LILLIAN D’ARCANGELO walked the long hallway of the administration building. Her sensible heels clicked on the glossy marble floor. She slowed as she made her way to a glass case that shielded merits, awards, and accolades Trask wanted to show off. As she sat staring at the papers and plaques that had less to do with the school as an institution of learning than with things that praised the school’s founder and honored its current keeper Harlan McKenna, she wondered if all of it wasn’t at the expense of students.

As Lillian stared into a space so full but so empty, her eyes refocused to her own reflection. She looked at the dark hair she always kept up and thought how much easier it would be to keep it down at her waist, where she felt it belonged. She saw the lines in her face and remembered when she was a student at Trask, so many years ago. She, too, had the same dreams as so many of the girls she now mentored. But it was her eyes she noticed the most, and that filled her with regret. The sadness she hoped only she could see. The melancholy that she hadn’t lived a life, but a lie.

Most of the girls, just like herself, would never make it. Some would, of course. Maybe not big, but they’d find work in commercials, or local theater, maybe bit parts in bad Saturday night sci-fi creature features. They’d find a way to make ends meet, maybe by waiting tables, or whip-creaming lattes, or folding T-shirts at a department store while they danced in a theme park, or sang in a club, or played bad parts in bad student films, or painted portraits. She wondered just how long they would hold on to a dream. How long before they grasped that the real world required real money, and a real job, and real responsibility? Those are the tenets that dashed the hopes of so many.

Like me, she had to admit to herself.

The woman knew her story was not one to be told to build up such hope. She was one who couldn’t. And because she couldn’t, she taught. She made sure her story was kept not just close to her vest, but tucked away inside a deep pocket. No one wanted to mourn the lost career of a fading wannabe. A has-been. She stopped herself from forming the full thought, a never-was. She smirked.

She had not given up.

She had given in.

She knew what they said, everyone who couldn’t understand what a creative soul is tortured with. The ones who call out the correct sports play minutes after it happens on the field because they, after all, are safe in their recliners with a beer, chips, and a belly.

No one can understand what it’s like to lose the one thing you worked for your whole life.

She thought of Sydney, and how the pressure had overtaken her. And then she saw the hurt in Layna’s eyes when she was told she’d been given a wonderful opportunity at the expense of another student. Her friend. But the show must go on. That’s what they’d been told all their lives.

Lillian knew the cliché was true. Besides, there was a school to run, and students still there who mattered, and expected things. No matter who got hurt.

It made her wonder. It made her worry.

The click of a closing door stopped her from traveling further into the rabbit hole of regret and fear of the place that might be causing such darkness. Its latch entered the strike plate and echoed.

She thought the sound may have originated in her office, so she walked toward it.

Her usually strong fingers tentatively grabbed the brushed metal handle of her door. She knew two things, the first being that she had locked her door, as she always did. It was the second that bothered her, and that was she expected the door handle to lower with ease instead of stopping after her first gentle push.

Her door was locked.

It was also slightly ajar.

She nudged it open. Normally her hand would reach to the left of the door, slide in between a tall filing cabinet and the wall, and flick on the lights. This time she let the hallway fluorescent flood the room, making her a silhouette to the person seated in her chair, who swiveled around to look up at her.

“What are you doing in my office?” she asked McKenna, with more than a little anger in her voice. She watched as the dean, unfazed, scanned the items on her desk.

“We have some things to talk about, you and I,” McKenna answered.

Lillian’s heart beat fast, and her hands tingled. Adrenaline pumped through her body. She was angry, but also worried.

“It seems there have been some unexpected developments,” McKenna stated.

A profound understatement. “Are you kidding me?” she hissed. “None of this would have been an issue had she just been made aware of her mother.”

“Careful, Lillian.” The dean stood. “Poor Layna and her mother. A tragedy, really. But what of everything else? Hmm? Just where should we draw the line?”

Lillian slammed the door and rushed closer to him. “Lines have been obliterated! First Sydney, and now Alice. We don’t know where that poor girl is or what might have happened to her.”

“Tragedies are inevitable,” the dean said in his smooth, cold voice.

“Just as inevitable as a young girl finding out that the story of her family, her life, has been a lie? Nothing can go right from here.” Lillian leaned in toward McKenna. Facing off. “You’ve dug yourself a grave with these secrets.”

The dean raised his right eyebrow before slowly turning to the frosted windows behind the desk.

Lillian watched him. He was so calculated, so calm.

“Is that so?” McKenna asked.

The rhetorical nature of the question was not lost on Lillian. She’d had enough. She wasn’t prepared for his tenor, so deep, so dark, more devoid of feeling than she remembered him being capable of. She didn’t like what had happened. What was happening. Didn’t like what she had been asked to be a part of all these years.

Most of all, for the first time, Lillian D’Arcangelo did not trust her boss, a man she had thought was a friend.

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LAYNA WAS ENVELOPED by the blankets on her bed, staring at the manuscript. She read each page, then discerned that she had absorbed none of the words, none of the information, none of its meaning. Like it would so often do when she was reading for school, her mind wandered. Her eyes scanned every syllable, but they ultimately meant nothing, and she would have to re-read them.

Layna was far too young, a baby, to remember her mother, but the two had been together. Or so she was told. Her grandparents, her mother’s parents, had mentioned the times Amanda took her for walks in the park when the air was cool and crisp. Or that Layna would be seated in the baby carrier, facing her mother, and that they couldn’t stop looking at one another and smiling.

Reading the pages, their difficult words about revenge, prejudice, and tolerance, and yes, murder, was difficult. But more difficult was that everything Layna ever thought she knew may not have been true. The adults entrusted to care for and love and shape her could no longer be trusted. Her grandparents were the chief offenders. Why had they allowed a charade to go on so long? Why—how—could they smile even as they lied to their only grandchild? And Mrs. D’Arcangelo, to whom Layna looked up, was now part of some master plan to sweep secrets not just under a rug, but away forever. What she and Dean McKenna had not counted on was that there was always a time when things must come clean.

Layna stopped in mid-flip of a page when a noise, something she couldn’t quite make out, rattled from somewhere in the hallway. She looked up to the left wall of her room, where it seemed to be the loudest.

Definitely in the hallway, she thought. Definitely close.

Her eyes went to the deadbolt on her door, and she let out a small breath when she saw it was locked. She waited silently, her head up, her mouth slightly open to minimize the sound of her breath. But there was nothing, so she returned to the pages.

Another noise, this time louder. And closer. Layna twitched. She closed the manuscript and crawled off the bed, knocking over a stuffed bear with a graduation cap. Something from a friend on the mainland, though she couldn’t remember exactly who had given it to her. At least not right at that moment.

Her feet hit the carpeted floor, and she shuffled to the door. She pressed the side of her face against it, and waited.

Still, she heard nothing.

With one hand flat on the door, she unlocked the deadbolt, then pulled the door open just enough to see outside. Her foot wedged against it at the bottom, just in case.

Warm light from the hallway etched its way vertically down her face and body. When Layna heard and saw nothing, she slid her foot away and opened the door wider.

She stepped into the hallway. She was alone. The streamers on the door across the hall from her were still, so the stairwell door must not have been opened. She slid across the hall and checked that door. Locked. Her hand grazed the wall as she walked down the corridor and checked every door she passed. Locked, locked, locked. And then she reached the stairwell door.

Layna looked through its long glass window. She saw nothing when she looked left, then right. She turned back to the hallway behind her, and suddenly the hairs on the back of her neck raised. There was nobody, of course, and she knew it. She turned back to the stairwell door, ready to leave.

Then she screamed.

Max’s face popped into view through the glass. Layna jumped back, her instincts telling her to run.

Max entered the hallway, followed by Nancy.

“Jesus Christ, Max!” Layna yelled, hitting him on the shoulder.

“Ow, babe, I’m sorry,” Max said. “We didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing alone, anyway?”

“What are you two doing skulking around campus?”

Max and Nancy looked at one another, but neither offered an answer.

Layna continued. “I’ve been reading that thing my mother wrote. Guys, it’s weird. It’s scaring me. I really think we’re in trouble.”

Nancy finally spoke. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Layna looked at her quizzically as Max took her hand.

“Grab it and let’s go,” he said.

The rain continued to fall as Layna, Max, and Nancy left the dorm and made their way across the campus. Layna had her book bag slung over a shoulder. Inside was the play, tucked away.

“I don’t understand all of it,” Layna said, “but it kinda reads like some sort of revenge treatise.”

“How Unabomber of your mother,” Nancy said with a straight face.

Layna ignored the comment, but Max gave a Really? glance at Nancy, who shrugged it off.

Layna went on. “The lead character is after someone for something they did to her.”

“What was it?” Max asked.

“I don’t know. The last act of the play is missing.”

“What did Crosby think?” Nancy wondered.

Layna shrugged. “He didn’t stay. I told him I was going to read it and he seemed—I don’t know.” But she did know. Or, at least felt she did.

“Upset?” Nancy chimed in.

The words bit Layna. She didn’t want to deal with it. Not then. Not ever. “I have every right to choose what I wanna work on, and this is so much bigger than that. How could you, or he, anyone, think the showcase matters now?”

“I’m sorry, you’re right,” Nancy said, grimacing. “He’s just been distant.”

“Where is he now?” Max asked.

“He said he was going to see if he could dig anything else up about the play, or my mother,” Layna said. “Frankly, I never did much digging at all. I’ve seen a few photos of me as a baby, a few of her, and the clipping about her car accident.”

“I don’t wanna sound like a jerk,” Nancy stated, “but you probably wouldn’t have gotten too far, since you only just now found out you have a new last name. Or a real one. Or something.”

“The fun part of learning your life is a lie,” Layna said sadly. It might have been the first real truth since all of the drama surrounding them, surrounding Layna, started.

“If Nancy and I have been together, and Crosby was with you, who does that leave?” Max wondered.

“Alice,” Nancy said.

Layna put her hand in her bag and felt the pages of the play. “Dillon,” she said, though she hated to admit it. “I don’t know where he’s been or what he’s up to.”

“That’s a first,” Max said.

Layna was too tired to fight again, so she kept her mouth shut. She brushed a thick clump of wet hair from her face, and she saw Nancy and Max’s eyes widen.

“Oh my God. Layn, you’re bleeding!” Nancy said.

Layna stared at her hand. Thin streams of red snaked through her fingers as raindrops hit them. She wiped her forehead again and looked down. There was less blood, but it was blood nonetheless.

“It’s not me! I don’t understand. It’s not me,” Layna repeated.

“It’s your bag,” Max revealed, pointing at it.

All three of them stared down.

Layna was stunned, worried. Her bag was tinged in the bottom corner with red. She dropped it to the ground.

Max grabbed it and opened it. “Oh, God.”

“What is it?” Layna demanded.

Max pulled something dark and wet from the bag.

“What the hell is that?” Nancy asked.

Crimson streamed from his fingers as he held it in his open palm. A severed rabbit’s foot. A real one, Layna knew, cut harshly with something rough. Prickles of bone jutted out from its end.

It sickened her. But what scared her was the note. It was typed, its message simple:

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“IS THIS A JOKE?” LAYNA asked, though she knew it wasn’t.

“It’s a warning,” Max offered. He threw it back into Layna’s bag. “Now do you believe me? Something happened to Alice. And if we don’t do something about it, I think we’re next.”

Layna felt lightheaded. First Sydney killed herself, though Layna questioned that theory. And then Alice went missing, or worse. And now a warning.

“We need help,” Nancy said. “We need to find Daniel. And that detective.”

“And Dillon,” Max spat out. “I wanna know what he’s been up to.”

For the first time on that subject, Layna agreed with Max. She had hoped Max was wrong about Dillon. But now, she didn’t know.

The three friends walked into the night toward the security building.

Layna turned back and squinted through the rain and darkness. She thought she saw movement, maybe a person. Or, she thought, more likely it was her imagination.

But her mind hadn’t played a trick on her. They were being watched.

And Layna did not know that it was Dillon watching, and when he lurched forward from behind a tree, when he flinched at a crackle of thunder, when something solid hit him on the back of the head, Layna did not see the boy she had once almost loved as he crumpled to the ground at the feet of the masked killer.