My hands lower from my ears—
And in that same exact moment, an eruption of applause blasts through the room.
Students throw up from the pews, standing, cheering, howling, hands smacking together…
And I just stare at the wall.
Scorched.
16
The entire next day, Dray haunts me.
I don’t speak a word to him at breakfast—which is at the Snake table now, because when I try to sit with Courtney, she leaves.
Dray only considers me in that hollow, distant way that he does.
It’s not so much himtodaywho haunts me. It’s Dray yesterday.
It’s the portraits, the screams, the casual way he brought them to life just to burn them into obscurity, to make them suffer or at least give us the illusion of it—and even if it’s just an illusion, and the portraits are perfectly fine down there in the hall, he chose to make it harrowing, to make them scream, their faces twist in anguish.
I have been afraid of Dray before.
A lot.
But this…
This is ice in my chest, it’s a gutted sensation in my stomach, it’s nausea when I chew my food.
I don’t think I speak a word through breakfast, and not for the rest of the day in the second round of practice exams.
I sit bundled up on the pew, arms wrapped around my woollen sweater, and watch the prints reveal on the podium.
Teddy’s is rituals.
I often thought of Teddy as too similar looking to Dray for my appreciation. He’s hot, no doubt about it, with dirty blond hair and ocean eyes, a brilliant smile and dimples—but I never let myself lust over him, because he shares an echo of Dray.
It lurks behind his bright eyes and wide smile, a little hint of viciousness, like he breaks hearts for fun, pits crushes against each other and sits back and watches.
He’s often behind the blackout pranks.
Things can get dark in the blackout, fast.
My strategy is always to get back to the dorm room as quick as I possibly can.
I watch Teddy on the podium and know that I was right about him.
Rituals are a dark print, and he’s too practiced at slicing open that poor chicken’s throat, too unaffected as he rips off the head and lets blood fall onto the painted pentacle on the floor, and his grin is too wide as he successfully summons a fucking poltergeist, and all hell breaks loose in the hall.
Poltergeists can only physically affect those who scream—but that doesn’t stop the shrieks from ripping through the hall.
Teddy laughs.
He laughs as seniors are clawed and thrown into walls—and the master of rituals has to step in to end it.
The poltergeist vanishes, but it reminds me of the poltergeist that was loitering in the corridors just last semester.
Maybe Teddy was the one who let it loose.
