Page 101 of She Haunts Me Still

But her phone remains silent.

She tries to quiet her anxiety by thinking of the night she spent with Saskia after leaving the theater. The pearlescentglow of her hair in the moonlight, fanned across her pillow like a star. The way Saskia coaxed Mallory onto her stomach against the mattress, fingers skillfully working her while trailing kisses up her spine. How it felt to taste Saskia in the dark, encouraged by her nails in her hair, the soft stream of praise that turned incoherent as she came.

Mostly, though, she remembers what it was like to fall asleep together after, limbs tangled, unafraid of whatever nightmares might find them.

When Mallory arrives for the cue-to-cue, she drops her bag in the greenroom and immediately searches for Ezra. But he’s not in the lighting booth or the storage vault, not in the Crypt or lurking in the wings.

He’s nowhere at all.

Hendrix announces that Ezra called out sick with a migraine, promising he’d return for dress rehearsal. Mallory exchanges a worried glance with Saskia.

“I don’t like this,” she whispers. “Something’s wrong. Let’s go to his room.”

It takes several attempts to convince her, but Saskia finally agrees. Yet when they arrive at Thorne Hall, Ezra’s room is dark, and he doesn’t answer the exterior door.

“Maybe he’ll be back tomorrow,” Saskia suggests.

He isn’t.

That night, when Mallory tries to fall asleep in Saskia’s bed, all she can think about is how time is slipping and slipping from her grasp like a fistful of dirt. The curtain will rise at the end of Hell Week, and there won’t be any floodlights. Just bloodshed and grief.

A glooming peace. An ancient grudge.

Violent delights and violent ends.

On the third day of Hell Week, Arden returns to campus like a decorated soldier home from war. Everyone treats her like a glass doll, and a swarm of students hover around her at all times. Hungry to learn how she kissed death and lived to describe how it tasted.

Mallory’s heard enough to know that the story has changed shape, that in every version, the contusions on Arden’s head are bigger, the break in her leg more severe. Most people say that Arden fell from the ladder, that the faulty wood crumbled beneath her weight.

She’s waiting for someone to ask whether she was pushed instead.

Mallory tries to apologize all day. She waits outside the brick building where Arden has physics at two o’clock, stakes out her advisor’s office shortly before four. But she doesn’t appear either time.

By evening, whatever anxiety Mallory felt surrounding Arden’s avoidance is replaced with resignation. Mallory sits in the dressing room alone and thinks about Arden’s bright laughter as they forged a pact that was meant to last a lifetime. TheirMW + AT, 1999winks in the wooden counter. Her ribs ache with regret.

Mallory blots her lipstick. Dusts her face with setting powder. She starts for the door—

And nearly collides with Arden as she hobbles inside on her crutches.

For a moment, neither of them says anything. Mallory’s practiced apology skitters away like a fat black fly, and all she can do is work out the two syllables of her name.

But Arden only stares.

Mallory waits for her to say something. To yell or swear, spit at her for the fucked-up things she’s done. She would take her punishment, would welcome Arden’s ire, because anything would be preferable to her silence.

But there are no words left. The wound to their friendship isn’t going to heal on its own after all. It’s turned into an abscess, one that needs to be drained dry.

“Arden,” Mallory whispers again. Her name sounds like beginnings, it sounds like endings.

Arden turns her back and walks away without a word.

By the final night of Hell Week, Mallory’s fever has returned.

She stands in the wings with Saskia, costume cinching her rib cage, and tries not to scratch at the bite marks beneath her choker. Tries not to notice the way they’ve been burning hotter every day, as though her flesh is angry at being so far away from the thing that branded it.

“We have to find Ezra,” Mallory whispers. “Opening night is tomorrow; the gala istomorrow. We’re sofucked.”

But Saskia doesn’t answer. Mallory tracks her gaze to the prop dagger lying on the table and sucks in a breath at the way her eyes suddenly look glassy and distant.