Vanishing Point - A Short Story by Haley Anne Laughlin

Chapter 1

She always said the world would end in fire, but I never thought she would be the one holding the match.

It sounded dramatic when she said it the first time—casual, like a joke she didn’t quite mean. I laughed. She didn’t. Just kept stirring her coffee, eyes fixed on me like I was already burning.

I don’t remember when I first noticed her. Maybe it was at the dog park, when she complimented my vintage Levi’s jacket and asked what breed my dog was—even though I don’t have one. Or maybe it was at the café across from campus, where she showed up wearing the exact same shade of plum lipstick I’d bought from a tiny shop in Bushwick. Not a dupe. The exact one.

At first, I thought her name was Hannah. She introduced herself so quickly, with a shy smile and a voice that hovered just above a whisper, like she was always afraid of being too loud. I didn’t think much of it until I saw her again. And again.

My name’s Rina. I’m in my final year at The New School, juggling a thesis on 20th-century performance theory and a part-time job at a bookstore that smells like old paper and citrus-scented hand sanitizer. My routine is boring by design: oat latte at 7:30, class at 9, bookstore shift at 4, and home by 9:15. I live alone in a shoebox apartment with a crooked window that leaks in the rain, and a dying pothos plant that I keep forgetting to water.

But lately, Hannah—if that’s even her name—has been showing up in all the in-between spaces. She joined the same elective I was in, one that was already halfway through the semester. She started coming into the bookstore, always when I was on shift, always pretending to browse the poetry shelf, though I never saw her buy anything. Then one day she handed me a copy of Nightshade, the same battered edition I’d taken home from the store’s markdown bin. She smiled and said, “I like the way Barnes describes people—like they’re made of glass.”

It wasn’t just unsettling. It was familiar.

The worst part wasn’t the clothes, or the café orders, or the sudden shift in how she styled her hair to match mine. It was when she began mimicking things no one else should have known. Like the way I hum the Jeopardy theme when I’m trying to remember where I put my keys. Or how I chew the inside of my cheek when I’m annoyed.

One morning, I went to grab my favorite corduroy blazer—the one with the little coffee stain on the right sleeve—and it was gone. I tore my room apart, even checked the laundry basket three times. That afternoon, Hannah walked into class wearing it. The stain was still there.

So today, I’m doing something about it. I’m sitting on a bench outside the student union, pretending to scroll through my phone, oat latte in hand, blazer-less in the cold. I’m waiting for her. I have AirPods in, but the music is paused. My reflection stares back at me from the black screen—tired eyes, chipped nail polish, and a smear of chocolate from the protein bar I ate in a rush this morning.

I see her now. Walking up from the library. Wearing my scarf. She pauses when she spots me, and for a second, I swear she mirrors my expression: half-curious, half-hollow.

“Hi, Rina,” she says. Her voice matches mine. Her cadence. Her tilt of the head.

I smile. It’s small, calculated. I stand up.

“Hi,” I say. “You forgot something last time.”

She blinks. “What?”

I reach into my tote and pull out a cheap pair of earbuds—mine. I found them tangled under the poetry shelf last night.

Her hand trembles when she takes them.

This is how I take myself back. Piece by piece. One stolen thing at a time.

Or so I thought.

That night, on the walk home, I took a different street. Not on purpose. I just missed the crosswalk while texting my professor an apology for missing another thesis checkpoint.

That’s when I passed her.

An older woman in a mismatched coat, seated at a folding table under the glow of a flickering streetlamp. A stack of tarot cards. A mug of something steaming. A handwritten sign taped to the front that read: “First pull’s free. Second costs you something.”

She looked up and smiled. “You’re being watched,” she said, before I said a word.

I laughed. It sounded hollow in the cold. “Aren’t we all?”

“Not like this.” She pointed to the empty chair across from her. “Sit. One card.”

I should have kept walking. I meant to. But my legs didn’t.

She turned the card over. The Two of Cups.

“Connection,” she said. “But not love. Obsession. Mirror image. One reaching. One being taken.”

I stared at her, waiting for the trick. The sales pitch.

Instead, she leaned forward and said, “She’s already decided she’ll be better at your life than you are.”

I stood up. “Thanks,” I muttered, brushing my coat sleeve, as if her words left dust behind.

“Last chance,” she called after me. “There’s still time to close the door before she walks all the way in.”

I didn’t look back.

Chapter 2

I stopped journaling. Not because I didn’t want to, but because I didn’t know who might be reading it.

That’s the kind of thought you’re not supposed to say out loud—not unless you want someone to ask if you’re okay, which, frankly, I wasn’t.

At first, I chalked it up to academic stress. Too much caffeine, too little sleep. My professor even emailed me a list of campus counseling services after I missed two thesis meetings in a row. I wanted to tell him it wasn’t the thesis that kept me up at night. It was the creeping feeling that someone else was living mine.

Last Thursday, I came home to find my apartment window cracked open. Not enough to scream break-in. Just… open. I never open it. The latch sticks. You have to pull up and then jiggle it sideways just right.

Nothing was stolen. Not exactly. But my desk chair had been moved slightly. My favorite pen—the Pilot G-Tec I only ever write in—was lying on top of my closed notebook, uncapped, bleeding a small black stain into the page.

It wasn’t where I left it.

And it wasn’t just that. My oatmeal container was facing the wrong direction. One of the cushions on the couch was flipped. There were small, stupid things that didn’t mean anything, unless you knew me. Unless you knew I notice everything.

I told myself I was being paranoid. Then I saw the post.

An anonymous account followed me on Instagram that night. No profile photo. No bio. Just a single post: a blurry photo of a page from my journal. Not the whole thing. Just a corner. Just enough to know it was mine. I recognized the slope of the “y.” The ink bleed. The phrase “fragments become ritual.”

I hadn’t written that anywhere else. Not online. Not in a doc. Only on paper.

I deleted the app for a week.

When I re-downloaded it, the account was gone. But so was my sense of control.

This isn’t just mimicry. This is replication. Invasion.

She’s not just watching me.

She’s rehearsing.

And she’s getting better.

Chapter 3

It’s the playlists that finally undo me.

They weren’t mine—not technically. But they might as well have been.

Hannah posted them on her Instagram story: muted beige graphics, lowercase titles, black serif fonts. girlhood theory, warm bodies, cold hands, november in my mouth. I clicked on one. It opened to Spotify.

The first song was a track I had played on loop for three days straight last winter, but never shared publicly. The third was from a playlist I’d made for a short story draft I never finished. And the fifth—

The fifth was from a video my ex had sent me years ago, captioned “this made me think of you.”

I never liked that song. I told him that. I skipped it every time it came on. But I never told anyone why.

She couldn’t have known that. She couldn’t have found that.

I closed the app and stared at my reflection in the dark screen. Something about the curve of my jaw, the way my collarbone showed just slightly in the loose collar of my shirt—it felt staged, like I was seeing myself the way she saw me.

Later that night, I checked the bookstore’s website. We have a staff picks page we rotate out monthly, and someone had added a recommendation I hadn’t written:

“A haunting meditation on identity, control, and how far someone will go to become someone else.”

Underneath it:

–Rina

I never submitted that.

I checked the listing. It was linked to Nightwood.

My favorite book. My personal copy. The one I wrote about in an old blog post years ago, a piece I’d buried under a fake name when I was still figuring things out.

I opened my journal and scribbled a single word:

“how.”

There’s no accident in this.

Not anymore.

You don’t stumble across someone’s private playlist.

You don’t just guess a hidden blog alias from 2018.

You don’t quote their ex.

You study them. You collect them. You build a version of them out of scraps and echoes and secondhand sentences—until one day, you look in the mirror and don’t recognize who’s copying whom.

This isn’t admiration.

This is a blueprint.

And lately, I can’t shake the feeling that someone’s following it.

Chapter 4

It wasn’t supposed to be a change in routine.

Class was canceled. No announcement. Just a printed note taped to the door:

Instructor illness – Session rescheduled.

I stood there for a moment, blinking at the paper like it had personally betrayed me. Then I turned around and walked home without thinking. No coffee stop. No bookstore shift yet. Just silence and cold and the sound of my boots on wet pavement.

My apartment was quiet when I opened the door. Still. Like it had been holding its breath.

I didn’t notice anything at first. The lights were off. My bag hit the counter. I kicked off my shoes. Normal. Boring. Routine.

But the air was warm.

Not just heated. Lived in.

I walked past my desk—and froze.

My mug was on the right side.

I’m left-handed. I always leave it on the left.

And it was still steaming.

I hadn’t made tea this morning. I hadn’t even been home.

I stood there, not moving, barely breathing. The apartment didn’t creak. Nothing shifted. No sound. But the warmth held me like a hand.

I walked over to my laptop. The screen was dark, but not asleep. When I tapped the spacebar, it blinked to life—already open to QuickTime. A video file sat in the corner of the desktop.

Untitled.mov

Last modified: 17 minutes ago.

I didn’t open it.

I didn’t leave it running.

But my stomach knew before my brain caught up.

I clicked it.

At first, it was nothing. Just my bedroom. My own bed. My window. Me—blurry and soft in the morning light, getting dressed, back turned to the camera.

And then I saw it.

In the corner of the frame. Near the door.

Stillness.

A figure. Barely there. Not moving. Not speaking. Not approaching. Just… watching.

The video ended.

I didn’t scream.

I didn’t cry.

I just reached up and pressed my fingers against my face, like I could mold myself back into something solid.

There was no broken lock. No signs of a break-in. Nothing missing.

Except maybe the space between who I was and what she had seen.

Chapter 5

I didn’t know where else to go.

I didn’t scream. Didn’t call anyone. Didn’t even lock the door again after I shut it.

I walked to the bathroom like I’d been told to. Like it was part of the script.

Shower. Steam. Shake. Repeat.

I turned the water as hot as it would go. Let it burn the skin on my shoulders. Let it fog the mirror and scald my throat.

I sank to the tile and pulled my knees to my chest.

It wasn’t dramatic.

It was quiet.

I let the water hit the top of my head until I couldn’t tell the difference between the heat and the tears and the parts of me that were unraveling so fast I couldn’t gather them anymore.

I kept seeing that corner of the video.

The silhouette.

The stillness.

I don’t know what’s worse—knowing someone was in my room

or knowing I didn’t feel it.

That she might have stood there watching me.

As if I belonged to her.

And then I heard it.

Not in the room. Not in the pipes.

In me.

That voice from the street, from weeks ago, from a night I tried to forget.

The woman with the tarot cards. The cracked mug. The single card.

“She’s already decided she’ll be better at your life than you are.”

I had laughed at her. I had walked away.

But now, huddled on the shower floor with my skin burning and my breath caught somewhere between a sob and a prayer, I couldn’t laugh.

Because I couldn’t tell if she was wrong.

I tried to remember what I’d said that morning. What I wore. If I’d hummed anything.

I couldn’t.

It’s like she’d already taken the memory before I could keep it.

The water ran cold before I realized I was shivering. My skin was blotchy, pruned at the knees and fingertips.

I stood, slowly. Everything ached.

The light above the mirror buzzed softly. My body didn’t feel like mine—it felt like something worn, something borrowed.

I reached for the towel and stopped.

It was folded differently.

Not the way I do it.

Not the way it’s ever been.

Corner in, edges tucked under. Clean. Neat. Intentional.

I stared at it like it was a loaded weapon.

Like touching it would confirm something I wasn’t ready to know.

I took it anyway. Dried off in silence. Got dressed in silence.

Sat on the edge of my bed with my hair still dripping down the back of my shirt.

Then I turned on every single light in the apartment.

Every room. Every lamp. Even the one in the closet.

I didn’t go back to the bathroom.

And I didn’t sleep.

Chapter 6

I went to class the next morning like nothing happened.

I wore a different coat. A different shade of lipstick. I braided my hair instead of leaving it down. I thought maybe if I broke the rhythm, she’d stop dancing to it.

But no one looked twice.

Not my professor. Not the girl who always borrows my notes.

Not even the barista at the café who calls me “Riri” on accident.

It was like the change never happened.

Or maybe it had, and I was just late to notice.

Hannah wasn’t in class. But someone had taken the seat next to mine—the one I usually leave empty. A girl I didn’t recognize, but who somehow felt familiar.

I thought about asking her name.

I didn’t.

At the bookstore, my key jammed in the lock. It never does that.

Inside, someone had restocked the poetry shelf in my exact system—alphabetical, but emotionally intuitive. I always shelve Plath next to Barnes. I never explained why.

The staff recs had been updated.

I looked for mine. It wasn’t there.

Someone had replaced it with a new card, clean handwriting, unfamiliar pen.

Different book. Different blurb. Different name.

I stood there for a long time.

Not angry. Not scared.

Just… uncertain.

When I got home, my apartment felt the same. But my reflection didn’t.

I walked to the mirror and stared at the girl looking back at me.

Same features. Same body. Same smudged mascara under tired eyes.

But something was off.

She looked more like me than I felt.

And somehow, I knew I wouldn’t be needed much longer.