I tap the mic with one finger and listen for the tiny, satisfying thump in my headphones. The soundboard glows green beside my elbow, levels dancing in time with my breathing. The loft smells like old brick, cold brew, and the last cinnamon donut we split in half and forgot to finish. Somewhere below us, in the alley, a bottle clinks and a car door slams, city noise muffled by thick windows that rattle whenever a bus lumbers past.
“All right,” I say, leaning closer so my lips brush the pop filter, “three, two—”
I point at Jazz across the table. She flashes both thumbs up, curls springing loose from her bun, and hits record. The red light comes on.
“Hey, friends,” I say, sliding into my on-mic voice, warmer and a little more theatrical than my regular one. “Welcome back to another episode of Second Take, the podcast where we lovingly rewatch the shows that raised us and then overthink them so you don’t have to.”
Jazz laughs into her mic, a low cackle that tickles my ears. “Speak for yourself,” she says. “I personally believe everyone has a moral obligation to overthink.”
“Correct,” I say. “Overthinking is community care.”
I swirl the chipped mug in my hand, coffee lukewarm and bitter on my tongue, and glance at the show notes on my laptop. Nora’s name blinks up at me from bullet points I wrote last night when I should have been sleeping.
“Today,” I say, “we’re going back to where one of the biggest current TV stories actually started. No, not Second Chances—we’ll get there. We’re talking River’s Edge High season one, episode four, ‘The Mill Party.’ AKA the episode that taught an entire generation that trespassing into abandoned industrial sites is romantic.”
Jazz groans. “You know there’s at least one listener who met their spouse in a condemned textile mill,” she says. “They’re going to write in.”
“If you met your spouse in a condemned textile mill,” I say, pointing at the mic like it’s a camera, “first of all, congratulations. Second, please don’t sue us if your lungs are full of asbestos.”
The chat window on my second monitor pings as our Patreon supporters toss live messages into the feed, little hearts and typing indicators popping up. I keep my eyes on the waveform and keep talking.
“So here’s the thing,” I say. “Watching this with 2020s eyes, knowing who Nora Hayes becomes, is… wild. Because in this episode, she’s not America’s sweetheart yet. She’s this angry, sharp little knife of a girl in a green hoodie, stomping around a foggy Pennsylvania river town where the mill looms over everything like a rusted skeleton.”
I can still see it in my mind: grainy night shots, breath clouding in the air, the mill’s broken windows cutting the sky into jagged pieces. The show did not have the budget for weather control, so the fog is real. The cold is real. You can hear it in the way voices crack.
“You watch her in that episode,” I say, “and you watch her now, delivering carefully worded apologies on late-night couches, talking about healing and boundaries and green juice, and you go… wow, that PR team deserves a raise.”
Jazz snorts. “You’re shading my girl.”
“I’m shading the system,” I say. “Nora’s allowed to grow. We all are. But River’s Edge gives us this weird little time capsule of who she was when the cameras were less polished and the NDAs were… probably still terrifying, actually.”
A supporter’s message pops up on the screen: “Remember that background girl at the mill? The one in the beanie?” My stomach gives a quick, tiny drop. I’d planned to get there in segment two. Our listeners, as usual, are half a step ahead.
“Okay, speaking of terrifying,” I say, riding the moment, “let’s talk about the mill party itself. Quick recap: the gang breaks into the abandoned riverside textile mill to drink cheap beer, make out, and give OSHA a collective heart attack. The camera keeps lingering on these metal stair rails, wet and gross, and you know someone is going to eat it on those stairs by the end of the scene.”
I hear the faint scratch of Jazz adjusting her headphones, the soft click of her keyboard as she drops a timestamp note for later. My foot bounces under the table.
“And in the background,” I continue, “there’s this girl. Not one of the main four. Dark beanie, denim jacket, leaning on the railing like she owns it. She’s in three shots, no lines, just… there.”
I pull up the still on my laptop, the one someone posted earlier. I don’t angle it toward the mic; I don’t need to. I’ve already memorized it.
“She shows up again,” I say, “in episode five, in the hallway at school, and in episode six, at the diner. She hangs on the edges of scenes like a shadow. And then, at some point, she… stops hanging. She vanishes. No exit storyline, no transfer speech, not even the classic ‘did you hear she moved to Florida.’ She just gets edited right out of their world.”
Jazz leans into her mic. “So, your theory?” she asks. “Did she get eaten by the river? Did the writers forget she existed? Did she turn into the diner’s bottomless coffee and spend the rest of eternity being poured into chipped mugs?”
I laugh, but my fingers tighten around the warm ceramic. “We love a metaphysical coffee girl,” I say. “But no. Today’s question for the hive mind is: who is the girl at the mill, and why did she disappear?”
I let the words hang for a beat, hearing my own breath in my ears.
“We’re not doing a takedown,” I add, deliberately. “Nora, if your publicist doom-scrolls this later, hi. We come in peace. But our listeners are the kinds of people who can identify a background extra from a three-second shot in a foggy stairwell. So we’re going to ask you all to help us trace this character’s arc. Did she have a name? Did she have lines in early drafts? Was there a storyline that got cut? You know where to find us.”
Jazz chimes in on cue. “Drop your theories in the Discord, in our DMs, in the comments, on the bathroom wall of your favorite diner—actually, scratch that last one.”
“Our lawyer would like you to scratch that last one,” I say. “Okay, let’s get into the actual plot beats, because the part where they light a candle in an abandoned mill continues to be a hate crime against fire codes.”
I pivot us back into the recap, guiding the conversation through character choices and tropes. On autopilot, my body relaxes. I gesture, I laugh, I let Jazz drag me into a tangent about denim skirts and emotional repression. Still, a piece of my brain stays looped around the beanie girl at the railing, around the way the camera framed her for a breath longer than necessary, acknowledging and then erasing her.
We stop recording an hour later. Jazz hits the button, and the red light clicks off. The loft exhales with us. Without the white hiss of our own voices in my headphones, I hear the air conditioner’s constant drone and the faint buzz of the neon sign from the bar across the street.
I peel the headphones off and hook them over my mic stand. My ears feel hot. “That felt… good?” I say.
Jazz stretches her arms over her head until her spine pops. “You were on fire,” she says. “In a non-mill-burning-down way.”
I smile, then flip the laptop around to check the recording bars. File saved, levels clean. A small rush of relief warms my chest.
“You circled that background girl a lot,” Jazz adds, casual on the surface. “You got a thing?”
I shrug, but my fingers tap the trackpad faster than usual. “I got a tiny thing,” I say. “It’s probably nothing. Our listeners love tiny things.”
“Our listeners turned that one extra from Star Harbor High into a micro-celeb in forty-eight hours,” she reminds me. “I’m just saying, if you want them to leave this girl alone, you did the exact wrong thing.”
“I don’t want them to leave her alone,” I say, sharper than I intend.
Jazz’s eyebrows lift.
I roll my shoulders and soften my voice. “Look, last time I talked about a ‘forgotten’ supporting actress, we got three DMs in an hour from people who had worked with her, plus a ten-minute voice memo with her own comments. You know that. Our whole thing is, pay attention to who disappears.”
Jazz studies me for a second, then nods. “Okay,” she says. “Then pay attention. I’m going to grab another coffee before I tackle the edit. You want?”
“I’m still pretending this one is drinkable,” I say, lifting my mug. The surface has gone cold, a thin film forming at the edge. “Go before the downstairs line hits post-work apocalypse.”
She grabs her keys and heads for the door, humming the River’s Edge theme under her breath. The heavy studio door thuds shut behind her, sealing me into a smaller pocket of silence. Just me, the hum of electronics, and the faint yeasty smell drifting up from the bakery on the corner.
I drag the laptop closer and open a new browser tab.
The legit streaming platform page for River’s Edge High pops up first, glossy and sanitized. Season one thumbnail: Nora at sixteen, green hoodie, chin lifted, the mill blurred behind her in moody blue-gray tones. A banner ad for Second Chances slides across the top, her present-day face older, smoother, lit by warm LA sun instead of Pennsylvania fog.
Glass in glass, I think. Past Nora behind one layer of screen, present Nora behind another.
I skip past the official interface and pull up the clunkier site with old bootleg uploads. Someone ripped the original DVDs years ago, watermarks and all. The video window opens on a pixelated school hallway; I scrub forward by instinct, fingers moving without conscious thought.
“There you are,” I whisper when I hit the mill party scene.
I drag the playhead back and forth, scrubbing through teenagers stepping over broken glass, dull party lights flashing against rusted machinery. The sound crunches in my cheap laptop speakers, tinny guitars and laughter smearing into one another. I pause and step through frame by frame.
Beanie girl leans on the staircase railing, shadowed eyes following the main group. Next frame, she shifts her weight, fingers curling around the metal. I swear I can feel the cold of it on my own skin, that specific bite of damp steel I remember from winters in my own East Coast town. The kind of cold that goes straight through gloves and into bone.
I capture a screenshot and drag it onto my desktop, tiny and grainy beside a dozen other research stills. My files look like a conspiracy already: cast lists, episode guides, DVD menu photos. This new image slots into place too neatly.
I hop to episode five. Hallway scene. Nora at her locker, slamming a book shut. Over her shoulder, beanie girl again, walking past, eyes cutting sideways toward the camera. No lines. No caption.
Episode six, the diner. Beanie girl sits in a booth behind the main cast, stirring coffee in a chipped mug, steam curling up past her face. The props department went hard on the “bottomless coffee” thing; I can practically smell the burnt drip through the screen, layered over bacon grease and fryer oil. The show made that diner look cozy. I know better now. Bottomless coffee means bottomless stories that no one wrote down.
Episode seven’s bootleg throws a 404 error.
I frown and refresh. Same error.
I close the tab and return to the official streamer, heart beating a little faster now. The episode list scrolls cleanly until I hit the gap.
Episode 1. Episode 2. Episode 3. Episode 4: “The Mill Party.” Episode 5. Episode 6. Then: a gray, unclickable box.
“Episode unavailable due to rights issues.”
I stare at the phrase. It shows up a lot these days—music, old reality shows, random movies. The price of licensing shifts, and content evaporates. Usually nobody misses it for long. But this show is a nostalgia engine; people notice when you break the machine.
I scroll down. Another gray box where episode eight should be. Then nine. Three in a row.
“Okay,” I murmur, throat dry. “That’s new.”
I reach for my phone and pull up an old fan-made episode guide from years back. The page loads with old-school fonts and rainbow hyperlinks, built long before social media made fandom a corporate product. Episode seven: “Fallout.” Episode eight: “Detention.” Episode nine: “The Pact.”
My finger taps the screen in time with the words. Fallout. Detention. The Pact.
I go back to the bootleg site and try those titles manually. “Fallout” and “Detention” give me grainy, low-res files, incomplete. “The Pact” redirects to an error page tagged with a date from last year.
I sit back in my chair, the wood pressing into my shoulder blades. The loft feels smaller. The AC’s hum grows needle-fine.
The episodes that center the mill, the fallout, the consequences… those are the ones the official streamer pulled? The ones where beanie girl moves from the edges toward the story, if the episode guide is right?
My Discord ping goes off, a little chirp. A listener has posted in the live chat channel: “Omg Quinn talking about the mill ep, this show made me obsessed with abandoned factories. Also who IS that girl? She’s everywhere and nowhere.”
Another message stacks under it. “My uncle worked on River’s Edge lol, I’ll ask him if there was a cut character.”
That takes exactly ten minutes. Our audience, right on schedule.
I watch the typing indicator flash, disappear, flash again. My hands hover over the keyboard. If I toss out a casual, “hey, anyone got production gossip about missing episodes,” I know what happens. The hive mind activates. People start trawling convention footage, scanning DVD commentaries, DMing former crew. We build a bonus episode around whatever they surface. We get good numbers. We maybe scare a few PR people.
And maybe, this time, we drag something into the light that someone buried on purpose.
I think about the way Nora’s face looks in the new Second Chances trailer, soft and earnest. I think about the interview last month where she talked about “needing privacy to heal” while the chyron under her name read REINVENTION ICON.
I also think about being twenty, reporting a professor for groping a student at a campus party, and hearing the dean say, “Are you sure you want to make this bigger than it needs to be?”
I click open a new document and type “Working Title: The Missing Girl.”
The blinking cursor waits under the words. Outside the window, the far-off shine of the city turns the glass into a dark mirror, my face faint overlaid with blocks of text. Part transparency, part reflection.
I don’t hit save yet.
Instead, I go back to the streamer and read the gray disclaimer one more time: “Episode unavailable due to rights issues.” The language is bland, gently gaslighting. Nothing to see here. Just business.
My cursor hovers over the “publish” button on our episode scheduled for tomorrow. I can still cut the section where I ask who the girl is. I can leave her where the show left her—present, then gone, no questions asked.
Another Discord ping pops up. “Screen cap of the girl at the mill. Anyone recognize her?”
Three typing indicators bloom at once.
I take a breath, my throat tight and my fingers buzzing, and decide I want to know what happens when a lot of very online people start asking why a girl disappeared from a staircase in a foggy Pennsylvania mill—and why the episodes that held her have been quietly edited out of the official story.