The Wrong House
Harper Reed woke up on her sixteenth birthday fully prepared to beg her parents for a free pass from school. Instead, she got a Twilight Zone reboot.
Her room looked… wrong. Not messy-wrong (that was normal). Wrong in a way she couldn’t quite pin down. The paint on the walls wasn’t the pale lavender she’d picked out last summer. It was a dull beige, like an old photograph left in the sun too long. Her desk was missing the dent she’d carved into the wood when she dropped her laptop last year. Even the posters were gone, replaced with faded prints she didn’t remember ever owning.
She sat up, her heart thumping. “Uh… Mom? Dad?”
Silence answered.
Her first thought was that they’d left early for a dig. Her second was that she’d slept through some bizarre home renovation. But when she padded into the hallway, everything had that same washed-out, not-quite-right look. Like someone had tried to recreate her house from memory—and gotten all the details almost but not quite right.
The air smelled stale, dustier than it should.
“Happy birthday to me,” Harper muttered. “Guess I got the gift of living in a sepia filter.”
Downstairs, her parents’ stuff was exactly where it should be. Her mom’s purse hung by the door. Her dad’s jacket was on the hook. Car keys sat tossed in the ceramic bowl on the counter. All there. But her parents? Nowhere.
Harper grabbed her phone—dead black screen. She swore it had been charging all night.
Her pulse climbed.
“Okay,” she said to herself, rubbing her temples. “Either this is the world’s worst prank, or I’ve officially lost my mind. Ten bucks says Morgan put you up to this, Mom.”
But even as she tried to joke, she knew Morgan Hale wasn’t behind this. Her best friend’s idea of a prank was color-coding Harper’s homework folders.
The kitchen clock ticked too loudly. Somewhere in the house, a door creaked—though she knew every door had been shut.
Harper froze, holding her breath. For the first time in her life, she wanted nothing more than for Morgan Hale to burst through the front door with one of her color-coded “emergency binders.”
But the door stayed shut. The silence pressed in.
And Harper knew—this was no prank.
She set her phone on the counter like it might behave if she gave it space. Then she opened the fridge. Cold air spilled out along with the smell of… nothing. No leftover curry. No dill pickles. No half-open container of strawberries she’d been pretending weren’t growing fuzz. Just milk, eggs, butter. Everything lined up like the inside of a brochure—no impulse buys, no sticky rings, no Post-it with “cake tonight :)” in her mom’s handwriting.
Her stomach twisted. “Mom?”
No answer.
She shut the fridge and caught her reflection in the dark oven door. Hair a mess. Birthday hoodie hanging off one shoulder. Eyes wide. She made a face at herself and then promptly looked away. The house did not deserve her mirror time right now.
Harper crossed the living room. The couch was in the wrong place by, like, six inches. Who even noticed six inches? Apparently, her. The throw blanket wasn’t their blue one with the frayed corner she always stole. It was a scratchy brown thing that belonged in a dentist’s waiting room.
On the far wall, the family photo collage was gone. In its place hung three framed prints of wildflowers labeled in cursive. Her mom hated cursive labels. “If a picture needs a caption,” Erika Reed always said, “it’s a bad picture.”
“Cool,” Harper whispered to the empty room. “So either I’m hallucinating, or the house hired a boring interior designer.”
She turned toward the hallway that led to her parents’ office and hesitated. The door at the end had always been closed unless someone was inside. Today it stood ajar, a slender wedge of shadow cutting across the hall floor.
Harper’s palms prickled. “Nope,” she told the shadow. “We’re not doing horror tropes before breakfast.” She headed for the front door instead. Yanked it open. Stepped onto the porch.
Outside, everything looked painfully ordinary.
The maple tree waved its branches in the breeze. Mrs. Keegan was already watering her flowerbeds across the street. A delivery truck rumbled past, the driver tossing her a casual wave.
Normal. Normal. Normal.
Which meant it was just the house.
Just her house.
Harper shut the door behind her, pressing her back to the wood like it could hold her up. “Okay,” she whispered. “It’s not the world. It’s just me. Fantastic. So much better.”
The house felt even emptier when she closed the door behind her. The clock ticked. Dust motes wandered. Somewhere, wood sighed like an old man getting out of a chair.
“Mom?” she tried again, softer. “Dad?”
She was going to have to check the upstairs. Fine. Great. Love that journey for me.
At the base of the stairs, she paused to press her fingers against the doorframe. There were faint pencil marks there, half-erased—their growth chart. She squinted. The highest mark she could make out said “Harper—6,” written in her dad’s blocky letters. The year scribbled next to it prickled along her spine.
“Coincidence,” she said to nobody. “Or my brain being dramatic. Which, rude.”
The stairs creaked under her weight in a pattern she didn’t recognize. At the top, the hallway smelled like cedar and dust. Her parents’ bedroom door stood open. The bed was made, hospital-corner neat. Too neat. Her mother’s scarf lay across the footboard, the green one with little gold flecks. When Harper picked it up and pressed it to her face, it smelled like sandalwood and a hint of lemon shampoo.
Her eyes stung. She put the scarf down carefully, like it might shatter.
On the dresser sat a stack of mail tied with twine. No bills. No glossy catalogs. Just a neat pile of envelopes with soft, rounded corners. On top, a birthday card. White, with a little cupcake on the front. No glitter.
Her name was on it in her mother’s handwriting.
