the bed and took inventory of everything I knew, in the order it came to me.
One: I couldn't wake up. Pinching my arm left a mark. I bit the inside of my cheek and tasted blood, then pressed my thumb into the corner of the desk until the skin went white. Nothing changed. Couldn't be a dream, mine usually had that sterile smell of a hospital while this smelt like videotape cassette and crusty old pizza. I had no better test than that, and I didn't fully trust it, but I couldn't sit here waiting to open my eyes somewhere else.
Two: I had some access to Randy's memories. They came when something prompted them. I couldn't have named his sister a moment ago, but hearing her complain through the wall brought her face and name together. The girl down the hall was Martha, my sister, thirteen, and she'd been in the bathroom twenty minutes because she'd just discovered eyeliner. The woman was my mom Diane. My dad, Edward, or Ted and Teddy as I remember mom calling him in my memories, had already left for work; he left at six-fifteen every day, before I was usually up, and on Fridays he brought home donuts. The car in the driveway was Mom's old Volvo wagon, and I got to drive it on school days as long as I picked Martha up from junior high at three.
Under all that, like a second coat of paint, I had my own life. Theo Alvarez, born in Sacramento. Mom left before I could remember her, dad was never there to begin with. Foster homes from four to sixteen, some of them fine and some of them the reason my nose got broken. A couple of arrests I'm not proud of, a sealed juvenile record, and a recruiter in a strip-mall office who looked at me like I might be worth something, which nobody had done in a while. Four years in the Army, 11 Bravo, infantry, out at twenty-two, and then a YouTube channel I started because the VA counselor said I needed a hobby that wasn't drinking.
The channel was called Rules of Engagement and had two hundred and eighty thousand subscribers. Horror movies from a soldier's point of view: How would an infantry platoon handle Camp Crystal Lake? Could the National Guard contain Derry? Military vs. the Xenomorph: a realistic breakdown. People liked it, and I liked it; it was the first thing I'd ever built that nobody could take away from me.
Three: I'd gone to sleep in my apartment in 2026, editing a video about Scream, of all the goddamn things, a thirty-year retrospective called Ghostface vs. a squad of MPs. I passed out at my desk with the movie still playing.
Four: Casey Becker and Steve Orth were dead. If the radio meant what I thought it meant, this was the morning after the opening scene. I gripped the edge of the mattress. Tonight Ghostface was supposed to call Sidney Prescott while she was home alone and chase her up the stairs. She'd lock herself in her room and report it on her computer, and Billy Loomis would climb in through her window with a cell phone in his pocket.
Five: in the film, Billy and Stu were the killers. I'd watched their confession more times than I could count. Remembering it felt like evidence, even though I'd woken up here less than twenty minutes ago. Tomorrow night, at a party, Billy was supposed to shoot Randy. Me.
Six: I knew what happened to Randy after the first movie. He lived, since Billy's bullet only caught him in the shoulder, and he cracked a joke about being glad he was a virgin, and the audience laughed. A year later, at a college in Ohio, Billy's mother dragged him into the back of a news van in broad daylight and cut his throat while a boombox played on the lawn outside, and nobody heard a thing.
I sat with my soft, useless hands on my knees and breathed the way they teach you. In for four, hold for four, out for four, hold for four. By the fourth breath I could unclench my hands.
On the fourth hold, the air in front of my face lit up.
I've hallucinated before, and this was cleaner than that. A flat panel of light the size of a sheet of paper hung about eighteen inches from my eyes, the color of a TV left on in a dark room. When I turned my head, it turned with me. When I closed my eyes I could still see it, which meant it was in me and not the room.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Connection established.
> User: Theo Alvarez (Randy Meeks)
> Start: Take Over
> Tickets: 0
> Feats feed the Gacha. The Gacha feeds you.
▌
I read it three times, then said out loud in Randy's cracked voice, "You have got to be shitting me."
I recognized the name from stories I'd read on my phone when I couldn't sleep. Somebody had built the Chaos Gacha as a randomizer for fanfic writers: do something impressive, earn a ticket, receive a random power or item. Sometimes useful, sometimes worthless. I'd stayed up late enough reading those stories to feel embarrassed remembering them now.
That didn't tell me who had put this window in my head, or whether their version worked the same way. I read the user line again. It had both our names.
Take Over. I remembered that one: you wake up in a canon character's body with their memories and training, and you start with nothing, on the theory that you've already got a whole life to work with.
The panel changed.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> A Take Over start receives no tickets.
> The Curse Roulette is available.
> Spin once to receive a ticket in exchange for a curse?
> [SPIN][DECLINE]
▌
The same VA counselor who told me to find a hobby that wasn't drinking also told me, very gently, that people like me don't do well with slot machines—people who grew up the way I did, waiting our whole childhoods for the next bad thing until we started to crave the second before we found out. You like the spin, she said. Not the win. The spin. I laughed at her. Then I went home and deleted three poker apps off my phone.
I kept thinking about the two killers and the body I'd seen in the mirror. No gun. No idea how much of my training would carry over. There were people downstairs I could ask for help, but I couldn't imagine beginning that conversation. The button was right in front of me. I let that make the choice seem smaller than it was.
"One," I said. "Just one."
I pressed SPIN. It didn't look like much: a wheel of red and black numbers, one to twenty, spinning behind my eyes with a click like the prize wheel at a county fair, slowing, stopping.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> CURSE ACQUIRED: Battle Maniac(Major)
> You can't turn down a good fight. Stronger opponents make it worse.
> Resolve: Expert-level Discipline, or an Epic-rank trait that strengthens the mind.
> Reward: 1× Gold Choice Gacha Ticket (you choose the category)
▌
Something settled into me low in the chest, a second heartbeat running a little faster than my own, and it pulled. The part of me that wanted to run out of this room and hide under Randy's bed for two days went quiet, and something else sat up and started paying attention.
Oh, I thought. Oh, that's bad.
One Gold ticket, and I got to pick the category.
I knew what I wanted, more or less. Something I could hold. Something that worked on a seventeen-year-old with a hunting knife, like some kind of magical gun, or hell, I could become a Spartan, a superhero, or some other Gacha nonsense. I looked at the ticket the way you'd look at a button on a screen, and the panel brightened around it, and a line came up underneath:
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> [PULL]
▌
I pressed it. Or thought at it, or leaned on it with whatever part of me was looking at the panel; I didn't know the controls yet. Nothing happened.
I tried again, harder. I said it out loud under my breath, "Pull," in case it was voice-activated, and felt like an idiot. I reached up with my actual hand and poked the air in front of my face where the button was, and my finger went through nothing, and the panel didn't so much as flicker. The [PULL] line just sat there, dull, like a button on a website that hasn't finished loading. No error. No category menu. No explanation.
I sat on the edge of Randy's bed and went through what I knew. In some of the stories the reward took time to arrive, a day, a night's sleep. In some there was a cooldown after a curse. In some the Gacha wanted a feat before it would do anything at all. I didn't know which kind of story this was. I tried twice more while I found Randy's socks, the second time with both eyes shut, and got the same nothing.
I'd already accepted the curse. Whatever was wrong with the ticket, the pull in my chest was here now.
I closed the panel. I could still feel it behind my eyes, and for a moment I wanted to open it again. Instead I put my feet on the floor. I needed clothes, a phone, and a few minutes in which I didn't make another decision like that one.
* * *
"Randy!" My mom's voice came up the stairs. "Are you up? You're going to be late!"
"I'm up," I said, and my voice cracked on up, and I shut my eyes.
"Come eat something. And I want to talk to you before you go."
Randy's clothes fit, obviously. Jeans with a hole in one knee, a flannel over the Bradley Video shirt, sneakers with the backs crushed flat from being jammed on without untying. I stood in front of the mirror again and made myself look at the face until it quit being a stranger and started being a problem.
All right, I thought. Assess.
That was the voice the Army gave me, and I liked it a hell of a lot better than the one going you're dead, you died at your desk, this is hell, this is a coma, this is a psychotic break. The Army voice didn't care what this was. It cared about mission, enemy, terrain, troops, time, and civilians.
Mission: stay alive, and keep the people around me alive.
Enemy: two seventeen-year-olds with a voice changer, a pair of hunting knives, a Halloween-store costume, and a plan they'd been working on for a year. They liked planning around movies. That was what I remembered; I hadn't spoken to either of them yet.
Terrain: Woodsboro, a small town, rich on one side and not on the other, with lots of trees and big houses far apart, landlines and pagers, no cell phones except the shoe-sized ones rich kids carried, slow internet and few cameras. Following somebody would take calls, witnesses, and people actually looking.
Troops: me. A skinny kid with a flashlight, if I could find one.
Time: tomorrow night, the party at Stu's.
Civilians: everybody, in every one of those big houses.
"Nobody's going to believe you," I told the mirror in Randy's voice.
I pictured telling a deputy that I'd seen the murders in a film. Then I pictured the deputy calling Billy's father. I had no evidence to put between those two conversations, and I was afraid of what Billy would do once he heard. Cops are insufferably shit in Scream movies, scratch that, in horror movies in general, and it would only be a matter of time before somebody at the station said something to the wrong person.
* * *
The kitchen was a mix of yellow and brown with a wood-paneled floor, for some reason, and the TV on the counter had the local news on low: a reporter in front of a big house wrapped in police tape. The Becker house. I recognized it from the movie, and seeing it on a real TV in a real kitchen made the floor tilt again.
Martha sat at the table in way too much eyeliner, fishing the last marshmallows out of her cereal. She looked up and said, "You look like crap."
"Thanks," I said. "You look like a raccoon."
It came out before I thought about it, in exactly a brother's voice, and she rolled her eyes exactly the way a sister would, and something in my chest turned over. I'd never had a sister, only foster brothers—some of them good guys, some of them the kind who stole your brand-new fucking shoes—but none of them had ever looked at me like I was a permanent feature of their life, the way you look at a wall or the weather. Martha did, and she didn't even notice she was doing it.
"Sit," my mom said, and put a plate of toast in front of me. She was small, with Randy's big eyes and her hair pulled back in a clip, dressed for work, her coffee half finished. She kept looking at the TV and then away. "Did you know them? Casey and the Orth boy?"
Randy's memories came up. Casey Becker: blond, nice, two rows over in English. Steve Orth: football, loud, called Randy "Blockbuster" for a whole semester for no reason.
"A little," I said. "Casey was in my English class."
"Oh, honey." She put her hand on my shoulder, warm, for a second. "I talked to Carol Meeker's mom this morning. Nobody knows anything. They're saying it might be someone passing through. Or it might—" She glanced at Martha and stopped.
"Might be someone from school," Martha said with her mouth full. "Everybody's saying it. Jenny's mom said the boyfriend's always the one who did it."
"The boyfriend's dead," I said.
"So… the other boyfriend."
"Martha," my mom said.
I looked at my toast. Her hand was still on my shoulder, and I kept still under it the way you'd keep still for a bird that had landed on you.
"I want you to come straight home after school," she said. "Pick up your sister, come home, lock the door. No video store today."
"I've got a shift," I said on autopilot, because Randy did. His memories had him on the schedule four to eight.
"Then call Mr. Bradley and tell him you're sick."
Randy would have argued. But half of my brain was already chewing on a problem, the problem was tonight, and wherever I was going to be tonight, it wasn't behind the counter at Bradley Video.
"Okay," I said.
She looked at me, surprised. "Okay?"
"I don't feel much like working anyway."
She took her hand off my shoulder and laid the back of it against my forehead, checking for a fever. "Are you feeling all right?"
"I'm fine, Mom," I said, and then I went out to the Volvo and sat in it for a while before my hands would turn the key.
* * *
Woodsboro High looked like a school in a movie, which made sense: low buildings, lots of glass, a big lawn with a fountain in the middle, eucalyptus along the parking lot. What the movie hadn't shown was how small it was. You could see the whole campus from the lot, and you could see the news vans.
Four of them lined the curb with their dishes up and cables snaking across the sidewalk. Reporters stood in front of the school doing takes. Kids clustered around them the way kids cluster around anything with a camera, and a few teachers were failing to herd everybody inside.
I parked at the far end of the lot, backed in, nose out—old habit—and sat with my hands on the wheel and watched.
One of the reporters was Gale Weathers. I knew her by her posture before I saw her face: sharp suit, sharp hair, holding the microphone like she meant to stab somebody with it. She was doing a stand-up in front of the fountain while a big guy with a camera on his shoulder filmed her. Kenny. Kenny, who was going to get his throat cut on the hood of a van at Stu's party while Randy sat alone on a couch four feet away yelling at Halloween.
I got out of the car, and walking across that lot was one of the strangest things I've ever done, and I've done a night jump. I half knew every face I passed, most of them not from the movie but from Randy: Jenny Mason, who borrowed my Dead by Dawn tape and never gave it back; Mr. Hudson, chemistry, same tie every Thursday; the kid who threw up on the bus in sixth grade and never lived it down. A whole town full of people who knew me, and I'd never met any of them.
A few I knew both ways, and Dewey was the first: Deputy Dewey Riley in uniform by a squad car, trying very hard to look like a cop. He was tall and gangly and looked about twenty-two, and he was asking a couple of kids to leave the entrance clear. He waited until they moved before turning to the next group. I knew how he ended up: stabbed in the back at the party and alive, then stabbed again and again, movie after movie, alive, alive, alive, until the fifth one, twenty-five years down the road, when he wasn't.
He saw me looking and nodded. "Randy."
"Dewey," I said. Then, because Randy would have: "Any leads?"
"Can't talk about it. Sorry, Randy." He glanced toward the reporters. "If somebody bothers you, come find me. Go on to class."
I went, hands in my pockets so nobody would see them shake.
* * *
Classes were a joke, with nobody teaching and nobody learning. In the first period Mrs. Tate tried The Scarlet Letter for about ten minutes, then gave up and let everybody talk. Half the class was crying and the other half was pretending not to be interested and was very interested. Casey's desk was two rows over from mine, and somebody had put a flower on it.
I let it wash over me and watched. I tried to notice who came in late and who was missing. It gave me something to do with my fear, although I didn't know these people well enough to tell what was unusual. Randy's memories supplied names, not an explanation for every empty seat.
Sidney Prescott didn't show up until the second period.
I knew her the second she walked in—brown hair, pale, a sweater too big for her, the look of a girl who hadn't slept. She'd lost her mother a year ago almost to the day, the whole town had watched it on the news, and now the vans were back. She sat by the window and looked out of it, not saying a word all period.
Randy's memories got loud when I looked at her, and they weren't just facts; they came with feelings stapled to them. Randy had been in love with Sidney Prescott since eighth grade, the hopeless, humiliating kind where you rehearse conversations in the shower and never say a word, and never would.
I could feel all that the way you feel somebody else's hand on your arm. But I was twenty-six, she was seventeen, and she was about to be hunted by her own boyfriend, so I put the feelings on a shelf and left them there. What I felt looking at her was simpler. It was what I used to feel on patrol going past a school or a clinic or a family pulled over on the side of the road—nobody gets hurt on my watch—which is a stupid, naive thing to feel, exactly the kind of thing that gets people killed, and I felt it anyway.
* * *
Lunch was at the fountain. I didn't plan it; I came out of the cafeteria with a tray, Randy's feet turned left instead of right, and there they were on the low wall around the fountain in the middle of the lawn, the way they always were: Randy's friends.
Tatum Riley, blond and sharp, sat on the edge of the fountain with her legs crossed, talking with her hands. Sidney sat next to her holding a sandwich she wasn't eating. And the two boys.
Stu Macher was stretched out on his back along the wall with his head in Tatum's lap, tossing grapes in the air and catching them in his mouth. Tall and loose-limbed, all elbows, a big goofy face and a mop of hair, a joke every other sentence. He looked like the kind of kid who got detention for mooning the principal. He looked harmless.
Billy Loomis sat very close to Sidney. Almost too good-looking, like a boy out of a magazine ad, dark hair falling in his eyes, his arm around her, rubbing her back in small circles. When I walked up he looked at me and smiled—the nice smile of somebody glad to see a friend.
I've been shot at. Not as many as some of the dudes I've been with for the patrols, but enough, and I got hit once, through the outside of the arm. I've been in a vehicle that rolled. I pulled a guy out of a river in January. I have never, before or since, been as scared as I was walking up to that fountain and sitting down across from Billy Loomis while he smiled at me.
"Randy," Tatum said. "Thank God. Tell Stu he's disgusting."
"Stu, you're disgusting," I said. My voice came out almost right. I set my tray on the wall, sat on the edge of the fountain, and made my hands behave.
"I'm not disgusting," Stu said around a grape. "I'm grieving."
"You're grieving with your head in my lap, eating my grapes," Tatum said. "I brought those, dumbass."
"Grief makes you hungry, babe. It's a process."
Sidney didn't laugh. She was watching the news vans across the lawn, where Gale Weathers was still doing a stand-up with the school behind her.
"They're going to do it again," Sidney said. "The whole thing. My mom. They're going to put her picture up next to Casey's."
"Hey." Billy pulled her closer and kissed the side of her head. "Don't watch them. Don't give them anything."
I watched his face while he did it. It was a perfect face: concerned boyfriend, sweet, a little sad. He'd had a year to practice it.
"Did you hear how they found her?" Stu said, sitting up. "Casey. I heard they hung her from a tree. And they, like..." He drew a line across his stomach. "Gutted her. From here to here."
"Stu," Tatum said.
"What? I'm just saying what I heard."
"Who'd you hear it from?"
"People." He shrugged and grinned and glanced at Billy, quick, and if I hadn't been watching for it I'd have missed it: a flick of the eyes and away. Isn't this fun?
In the movie, this is where Randy makes a joke. He says Stu might be the killer, since Casey dumped Stu for Steve. He says it to be funny, to needle him, and because in Randy's head everything's a movie and everybody's a suspect. Stu says he didn't kill anybody, everybody laughs, and it's a great bit of writing, because the audience doesn't know yet that Randy's right.
I thought about not saying it, but Randy's mouth was already opening, and I could feel the words lining up. It didn't feel like remembering a line so much as somebody nudging me under the table. If Randy Meeks sat at the fountain the morning after a murder and didn't make one stupid joke about who did it, somebody at this fountain would notice, and the somebody who'd notice was the one with the nice smile.
"Well, Stu did go out with Casey," I said. "Just saying. Guy's got a motive."
Tatum turned so fast her hair whipped. "What? Casey dumped you? You told me you dumped her."
"I did dump her," Stu said.
"For me?"
"Obviously for you, babe."
"Then why does Randy—"
"Because Randy's a freak," Stu said cheerfully, "who has watched Buffalo Bill eleven hundred times. Hey, Randy." He pointed a grape at me. "For the record. I didn't kill anybody."
"That's what the killer always says," I said.
Everybody laughed, even Sidney, a little. Stu laughed hardest, head thrown back, and I laughed too and felt my own laugh go into my stomach like a knife.
Billy smiled, but he didn't laugh. He was looking at me.
"You're in a mood today, Randy," he said.
"Somebody murdered two people in our class," I said. "I'm allowed to be in a mood."
"Sure. Yeah." He nodded slowly. "It's just, you know. Not really a movie."
"Everything's a movie," I said. "That's the whole problem. If it wasn't, we wouldn't have the news crawling up our asses for the 'big story.'" I did the air quotes.
He held my eyes a second longer. Then Sidney said something to him and he turned away, and I picked up my sandwich with a hand I held still.
While he'd been looking at me, I'd noticed a scratch on the back of his left hand—fresh, a thin red line, the kind you get from a branch or a fence, or a window frame. He'd been in Sidney's room last night before the murders were even on the news; that was in the movie too, the start of her story, Billy climbing in her window to fool around while she was in her pajamas and her pushing him back out. He'd come to her straight from Casey's house, maybe with Casey's blood still under his nails.
* * *
After lunch I went to the bathroom and threw up.
Into the last stall in the B-hall boys' room, down on my knees, and up came the sandwich and most of breakfast. What brought it up was Billy's hand on the table at the fountain with the scratch across the back of it, and Stu laughing with his mouth full, and the two of them sitting three feet from Sidney Prescott like they'd sat three feet from her every day for a year. They'd talked about all that macabre nonsense at lunch knowing they'd already done it, and that they were planning to do it again.
"Billy," I heard myself say into the bowl, between the second heave and the third, in a voice that came out of Randy's throat without asking either of us. "Fucking Billy. And Stu—"
Then I heard the sink.
Somebody had come in while I was busy. The tap ran and shut off. Sneakers squeaked on the tile and stopped, right outside my stall.
"Meeks?" said Josh Carter, who sat behind me in chemistry and worked the afternoon shift at Bradley Video when I didn't. "Dude. You dying in there?"
I wiped my mouth with toilet paper and stayed exactly where I was.
"Bad lunch."
"Did you say Billy?"
"I said I'm dying."
A pause. I could see his sneakers under the stall door, one of them turned toward the exit and the other one still pointed at me.
"Gross, man," said Josh finally, and the door swung shut behind him.
I flushed and sat on the floor with my back against the stall door and the tile cold through my jeans, and listened to my heart going. I had no idea how much he'd heard. I had no idea who he'd tell, or what Billy would do if it came back to him with my name on it, the day before the party.
Then I ran the next part of the movie. Sidney goes home after school, and her dad's leaving on a business trip. Tatum has practice till late and is supposed to pick Sidney up afterward so she can stay at the Rileys'. Sidney waits and falls asleep. The phone wakes her (Tatum, running late), and then it rings again: the voice, the game and the man in the mask coming out of the coat closet by the front door.
Sidney survives that one. She's smart and fast; she runs upstairs, blocks her bedroom door, reports it on her computer, and the killer disappears. A minute later Billy climbs in her window, his phone falls out of his pocket, she runs, Dewey's at the door, and Billy goes to the station in handcuffs.
That's canon, and in a sick way it's safe, because she lives. Billy gets arrested and released, because his phone records show nothing, because the calls came from Sidney's dad's phone and Sidney's dad is already tied up in a closet at Stu's. Once he's been arrested and released, nobody looks at him again. He's the boyfriend who got wrongly accused. The next night he and Stu kill Tatum, Kenny and the principal, and take a run at everybody else.
I really wanted to believe that leaving it alone meant that sequence would hold.
Except knowing what happens in a movie isn't knowing what happens in real life. In the movie Sidney gets away because the killer lets her, because the script needs her alive for the next act. I didn't know if this world had a script. I didn't know if I'd already changed something by sitting at that fountain and saying Randy's line half a second late, or in a slightly different voice, or by looking at Billy's hand. I'd already done things Randy hadn't done. I couldn't know which of them Billy had noticed, or whether he'd noticed anything at all.
So maybe tonight went like the movie, and Sidney got upstairs and locked the door and lived.
Or maybe the killer was half a step faster this time. Maybe the closet door stuck, or Sidney tripped on the stairs, and I was at home eating meatloaf with Randy's mom and Randy's sister, knowing.
I got up off the floor, cleaned my face and looked at Randy's face in the mirror over the sink, again, although this time I didn't feel as… perplexed by it as before.
The water ran while I held the edge of the sink. I could ask Sidney to leave the house early, or maybe I could stay with her. Although that wouldn't really change the fact that Stu and Billy would still attack her.
I shut off the tap. I needed to speak to her before I turned uncertainty into another reason to stay here.
* * *
I caught Sidney after the last period at her locker.
Tatum had already left for practice. Billy was nowhere around; I'd checked twice, carefully. Sidney was trying to cram a textbook into a locker that didn't want it, and she looked so tired I almost turned around and left her alone.
"Hey," I said.
She jumped a little, saw it was me, and her shoulders came down. "Hey, Randy."
"So your dad's going out of town, right?"
Wrong way to start. She gave me a funny look. "How do you know that?"
Randy's memories scrambled and came up with something. "You said it yourself, last week I think? Something about Sunday."
"Oh." She shrugged and gave up on the textbook. "Yeah. He's leaving this afternoon. I'm staying at Tatum's."
"She's got practice till late, though."
"Till six. Maybe seven." She shut the locker. "Why?"
I'd spent three periods on that question and come up with a dozen plans, every one of them bad. Tell her the truth, and she'd think I was insane, or worse, she'd tell Billy. Phone in an anonymous tip and hope the cops showed. I kept rejecting that one because a patrol car might make Billy and Stu change their plan. Each time, I caught myself trying to preserve the attack I remembered. Sidney would still have to live through it. I knew how ugly that sounded. I couldn't seem to stop treating the familiar danger as the one I could manage.
So I did what Randy would have done. I asked.
"I just thought, you know." I rubbed the back of my neck—Randy's move, not mine, and I let it happen. "You shouldn't be alone in that house. With all this. I could come over and hang out till Tatum gets there. Bring some movies. Comedies, I swear. Not one single horror movie. Nothing with a knife in it."
She looked at me, and I knew what she was seeing. Randy Meeks, the nice goofy guy from the video store, who'd had a crush on her for four years that everybody in school knew about except somehow her, asking to come over while her dad was out of town. My face went hot. Randy blushed like a fire alarm.
"Randy," she said.
"I know. I'm not asking you out." I took my hand away from my neck. "Would you rather come to ours? Mom's making dinner. Tatum could get you there."
"She's already coming to my house." Sidney shifted the textbook against her hip.
"Then I can wait with you. If you want."
She laughed. It was small and tired, but it was the first real laugh I'd seen out of her all day.
"Okay," she said. "That'd be nice, actually. Come at five-thirty. My dad'll be gone by then."
"Five-thirty," I said. "I'll bring Tommy Boy."
"I've seen Tommy Boy."
"Want something else?"
"No. That's fine." She shut her locker and headed down the hall. I stayed there a moment, listening until her footsteps were lost among the others.
* * *
I picked Martha up from junior high at three, drove her home, and made her lock the door behind me when I left again. She yelled after me that Mom was going to kill me. I yelled back that I'd be home by nine, which was probably a lie.
Then I went to Bradley Video, not to work—I'd called Mr. Bradley from the pay phone at school and told him I was sick, and he'd grunted and said feel better, kid, and hung up. But Sidney would notice if I showed up empty-handed, so I needed tapes, and I needed something else.
Bradley Video sat in a strip mall between a dry cleaner and a Chinese place. It smelled like carpet cleaner and popcorn inside. New releases along the wall by the door, horror in the back where it always is, Clueless on the TV over the counter with the sound off. Josh, a sophomore I half recognized who worked the afternoon shift, was reading a comic behind the register.
"Randy? I thought you were sick."
"I called Bradley. I'm just picking these up."
Josh looked at the tapes, then back at me. I went past him before he could ask anything else.
I went down the aisles, touching the spines as I walked to check they were real, because every movie I'd ever seen from before 1996 was supposed to be in here on VHS, in big clamshell cases with cracked plastic and faded covers.
The Night He Came Home was there. So was Never Sleep Again, with Never Sleep Again 2 next to it. The first one, the movie from the poster in my room, gave me an itch, as if I should've seen something obvious, and it annoyed me that I couldn't work out whether there was anything to decipher at all.
When I reached for Randy's memory, it was perfectly calm about it. Two Never Sleep Again movies, and the second wasn't as good as the first, from what I could recall. It was like a crappier Nightmare on Elm Street, where the killer drugged his victims with an experimental syringe that gave them night terrors, or something like that.
Then nothing, where there should've been more, or at least I kept thinking there should be something besides those two. As far as Randy knew, there'd never been anything to put there. The shelf just went on to completely unrelated horror movies, like Night of the Living Dead, which, strangely enough, played exactly the same in both sets of memories.
I made myself move on, grabbed three comedies without looking at them very hard and went into the back room: storage and break area in one, boxes of empty cases, a microwave, a mini-fridge, a mop bucket, a corkboard with shift schedules and a flyer for a lost cat. On a shelf by the back door sat the toolbox where Mr. Bradley kept the stuff for fixing the shelving.
What I wanted was a gun. What I had was a seventeen-year-old's body and 1996 small-town hardware, so I took the closest thing in the box to a weapon: a big black Maglite, the long kind that takes four D batteries. Technically a flashlight. It weighs about as much as a small hammer, and every cop and security guard in America carried one in the nineties for exactly the reason I was taking it. I clicked it on and off, and it worked, and it went in my backpack along with the duct tape, in case I needed to hold a door shut or wrap something broken.
On the way out I stopped at the counter to check out my tapes. While Josh ran them through, my eyes went to the TV, where somebody had switched Clueless over to a news channel. Sound still off, captions running a beat behind the picture. A national segment, not local: a reporter in front of a two-story house with a porch on a quiet street full of trees.
I didn't recognize the street until the caption caught up.
...SPRINGWOOD, OHIO, WHERE A 16-YEAR-OLD GIRL REMAINS HOSPITALIZED AFTER WHAT POLICE DESCRIBE AS AN APPARENT SUICIDE ATTEMPT. THIS IS THE THIRD SUCH INCIDENT AMONG SPRINGWOOD TEENAGERS THIS YEAR...
Josh said, "That's six-fifty, Randy," but I was looking at the TV. A sixteen-year-old in Springwood, Ohio, in the hospital after cutting her wrists—except she'd say she didn't do it, and nobody would believe her. The hospital she'd end up in next was called Westin Hills, and a woman would be starting there soon as an intern, a woman who'd survived something on Elm Street as a teenager and knew exactly what was happening to those kids.
It was the third movie, Dream Warriors, the one without a counterpart on the shelf.
Coincidence, I told myself. Teenagers had problems in Ohio too, surely.
"Randy? Six-fifty."
"Yeah." I dug a crumpled five and two ones out of my pocket. "Keep the change."
Josh put the coins beside the register. I left them there and went out to the car. I sat with my hands on the wheel until a customer tapped on the window and asked whether I was leaving.
I'd thought I was in Scream, one movie and one town and one set of rules, and I knew those rules better than anybody alive. But the radio this morning had said Woodsboro, and the TV just now had said Springwood like it was a real place with a zip code where a girl was in a hospital bed tonight. To be frank, I didn't have time for Ohio right now. Maybe later. It was four-thirty, and I had an hour. I put the car in drive and managed not to think about Freddy Krueger for almost a whole mile.
* * *
The Prescott house sat on a big lot at the end of a quiet road, a long lawn running down to the street and trees on every side: white, two stories, a balcony off the second floor. The nearest neighbors were across the road, too far to count on hearing a struggle indoors. I'd barely thought about those distances while watching the film. From the curb, the lawn seemed to go on forever.
I parked on the street instead of the driveway, nose out, and spent two minutes in the car looking at everything: the front door, the big front windows, a side gate leading around back, trees close in on the east side of the house, and a garage. There was no car in the driveway, because her dad was gone, and the only light came from a couple of lamps on inside.
I made myself breathe, and while I breathed I went over the thing I'd worked out sitting outside Bradley Video.
In the movie, Sidney's dad leaves on a business trip and never gets there, because Billy and Stu grab him. They keep him tied up at Stu's for days so they can frame him at the end, and they use his phone to make the calls, which meant they'd had him since this afternoon, and his car and his wallet and his keys.
The killer comes out of the coat closet by the front door, and I'd always wondered how he got in, because Sidney locks the house—there's a shot of her doing it. Fans had been arguing about it online for twenty years: back door, window, garage. He hadn't needed any of them. He'd had Neil Prescott's keys in his pocket since lunchtime.
* * *
Sidney opened the door before I knocked. "You're early."
"Traffic was light. Is this okay?"
She let me in. It was nicer than Randy's house: wood floors, a big staircase going up from the front hall, a living room with a couch and a fireplace, a coat closet to the left of the door.
"My dad left like a few hours ago," she said. "He said to lock everything. So." She reached past me, locked the front door, threw the deadbolt, and put the chain on. Then she caught me watching and made a face. "What? Everybody's locking their doors."
"Good," I said. "That's good. Keep doing that."
I put Tommy Boy in the VCR because she'd already seen it, which made it safe, and I needed to not be paying attention to a movie. She sat at one end of the couch with her feet pulled up. I sat at the other end as promised, my backpack on the floor between my feet.
For about forty minutes it was almost normal. She laughed at the parts everybody laughs at. She told me about her dad, who'd been trying really hard since her mom died; he'd started cooking even though he was bad at it. She told me about Tatum, who was going to be either a lawyer or a stand-up comedian and hadn't decided which. She didn't talk about Billy much, and when she did, a little crease showed up between her eyebrows.
"He came over last night," she said, not looking at me. "Through my window. Like, climbing the tree and everything."
"Did you want him there?"
"It was kind of stupid." She picked at a thread on her sock. "He wants... he's been patient, you know? Since my mom. He's been really patient. And I keep thinking I should be ready, and then I'm not."
I wanted to tell her exactly what Billy was. I also wanted her to trust me, and I couldn't make those two wants fit into an answer she could use.
"You don't owe him that, Sid."
She pulled the loose thread until it snapped.
"Why are you saying that?" she said. "And I hope you don't say it's because having sex gets me killed in a horror movie." She said it like a joke, with a smile and everything, and she was closer to the truth than she knew.
"I just think if you're not comfortable, then you're not," I said. "Something like that should only happen when you're sure, because you only get one first time, and it's supposed to be special."
She smiled at me for a moment, then went back to watching the TV, and I left her alone.
At six-fifteen I said I was going to the bathroom. When I came out, I walked the house as quietly as I could in a body that had never been taught how, Maglite off and held like a club along my forearm. In the kitchen the back door was locked and deadbolted, with a knife block on the counter. I stood looking at it longer than I liked. A kid with a kitchen knife is a bigger danger to himself than to anybody else; I'd believed that in another life, and I still did. But I'd been kidding myself at Bradley that the Maglite was anything except a light. I took the chef's knife, eight inches of German steel that Mr. Prescott probably used on Thanksgiving, wrapped a dish towel twice around the blade, and put it in the back of my waistband under my flannel, where it lay cold against my spine. The laundry room window was latched, the inner garage door locked and the big door down. I did the dining room and the den and the coat closet by the front door last, and opened it with my heart up in my throat, and found coats and umbrellas and a vacuum cleaner and nobody. Upstairs: Sidney's room with the window by the big tree, locked; her dad's room; a bathroom; a guest room; closets; under the beds. All clear. I came back down and found her standing in the front hall with her arms crossed.
"Were you just searching my house?"
I lowered the flashlight. "Checking the doors. I should've asked."
"Yes. You should have."
We looked at each other. I don't know what was on my face—probably something that wasn't Randy—because her expression changed, not to scared but to curious and a little unsure.
"Randy," she said. "Are you okay? You've been weird all day."
"I'm okay."
"You're not. You threw up after lunch. Josh Carter heard you in the bathroom and told everybody."
"I couldn't get lunch down."
Her arms loosened. "Because of Casey?"
"Yeah. And Steve." It was true as far as it went. She was still waiting when the phone rang.
* * *
It was Tatum. I could hear her through the receiver from across the hall, loud and apologetic: practice was running over, Coach was being a psycho, she'd be there by seven-thirty, eight tops, was Sid okay? Sidney said she was fine, Randy was here. A pause, then a very loud Randy?, and Sidney went red, told her to shut up, and hung up on her.
She put the receiver down harder than she needed to. I let her go back to the couch first.
We went back to the couch. The movie had ended, so I put in another one without looking at it. Outside it was getting dark—the trees on the east side of the house went to black shapes against a dark blue sky, and then the sky went black too, and the only light left was the TV and the lamp on the end table.
Seven o'clock. In the movie, this was when the phone rang. Sidney would be half asleep on the couch, she'd pick up, and a soft, smooth, friendly voice would ask her about scary movies.
Seven-oh-five came, and seven-ten, and nothing. The movie played. Sidney's head drooped against the arm of the couch. I sat on my end with my backpack between my feet, the Maglite under a throw pillow in my lap and the chef's knife lying along my spine, thinking maybe I changed it, maybe they saw my car and called it off, maybe—
Then the phone rang, and Sidney jerked awake and reached for the cordless on the end table.
"Wait," I said.
She looked at me. It rang again.
"It's probably Tatum," she said, and picked up. "Hello?"
I couldn't hear the voice and didn't need to. Her face went polite, then confused. She laughed a little, unsure, said, "Stu, is that you?" Nothing came back from the other end, and the color went out of her face.
"Who is this?" she said.
I got up slowly. Sidney was watching me now, and I didn't want her to see how scared I was. I slid the Maglite out from under the pillow and held it along my forearm and held my other hand out to her, flat, palm down. Stay calm. Stay with me.
"I'm not playing this game," she said into the phone. Her voice was shaking. "I'm hanging up. I'm calling the police."
Whatever the voice said next, she didn't hang up.
I moved to the doorway between the living room and the front hall, where I could see the front door and the coat closet and the stairs, and put my back to the wall.
"How do you know that?" Sidney whispered. "How do you know he's here?"
She was looking at me. The voice was talking about me. I held out my hand for the phone, and after a second she gave it to me.
"...cute, Sid. Real cute. Your own little bodyguard." The voice was exactly like the movie, deep and soft and warm, a voice you'd trust if you didn't know better, with the changer's fuzz running underneath it. It was so exactly like the movie that for a second my brain whited out and I was twenty-six at my desk again with headphones on and that voice coming out of a speaker.
"Hi," I said.
A pause. Then, delighted: "Randy! Randy Meeks. The movie man."
"That's me, alright."
"So tell me something, movie man. In the movies, what happens to the guy who shows up where he's not supposed to be?"
I looked at the coat closet. The gap beneath it stayed dark.
"Cops are on their way," I said. "I called them twenty minutes ago."
It was a lie, and the voice knew it. It laughed, long and soft, and said, "No, you didn't." Then it said something I've thought about a lot since.
"You're not supposed to be here, Randy."
My fingers tightened on the receiver. I wanted him to keep talking long enough for me to place the voice, as if that could tell me which door to watch.
The line went dead, and the lights went out.
* * *
I couldn't see Sidney. I reached toward where she'd been sitting and caught the edge of the couch instead.
The whole house went black at once, the TV and the lamp and the porch light together. Main breaker, I thought, and the panel would be in the garage, so they were in the garage—no, one of them was in the garage, and the other one—
"Randy," Sidney said in the dark, very small.
"I'm here." I found her arm and pulled her down behind the end of the couch where she'd have a wall at her back, and clicked on the Maglite, and the beam jumped across the room, huge and white. "Stay down. Stay behind me. If I say run, you go out the front door and down to the street and you scream as loud as you can the whole way, and you don't stop for anything."
"What's happening? What's happening?"
"Somebody's in the house."
"How do you know?"
"The breaker's inside. Stay low."
I didn't say because I've seen this movie, because that sounded insane, and I didn't say because your dad's tied up in a closet across town and they took his keys. There'd be time for that later, if there was a later.
The house was dead quiet except for the refrigerator ticking as it cooled, Sidney's breathing, fast and shallow, my own heart, and, very faintly, toward the back of the house, the door from the garage into the kitchen opening.
I swept the light over the front hall, the coat closet, the stairs, the front door with its chain still on. Then I aimed it at the kitchen doorway and held it at head height, so anybody coming through would be coming through blind.
Nobody came.
"Randy," Sidney whispered.
"Shh."
The phone rang. It was on the floor where I'd dropped it, ringing loud in the dead house, and Sidney screamed, and I made a mistake—I looked. Just a flick of the eyes, with the beam following, and when I brought the light back up to the kitchen doorway he was already through it.
The mask filled the beam. I hadn't heard him cross the kitchen. His knife was already coming up, Sidney was behind me, and I stepped into him because I couldn't find room to do anything else.
I got my left arm up, flashlight and all. The knife went across my forearm like a hot wire. I kept the light. I brought the Maglite around and hit him in the side of the head with all three pounds of aluminum, and the mask twisted sideways, and he staggered back a step into the kitchen doorframe with a grunt—a real, human sound.
That was the opening, and I knew it the way you know a door's unlocked before you try the handle. My right hand was already behind my back. The dish towel fell off the blade somewhere between my spine and his throat. I put my bleeding left forearm across his knife wrist and pinned it to the doorframe, stepped in with my hip against his, and set the point of Mr. Prescott's chef's knife under the jaw of the mask, where a throat had to be.
For one second I had him.
I could feel him breathing against the point through the rubber. I could feel the second heartbeat in my chest come up roaring, yes, now, push. The Army had shown me exactly this, on a mat in Georgia, with a rubber knife and a staff sergeant saying it's not the blade, it's the weight behind it. I knew where the weight went.
I pushed, and the weight wasn't there.
It was a seventeen-year-old video clerk's arm, the one I'd looked at in the mirror that morning, and it shook. The knife point dented the rubber and stopped. And Billy Loomis, who'd been lifting weights in Stu's garage since ninth grade and was heavier than he looked under the robe, simply put his free hand around my wrist and moved it.
Not fast. That was the worst part. He moved the point away from his throat an inch at a time, the way you'd move a kid's hand off a hot stove, and I put everything I had against it, and everything I had was nothing. He was so much stronger than I'd thought. I'd pictured him all day as the boy at the fountain, loose and narrow, and I'd forgotten that loose and narrow is what a lot of strong people look like sitting down.
He turned my wrist until the bones ground and the chef's knife fell out of my fingers. He snapped the mask forward into my face, hard plastic into my nose, and the light went white. Then he got both hands on my chest and shoved, and I went flying. My shoes skidded and I couldn't get them under me.
I hit the wall. The flashlight went spinning across the floor, its beam whipping around the room, and my head cracked against something, and for a second everything went white and far away.
When it came back he was standing over me with the knife.
He didn't look like what I'd just felt. Tall and lean, a runner's build under the robe, the mask still crooked enough to show a slice of pale throat, and I could hear him breathing hard through the fabric. He stood the way he'd sat at the fountain, loose and patient, weight on his back foot, like he had all the time in the world.
Billy, I thought. The build, the way he held himself. I couldn't see his face. I wanted to believe he was only frightening her tonight, because that was how I'd survived thinking about this all afternoon. He moved the knife and I stopped thinking.
He raised the knife.
And Sidney Prescott hit him in the back of the head with a lamp.
The brass one from the end table, the one with the heavy base. She swung it two-handed like a baseball bat, the base connected with a sound like a dropped bowling ball, and he went sideways into the coffee table and took it down with him in a crash of glass.
I don't know how I got up. Sidney caught my sleeve. I got my feet under me and we ran for the front door, and I fumbled at the chain with my left hand, which was slick and hot with blood and wouldn't work, until Sidney shoved me aside and did it herself. Behind us glass crunched as he got up.
The door came open on cold air and the wide dark lawn running down to the street.
"Run!" I said, and we did.
We went down that lawn screaming, both of us, as loud as we could—Help! Help! Somebody help!—the whole length of it. I looked back once and saw a figure in the doorway, black on black, the white mask catching the moon, and it didn't follow; it stood there watching us, and then it stepped back into the dark house and was gone.
Across the street a porch light came on, then another. A dog started barking. A man in a bathrobe came out on his front step and shouted "What's going on?", and Sidney screamed at him to call the police, call the police, and he went back inside fast.
We ended up in the middle of the road. Sidney was shaking so hard her teeth chattered. I held my left arm against my chest with blood coming through my fingers and my flannel sleeve soaked through, and I wasn't watching the house anymore. I was watching the big dark trees on the east side of the lot, the ones close to Sidney's bedroom window, and there was nobody in them. I waited for movement anyway. I no longer knew what he would do next.
Something chimed behind my eyes, soft and bright, like a microwave finishing in another room. I blinked hard, trying to keep the road in view through the panel.
◆ CHAOS GACHA ◆
> Feat Achieved!Drive a killer out of his own scene
> +1× Silver Ability Gacha Ticket
> Feat Achieved!Change a fated night
> +1× Bronze Trait Gacha Ticket
▌
I shut it without reading it twice; Sidney was still shaking next to me, and it could wait. Under my breastbone the second heartbeat was still going, fast and happy. The part of me Battle Maniac had its hooks in had enjoyed that, and it wanted to go back up the lawn and finish it, and I stood in the road with my arm bleeding into my sleeve and didn't let it.
* * *
The sheriff's department got there in eleven minutes: two squad cars with the lights going, then an ambulance, then more cars. Dewey was in the first one. He came out at a run with his gun drawn, saw his sister's best friend standing in the road in her socks, shaking, and the Meeks kid next to her dripping blood onto the asphalt, and his face went through about six things at once.
"He's in the house," Sidney said. "He was in the house. He had a knife. Randy—Randy hit him with—"
"Is he still in there?"
"I don't know," I said. "He went back inside. Maybe out the back. There's a door from the garage."
Dewey looked at the house, at his partner, back at us, and for a second I saw exactly how young he was. Then he swallowed it and got his voice back. "Stay with the paramedics," he said, and went.
They didn't find anybody. They found the power switched off at the panel in the garage and the door from the garage to the kitchen standing open. They found glass all over the living room, a brass lamp with blood and a little tuft of dark hair on the base, a lot of my blood on the floor and the wall, and Mr. Prescott's cordless lying where I'd dropped it. They didn't find a key in any lock or a broken window or any sign of how somebody got in. I heard a deputy tell Sheriff Burke that, and I heard Burke say, "Then somebody had a key," and I sat on the back bumper of the ambulance while a paramedic named Rosa picked glass out of my palm and thought, Good. Somebody write that down.
The cut on my arm needed stitches. Rosa asked me to move my fingers, then checked them again when I said they felt numb.
"You were lucky," she said.
I watched her tighten the dressing. I hadn't chosen where the blade landed. I needed to remember that.
Sidney sat on the other bumper wrapped in a blanket with a deputy asking her questions. She kept looking over at me, and every time I nodded she took a breath.
At some point Tatum's car came screeching up the road, and Tatum sprinted out of it and threw herself at Sidney and held on. Then she looked at me over Sidney's shoulder, at my arm and the blood all down my shirt, and her face went from panic to something I couldn't read.
"Randy?" she said.
"Hey, Tatum."
"You—what—"
"She got us out," I said.
Tatum looked back at Sidney. Then she let go of her long enough to hug me, carefully around the bandage.
"You idiot," she said into my shoulder. Her voice broke on it. I kept my good hand on her back until she stepped away.
* * *
Billy showed up at nine-fifteen, by which time half the street was out on the lawns in bathrobes, and two news vans had rolled up with Gale Weathers's in front. The deputies had set up a line to keep the cameras back. Kenny was filming the house over the tape, Gale was doing a stand-up with the ambulance lights going behind her, and I could guess the copy: Horror returns to the Prescott home. One year after Maureen Prescott's brutal murder...
Then there was a commotion at the tape—somebody said "Hey, you can't—"—and Billy Loomis ducked under it and ran across the lawn.
"Sid!"
He went straight to her and held her, and she let him, and he buried his face in her hair and said her name over and over. He was in jeans and a jacket, out of breath, his hair damp like he'd just showered and combed forward on the left side, and he looked for all the world like a boy who'd heard on his dad's police scanner that somebody had attacked his girlfriend and had driven over as fast as he could, which was exactly what he told Dewey: his dad had a scanner, he'd heard the address and jumped in the car.
Dewey asked about his head, because when Billy turned into the ambulance lights you could see a raw scrape at the hairline above his left ear with a walnut-sized lump under it. Billy touched it and winced and laughed at himself. He'd been running up the Prescotts' driveway in the dark, tripped over the curb, hit his head trying to catch himself, stupid. Dewey nodded. It was a good story, exactly the kind of thing that happens to a kid running to his girlfriend.
Nobody searched him: he hadn't climbed in any window. As far as anyone knew he'd never set foot in that house, and no cell phone had fallen out of his pocket onto a bedroom carpet. He'd come running across the lawn in front of twenty witnesses and two news cameras, frantic, the perfect boyfriend, with a bump on his head he'd explained before anybody could wonder about it.
I watched him from the ambulance, and after a minute he looked right at me over Sidney's shoulder. It was the look from the fountain, friendly and concerned, and behind it, like something moving under ice, was a kind of attention I'd seen on a handful of people in my life and never on good ones: somebody taking a measurement.
He let go of Sidney, came over, and crouched in front of the bumper so we were eye to eye. From that close I could see where the Maglite had caught him, just above the ear, where the hair didn't quite cover it. I looked at it, and he let me. He looked at my arm, the gauze, the blood on my shirt.
"Jesus, Randy," he said. "You okay, man?"
"I'm okay."
"Sid said you fought him off. Hit him with a flashlight or something."
"Sid hit him with a lamp."
His eyes stayed on mine. He put a hand on my knee and squeezed.
"You're a hero, man," Billy said. "Seriously. I don't know what would've happened if you weren't here."
"Yeah," I said. "Me neither."
We looked at each other, and I thought about how, in the movie, this is the night Billy gets arrested: the window, the phone falling out, Sidney running, a night at the sheriff's station, released in the morning, and from then on he's the one who was wrongly accused and nobody looks at him twice. Tonight he'd arrived through the police line with an explanation ready. The arrest I'd counted on hadn't happened. He'd showered and changed and combed his hair over the place I'd hit him and run across a lawn in front of two TV cameras to hold his girlfriend, and every person on this street would swear to it. I'd kept Sidney from being alone in the dark. I'd put a flashlight into Billy Loomis's skull and Sidney had put a lamp into it, and he was crouching in front of me with the lump to prove it—and I'd helped him escape the suspicion I'd been relying on.
The wound was still something a deputy could check. So were the lamp and the blood. I needed to stop sorting the night into scenes that had gone right or wrong and give somebody the facts. But Billy's hand was on my knee, Sidney was watching us, and for another few seconds I sat there saying nothing.
"Get some sleep, Randy," Billy said. He gave my knee one more squeeze and stood up. "Big week."
He went back to Sidney. She leaned into him, and he put his arm around her and looked out over the lawn at the cameras and the lights with an expression of perfect, handsome grief.
* * *
My mom got there at nine-forty, and I heard her before I saw her, yelling at a deputy at the tape who didn't want to let her through. She got through anyway and came across the lawn in her work blouse and slippers with her hair coming out of its clip, and when she saw me on the back of the ambulance with my arm wrapped and blood all down my front, she made a sound I'll remember for the rest of my life.
Then she had both arms around me and my face in her shoulder, holding on like I might fall off the planet if she let go. She smelled like coffee and hand lotion, and she was shaking. She said my name—Randy's name—over and over into my hair, the way Billy had said Sidney's, except she meant it.
I didn't know where to put my hands. I put my good arm around her.
"I'm okay, Mom," I said. "I'm okay. I'm okay."
"You said you'd be home."
"I know. I'm sorry."
"You said you'd be home by nine."
"I should've called."
She drew back far enough to look at the dressing. "Where are they taking you?"
Rosa answered. Mom listened, asked whether she could ride with me, then put her arm around my shoulders again. I leaned against her while she arranged it.
Over her shoulder, across the lawn, Billy was stroking Sidney's hair by a squad car. Somewhere in town Stu was putting a voice changer back wherever they kept it. I didn't know what they'd change now. I had spent the afternoon afraid of losing the only version of events I understood, and I'd lost it anyway. I held on to my mother and watched the lights go around and around on the dark lawn and started counting the hours until the party.Last edited: Oct 21, 2026 Like Quote ReplyReport Reactions:Shadow Pen, Rozrand, Starheco and 1,157 othersManOMarsSep 29, 2026Reader mode