," Yerin asked.

"Because one of us seeing it is enough."

Ten at night. In the back seat by the window, someone was sitting.

A uniform. This school's uniform. The head was bowed, and where a face should have been the features were smeared, as if rubbed out. Only the name tag on the chest was sharp.

Park Seojin.

It raised a hand. With its fingertips, it rubbed at its own name tag.

The name came away. Something like eraser dust fell onto the desk and gathered in a small heap.

The same dust from the afternoon. Dust with nothing erased under it. What had been erased was never paper. It was a name.

The back of Doha's hand throbbed. He pushed the sleeve up: the mark had left the back of his hand and run down in a thin line into the inside of his wrist. And he hadn't untied anything yet.

It did not look at him. It did not come for him. It set its fingertips back on the erased space and began to write something. Very carefully. Correcting itself, again and again.

It was not a hand meant to harm. It was a hand holding clothes up against a body, one after another. This one doesn't fit. Not this one either. Not this.

Days' worth of dust. It had been doing this for days. Erasing a name, trying another one on, erasing it again.

Doha's throat had gone dry.

"…What was your name," he said.

For the first time, it raised its head. With no face to raise.

Doha stepped back until the doorframe met his spine. Under the palm he braced behind him, something caught.

On the inside of the frame, a single black ring, blurred with water, had been cut into the wood. A knot.

Mingyu's doorway. The emptied apartment. And here.

When he laid his hand over the knot, the smell thickened. Rain-wet earth and antiseptic. Without meaning to, he looked back into the room, at the thing in the seat. The smell wasn't coming from there. It was rising from under his own palm.

The third one. In his head the three scenes lined up side by side, failed to join, and scattered.

Then the thing lowered its hand. The new name stood revealed.

Doha read it.

Kang Yerin.

There was one name that fit. Whoever sits in that seat has her name taken; the one whose name is taken holds other names up against herself, trying to win one back. But not just any name will fit. Only the name of someone who is still being called by another person.

There was exactly one person left in the world who still called out for Park Seojin.

Doha kicked the classroom door open and ran into the corridor.

"Yerin!" His shout carried the length of the hall. "Get out of here right n—"

Sea was standing on the landing. Beside her stood Yerin, bag strap in her fist, looking his way.

Sea looked at him. And blinked, very slowly, as though tracing back the name he had just called.

"…Who?" Sea asked.

Yerin's lips parted. Sea did not look at the girl standing right beside her. Like someone who could find no reason to, she kept her eyes on Doha.

Then she looked down at the notebook in her hand. Why she was standing on a stranger's stairwell at ten at night, she could not have said. Like the students in that classroom. I don't know. It's just how it is.

The girl was standing right next to her, and Sea had already forgotten her.

The hair tie made one turn on Yerin's wrist. The only person left who knew whose it was, and the only person left who knew the girl, were now the same person.

And now there was exactly one person left who could call out for Kang Yerin.

Changing the name on a tag took one pass of a fingertip; Sea forgetting the girl took less time than that. What was left was one man who had stood face to face with a faceless thing—and on the day he forgets, Kang Yerin becomes a girl who never was.