He didn’t.

  At least, not that I could tell.

  “Alright, class.” He waved his hands as he came over. He was broad in the shoulders with a strong jaw, and thinning dark hair. His black eyes glittered with mirth as he held up the key to the classroom. It was always the same routine. “Look who’s finally arrived! Your favorite teacher!”

  “Good morning, Mr. Carp,” chorused most of the gathered students. A few of them looked like they were barely recovered from their weekends and stayed silent; I was among those ranks.

  Mr. Carp unlocked the door and swung it open with a whistle. The students milled inside. I hung back again, so I didn’t have to fight against elbows and shoulders, then crossed the room to my usual seat by the window.

  I started setting up, bag down and then my computer out. I hooked up the tablet and got that set up too. I glanced up. The seat next to me was still totally empty.

  Where was Trevor?

  My heart skipped a beat as I glanced around the classroom. He usually sat next to me for illustration class.

  Mr. Carp hummed, looking over the chairs. “Does anyone know where Trevor went?”

  One of the girls held up her hand.

  “Go ahead, Dee Dee,” said Mr. Carp, nodding at her.

  Dee Dee had cropped black hair with fuzzy rabbit clips pinning it back away from her face. “He texted me this morning. His mom’s car had a flat, so he’s running late.”

  Relief swept through me.

  Of course he’s just running late. That was a dream. You didn’t actually kill anyone. The tension slid out of my shoulders. No one is dead. He’s not really a doll in your closet. That would be nuttier than peanut butter!

  Mr. Carp nodded. “Alright, that’s no problem. I’ll send him today’s instructions later. Class, we’ve been working on things for a while now, and I want you all to start taking your original concepts and pulling them together into a solid story.”

  “Like, a plot?” Dee Dee asked without raising her hand.

  “Not just plot, but connective tissue. You’ve got some solid pictures. It’s time to put them into an order, building a timeline. This timeline should allow you plenty of room to add more into the story later on,” explained Mr. Carp. “Alright, let’s think about this a different way.”

  He clapped his hands together. “Think about a picture book! These are full stories that don’t have words, have a limited amount of pages, and are still perfectly easy to understand. The best way to do that is by focusing on the connective tissues in your story. You have characters, but how can you create the fluid motion from one scene to the next? How can you explain the story fully without actually adding dialogue?”

  “How do we do that?” asked a student with frosted red tips—Carlos.

  Mr. Carp pushed his lips out “You begin by making a timeline. What structure are you working on? All art has the same basics. When a sculptor starts a new body of work, they don’t go straight to the clay. They start by using wire to make a base. So, we’re going to take the work that we’ve already done, and it’s going to become the base. Then, we’re going to start adding body to the work. Base. Body. Details. That’s the order of operations with art.”

  Alright, that was fine. I knew what the timeline was, so that actually didn’t take me any time at all.

  First, it was Alice. Then it was May. Then Mr. Tart, and Mrs. Harringbone. And last was Trevor.

  I pushed the pictures into the right images, with the little shots of the house in between. I did a few quick drafts of other rooms in the house over the weekend, places that had been there in my dreams, and I added those into the right order of things too.

  There was one of the attic, with its creepy mannequins. I wanted it to look extra surreal, so I gave some of the mannequins detailed faces, and I draped others in gauzy black fabric that had been eaten up by moths. And there was the crooked staircase too.

  It had seemed almost endless in my dreams, but I made it just three floors tall for the house in my story. It zig-zagged through open flooring, and the walls were—well, it had just been faded fruit wallpaper in my dream, but I lined them with rough oil portraits of the different dolls that were in my grandparents house.

  There was the weird one with the too-big eyes from the study. There was the one dressed up like a cowboy that sat on Gramps’ side of his room, and there was the angel that sat on Grandma’s side. One doll looked like my dad. Another one, like she was the goddess of storms herself.

  I kept them rough, the details vague and blurred, because I thought that it looked creepier. Also, it would be easier to draw it more than once, if I didn’t have to worry quite so much about getting all of the details spot on.

  Then I glanced at the clock.

  I still had time. A strange sensation drifted down my spine as I stared at the pictures of the victims. I was the one that had done this. Killed them. Stabbed. Strangled. Drowned. I had murdered them.

  And it had been fun.

  It had been so much fun that I could almost taste it.

  But now that I was sitting here in the classroom again, a part of me wondered whether this was the right path to take or not. Molly, the ballerina doll and my cohort through the dream world—she had told me that it was only the first chapter.

  Did that mean… It was crazy to think that I would ever go back there, right? Totally crazy. Buck wild, even! But a part of me couldn’t help but wonder if I should try and make my story a little bit nicer. I added a new character to the role, an old woman.

  Not Grandma.

  Just… An old woman. She wore a daisy dress and carried a purse shaped like a teapot. Her hair was brown. Her eyes were big and made even bigger by her wire-rimmed glasses. She moved into the house, and I decided that Ghost Girl—who was modeled after my own face, who I had become during my dream—would take a liking to her.

  She would remind Ghost Girl of her aunt.

  A picture of said aunt was added to Ghost Girl’s room; she looked like my mother. I scratched it out. I made her look more like me, but an adult. Long, curly hair, still dyed Violet Magenta because I was pretty sure that I would always have my hair dyed this color, and with the same big, illustrated eyes as Ghost Girl. She wore a Victorian-style high-necked bright-yellow dress in the picture, which curled outward beneath the chin like flower petals.

  There.

  Aunt… Lulu?

  It would work for now.

  I made a few thumbnail sketches, and added in some notes about the general progression of the story. If I was going to pull this off, then I was going to have to make a more distinct plot than just ‘she kills people, the end.’

  As it got closer to the end of class, Mr. Carp started to go from desk to desk, the same way he always did.

  He stopped at Dee Dee’s. “Very nice, Dee Dee. You know, you’re the only one making a story about zombies. I think that makes it special.”

  “I like the rot,” said Dee Dee with a devious mini-grin.

  Mr. Carp just nodded and kept going. He stopped by my desk. “Alright, Quinn. Let’s see what your spook is up to.”

  I angled my laptop toward him, and waited with baited breath as he looked it over.

  “I like the direction… But you’re supposed to be making a villain here. I think that it’s getting a bit too cozy,” said Mr. Carp. “The aunt, she can stay if you want. But you don’t want to lose the core of your idea.”

  He picked up my pen, pressed it to the tablet, and started to draw more stars on the arms of my Ghost Girl. Why did the faculty keep drawing on my art? The original idea had been this: for each person that Ghost Girl killed, a new star would appear. She wasn’t evil. She was lonely. The spirits of those she killed would get trapped in dolls, and then she would be able to have company again.

  “Isn’t that too many?” I asked, my voice trembling with nerves.

  Mr. Carp shook his head and licked his lips. “She is a villain after all! She is supposed to be dark.”

  “I guess,” I told him, but I wasn’t totally sold on the idea. “But I like her having this lady around.”

  “Sure, that’s fine, but… What if she’s now killing anyone that she thinks might take the old lady away from her?” Mr. Carp offered. “Delivery people. Doctors that come for house calls. The little boy who came by to rake the yard! Your ghost is lonely, so it would be a two-for-one victory. The old lady stays hers, and she gets more company in the house.”

  My front teeth caught on my lower lip. I wanted to protest that it was my story and if I wanted to make it lighter and nicer, I should have been able to do that… But the fact was, that’s just not how school worked.

  If the teacher said that something had to be done a certain day, you had to listen. It was irritating. It was more than irritating. It was infuriating.

  I almost told him off. I was going to, even—but he dropped the pen and moved on to the next student instead. My gaze settled hard on the computer screen, looking at the stars that had been added into the thumbnail images.

  My mouth watered. How many ways could you kill someone before it was boring? How many times could you kill in a dream before it made you a murderer in reality?

  I forced myself to give a long, slow exhale. Reaching out, I jotted down one more note for myself, for the next day.

  Make a circus.

  If Harry did exist—and even thinking that made me feel all kinds of crazy, honestly—but if he did, I had a promise to keep.

  I could appease the teacher at the same time and kill the popcorn vendor or something. Whatever, forever. Right?

  There was one last chance at making the story go the direction I wanted it to go in, anyway. If I could just get the mentor, Mr. Tart, to agree with me when I spoke with him tomorrow then Mr. Carp would have no choice but to let me change it.

  Fingers crossed that he didn’t remember me killing him!

  Push Harder

  Tuesday’s meeting with Mr. Tart couldn’t come quickly enough. I didn’t even mind that it meant I had to skip Illustration class. In fact, considering the fact that Trevor was in there today, I was glad for it!

  Every student had a biweekly meeting with Mr. Tart. It was kind of like meeting with an advisor in college. At least, that’s what the school billed it as. He looked over our main projects, and helped answer any questions the teachers might not have had time to do. His office was on the second floor of the school.

  It was one of the only reasons I ever had to come up here. Most of the physical art classes were on the first floor; the second floor was host to performance-art classes, like the ones all the theater kids attended.

  By the time I made it up the stairs, my mouth was watering again. I had to swallow a few times to make the feeling of puking go away. The last time I had seen Mr. Tart, he was a mindless wind-up doll in my dream, who paced up and down the hallway and through rooms in a pattern on repeat.

  Molly and I used fishing line to choke the life out of him. Literally.

  And then he’d appeared on the shelf with all of the others, in my room. The key was missing from his back. I had taken it in my dream, and it was just… Gone now. I had checked in the closet and my pockets. But there was no key.

  There was just Mr. Tart, the windup doll.

  Now I was going to have to look him straight in the face and ask him for help with a school project.

  Great.

  There was the door to his class. I took a moment to steal myself, then turned the handle and let myself in.

  The room was brightly lit and covered in posters. They had all clearly been made by various students over the years, each one sporting a different positive, uplifting message and each one in a different unique illustration style. One of them read: YOU CAN’T HATE YOURSELF INTO A BETTER ARTIST. Another on:, DON’T STOP UNTIL THE PAGE IS FULL.

  “Quinn!” Mr. Tart said enthusiastically. He wore the same pink-and-white-striped shirt that he always seemed to be sporting, with the same neon green tie and the same pair of black slacks.

  How could an outfit that bright have become boring?

  Bright. Boring. Old. Pattern appeared again. What a surprise.

  Mr. Tart sat on the far side of the big desk and grinned at me, showing off his smile lines and crow's feet. His curly red hair bushed out around his cheeks. There were no cobwebs in it. I had to remind myself that this Mr. Tart was human.

  He was also just about the most cheerful person I’d ever met.

  At least, in real life.

  I felt a little guilty for allowing myself to get so mad at him before.

  “Hey, Mr. Tart,” I said, suddenly sheepish around him. I took a seat in the chair on the other side of his desk, trying not to duck my head too much. Licking at my front teeth, I pulled the laptop out of my bag and started setting it up.

  Reluctantly, I added the tablet, too. I was kind of leery about it. The teachers—they kept reaching over and adding stuff to my picture. That’s what made Mr. Tart a victim the first time around. I held onto the pen myself, so he couldn’t snatch it up and take it.

  “How have you been, Quinn? I feel like it’s been ages since I got to sit down and talk with you. Let’s see here, you have the—you have the ghost, don’t you?” He flipped through papers that were spread out all over his desk.

  I caught the names of some of the students, their class numbers, a few notes.

  Bethany, read one of them, needs to improve on consistency.

  Swallowing hard, I found myself wondering what his notes said about me.

  “Yeah, that’s me. The ghost. This one.” I pulled up the main picture of Ghost Girl and turned it toward him, letting him catch a glimpse of her. She was pretty. Well, she was me, so maybe it was vain of me to think that?

  Ghost Girl, as I had been calling her, was the villainous version of myself that I had pulled together for my big class project. It was a semester-long event, where we had to illustrate a world and a story where we happened to be the villains. And because we were the villains, well, there you had it.

  My girl was a ghost.

  She looked like me, though her pinkish-purple curls were a little longer and her eyes were a lot bigger, to try and give her that illustrative look that I’ve always loved. Her dress was old, and it was tattered. The collar folded out over her shoulders, longer than most collars, and the hem was full of rips and tears.

  I had added a few more of them in at my own decision; I wanted her to look tired.

  I felt tired.

  A whole weekend had passed by, and the dream hadn’t faded. It was still right there in the forefront of my mind, clinging to everything I did. And there were those stars now, too, all over the sides of her arms.

  A whole slew of people that Ghost Girl was supposed to kill. According to Molly, that meant that I would need to kill them too. In…the next moon cycle? I frowned.

  “What’s wrong?” Mr. Tart asked, sounding genuine in his concern. “You look seriously unhappy right now, Quinn. That’s not the sort of look we want to see on our students.” When I didn’t respond right away, he went on. “Alright, why don’t you tell me what the problem is, and maybe we can brainstorm it out! Remember, two heads are always better than one!”

  Gesturing at the stars all over Ghost Girl’s arms, I complained, “Mr. Carp added these.”

  “Did he?” Mr. Tart leaned forward, giving an owlish blink. “Well, I think they look pretty good. You know, I would just redraw them when you touch the pictures up later, so they all match the style you’ve been using.”

  “That’s not the point.” It was impossible to keep the note of frustration from curling through my words. “I didn’t want her to have more stars. I was—she was going to meet this little old lady who reminded her of someone that she knew, and they were going to be friends!”

  “That’s fine,” said Mr. Tart with a bobble of his head. “It is. I think that every main star should have a buddy, and it gives a nice added layer to your little ghost that might not have been there otherwise. You know, even a silent character needs to have somebody to play off of!”

  “Right.” I got the distinct feeling that he didn’t see the vision I was going for, which really did rub me the wrong way. It didn’t surprise me though.

  People never understood my art. It had been like that since I was little. The only exception had been my dad. He could look at anything that I made and just instantly knew what I had been going for, what I had been trying to get across through the pictures.

  But the rest of the world? Yeah, not so much. I was too weird. Too out there. Too much, or too little, or too far to the left when I should have been right, or too far down when I should have been up. Too much dark. Too much light. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

  Swallowing hard, I shifted in my seat and frowned, then reached up and tucked the hair behind my ear.

  I had killed Mr. Tart.

  I had wrapped fishing wire around his throat, and killed him.

  And I had enjoyed it.

  But I don’t like it right now, sitting in front of him, with his real human eyes staring at me and this big, bright smile on his face. Mr. Tart was a sweet guy, and he had tons of energy. Some of the kids liked to joke around that maybe he did a little something on the side to get all of that energy—but I thought it must have been natural for him.

  It had even been there in my dream, where he had served as a sort of real life wind-up doll that went up the halls and back down them. And now, he was sitting on the shelf across from my bed, looking much the same.

  Missing his key.

  I swallowed hard. “Mr. Tart, I don’t want her to be too evil. I know that she’s a villain, but she’s the main character, too. The antihero, right? So shouldn’t people have a reason to, you know, like her? Root for her? I mean, they want her to make it all the way through the to the end of the story.

  “You have to push yourself, Quinn.” He blinked again. “Don’t play it safe. Artists can’t afford to be safe; they have to take risks!”