YOU KNOW THAT MOMENT in a horror movie when the main character hears some kind of weird scratching and moaning coming from the dark, ominous basement, and she thinks, Huh, I should go down there and check that out? And you’re watching her tromp down the stairs with a dinky little flashlight, descending toward almost certain death. You’re covering your eyes and screaming, no, don’t, are you insane, stay where you are, or even better, go hide under the bed and let some other character save the day?

That was me, standing just beyond the floodlights of Shaggy’s hulking mansion, steeling myself to go inside and face my doom. And that was also me, the little voice inside my head, screaming that I should turn around before it was too late.

It was too late.

I approached the house, heart sinking ever deeper into stomach. The Rogers estate was the biggest house in town. It had been in Shaggy’s family for generations and looked, appropriately, like something you’d only find in a horror movie, the kind of gothic estate with bats in the attic, a mummy in the basement, and a bunch of secret doors and hidden corridors eager to trap you in the dark.

I hadn’t been here since I was a little kid. Daphne, Fred, Shaggy, and I used to have sleepovers in the great room—that’s what Shaggy’s mother called it—and after his parents went to bed, we would creep through the house with flashlights, hunting for ghosts. I think, secretly, we all expected to find some.

Ghosts would have been preferable to what I expected to find that night when I stepped inside. I’d never been to one of Shaggy’s infamous parties, and I would have been more than happy to keep it that way. But Marcy was on the other side of that door, and so I was prepared to force myself through it.

“Like, am I hallucinating?” Shaggy asked when he saw me on the doorstep. “Like, I must be hallucinating, because no way did Velma Dinkley actually show up.” He swept his arm in a low, dramatic bow. “Consider me honored.”

The house was just as impressive inside as it was out. Lots of marble, shiny wood, some glints of gold. A row of gilt-edged portraits lining the hallway, oil paintings of Rogers forefathers, each bearing Shaggy’s distinctive broad forehead and sandy hair.

The Rogerses were the closest thing Crystal Cove had to royalty—they could trace their origins back even farther than my father’s family, because Shaggy’s great-great-great-whatever grandfather had been the only one of the original settlers to survive the mass vanishing. In fact, he was the one who discovered the vanishing. Back in 1850, he’d gone on an expedition inland in search of gold, and returned a month later to find that everyone he knew was gone. There was only one survivor: Rogers’s young son, asleep under a tree. Whatever had happened to the rest of the town, he’d slept through the whole thing. Or so he told his father.

Samuel Rogers, the original, had rebuilt the town from scratch. When the town burned down, it was a Rogers who spearheaded the rebuilding yet again, persuading the terrified survivors that the land wasn’t cursed, that there was no reason to run away, that they could build a bigger and better Crystal Cove on the ashes. (And not so coincidentally, it was a Rogers who would sell them the lumber.)

Ever since, Rogers men (and some women, though in my opinion, not nearly enough) had been behind the scenes, pulling Crystal Cove’s strings. Shaggy’s dad, also named Samuel Rogers, was enemy number one in our house, at least according to my mother. He wanted to abolish the zoning laws that made sure any Crystal Cove land sold to outside developers didn’t damage the character of the town. “We are the character of the town,” he’d yelled at my mother, during the last town meeting she’d dragged me to. “It’s our choice whether we want our character to be poor and mired in the past or rich and looking toward the future.”

My father wasn’t a huge fan, either, and liked to joke—back when he joked about things—that Mr. Rogers must have blackmail material on everyone in town, because no man had ever been so good at getting everything he wanted.

Shaggy, somehow, had turned out the opposite of what you might expect from a rich kid born to small-town royalty. He didn’t act like Crystal Cove’s crown prince. He was popular, of course—he was rich, hot, and threw legendary parties, so how could he not be popular—but he didn’t much seem to care about that. Or anything else.

Shaggy showed me where to find the food, where to find the drinks, where to find the dancing. (I tried not to shudder.) When I asked if he knew where to find Marcy, he scowled.

“Trust me, you won’t be able to miss her. Anyway—” He slung an arm around my shoulder, pulled me in for a quick hug, almost as if we were friends and he was genuinely happy to see me. “Make yourself at home.”

“Where are you going?” I asked as he turned toward the grand staircase.

“Up to my room—got a dog and a pizza waiting for me.”

“But you’re having a party,” I said, confused.

“Yeah. I hate parties.”

“Um … I hate to ask an obvious question, but …”

“Think of it as a public service, man,” Shaggy said. “I like to spread the joy. So do me a favor, V? Try to look at least a little joyful.”

I gave him the biggest, fakest smile I could muster. He laughed, and then hurried upstairs. I was dying to follow. Instead, I veered straight into the heart of adolescent darkness, also known as: party time. It was dark, which was good, because I was dressed all wrong—nothing strappy or sparkly or blousy or hot. I’d known that going in, of course. I was wearing my own personal battle gear—thrift store jeans, an orange hoodie, combat boots. Suffice to say, I didn’t exactly fit in.

Also, for the record, I didn’t have anything against girls who cared about wearing strappy, sparkly, blousy, hot clothes, or cared about clothes at all, much like I didn’t have anything against girls who cared about makeup or dating or skin care or whatever clichéd thing high school girls were supposed to care about these days. I’d read Simone de Beauvoir and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Andi Zeisler, I knew all about third-wave feminism and internalized misogyny. I’d also seen The Devil Wears Prada—twice. If a girl wanted to be überfeminine and spend all her time staring in the mirror, comparing lip gloss colors, I didn’t have anything against it on general principle.

No, it wasn’t girls in general I hated. It was these girls in particular. It was Shawna Foster and Haley Moriguchi and Nisha Shah and Marcy Heller and, that dark queen of the feminine dark arts, Daphne Blake. It was these particular girls, who’d gotten some subsonic message in middle school that they were contractually obligated to make me feel like a walking Ugly Doll, and they’d been doing their job with zeal ever since.

Fortunately, they were all too focused on what they were doing to pay much attention to me. What they were doing: not what I expected, from all those teen movies. Or from all that Monday morning gossip about how “epic” and “wild” and “legendary” that weekend’s party had been. Mostly, there were just little clumps of people sitting on couches, talking, munching popcorn. Pretty much what I did on a normal Friday night, except with five people crowded onto one couch.

Fred Jones, not surprisingly, was the exception to the rule, doing cartwheels across the crowded room and flirting with any girl he collided with. None of them seemed to mind, and why would they? Fred was as handsome as he was charming, big and blond and absurdly easygoing. Last I’d heard, he was dating Jacqui Parker, a tattooed senior with a Thunderbird, but that was Fred: He’d dated half the girls in school and probably made out with the other half. Sometimes I thought I was the only girl in school Fred Jones hadn’t dated. Not that I thought about this. Not much, at least.

One thing was weird, though. The house was filled with popular kids, but the most popular girls, the girls everyone else tried to suck up to and imitate—including my prime target, Marcy Heller—were nowhere to be seen. But it didn’t take a detective to suss this one out: Wherever I found the little worker bees, I would find their queen. Not in the living room. Not in the dining room. Not in the great hall or the billiards room or the sun porch or the tea lounge.

Then I stepped into the small room in the far west corner of the house, the one that Shaggy used to call his dad’s war room, because it was a room with one couch and about a thousand military artifacts—uniforms, battle maps, dusty old helmets, even a sword supposedly used in the Revolutionary War.

The sword hung on the wall, blade pointing straight down like an arrow, and beneath it: Marcy Heller. Surrounded by all her pathetic acolytes, just like I’d thought. Her eyes were closed, her face in shadow. As I got closer, I realized the girls around her had linked hands, and they all had their eyes closed. Marcy was speaking in a hushed, almost holy voice.

“Great spirits of our Crystal Cove forefathers,” she said, face tipped to the ceiling. “We ask your forgiveness for our trespass and our disrespect. For our years of partying on your grave.”

Unless there were secretly bodies buried in Shaggy’s backyard, I figured she was talking about the town’s annual anniversary celebration, coming up in a couple weeks. It used to be a solemn commemoration of the mass disappearance, but these days it was just an excuse for people to sell cheap Haunted Village souvenirs and set off illegal fireworks.

“We want to apologize,” Marcy said. “We want to atone for our offenses.”

“You don’t have to apologize to the dead,” I told her, sharply. “But maybe you should say you’re sorry to some of the living you’ve offended. Like my mother.”

There were six girls in the circle, including Marcy. They all turned to glare at me, as one.

“You’re breaking the circuit,” Shawna said.

“Not to mention being a total jerk,” Haley said.

They were all here, all the girls who could make me miserable with a single glance—all except for Daphne. I wondered where she was and why she wasn’t joined to Marcy’s hip, as usual, and then reminded myself that wasn’t my concern.

“Give me a break,” Marcy said, rising to her feet. “Your mom sucks at her job. She deserves whatever she gets.”

“You take that back,” I said, aware that I was sounding like a child. Pure white-hot rage had a way of making me regress. So did Marcy.

“Or what, Detective Dinkley?”

I flinched. That was what she and all her little minions had called me when we were kids, thanks to Daphne.

“I know you don’t care about lying, Marcy, but how do you not care when your lies hurt actual people? Are you really that heartless?”

This time, she flinched. And for a flicker of a second, it seemed like that might actually have gotten through. Then Marcy snickered. “You know what, Detective? You don’t have a clue. You never did.”

On cue, the other girls started laughing and asking if I was going to try to bust the ghost, and I got out of there before I could make everything worse by letting them see they had any power over me.

I nearly slammed into Daphne on my way out the door. Of course. Because no public humiliation could be complete without her.

“Velma?” she said, with an almost perfect imitation of human concern. “You okay?”

“Like you would care,” I spat, and then flung myself out the door, into the blissfully cool, quiet dark.

Remember this, I told myself, next time you feel sorry for yourself about spending so much time alone. At least when you’re alone, when you’re invisible, there’s no one to laugh in your face. And no one to see you cry.