Episode 41

The relentless cycle of upheaval had become the soundtrack to Kadja’s young life. Each forced move, each new school, was meant to be an escape, a fresh start, a way to outrun the shadows that clung to her like a second skin. But the shadows, she was learning with a weary certainty, were not tied to geography. They were tied to *her*. Her family, their faces etched with a mixture of love and profound exasperation, had pinned their hopes on an all-girls institution in Portland, Maine: Catherine McAuley. The name itself, evoking a saintly figure of mercy, felt like a cruel irony.

The move to Portland was a blur of packed boxes and strained silences. The air in the new house, though ostensibly free of the residual unease of their previous haunted abode, felt heavy with unspoken expectations. Kadja, a ghost in her own life, moved through the motions, her eyes already scanning the unfamiliar rooms for the tell-tale signs of the encroaching darkness. She knew, with a bone-deep intuition, that this was no sanctuary. The same unseen forces that had trailed them from Maine to Canada, the same malevolent presence that seemed to feast on her fear, had followed. It was a constant, suffocating pressure, a chilling whisper just beyond the edge of hearing, a promise of the familiar terror that awaited her between the hours of one and three in the morning.

Catherine McAuley was a vast, imposing building, its stone façade exuding an aura of tradition and discipline. For Kadja, it was just another arena for her silent battle. The other girls, a sea of unfamiliar faces, moved with a confidence Kadja could only envy. They chattered about boys, about classes, about the mundane concerns of adolescence. Kadja, meanwhile, navigated the hallways like a warship under constant siege, her gaze flicking to every darkened corner, every closed door, every flicker of movement in her peripheral vision. The bullying, a constant companion, found new fertile ground here. Whispers followed her down corridors, cruel nicknames were scribbled on locker doors, and the isolating chill of being an outcast settled over her like a familiar shroud.