Is it stranger danger

At 11:47 p.m., Mishti Sharma had three problems: an unfinished physics lecture, a biology textbook open to a chapter she had read four times without absorbing a single word, and a group chat full of people who seemed to have no ambitions beyond annoying one another until two in the morning. The first two were supposed to determine her future; the third was ruining it. Her phone vibrated beside her notebook, and she glanced at it with the guilty speed of someone checking whether a teacher had caught her cheating. Someone had sent a message. Someone else had replied with seven laughing emojis. A third person was arguing about a song nobody had asked them to identify. Mishti smiled, forgot about electric potential for the forty-seventh time that evening, and picked up her phone. She didn't know anyone in that chat well enough to miss them if they disappeared. That, at least, was what she believed.Arman was just another username in the group chat when Mishti first noticed him, which was almost insulting considering the amount of trouble he would eventually cause her without ever actually doing anything wrong. He wasn't the loudest person there, nor the funniest, at least not according to any official ranking Mishti had bothered to conduct. He simply appeared every now and then, dropped a comment that made someone laugh, and disappeared before anyone could drag him into another argument. The first time she replied to one of his messages, she hadn't even looked at his profile properly. She was busy eating something with one hand and trying to convince herself that watching a forty-minute physics lecture at double speed counted as studying with the other. Arman replied to her with two words. Mishti sent back three. Neither of them said anything particularly memorable, and the conversation ended almost as soon as it began. If someone had told her that she would one day recognise his absence faster than she recognised her own bad habits, she would have laughed in their face. Then she would have asked what they meant, because Mishti had always been curious about things she should probably have left alone. To be continued