Six Girls, Only Five Pairs of Legs
The photo started as a harmless snapshot—one taken on a slow winter afternoon in the student lounge of Westborough College. Six friends squeezed onto a long, lumpy sofa with the brick wall behind them and a scattering of backpacks at their feet. They were laughing, mid-joke, when one of them, Tessa, lifted her phone and said, “Hold it—this is too good not to capture.”
The shutter clicked. No one thought anything of it.
Not until later.
The girls—Tessa, Lily, Hannah, Marisol, Keira, and June—were study partners, roommates, teammates. They were used to taking silly photos together: bad hair days, coffee-fueled all-nighters, and the occasional holiday picture that one of their mothers insisted on posting online. That afternoon’s picture should have been just as forgettable.
Except it wasn’t.
That evening, after study group ended, Tessa tossed the photo onto the group chat with a casual caption: “Cute, right? Also someone tell me why it looks like we’re missing a leg???”
At first, the others assumed she was joking. But as each girl zoomed in on the image, a strange hush fell over their phones.
There were six girls…
But only five visible pairs of legs.
“How is that even possible?” Hannah typed. “Everyone was sitting on the same couch. Where did the legs go?”
Marisol, the team’s unofficial rational thinker, replied: “Probably one of us is angled weirdly. Perspective or whatever.”
But the more they looked, the stranger the photo became.
Each pair of legs was easy to identify—Lily’s ripped jeans, June’s dark leggings, Hannah’s plaid skirt over tights, Marisol’s athletic joggers, and Keira’s bright orange sweatpants. That left Tessa, whose floral-print dress should have revealed her bare legs.
But there were none.
Her entire lower half blended into the background as if someone had erased it.
“You Photoshopped it,” Keira wrote.
“I absolutely did NOT,” Tessa responded. “Why would I even know how?”
There were jokes at first. Ghosts. Shadows. Maybe the couch had swallowed her. Maybe she was secretly levitating. But curiosity—and a little unease—pushed them to meet back in the lounge to recreate the photo.
They sat exactly as before: Tessa in the middle, the others leaning inward, squished together. The couch’s cushions sagged predictably. June cracked a joke that the couch was more committed to their degree than they were. They laughed. The room felt perfectly normal.
Tessa lifted her phone again. “Okay, ready?”
Click.
They all gathered around her.
Once again, only five pairs of legs appeared.
And once again, Tessa’s were gone.
The laughter instantly died.
“What is going on?” Lily whispered.
There was an instinctive pull to superstition—college students were no strangers to ghost stories—but Marisol refused to let the mood spiral. “There has to be an explanation,” she said firmly. “Optical illusion. Lighting. Angle. Something.”
But even she sounded unsure.
Keira crouched down and literally touched Tessa’s shin. “She’s got legs,” she announced, which would’ve been funny if everyone wasn’t so tense.
“Okay,” June said, “maybe it’s the couch.”
They moved to the floor and tried again.
Five pairs of legs.
They moved to standing.
Five pairs.
They took a goofy one in the hallway, with Tessa leaning on a vending machine.
Still five.
“Why me?” Tessa whispered, half-joking, half-serious. “Am I cursed?”
“You’re not cursed,” Marisol said, though her voice lacked its usual conviction.
Hannah was the first to step back from superstition and propose a logical step: “Let’s try with different phones.”
They did.
Still five.
It was as if every device, regardless of angle, brightness, or resolution, refused to acknowledge Tessa’s legs.
Like they simply… weren’t there.
By now the group wasn’t laughing or theorizing. They were quiet, thinking, each girl circling the same unspoken question:
Is something wrong with the picture… or with Tessa?
To break the tension, Lily forced a smile. “Listen,” she said, “this could go viral. You know the internet loves weird optical illusions. We could post it and see what people think.”
“No.” Tessa shook her head immediately. “I don’t want strangers analyzing my body like some mystery puzzle.”
“Fair,” June said. “Then we solve it ourselves.”
So that night, the six girls became amateur detectives. They experimented: different rooms, different lighting, different clothing. They tried flash, no flash, standing, sitting, squatting, jumping.
Always five pairs of legs.
Eventually, frustrated and unsettled, they collapsed into the couch again—the same couch from the first photo. The lounge was mostly empty now, reduced to humming vending machines and the faint smell of microwaved noodles. They sat quietly, the earlier excitement replaced by something heavier.
After a long silence, Hannah spoke in a soft voice: “Tess… how long has this been happening?”
Tessa frowned. “How long has what been happening?”
“You said you didn’t notice until today. But have you ever looked at other pictures—like old ones?”
Tessa hesitated.
She had taken thousands of photos over the past year. Sunny park days, team lunches, mirror selfies… but she couldn’t recall ever focusing on her legs before. Why would she?
“Let’s check,” she murmured.
They huddled around her phone as she scrolled through her gallery. Dozens of photos passed by. Birthday parties. Coffee dates. Selfies. But now, with new eyes, they noticed something they had never paid attention to before:
In almost every full-body image of Tessa, her legs were obscured. Cut off by framing. Hidden behind objects. Blocked by shadows. Cropped out unintentionally.
Not a single clear shot of her legs existed from the entire semester.
A ripple of unease moved through the group.
“This is freaky,” June whispered. “Like… some universe glitch.”
“It’s not a glitch,” Marisol said, but she sounded like she was trying to convince herself. “It’s coincidence. A pattern we’re only noticing now.”
But even she scrolled slower, more carefully.
Finally, she found one photo where Tessa’s legs should have been clearly visible—an outdoor picture where they stood in a circle at the campus fountain.
The sunlight was bright. The shadows clear.
Everyone’s legs were visible.
Except Tessa’s, which were swallowed in an unnatural patch of shade.
A shade that didn’t match the direction of the sun.
A shade that didn’t appear anywhere else.
Tessa closed the photo abruptly.
“Okay,” she said. “I don’t want to look anymore.”
The others looked at her, seeing the unease she tried to hide.
Then Keira, the usually loud, impulsive one, reached over and squeezed her hand. “Hey. Whatever it is—optical illusion, camera glitch, universe being weird—we’ve got you. Six of us, five pairs of legs, whatever. You’re not alone.”
The others nodded.
And gradually, the tension faded.
Because in that moment, the number of legs didn’t matter.
The connection did.
And if the universe insisted on miscounting them, so be it.
Because the girls weren’t going anywhere.
Together, they were whole—whether the camera believed it or not.
