There was a slight sheen of sweat on his forehead. He might have been out of breath, or drunk, but whatever was going on with him, he was trying to hide it. He swallowed hard before speaking.

  “Hey,” he said, then continued, fast and breathless, “Can I ask: When does tonight’s show end?”

  “It’s um . . .” Jerri took a beat before answering, trying to remember not only tonight’s schedule, but her own name and the English language.

  If the upperclassmen of KHS were larger-than-life soap opera stars that Jerri liked to keep tabs on from afar, then Hunter Duvall, a year older and much rarer to spot around town, was even more intimidating.

  Jerri found her voice in one of the only ways she knew how: talking movies.

  “The program’s not even half over. We started late. There was an issue with the trailer reel. Which is good news for you, because there’s still a whole movie left. The Conjuring. The first one. The one with Annabelle in it.”

  “Okay.” Hunter seemed to chew on this information. “Okay. Great.”

  “The box office is closed, but I can sell you a ticket inside, if you’ll follow me.”

  “No. That’s okay. I have to drive back to . . .” Then he changed his mind.

  Whatever was going on with him, he was having trouble keeping eye contact with Jerri. She wished he’d look away long enough to give her a reason to look down at her hands. “Actually, would it be all right if I came in? Just for a second. I want to check if my friends . . . if my friends are in there. Whether they got here first.”

  Friends? Not that she was in a position to judge, but did Hunter Duvall have friends? Jerri could name most of the people in the auditorium right now, and she thought it was highly unlikely that any of them were Hunter’s friends. The regulars at the Eureka tended to be older. The town cinephiles. One or two town drunks.

  “Come on. It’ll just be a minute. I’m not trying to sneak in for free. I promise. Please, Jerri.”

  “Jerri.” Jerri said her own name. How did he—

  “Your name tag.”

  She didn’t know why, but that pissed her off. She’d gotten this way since Dorothy’s death. Quicker to anger. Ms. Slade had given her a pamphlet about it, but the pamphlet hadn’t helped.

  Jerri thought about the seventeen tickets they’d sold tonight, of poor Ms. Reyes who cared so much about this town, and about how much money this guy and his family were siphoning away from the business. How the theater hadn’t had a decent teen crowd since the haunt opened.

  Bastard. She stood up straighter.

  “A ticket’s eleven fifty. And you have to buy a ticket; otherwise I can’t let you in.”

  “Eleven dollars!”

  “Eleven fifty. Special price for a double feature.”

  “That I missed half of!”

  “So you’re poking your head in to check for your friends or you’re staying to watch the movie? I’m confused,” Jerri said, a finger under her chin.

  “I can’t believe this,” Hunter said, reaching behind his jacket. The movement alarmed her for a second, until she realized he was reaching for his wallet.

  “Do you take credit cards?” he asked.

  Jerri smiled and held the door wide open for him, ushering him toward the concession stand. “Everything but American Express.”

  Hunter stood impatiently while she looked through the register’s ancient operating system for the “double” SKU. Then she took his card and, before swiping, asked: “Will that be all? M&M’s or Sour Patch Kids? A Diet Coke, maybe?”

  He stared forward. Eyes blank. Not amused.

  She tore his receipt at one corner as his stub and handed back his card, and he continued into the auditorium without another word.

  A minute later, the sweat on his brow more pronounced, breathing heavier, he left the theater and pushed out into the night.

  Well. He really had been looking for his friends, she guessed. And hadn’t found them.

  With Hunter gone and no new customers coming anytime soon, Jerri stood by the far corner of the concession stand and peered through the auditorium door’s tinted diamond window. Standing in that position, her back to the lobby, she watched the final reel of The Haunting.

  She was proud of herself. She’d gotten an additional eleven fifty in the till, but it felt like more than that.

  So even with muffled sound and an obstructed view, Jerri Shaw allowed herself to be absorbed by the movie.

  She was so rapt, she never once turned to look at the lobby behind her.

  Even as Frendo the Clown crossed through.

  Nine

  The room’s door shook in its frame.

  Little stood between them and the party that was currently raging.

  According to Dev, this whole thing had started as a quiet pregame session in someone’s room. But somehow, as people got into their costumes and group chats were consulted, it had become a case of Why not just party here? and the room party had grown to a floor party with everyone in the building invited, and soon seasonal novelty songs were being exchanged for some pounding Meek Mill.

  Bags of Halloween candy bought and shoplifted from the CVS two blocks down Broad. Rooms cleaned out and the school-issue furniture pulled into the hall to give kids a place to sit. Some kind of Be smart and keep it in your rooms agreement had been reached with the RAs on duty, so drinking had to be done discreetly—“11B has Beam, 19A has lager”—shots were lined up in shower stalls, and bottles overflowed ice-filled sinks.

  Even though Rust, Cole, and Quinn had arrived at an early stage of the party, they still had to push their way through a lot to reach Quinn’s room at the end of the hallway.

  A lot of hands for Cole to fist-bump and slaps on the back for Rust to flinch against.

  A lot of “Hey, Clown Girl! What’s up?” for Quinn to sneer at.

  Quinn sat on the radiator, listening to the noise outside her room.

  Cole and Rust sat on her bed. Both looking like they regretted every bit of driving out here to visit with her.

  “When we first got here, that guy had said”—Rust looked over to Dev, who was sitting cross-legged on her own bed—“he said, ‘They’re here.’ Are we some kind of guests of honor?”

  “Yeah, I mean no no no, you’re not. Sorry about that,” Dev said. “We didn’t even know if you’d be back in time. Quinn said she was taking you out to see the city. So we weren’t expecting you. At all. Honest. But people know that Quinn lives here and—”

  “And you had to let them know what I told you last night. That my friends were coming into town for the weekend.”

  Dev frowned at Quinn, a sorry look about to become a cascade of verbal “sorry”s.

  “No need to apologize,” Quinn said, not wanting to hear it.

  While the girls in the hallway had opted for sexy costumes, topical costumes, or a mix of both, Dev was wearing an off-the-rack honeybee costume that could have been for children. She wore the bulky fabric thorax over black leggings and a black turtleneck. Dev had accessorized the form-concealing yellow-and-black polyester with springy sparkled antennae and painted freckles of pollen across her cheeks.

  It was a costume so lame it became endearing, and Quinn was finding it impossible to stay pissed at the girl. And she was trying to stay pissed. Even if the party had been spontaneous, Dev could have at least texted Quinn a warning to let her know what they were walking into.

  They sat for a moment. Not in silence, because the music was too loud for silence, but at least without talking.

  Cole looked at his phone. Rust closed his eyes and let his head rest against the wall, raising it after a second, probably because the vibration of the music was too strong, was rattling his skull.

  Dev was twitching her lips and scrunching her eyebrows—her I’m sorry face.

  Under Quinn, the radiator was beginning to warm. She tried to focus on the heat and not Dev’s stare.

  “You are my guests, though,” Quinn finally said. “So what do you want to do?”

  “What are the choices?” Rust asked, keeping his eyes closed as he spoke. Implying that his choice was trying to sleep through this, shutting out the world.

  Something slammed against the door. They all cringed at the sound. Except Cole, who was typing on his phone, unfazed.

  Out in the hall, a burst of laughter, and someone else called someone a dick. Quinn couldn’t know for sure, but she guessed a Nerf football or something similar had been whipped against the closed door. A mistake that wasn’t a mistake, some mischievous drunk guy trying to get “Clown Girl” and her friends’ attention. To get “the Three” to come out from where they were hiding and party with them.

  “Choices are we stay in here,” Quinn started, “or we try to leave.”

  “Leave to go where?” Rust asked.

  “There are plenty of places, I guess. Maybe a restaurant? Get another Lyft and go bowling or something?”

  “Yeah, I’d rather not,” Rust said.

  “There’s also option three,” Cole said, putting his phone back into his pocket.

  “He speaks.”

  “Yeah, my sidepiece isn’t texting back.”

  Rust opened his eyes at that, blinked.

  Quinn was lost, because Cole’s delivery barely sounded like a joke. Did he have a sidepiece?

  “Sure, zing, good one. What’s your option three?” Rust asked.

  Cole spread his hands out like it was obvious. The reverb wasn’t as bad now. The Meek song was over, and it was time for the playlist to switch to another holiday song. A bluegrass version of “Dragula” with a few boys on the floor singing along. Quinn wondered if this was a Spotify playlist or if some Halloween enthusiast out there was DJ-ing.

  “We could go out there, have a drink, and loosen the fuck up,” Cole said, a challenge in his voice.

  “Are you serious?” Rust asked.

  “He’s serious,” Quinn answered for Cole.

  “It’s a college party,” Cole said, a pleading in his voice, looking around at all of them, even Dev, who wasn’t involved in this decision-making process, as far as Quinn was concerned.

  “Yeah, when you say it like that, I don’t know what I have a problem with. When have we ever had a bad time at a party?” Rust’s scars seemed extra prominent in the dorm room’s lighting.

  “Come on, don’t be that way,” Cole said.

  Quinn could almost see Cole’s reasoning. There weren’t many safer places they could be. Downstairs, Joe, the security guard in his seventies, wasn’t exactly intimidating, but he was a deterrent. Nobody was going to be walking into the dorm off the street. At least not easily. It was as safe a place as they were going to find.

  “This seems like it’s probably a private conversation,” Dev said, inching her butt to the edge of her bed, her bee antennae bouncing as she uncrossed her legs. “So maybe I’ll just go out there and—”

  “Don’t open that door,” Quinn said. The radiator had reached full blast now. It was becoming uncomfortable to sit on.

  Quinn stood up, which caused Dev to move back onto her bed, shrinking.

  “It’s a costume party,” Rust said. “I would go. But I don’t want to feel . . . out of place.”

  “Look. I get it.” Cole clicked his tongue. “You two can live your lives like this if you want. But it’s been a year. Over a year. If something was going to happen—say like if my dad was going to return and try to kill me again—don’t you think he’d have done it already? Like on the one-year anniversary or whatever?”

  Quinn didn’t know how to react to his question. For all of Cole’s joking and self-deprecation, they never talked about Arthur Hill. Or the fact that his body was never recovered and that the internet was chock-full of rumors he was still alive.

  Also, they’d all three let the anniversary pass mostly without comment. They hadn’t even discussed it. When nothing had happened, even though Quinn had been in Philly for the day itself, it had seemed disturbingly anticlimactic. Like they really were done. Like she’d memorized chokeholds and ammunition caliber charts for nothing.

  Rust sat up, then laid a hand over Cole’s shoulder. He was quickly shaken off.

  “No. I mean . . .” Cole started again. “Yes. We’re going to get looks. Yes, people are going to be weird. But my god, guys, I can’t tell you how badly I want to have a beer somewhere other than sitting on my couch.”

  Cole reached for the doorknob.

  “Or sitting on the toilet,” Rust said. He was smiling now.

  “Or while I’m crying in the shower,” Cole added. Also smiling.

  “Come on,” Rust said. “You know if you go out there that I’m going with you.”

  “Yeah. Me and my shadow. But I just don’t want to feel guilty about it.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “You’ll tell me when you’ve had enough?”

  Rust nodded.

  “By using your words? Not just by being a quiet bitch?”

  Rust nodded again, but looked pissed about it.

  “Good.”

  They both looked back to Quinn.

  Okay.

  They were doing this.

  They were going to a college party.

  “Um,” Dev said, her voice small. Rust and Cole turned to the girl, surprised. Quinn understood; half the time, she forgot Dev was there, too. “I know he was probably joking about the costumes thing, but I . . .”

  Dev reached under her bed and pulled out a long plastic crate, a container that only fit because she’d put her bedposts on two sets of risers. Dev lifted the lid on the crate to show Rust and Cole all the construction paper, glitter, and markers she kept in her arts and crafts set.

  “Ha. Now we’re talking,” Cole said.

  “I chose a bee not just because I thought it’d be a cute animal costume, but because I really like bees. I think they’re important and I respect them. They do a lot for the environment. If we didn’t have bees, the planet would, like, completely fall apart,” Dev said, handing out pairs of small child-safe scissors like a kindergarten teacher. “Now, before you start cutting, think: What kind of animal do you, more than like, which animal do you think is important?”

  Cole used the scissors and gray construction paper to trim tufts of hair and two curved horns. A goat. The GOAT, he insisted.

  Quinn, least enthusiastic among them, cut two triangles for ears and glued on a black pom-pom for a nose. “I’m a fox,” she said. And when Dev asked why she didn’t use red paper or at least her orange markers, Quinn specified: “I’m an Arctic fox.”

  Rust used his green construction paper to shape a beak and poked two small nostril holes.

  “A, uh, parrot?” Dev asked.

  “A turtle.”

  “’Cause he’s slow and wise,” Cole explained, urging them to hurry up and staple on their elastic so he could get out the door and start his drinking.

  “No,” Rust corrected: “Because turtles are tougher than shit.”

  Ruston Vance had worried the mask would be claustrophobic.

  He worried that he would get too hot in it, that the paper would soak up his sweat.

  But now, after twenty minutes—or had it been more like an hour?—Rust was learning to love the mask.

  Rust stood in the doorway to Quinn’s dorm room, the empty suite at his back so he could retreat into its privacy, if he wanted to, and watched the party.

  The masks were kind of stupid. Everyone in this hallway knew who was behind them. But there was something comforting in having a barrier, even a paper-thin barrier, between the commotion in the hallway and himself. Peering through his turtle eyeholes, Rust felt less like a participant, more like an observer.

  People were being cool, leaving him alone, letting him just stand and take in the sights.

  Rust watched as a vape was passed between girls discreetly, the gem on it glowing pot green instead of fire red. He watched as a couple exchanged phones, dialed in their numbers bashfully while stealing glances and giggling. He watched a guy stumble out into the hallway, then fall onto his friend and kiss a wet burp in his ear.

  It was nice, watching all these things.

  And then, when he was feeling about as comfortable as he’d felt all year, through his construction paper mask Ruston Vance could see down the hallway as the elevator doors slid open and Frendo the Clown stepped out into the hallway.

  Quinn heard the gasps and the yells. But they didn’t worry her. They sounded like any number of party yelps. She expected the noise would be followed by laughter, and somewhere a girl would be swatting playfully at someone’s shoulder.

  But when no laughter followed these sounds, Quinn felt her skin go cold underneath her paper mask.

  She turned just in time to watch the elevator doors close—a large man in a Frendo mask dressed in black tactical gear now in the hall with them.

  “Bad taste, my guy!” someone yelled.

  “Fuck off with that costume!” the girl next to Quinn shouted, then put her hands in the air and gave him an enthusiastic double thumbs-down.

  The man was huge, a head taller than the nearest students that shifted uneasily out of his way. The Frendo mask scanned the party. He was looking for someone. This wasn’t the Frendo that Quinn remembered from Tillerson’s B-field. His black tactical fatigues had endless pockets and pouches, and the short-sleeved Under Armour top he wore under his vest and bandoliers revealed tanned, muscular arms and two sleeves of tattoos that stopped at his wrists.

  “Hey!” Quinn could hear Rust yelling from behind her, not wanting to use her name. “Hey. Form up!”

  They’d drilled for situations like this, using phrases like that. But, clearly, they hadn’t anticipated this exact scenario. A long hallway with dozens of other bodies between her and Rust. It was not ideal.

  Rust might have been being overly cautious, though. It was uncertain whether there was any real threat. The Frendo mask might have been someone’s idea of a joke.

  And the party seemed to be taking care of the situation itself.

  Quinn readjusted her mask, peered into the room across the hall, and squinted at the dimness. Cole was somewhere in there, drinking in the bathroom. Hopefully he’d hear the change in party sounds, get the hint that something more serious was going on, and come out.