The lecture hall blurs into a sea of projected slides and half-awake zombies. Professor Harrington pontificates about victimology, as if his painfully boring lecture isn't already a literal crime against humanity. Suddenly, my phone buzzes with an restricted number—and a text containing a photo of Harrington taken from exactly where I am sitting

I pause, staring at my phone from where it sits atop forgotten notes and dried up highlighters. Harrington isn’t looking at me. I make a dive for the phone.

Who is this?

I send the text too quick to check my phone is on silent, and the swoosh-ding of it sending alerts the boy next to me, drawn out of his Taki-induced stupor to peer over my shoulder. His name is Michael, I vaguely remember his name from the start of the year.

“You got it too?” He asks, licking his reddened fingers clean.

I pause. “You know this person?”

Michael shrugs. “No one does. We call him the Ghost of Lectures Present.” He stops briefly to open a can of Coke, the soft hiss and release of the can drawing stares from those around us. He doesn’t seem to care.

My phone buzzes again before I can ask anything else.

Not important. What's important is what he did to you.

I feel the blood leave my face. Beside me, Michael cranes his neck again, and this time I don't bother hiding the screen from him.

"Yeah, that's new," he says, chewing on the inside of his cheek. "Usually he just sends the photo.”

"He's done this before? To you?"

Michael's jaw tightens, just slightly, before he shrugs it off. "Couple times last semester. Different professor. Guy's a ghost—texts come from a number that doesn't exist, disconnects after, like, ten minutes if you try to call back." He pops another Taki into his mouth. "I stopped trying."

Up at the podium, Harrington drones on about secondary victimization, oblivious, his laser pointer trembling faintly against the slide. I look back down at my phone. The three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

Ask him about Rosalind Cho.

I don't recognize the name. I glance at Michael, whose face has gone blank, but there’s something behind his eyes that tell me he recognizes it just fine.

"Michael."

"I have an appointment to get to," he says, gathering his bag with sudden urgency, Coke can still half full. "Delete the texts. Block the number. Do whatever, just—" He pauses at the end of the row. "Don't ask him about Rosalind Cho. Don't ask anyone."

I raced back to my dorm room, pulled my laptop out of my backpack, and clicked open a new browser tab.

Rosalind Cho, I typed into the search bar, then started scrolling down the list of results. The LinkedIn profile of an accountant from Nevada. A British woman who had won an award for watercolor painting. A preteen from Portland, Maine, who had been interviewed by the local paper about the dogwalking business she'd started last summer.

About halfway through the second page of results, I paused. A news article from Cincinnati with the headline "College Student Remains Missing, Parents Plead for Answers." Something shivered in the pit of my stomach as I clicked onto the page.

A pretty young woman stared back at me – long black hair, dark almond-shaped eyes, and a broad smile that seemed sickly ironic in conjunction with the text below it. "Rosalind Cho, 19, remains missing as search efforts enter their second week. Cho, originally from South Bend, Indiana, was in her first semester at Milford College, where she played on the women's club field hockey team. Cho was last seen on October 4th by her roommate, who reported that the missing girl left the shared dormitory at about 9pm to go to the library to study for an upcoming criminology exam. Her student ID was never used to scan into the library building, and she has not been seen since."