I didn't rush after her, but I did quicken my pace.
Leaving the music room, I followed the footsteps down another corridor and came to the art room.
Quite a few students' paintings hung along the corridor, all perfectly normal. But every painting inside the classroom featured that girl.
Oil paintings, watercolors, sketches, cartoons... They all showed the girl, always from behind, with her head turned to the side.
It looked as though the girl in the paintings might turn around at any moment and face me fully.
She seemed alive, able to move freely.
She was a ghost.
But I felt no fear.
I watched quietly, like a bystander.
There was no yin energy in the room. The girl wasn't here.
I returned to the corridor and saw that all the paintings hanging there had changed into images of the girl.
The same pose, with her back turned and her head tilted to the side. Only now, it seemed as though the girl in the paintings was watching me.
I continued down the corridor, feeling as if every painting had become a watcher.
Those gazes made me uncomfortable, but I still felt no fear.
The first floor had only the music room and the art room.
On the second floor were the laboratories.
The physics, biology, and chemistry labs were separate, each in its own classroom.
The plastic skeletons and anatomical models in the biology lab hadn't moved, and neither had the tracks, toy cars, or balls in the physics lab. When I reached the chemistry lab, there was no strange chemical smell, and I saw no reactions giving off light or heat.
Everything on this floor was normal.
The girl wasn't here.
I stood by a corridor window and looked out, but saw no one.
She was gone.