On the second day of sixth grade at Pine Ridge Middle, my locker whispered my name. I'm not saying that to be dramatic. I know what whispers sound like. I have a little brother who sneaks into my room to steal my markers and then tries to return them without getting caught. He whispers all the time. This was like that-soft and breathy-but it slid out of the vents of Locker 333 while I was stuffing a binder inside. "Maya." I froze with one spiral notebook halfway in, halfway out. The hallway was a river of backpack straps and squeaking sneakers, someone clapping a rhythm on a locker door near the band room, and the water fountain over by Hall B doing its usual hiccup trick. Nobody was standing close enough to say my name. Nobody was even looking at me. Theo Alvarez was three lockers down, wrestling his hoodie out from under a stack of science worksheets and humming the theme from a superhero movie. I did the only sensible thing. I leaned toward the vents and whispered back, "Nope." Then I shut my locker. The boingy sound of the metal closing should have made it feel normal again, like I had imagined the whole thing because it was barely 8:20 and the bus had been late and I had forgotten my gym shoes. Instead, the number painted on the door-333-seemed to stare at me a little too hard. "Ready for homeroom?" Theo asked. He slung his backpack over one shoulder and started walking backward so he could grin at me and not trip on the crack in the tile outside the art room. He trips on it every day anyway. "Did you say my name?" I asked. "No? Should I have? I can say it again if you want: Maya, Maya, Maya." He stopped and peered around me. "Hey, you look weird. Not bad weird. Like, I-just-saw-the-cafeteria-menu weird." "My locker said my name," I said, too fast. He blinked. Somewhere behind us, the late bell buzzed. "Okay. Like... an echo? Because this building does that thing where it sounds like the vents are talking." "I know what the vents are like," I said. Pine Ridge was old enough that the history teacher always said things like, 'During the Roosevelt era,' and people weren't sure which Roosevelt she meant. The hall ceilings had metal grates that hummed in the winter and clicked in September if you stood at them long enough. "This wasn't humming. It said my name." Theo nodded slowly. "Cool." He said it the way he says cool when I beat him at chess in exactly seven moves. "Want to tell Ms. Patel? Or should we poke it with a pencil first?" "I tried ignoring it," I said. "We'll try the pencil after homeroom." Homeroom tried its best to be boring. Ms. Patel had a soft voice that made everyone lean forward to hear, and she passed out our field trip forms to the planetarium next month. She let us decorate our planner covers with washi tape, which is not boring, but you can't exactly tell your teacher you want to test a locker with a pencil when you are in the middle of cutting tiny stars out of foil tape. I kept glancing at the round clock above the whiteboard that always ran three minutes slow. The one in Hall B did the opposite; it was stuck at 3:33 all day, which was not useful even a little. At break, I dragged Theo and my chewed-up pencil back to 333. The fluorescent lights made everything look like it had been dipped in lemon juice-the walls, the linoleum, Theo's hair. I listened. Nothing. I knocked twice, then once more for good luck. The metal clanked. I could hear someone tossing a basketball in the gym down the hall: thump, thump, thump. Then I saw it. A folded square wedged behind the slant of the top vent, like it had been tucked there carefully so it wouldn't fall. "Note," I said. "From who?" Theo said, even though he could see I didn't know. I dove my fingers into the vent, which was just big enough for a note and just small enough for my knuckles to get scraped. I fished it out, unfolded it with one torn nail, and read the three words in neat blue ink. "If this is you." I waited for more to magically appear. That was it: If this is you. No name, no signature, no explanation. The edges were soft like the paper had been folded and unfolded a lot. There was a pencil smudge at the bottom, the kind you get when you erase something and then change your mind. Theo leaned over my shoulder. "If this is you... then what?" "Then what," I repeated. The in-between bell rang and people surged past us again, a tide of elbows and zippers. I shoved the note into my pocket and told myself it was a joke. Locker pranks are a sixth-grade classic. Last year, my cousin reported that a seventh grader kept sliding pictures of winking goats into his Spanish book. By lunch, I was pretty sure I was fine. I survived math without my stomach twisting itself into a pretzel. I survived science even though our new teacher, Ms. Redwood, announced that our first unit was on "systems and patterns," which made her sound like the kind of person who forgot to blink. Theo and I found a table near the windows in the cafeteria, which is where the nice light lives and the smell of chicken nuggets is the least loud. He opened his milk carton like it was a tiny treasure chest. "So," he said, "if this is you?" "Then hi," I said, through a tater tot. "I guess?" He drummed his fingers on the table. "I heard from Jamal that the theater kids think the auditorium is haunted, but I think they just want people to come to their play. We could ask around about 333, or we could leave it alone. Everyone says the science wing is the oldest part of the building. Maybe the lockers are... sentimental." He smiled like he'd made the world's first locker joke. I laughed even though my head was somewhere between the chicken nugget tray and the fact that the paper had made my fingers dusty. "Let's ask after last bell," I said. "No reason to get yelled at for investigating during social studies." We did not get yelled at in social studies. We did get to watch a video about explorers with dramatic music and maps that curled at the edges. The air conditioner rattled and the lights flickered once like they were deciding whether being on was worth the effort. When the final bell finally did its flat bray and the hallway filled with the sound of lockers popping open, I felt the thing I always feel at that exact moment: a tiny lift, like the building took a breath out. Three minutes later, the hallway was almost empty. It always happens fast-people sliding out the doors to buses, to bikes, to parents lined up in a long double-parked zoo. The quiet had an echo. "Ready?" Theo said. "No," I said, and we both walked anyway. Locker 333 sat in the middle of the row, between 332 and 334 like a kid in a class photo trying not to blink. The 3s looked like little hearts if you squinted, which I did not. I tried my combination. 25 to the right, 18 to the left, 4 to the right. Click. The handle was cool under my hand. I felt ridiculous listening for a whisper like it was going to say, 'Sorry, wrong number.' Before I pulled, I glanced up, because I'm the kind of person who glances up when I'm nervous. The round clock at the end of the hall-which was not the broken Hall B one-said 3:29. The second hand twitched forward. A dusty swath of sunlight slid along the lockers as a cloud moved past the windows, going from bright to dim and back again in a slow blink. Someone far away slammed a classroom door. "Wait," Theo said. He was squinting at the top vent. "Is that another note?" My pulse did the little hop it does when I find a forgotten gift card in a pocket. There, pinched by the metal like a letter for a mailbox that I didn't know it was a mailbox, was another square. I pulled it free much more carefully this time and unfolded it. The same neat blue ink. This time, four words. "I can hear you. 3:33." We both looked at the clock again. 3:30. The second hand twitched. The hallway hummed in that way halls do when they have to decide whether to feel creepy or normal. "Okay," I said. "Well, maybe 3:33 is when the custodian takes out the recycling and the locker enjoys the view." Jokes are for when you can feel the back of your neck noticing that you have a back of your neck. Theo lifted one shoulder. "Or maybe whoever wrote it is watching right now." He widened his eyes in a way that was supposed to be silly, but I had the sudden urge to check the reflection in the glass of the trophy case down the hall to see if anything was moving that I didn't recognize. "Fine," I said, because fine is what I say when I mean I am definitely not fine but also I'm not turning around. "We can do exactly three minutes of being brave. Then we go." We stood there and did the one thing nobody ever tells you is harder than it looks: we waited. The seconds moved like they were wading through syrup. I could hear a bus honk outside. I could hear the distant, hollow pop of a basketball from somewhere below us, because Pine Ridge has a lower level that practically nobody gets to go to unless you are in band or you know where the stairwell with the heavy gray door is. I could hear my own breathing, and Theo's, and something else that might have been the building settling or might have been my imagination stretching its legs. 3:31. 3:32. 3:33. The clock hand ticked into place, and in the exact same second, something tapped from inside my locker. Three quick taps, like a code. Tap. Tap. Tap. I didn't jump. My whole body did. Theo whispered, "Okay, that's not the custodian." He was smiling and not smiling at the same time, which is a face I didn't know he could make. I touched the handle. It was warmer than before. Or maybe my hand was colder. The metal had a tiny scar across it I'd never noticed, a scratched line that might have been somebody's attempt at a lightning bolt. My combination hung in my head like a sentence I had said out loud, proof that the door would open if I wanted it to. "If this is you," I said softly to the vents, because I couldn't help it, "we're here." Another tap. Tap. Tap. And then something even weirder. The slightest tug on the handle. Not me. Not Theo. The handle shifted under my fingers as if someone, on the other side of my dull gray door, had wrapped their hand around the inside latch and was pulling back. Theo and I looked at each other, and in that instant, everything decided to go extra quiet: no bus honk, no faraway ball, no hum. Just the clock at the end of the hall, stuck at 3:33 like it always is in Hall B, except this wasn't Hall B and this clock was not stuck, and still somehow the second hand wasn't moving at all. "On three," I said, and my voice didn't crack, which I will be proud of for the rest of my life. "One." The handle tugged again. "Two." Somewhere very close-right past the thin metal-someone breathed in. "Three," I said, and I pulled.