"Brenda Doesn’t Exist"

Everyone remembers Brenda.

They remember the red hair, always damp like she’d just stepped out of rain. They remember the laugh that cracked the stillness of study halls, the notes she passed in class folded into intricate little hearts. They remember the way she walked—fast, like the world was trying to catch her and never could.

But Brenda doesn’t exist.

Not on paper. Not in yearbooks. Not in hospital records. Not even in the photos we took that summer by the lake. Look closely and you’ll see an empty space beside me where I remember her standing, toes in the water, eyes wide as if the world was too beautiful to hold.

I tried to tell people. Teachers. Friends. Even my mother. They smiled the way adults do when they think you’re “going through something.” They said grief makes us imagine things. That maybe Brenda was a dream stitched together from loneliness.

But she wasn’t.

She was the only real thing in a world that now feels like it’s made of fog and cardboard.

I met her on a Thursday.

It was late spring, and the air smelled like wet pavement and secrets. I had skipped gym, hiding under the bleachers with a paperback and a headache. I wasn’t expecting anyone else there—especially not a girl with fire-colored hair and scuffed shoes who sat beside me like she belonged there too.

“You’re reading Frankenstein,” she said. “Do you think the monster was ever really a monster?”

“No,” I answered without thinking. “He just wanted someone to understand him.”

She smiled. “Same.”

That was the beginning.

We were inseparable after that. Not in the way popular girls are, giggling in packs and posting selfies. We were quieter. Secretive. We had our own language built from glances and stolen chalk, messages drawn on bathroom walls and erased by the end of the day.

Brenda liked abandoned places. We found old barns, forgotten trails, rooftops no one dared to climb. She said silence echoed better in empty spaces—that it told the truth when people couldn’t.

Sometimes she spoke like she remembered things that hadn’t happened yet.

“This place won’t be here next year,” she whispered once, fingers tracing the cracked brick of an old warehouse. “We won’t either. Not like this.”

She said a lot of things I didn’t understand until later.

Then one day, she was gone.

No text. No note. No dramatic goodbye.

Just… gone.

I waited. Checked her usual hiding spots. Left scribbles in chalk where we used to meet. Asked around.

“Brenda who?” they’d say.

“Are you sure that’s her name?”

Even the substitute teacher she always argued with—the one Brenda called “Mr. Beige” behind his back—tilted his head and blinked like I was speaking another language.

“There’s never been a Brenda in this class,” he said.

And that’s when it started: the gaslighting from the universe.

Her desk was empty. Then gone. Then rearranged like it never existed. Her name wasn’t on the roster. Her locker? Clean, unused, still had the paper combo tag from when they assigned it. Her scent—the one like matches and strawberries—vanished from the air.

I went home and tore through my notebooks.

No doodles from her. No notes.

Even the polaroid I took of us by the train tracks had changed. My arm still reached out… but there was no one beside me. Just rusted rails and trees.

So I did what anyone would do.

I tried to forget her.

Tried to believe what everyone said: that maybe I’d imagined her, crafted a friend out of my own unraveling mind. I almost succeeded.

Until the letters started arriving.

They were always unsigned, always written in the exact shade of red ink Brenda used.

“You remember, don’t you?”

“I still exist, even if they say I don’t.”

“They’ll never understand. But you do.”

I found them in books I hadn’t touched in years. Folded into coat pockets. Tucked beneath my pillow.

And sometimes, I’d wake in the night to the scent of sulfur and strawberries, and the sense—more than the sight—of someone sitting at the edge of my bed.

Watching. Waiting.

There’s a theory I read once. About people who slip between realities. Glitches in the simulation. Souls who can’t be anchored to this world, so they flicker in and out of memory like old radio static.

Maybe Brenda was one of them.

Or maybe she’s something else entirely.

A ghost who never died.

A thought too powerful to stay imagined.

A truth the world wasn’t ready for.

This morning, I got another letter. Tucked inside my mirror.

It said:

“They almost erased me. But you kept me alive. Meet me where the light bends.”

I know what that means. Brenda always said twilight was her favorite time—“It’s when the world forgets what it’s supposed to be,” she told me once.

So I’m going back to the lake.

To the place where she never stood.

Where I remember her the clearest.

And if I vanish after tonight, don’t worry.

I’ll be where she is.

In the space between memory and myth.

In the echo of a laugh you’re not sure you heard.

In the warmth beside you when no one’s there.

Because Brenda doesn’t exist.

But somehow, she’s more real than anything else.