ONE
Aside from the monsters, the murderous cult, and the looming threat of an ancient, unspeakable evil rising up to destroy all that was good in the world, and then the world itself, Ashcroft High School was a perfectly normal American high school.
The original building was built sometime in the early 20th Century to serve the small but growing population of Ashcroft, Massachusetts. Children entered the Ashcroft Public School as kindergarteners and left as high school graduates, migrating to different classrooms as they aged but always attending classes in the same building. As the village grew into a proper town, the school was expanded in haphazard fashion to accommodate the rapidly exploding student body. Eventually, Ashcroft opened separate elementary and middle schools for the younger students and let the teenagers take over the original facility, redubbed Ashcroft High School.
As a result of generations of under-planned, somewhat slapdash expansion, Ashcroft High ended up with a somewhat labyrinthine layout that regularly confounded new teachers and students alike, but they eventually got used to it. In the approximate center of this awkward piece of architecture was a lovely enclosed courtyard where students congregated and socialized in-between and after classes, and in the approximate center of that sat a monument the students referred to as the Tomb of the Unknown Teacher — a simple granite block the size and shape of a large dining room table, engraved with decorative edging that time and the elements have worn down to a blur. Its original purpose remained a mystery to this day, but students regularly used it for a picnic table or as a backdrop for their senior photos.
Many students, past and present, also claimed to have sacrificed their innocence atop the monument, but that was always a lie.
In addition to the usual academics, the school offered a varied and robust selection of extracurricular activities: twenty-one different athletic teams, none of them exceptional; a cheerleading squad and color guard, which were exceptional and had the trophies to prove it; a school band that performed three times a year on stage and marched in the town’s annual holiday parade (against their will; it was always freezing and the uniforms were butt-ugly); a glee club; a choral ensemble, which was basically a pretentious glee club; a drama club that produced a fall drama and a spring musical; a number of small clubs for the artistically inclined (drawing and painting, photography, sculpture, etc.); an LGBTQ Alliance; a debate club; a chess club; a school newspaper; and a student council that was never able to affect any major programmatic or policy changes in the school, but they did organize several well-attended school dances each year, so it wasn’t completely useless.
Incoming seniors spent their first day of the new school year in a morning-long orientation session, at which they received their homeroom assignments, locker assignments, class schedules, information about afterschool extracurriculars, and whatever else they needed to hit the ground running the following day, the first full day of school for all grades.
Among the student body as a whole, attitudes and emotions ran the gamut from excited to resigned to despondent. Among the seniors, however, spirits tended to run high because this was the first day of their last year as captives of the public school system. The light at the end of that tunnel was their whole lives lying ahead of them.
Of course, in order to reach that light, they first had to survive the darkness.
***
Vanna Helmond was what one might call an All-American Girl. That is to say, she was demographically unremarkable, but she was very pretty, which drew people to her, and highly personable, which kept them around. Her attitude going into senior year was also typical; this was her last first day of high school ever, and every new day got her one step closer to graduation and freedom.
Her mother, also named Vanna, told her not to be in such a rush to leave. High school, she said, was supposed to be the best four years of her life and she should enjoy every second of it. Vanna thought if that was true, that meant it was all downhill from there, and she refused to believe she was going to peak at seventeen going on eighteen.
She wondered if her mom, a successful estate planning attorney, considered her high school career the best years of her life, but couldn’t bring herself to ask for fear the answer would depress the hell out of her.
Those were the kind of conversations they had — or, sometimes, avoided — on the ride to school. The elder Vanna was a workaholic who was reliably the first person to arrive at the office in the morning and the last to leave, and she wore this as a badge of honor (which, in the younger Vanna’s mind, lent credence to the idea her mother’s life post-high school really wasn’t all that awesome). Because her schedule coincided with the start of school, she insisted on driving her daughter there. Vanna (younger) resisted this at first on the grounds there was a perfectly good school bus available that would accomplish the same goal, and without adding to the unnecessary train of crawling traffic clogging the roads and spewing exhaust. But Vanna (elder) like they “us time” it provided, so they compromised: Vanna (elder) drove Vanna (younger) to school but dropped her off at the big intersection nearby so she could walk the rest of the way.
“Will you be coming home right after school?” Vanna the elder asked.
“No, we have a squad meeting,” Vanna the younger said. “Will you be coming home right after work?”
It was a rhetorical question, but her mother answered anyway. “We’ll see. Things have been piling up again.”
“As they are wont to do.” That was her mother’s number one excuse for working late.
“We’ve gotten a lot of new clients lately. People are very interested in planning for their future.”
“Or lack thereof,” Vanna the younger said dryly.
“What? Oh. Right. Because they’re dead. Got it. Estate planning humor.”
“I know how to play to my audience. This is my stop.”
The red light was with them, so Vanna the younger hopped out of Vanna the elder’s SUV with a hasty goodbye and took the final stretch on foot.
The sign outside Ashcroft High School was an old-fashioned wooden deal, seated in a brick planter kind of thing and illuminated at night by an overhead streetlight. Several graduating classes had attempted to make a class gift of a more modern replacement, to no avail. Last year’s class wanted to buy a digital mini-billboard loaded with bells and whistles. The class officers really pushed the energy-efficient LED screen, which could be programmed to display seasonally appropriate images and share important message via a scrolling chyron at the bottom, but the school committee unceremoniously shot it down as “not in keeping with the historic character of the building and grounds.”
Old people clinging tenaciously to old stuff out of habit. No way to run a society, Vanna thought as she passed the sign, which had received a new paint job over the summer and was bright, shiny, and colorful. The only thing that ever changed was the school mascot, the local cryptid known as the Moon-Glider, depicted on the sign as an off-brand pterodactyl with puppy-dog eyes and a big, friendly smile. Its color scheme generally stuck to the school colors, crimson and white with black accents, but the exact shades depended on whoever did the periodic touchups. This year’s iteration, Vanna would have described it as blood red. Maybe fire engine red in better light, but it was a little overcast today.
(Whether the cartoon Moon-Glider in any way resembled the actual creature was a mystery for the ages. Descriptions of the Moon-Glider varied among those who claimed to have caught a glimpse of its silhouette soaring through the night sky.)
School buses crawled down the long main driveway toward the loop in front of the school, where they’d disgorge their passengers and head back out to pick up the middle schoolers. They were another sign of the school committee’s pointless nostalgia: two years ago, a company approached the committee pitching their new propane-fueled vehicles as replacements for the current fleet of diesel-guzzling, toxic emission-spewing models, and were turned away. The committee argued that the buses they had worked just fine despite their age, creeping up on fifteen years of service, and the very notion of propane buses, they reacted to that as if they’d been told they were fueled by fairy dust and children’s laughter.
(Vanna knew all this through her friend Kim, whose mother sat on the school committee at the time and was the proposal’s sole supporter. She was ousted last year by a newcomer who, ironically, promised to bring fresh new ideas to the group.)
A thin stream of students flowed in from the main parking lot — seniors who, by dint of their senior status, earned the right to drive themselves to school. They merged with the heavier current of students getting off the buses, then moved as a cluster toward the open main entrances. Vanna joined the parade, trading hellos with other students, and made her way inside.
Almost. She was stopped just outside the front doors by Principal Blandell and the new assistant principal, introduced to the seniors yesterday simply as Ms. Levy. If one were to ask Vanna to describe a typical high school principal, she’d describe Mr. Blandell, at least in the broad strokes: white, male, middle-aged, slightly paunchy, more than slightly balding. If one were to ask her to describe an assistant principal, she wouldn’t describe Ms. Levy, who, in her lavender blazer, looked like she should be selling perfume in an upscale department store.
“Good morning, Vanna,” Blandell said warmly.
“Mr. Blandell, good morning,” Vanna said.
“Hold up a minute, would you? I’d like to formally introduce you to my new right-hand man — er, woman, excuse me — Tonya Levy. Tonya, this is one of Ashcroft’s star students, Vanna Helmond.”
“Vanna?” Levy said. Vanna braced for The Question. “As in Vanna White?”
“As in,” Vanna confirmed. Thankfully, Levy didn’t press for details, which Vanna would have preferred not to provide.
(The details are this: Molly Harkness was a rabid Wheel of Fortune fan who named her first child Vanna Patricia, after Vanna White and Pat Sajak; and she in turn passed her inherited love for the game show and its hosts onto her own daughter, whose full legal name was Vanna Patricia Helmond Jr. Vanna Jr. vowed that sad legacy would end with her and there would be no Vanna Patricia III. She hated Wheel of Fortune.)
“And what makes you a star student?” Levy asked as if addressing a child half Vanna’s age. Vanna reeled in an flash of disdain; for all she knew, Levy previously worked with grade-schoolers and had yet to adjust to working with near adults.
“That is a question you’d have to ask Mr. Blandell,” Vanna said. “I’d never be so presumptuous as to bequeath myself with such an honorific.”
Blandell, chuckling, said to Levy, “Well, as you can see, she’s both modest and well-spoken, but she’s also a star student, on her way to class salutatorian at the very least, and she’s co-captain of our award-winning cheerleading squad.”
Levy’s eyebrows leapt. “My! Quite accomplished.”
Vanna did a tiny curtsey. “And those accomplishments won’t accomplish themselves, so if you’ll excuse me…”
“I won’t hold you up any longer. Have a good day, Vanna,” Blandell said.
“I always do.”
She rejoined the flow, which had thinned out as the clock inched closer to the next bell — yet another holdover from a bygone time. It was loud, obnoxious, and as subtle as the claxon on a World War II submarine preparing to submerge. The student council, once again stepping up as best as it could, recommended updating it with something less startling on an annual basis, but the excuse from the school committee was always, “That would cost money we don’t have to spend.”
There were, however, a few benefits to this weird, pointless resistance to progress, one of which could be found in what was known as The Block — sometimes The Main Block, sometimes The Central Block, occasionally as The Cell Block, but mostly just The Block. Once upon a time it was the entirety of the school, but now it was primarily offices for administrators and support staff. It also hosted another senior perk: the lockers here were of the classic variety, full-length and deep enough to stash a body in. Seniors got to claim those, while underclasses had to deal with the newer lockers in the newer sections. Those too were technically big enough to stash a body in, if the body in question was on the small side and you really smushed it in.
Vanna took a minute to admire her spacious new digs, then dropped her backpack inside. It looked lonely there all by itself, but that would change. Fall would come soonish, and then winter, and she’d be able to hang her favorite long coat in there without it pooling on the floor like it did in the underclass lockers. The top shelf had plenty of room for the many, many books she’d amass today, with a little room to spare for a few personal belongings. In a big city like Boston, she mused, a locker like this would be marketed as a studio apartment and go for four figures a month, utilities not included.
Her attention was drawn away by the arrival of a young man who looked like a perfect blend of comic book icons Archie Andrews and Big Moose: tall, broad, beefy, red hair that was more orange than red, a smattering of pale freckles coloring his cheeks. He consulted a piece of paper in a hand like a catcher’s mitt, his brow furrowed in concentration, then the little number plate on the locker next to Vanna’s. His eyes jumped back and forth between the note and the locker several times, more than was reasonable, then he nodded to himself.
“Oh. Hi,” he said, just now noticing Vanna. “Looks like we’re neighbors,” he observed, a distinct Southern accent flavoring his voice, strong but not overly twangy.
“Looks like,” she said, offering a hand. “I’m Vanna.”
“Like Vanna White?”
“Like.”
“I’m Mackenzie. Folks call me Mac,” he said, his hand swallowing Vanna’s. “Nice to meet you.”
“Am I wrong in assuming you’re new to Massachusetts?”
Mac’s face lit up. “I am. How’d you know?”
“The accent’s a bit of a giveaway.”
“Oh. Yeah. Duh.” He bapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Yeah, our folks moved us up here over the summer. Work stuff.”
“Us?”
“Me and my twin sister. She’s around here somewhere.”
Vanna tried, and mostly succeeded, to not give Mac a once-over. “I’m sure she stands out as much as you do.”
The school provided students with combination locks so administrators could access the lockers whenever they wanted to — another entry on the student council’s list of things they wanted to change, another request the school committee refused to consider. Mac’s lock looked comically tiny in his hand as he twirled the dial, checked his note, twirled, checked, twirled, checked…it took him four tries to get the lock to pop open.
“Hot dog!” He stuffed the note in his back pocket, threw his backpack into the locker, sealed it up, muttered, “Aw, dang,” opened his locker back up (after three tries with the combo lock), and retrieved from his backpack a crumpled printout with his class schedule. “Be kinda lost without this.”
“Trust me, you’ll be lost with it,” Vanna said. “The school’s rather labyrinthine.”
“And a big maze too, from what I hear.” He looked around, decided on a direction, perhaps arbitrarily, and said before heading out, “Nice to meet you.”
Vanna hated to see him leave but she loved to watch him go.
She shut her locker door and jumped at the pale, raccoon-eyed face glaring at her in disapproval. “May I help you?”
“What was that?” asked the girl, whose overall aesthetic could be best described as shaggy, from her short black hair down to her jeans with the shredded knees. Only her black biker jacket was in good shape. She took scrupulous care of that.
“That was me being friendly to a new student.”
“You were flirting with him.”
“I was not,” Vanna gently insisted. “Much. Hardly at all.”
“He sounded kinda dumb.”
“He did not come across as the sharpest knife in the drawer, no, but he seemed nice, and I’ll take dumb but nice over a smart jerk any day.”
“Fair.”
“You okay, pumpkin? You sound grumbly.”
Kim leaned against the neighboring locker. “Didn’t sleep well.”
“Don’t tell me you’re pining for Alison again.”
“I am not pining for Alison again. I broke up with her two months ago. She’s old news. Out of sight, out of mind,” Kim said, passing a hand through the air as if erasing the name Alison Ayer from the whiteboard of the universe. “No, some cat was hanging out in our back yard. I don’t know if was a stray or a neighbor cat or what, but Springfoot did not like it. All he did was growl and hiss all night.”
“And you’d never be so cruel as to expel your beloved Springfoot from your room.”
“I’m not a monster. I got up around two to try to catch it, but it took off. I was too awake at that point so I just sat up reading.”
“My poor sleepy Kimmy,” Vanna said with a sympathetic pout, “but be of good cheer, sweetpea, we only have to get through today and tomorrow, then we have the long Labor Day weekend.”
“Whoever thought starting school at the end of August was a terrible person and I hope he burns in Hell.”
“One hundred percent.” The girls flinched as the final warning bell sounded in all its rude glory. “There are many things about high school I won’t miss, and that bell is at the top of the list.”
“Seconded.” Kim took a deep breath. “I can do this.”
“You can do this.” Vanna raised a defiant fist. “Fortify.”
Kim returned the gesture. “Fortified.”
ONE
Aside from the monsters, the murderous cult, and the looming threat of an ancient, unspeakable evil rising up to destroy all that was good in the world, Ashcroft High School was a perfectly normal American high school.
The original building was built sometime in the early 20th Century to serve the small but growing population of Ashcroft, Massachusetts. Children entered the Ashcroft Public School as kindergarteners and left as high school graduates, migrating to different classrooms as they aged but always attending classes in the same building. As the village grew into a proper town, the school expanded in haphazard fashion to accommodate the exploding student body.1 Eventually, Ashcroft opened separate elementary and middle schools for the younger students and let the teenagers take over the original facility, renamed Ashcroft High School.
Generations of under-planned, somewhat slapdash expansion resulted in a labyrinthine layout that regularly confounded new teachers and students alike, but they eventually got used to it. In the approximate center of this piece of awkward architecture sat a lovely enclosed courtyard where staff and students congregated and socialized, and in the approximate center of that sat a structure some unknown wit dubbed the Tomb of the Unknown Teacher: a wide, shallow fountain bowl Rodan could have bathed in, surrounding a fat granite obelisk engraved with decorative swoops and swirls that time and the elements had worn down to a blur. Students speculated it was intended as the base of a fountain that was never finished for cost reasons, which is also why it was never removed. It was a popular backdrop for senior photos, and many students, past and present, claimed to have sacrificed their innocence in the shadow of the Tomb.2
That was always a lie.
In addition to the usual academics, the school offered a varied and robust selection of extracurricular activities: twenty-one different athletic teams, few of them exceptional; a cheerleading squad and color guard, which were both exceptional and had the trophies to prove it; a school band that performed three times a year on stage and marched in the town’s annual holiday parade (against their will; it was always freezing and the uniforms were butt-ugly); a glee club; a choral ensemble, which was basically a pretentious glee club; a theater club that produced a fall drama and a spring musical; a number of small clubs for the artistically inclined (drawing and painting, photography, sculpture, etc.); an LGBTQ Alliance; a debate club; a chess club; a school newspaper; and a student council that was never able to affect any major programmatic or policy changes in the school, but they did organize several well-attended school dances each year, so it wasn’t completely useless.
Incoming seniors spent their first day of the new school year in a morning-long orientation session, at which they received their homeroom assignments, locker assignments, class schedules, information about afterschool extracurriculars, and whatever else they needed to hit the ground running the following day, the first full day of school for all grades.
Among the student body as a whole, attitudes and emotions ran the gamut from excited to resigned to despondent. Among the seniors, however, spirits tended to run high because this was the first day of their last year as captives of the public school system. The light at the end of that tunnel was their whole lives lying ahead of them.
Of course, in order to reach that light, they first had to make it through the long, dark tunnel that was senior year.3
***
Vanna Helmond was what one might call an All-American Girl. That is to say, she was demographically unremarkable, but she was very pretty, which drew people to her, and highly personable, which kept them around. Her attitude going into senior year was also typical; this was her last first day of high school ever, and every new day got her one step closer to graduation and freedom.
Her mother, also named Vanna, told her not to be in such a rush to leave. High school, she said, was supposed to be the best four years of her life and she should savor every second of it. Vanna the younger4 thought if that was true, that meant it was all downhill from here, and she refused to believe she was going to peak at seventeen going on eighteen.
She wondered if her mom, a highly successful estate planning attorney, considered her high school career the best years of her life, but couldn’t bring herself to ask for fear the answer would depress the hell out of her.
Those were the kind of conversations they had — or, as often, avoided — on the ride to school. Vanna the elder was a workaholic who was reliably the first person to arrive at the office and the last to leave, and she wore this as a badge of honor (which, in Vanna the younger’s mind, lent credence to the idea her mother’s life post-high school really wasn’t all that awesome). Because her schedule coincided with the start of the school day, she insisted on driving her daughter there. Vanna the younger resisted this at first on the grounds there was a perfectly good school bus available, and many friends with whom she could catch a ride, but Vanna the elder like the “us time” it provided, so they compromised: they drove together most of the way, then Vanna the elder dropped Vanna the younger off at the big intersection nearby so she could walk the rest of the way.
“Will you be coming home right after school?” Vanna the elder asked.
“No, we have a squad meeting. I told you yesterday,”5 Vanna the younger said.
“Oh, right.”
“Will you be coming home right after work?”
It was a rhetorical question, but her mother answered anyway. “We’ll see. Things have been piling up again.”
“As they are wont to do.” That was her mother’s number one excuse for working late, even though it was her firm and she had plenty of underlings who could have taken on some of her workload.
“We’ve gotten a lot of new clients lately. People are very interested in planning for their future.”
“Or lack thereof,” Vanna the younger said dryly.
“What? Oh. Right. Because they’re dead. Got it. Estate planning humor.”
“I know how to play to my audience. This is my stop.”
The red light was with them, so Vanna the younger hopped out the SUV with a hasty goodbye and took the final stretch on foot.
The sign outside Ashcroft High School was an old-fashioned wooden deal, seated in a brick planter kind of thing and illuminated at night by an overhead streetlight. Several graduating classes had attempted to make a class gift of a more modern replacement, to no avail. Last year’s class wanted to buy a miniature digital billboard loaded with bells and whistles. The class officers really pushed the energy-efficient LED screen, which could be programmed to display seasonally appropriate images and share important message via a scrolling chyron at the bottom, but the school committee unceremoniously shot it down as “not in keeping with the historic character of the building and grounds.”
Old people clinging tenaciously to old stuff out of habit. No way to run a society, Vanna thought as she passed the sign, which had received a new paint job over the summer. The text was always rendered in Ashcroft High’s official crimson with white and black accents, but whoever handled the annual touchups liked to change the color scheme on the mascot in the corner, the local cryptid known as the Moon-Glider, depicted on the sign as an off-brand pterodactyl with puppy-dog eyes and a big, friendly smile. This year’s iteration, Vanna would have described it as blood red, maybe fire engine red in better light, but it was a little overcast today.6
(Whether the cartoon Moon-Glider in any way resembled the actual creature was a mystery for the ages. Descriptions of the Moon-Glider varied among those who claimed to have caught a glimpse of its silhouette soaring through the night sky.)
School buses crawled down the main driveway toward the loop in front of the school, where they disgorged their passengers before heading out to pick up the middle schoolers. They were another sign of the school committee’s pointless devotion to the old ways: two years ago, a company approached the committee to pitch their new propane-fueled vehicles as replacements for the current fleet of diesel-guzzling, toxic emission-spewing models, and were turned away. The committee argued that the buses they had worked just fine despite their age, creeping up on fifteen years of service, and the very notion of propane buses, they reacted to that as if they’d been told they were fueled by fairy dust and children’s laughter.
(Vanna knew all this through her friend Kim, whose mother sat on the school committee at the time and was the proposal’s sole supporter. She was ousted last year by Gabrielle Lennox7, a newcomer who, ironically, promised to bring fresh new ideas to the group.)
A thin stream of students flowed in from the main parking lot — seniors who, by dint of their senior status, earned the right to drive themselves to school. They merged with the heavier current of students getting off the buses, then moved as a cluster toward the main entrance. Vanna joined the parade, trading hellos with other students, and made her way inside.
Almost; Principal Blandell and the new assistant principal, introduced to the seniors yesterday simply as Ms. Levy, stopped her before she reached the entrance8. If one were to ask Vanna to describe a typical high school principal, she’d describe Mr. Blandell in the broad strokes: white, male, middle-aged, not enough hair, too much tummy9. If one were to ask her to describe an assistant principal, she wouldn’t describe Ms. Levy, who, in her lavender blazer, looked like she should be selling perfume in an upscale department store.
“Good morning, Vanna,” Blandell said warmly.
“Mr. Blandell, good morning,” Vanna said.
“Hold up a minute, would you? I’d like to formally introduce you to my new right-hand man — er, woman, excuse me — Tonya Levy. Tonya, this is one of Ashcroft’s star students, Vanna Helmond.”
“Vanna?” Levy said. Vanna braced for The Question. “As in Vanna White?”
“As in,” she confirmed. Thankfully, Levy didn’t press for details, which Vanna would have preferred not to provide.
(The details are this: Molly Harkness was a rabid Wheel of Fortune fan who named her first child Vanna Patricia, after Vanna White and Pat Sajak; and she in turn passed her inherited love for the game show and its hosts onto her own daughter, whose full legal name was Vanna Patricia Helmond Jr. Vanna Jr. vowed that sad legacy would end with her and there would be no Vanna Patricia III. She hated Wheel of Fortune.)
“And what makes you a star student?” Levy asked as if addressing a child half Vanna’s age. Vanna reeled in a flash of disdain; for all she knew, Levy previously worked with grade-schoolers and had yet to adjust to working with almost-adults.
“That is a question you’d have to ask Mr. Blandell,” Vanna said. “I’d never be so presumptuous as to grace myself with such a title.”10
Blandell, chuckling, said to Levy, “Well, as you can see, she’s both modest and well-spoken, but she’s also a star student, on her way to class salutatorian at the very least, and she’s co-captain of our award-winning cheerleading squad.”
Levy’s eyebrows leapt. “My! Quite accomplished.”
Vanna did a tiny curtsey. “And those accomplishments won’t accomplish themselves, so if you’ll excuse me…”
“I won’t hold you up any longer. Have a good day, Vanna,” Blandell said.
“I always do.”
She rejoined the flow, which had thinned out as the clock inched closer to the next bell — yet another holdover from a bygone time. It was loud, obnoxious, and as subtle as the claxon on a World War II submarine preparing to submerge. The student council, once again stepping up as best as it could, recommended on an annual basis updating it with something less startling, but the excuse from the school committee was always, “That would cost money we don’t have to spend.”
There were, however, a few benefits to this weird, pointless resistance to progress, one of which could be found in what was known as The Block — sometimes The Main Block, sometimes The Central Block, occasionally as The Cell Block, but mostly just The Block. Once upon a time it was the entirety of the school, but now it was primarily offices for administrators and support staff. It also hosted another senior perk: the lockers here were of the classic variety, full-length and deep enough to stash a body in. Seniors got to claim those, while underclasses had to deal with the newer lockers in the newer sections. Those too were technically big enough to stash a body in, if the body in question was on the small side and you really smushed it in.
Vanna took a minute to admire her spacious new digs, then dropped her backpack inside. It looked lonely there all by itself, but that would change. Fall would come soonish, and then winter, and she’d be able to hang her favorite long coat in there without it pooling on the floor like it did in the underclass lockers. The top shelf had plenty of room for the books she’d receive today, with a little room to spare for a few personal belongings. In a big city like Boston, she mused, a locker like this would be marketed as a studio apartment and go for four figures a month, utilities not included.
Her attention was drawn away by the arrival of a young man who looked like a perfect blend of comic book icons Archie Andrews and Big Moose: tall, broad, beefy, red hair that was more orange than red, a smattering of pale freckles coloring his cheeks. He consulted a piece of paper in a hand like a catcher’s mitt, his brow furrowed in concentration, then the little number plate on the locker next to Vanna’s. His eyes jumped back and forth between the note and the locker several times, more than was reasonable, then he nodded to himself.
“Oh. Hi,” he said, just now noticing Vanna. “Looks like we’re neighbors,” he observed, a distinct Southern accent flavoring his voice, strong but not overly twangy.
“Looks like,” she said, offering a hand. “I’m Vanna.”
“Like Vanna White?”
“Like.”
“I’m Mackenzie. People call me Mac,” he said, his hand swallowing Vanna’s. “Nice to meet you.”
“Am I wrong in assuming you’re new to Massachusetts?”
His face lit up. “How’d you know?”
“The accent’s a bit of a giveaway.”
“Oh. Yeah. Duh.” He bapped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “Yeah, our folks moved us up here over the summer. Work stuff.”
“Us?”
“Me and my twin sister. She’s around here somewhere.”
Vanna tried, and mostly succeeded, to not give Mac a once-over. “I’m sure she stands out as much as you do.”
The school provided students with combination locks so administrators could access the lockers whenever they wanted to — another entry on the student council’s list of things they wanted to change, another request the school committee refused to consider. Mac’s lock looked comically tiny in his hand as he twirled the dial, checked his note, twirled, checked, twirled, checked…it took him four tries to get the lock to pop open.
“Hot dog!” He stuffed the note in his back pocket, threw his backpack into the locker, sealed it up, muttered, “Aw, dang,” opened his locker back up (after three tries with the combo lock), and retrieved from his backpack a crumpled printout with his class schedule. “Be kinda lost without this.”
“Trust me, you’ll be lost with it,” Vanna said. “The school’s rather labyrinthine.”
“And a big maze too, from what I hear.” He looked around, decided on a direction, perhaps arbitrarily, and said before heading out, “Nice to meet you.”
Vanna hated to see him leave but she loved to watch him go.
She shut her locker door and jumped at the pale, raccoon-eyed face glaring at her in disapproval. “May I help you?”
“What was that?” asked the girl, whose overall aesthetic could be best described as shaggy, from her short black hair down to her jeans with the shredded knees. Only her leather biker jacket was in good shape. She took scrupulous care of that.
“That was me being friendly to a new student.”
“You were flirting with him.”
“I was not,” Vanna gently insisted. “Much. Hardly at all.”
“He sounded kind of dumb.”
“He did not come across as the sharpest knife in the drawer, no, but he seemed nice, and I’ll take dumb but nice over a smart jerk any day.”
“Fair.”
“You okay, pumpkin? You sound grumbly.”
Kim slumped against the neighboring locker. “Didn’t sleep well.”
“Don’t tell me you were lying awake pining for Alison again.”
“I am not pining for Alison again. I broke up with her two months ago. She’s old news. Out of sight, out of mind,” Kim said, passing a hand through the air as if erasing the name Alison Ayer from the whiteboard of the universe. “No, some cat was hanging out in our back yard. I don’t know if was a stray or a neighbor cat or what, but Springfoot did not like it. All he did was growl and hiss all night.”
“And you’d never be so cruel as to expel your beloved Springfoot from your room.”
“I’m not a monster. I got up around two to try to catch it, but it took off. I was too awake at that point so I sat up reading.”
“My poor sleepy Kimmy,” Vanna said with a sympathetic pout, “but be of good cheer, sweetpea, we only have to get through today and tomorrow, then we have the long Labor Day weekend.”
“Whoever thought starting school at the end of August was a terrible person and I hope he burns in Hell.”
“One hundred percent.” The girls flinched as the final warning bell sounded in all its rude glory. “There are many things about high school I won’t miss, and that bell is at the top of the list.”
“Seconded.” Kim took a deep breath. “I can do this.”
“You can do this.” Vanna raised a defiant fist. “Fortify.”
Kim returned the gesture. “Fortified.”11
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