During a school trip to Scotland, we stayed at a small beachside hotel. While most of the group went to a party, my girlfriend, another couple, and I took a quiet walk in a park and returned early. The next morning, at breakfast, we realized one of the students, Mark, was missing.
Everyone was worried, with some girls even crying. After an hour, they found Mark in an old fishing shed down the beach, asleep, cold, and soaking wet. That should’ve been the end of it.
He got lost, wandered too far, fell asleep in a shed, right? But the story Mark told later didn’t make sense. And the truth we uncovered changed how I looked at people—especially the ones we think we know.
Mark wasn’t my friend. He was one of those in-between guys—quiet, sometimes funny, always kind of on the sidelines. He didn’t have a tight friend group, but no one hated him either.
I think most people liked him without ever really knowing him. On that trip, though, something felt off. After they found him, teachers swarmed.
Someone wrapped him in a towel. He was shivering so hard he couldn’t speak at first. Then he said something like, “I just needed air, I walked too far… lost track of time.” And everyone sort of nodded and backed off.
Except Niko. Niko was the other guy in the couple that walked back early with us. He wasn’t exactly a detective type, but something about Mark’s story bugged him.
“Who just ends up soaking wet in a locked fishing shed?” he whispered to me later. “That tide was high last night. He could’ve drowned.”
My girlfriend, Asha, brushed it off.
“He’s weird. Maybe he likes sleeping in weird places.”
But Niko didn’t drop it. And honestly, I couldn’t stop thinking about it either.
That afternoon, when the teachers were distracted planning the next day’s trip, Niko pulled me aside and said, “Come with me. Just for ten minutes.”
We snuck back to the fishing shed. The door was padlocked now.
Someone had clearly closed it after Mark was found. But Niko led me around the side, to a crack in the wood. “Look,” he said.
Inside, there were two soaked backpacks—neither of them Mark’s. One of them was zipped open and had a bottle of vodka, some wet clothes, and a pack of cigarettes. The other had a hoodie I recognized.
It belonged to Perry. Perry was one of the loud kids. Popular, always at the center of the crowd.
He was at the party the night before, bragging about some game he won money on. But the hoodie—no doubt it was his. It had a stitched patch from our school trip to Berlin the year before.
“What’s his stuff doing here?” I asked. “I think Mark didn’t end up here alone,” Niko said. Back at the hotel, things went quiet.
Mark was fine, apparently. No signs of injury, no broken phone, nothing to report. The teachers told everyone not to ask him too many questions—“He’s had a scare,” they said.
But that night, when we gathered around a firepit on the beach, someone brought up the shed. Juno, one of the girls who went to the party, said something that made my heart skip. “We saw Perry running toward the water last night.
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