Odd Things

“It was the strangest thing,” Joseph thought as he stepped out of the history lecture hall, his backpack slung over one shoulder. The final exam had been brutal, but the weight in his chest wasn’t from the test—it was from the empty seat across the room from him. Therese hadn’t shown up.

No one seemed to care. The professor had not even called her name during roll call, nor had anyone asked about her absence. It was as if she had never existed, and that gnawed at Joseph in a way he couldn’t quite explain. “Had she taken the test early?” The thought stung more than he expected. If she had, it meant he’d lost his last chance to see her before the semester ended.

The hallway buzzed with chatter as other students walked past him, their voices blending into a meaningless hum. Joseph lingered by a window, staring out at the snow beginning to dust the campus grounds. “Maybe her social media will have answers,” he thought, pulling out his phone with trembling fingers.

He opened Facebook and quickly typed her name into the search bar: Therese Lang.

Nothing.

Joseph frowned and checked the spelling. He was sure he had it right. Yet, no profiles came up—not even an inactive one.

“Did she delete her account?” he muttered to himself. The thought made his stomach drop. Therese had been active on social media just a few days ago—he remembered seeing a post about her study playlist. Why would she suddenly vanish?

His thumb hovered over the search bar again. He tried Instagram next. Then Twitter. Each time, the same result: nothing. It was as if Therese had been wiped off the face of the digital world.

Joseoh’s chest tightened. “This isn’t normal.” He wanted to believe there was some mundane explanation—maybe she decided to go offline for the holidays, or maybe she’d made her accounts private. But none of it felt right.

His mind raced with possibilities, some more concerning than others. “Did something happen to her? Did she transfer schools? Was she… okay? “

The realization hit him hard: this wasn’t just about a silly crush anymore. Jason genuinely cared about her. And now she was gone, leaving nothing but an empty seat in a lecture hall and a blank search result on his phone.

Feeling hollow, Joseph stuffed his phone back into his pocket and turned away from the window. The winter chill bit at him as he stepped outside, walking briskly across the snow-dusted campus.

His dorm room felt colder than usual when he arrived. The tiny fake Christmas tree in the corner blinked weakly with mismatched lights, and the silence in the space was deafening. Dropping his bag on the floor, Joseph sank onto his bed, pulling out his phone one last time.

He scrolled through old posts in the campus Facebook group, searching for any mention of Therese—anything at all. But there was nothing. No one else seemed to notice she was gone.

For a brief moment, Joseph considered asking someone—maybe a professor or one of Therese’s friends if they knew where she was. But the thought of drawing attention to himself, of people asking why he cared so much, made his chest tighten with anxiety.

Instead, he lay back on his bed, staring at the cracks in the ceiling.

“Where are you, Therese?” he whispered into the stillness.

But the silence had no answers for him.