Chapter One – Maggie
“I can’t believe the closets at the dorm are so small,” my best friend Alexa whined. We were in her bedroom, and she was trying to narrow down what she was going to bring while I lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling.
It was our last summer before we went to college. She’d planned on going somewhere else, but I got her to apply to the same school I was going to last minute, and she got in. We’d be roomies soon enough, and it was going to be fun. Like a slumber party every night.
But she was right. The closets were freaking tiny. Online, the school had measurements of the room and the furniture that came with it—let’s just say the only way this particular room was even semi-useable was because both beds were bunk beds, allowing the space underneath to be used for something else.
A futon and a TV, obviously.
“My closet is going to be so full of shit,” Alexa huffed, collapsing onto a pile of her clothes. She lay back, resting her forearm against her forehead in a dramatic gesture. “You might have to let me have some of your closet space.”
“What? No way.” I propped myself up on my elbows to glare at her. Just because I had less clothes overall didn’t mean I wouldn’t use the space myself. What I figured, that tiny two-foot space would not only have to hold all of my clothes, but also my shower caddy and the laundry basket.
Yeah, I wasn’t going to have any space to give her.
Alexa sat up and let out an annoyed huff. “Don’t they know that’s not enough room? And what about my shoes?”
“I think they don’t care. They just want to pack us in like sardines so they can get as many of us in there as they can. It’s all about the money.” I, myself, was well-aware it was all about the money. My mom, being a single mom working multiple jobs just to keep a roof over our heads, couldn’t afford to chip in. Every dollar would come from a loan in my name.
Alexa was lucky. Her parents were still together, and though they didn’t have great jobs, they could still afford to pay some of it for her.
“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Alexa agreed, and then she returned to sorting her clothes into three separate piles. The yes pile, the no pile, and the maybe pile. After a while, it was obvious ninety percent of her clothes were either going into the yes pile or the maybe one… and that told me she might not be ready to do this yet.
We still had a week. One week before summer vacation ended and we were forced to go back to school. At least it’d be different than high school. I knew a few others from our grade who were going to the same college, but most of the people we’d meet would be new.
I was ready. I liked new people. I could do this.
Maybe if I kept repeating those three sentences to myself, it’d start to sound true. The truth was, I wasn’t ready, and I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready. As for the new people part… well, let’s just say I was one of those quiet people in class, the introverted person everyone made fun of for being so quiet.
It wasn’t that I was quiet all the time. If I liked you, if we were friends, I could be just as loud and annoying as the rest. That’s the thing most people didn’t understand about introverts: we weren’t silent twenty-four/seven. We were just pickier on who got to really see us.
But back to the list of three, the whole I could do this part. I didn’t know if I could. I guessed I was more of a realist than most other people. Personally, I didn’t think going to college was even smart these days, with how expensive it was. There was also no guarantee you’d get a good job once you were done.
What else was there to do, though? Being a realist, I knew I’d never be able to do the one thing I really wanted to.
Sing.
Yeah, yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Everyone with a semi-decent voice wanted to be a singer at one point in their lives. I was one of those kids that got home from school and ran around the house, putting on an imaginary show for no one, and when my sister graduated from daycare and started to go to school too, those imaginary shows moved into my bedroom.
I’d tried to do a YouTube channel once, I’d also tried to get into reels and other social media sites, but those things required me to be outgoing and social—because if you didn’t promote yourself, no one saw it, and then it just stung.
And once you got older, everybody’s dreams got more realistic. Girls who wanted to be ballerinas and the president decided they wanted to be nurses and teachers instead. Nothing wrong with that, but the dreamer part of me never died, and that was why I was going into freshman year as an undecided major. I didn’t know what to do.
Alexa was my opposite. More outgoing, louder. We had other friends, but she was the only one who could ever really bring me out of my shell. She was taller than me by quite a few inches, had less curves overall, and somehow was still skinnier than me. Short black hair and dark brown eyes; she was literally my polar opposite.
Me? I was a whopping five foot three, one hundred and twenty-five pounds, with blond hair so long it fell halfway down my back and blue eyes I’d inherited from my mom. Oh, and let’s not forget the boobs that, depending on the day, were caught between a C and a D.
The only thing Alexa and I had in common was the fact that neither of us had had a boyfriend. She’d done a lot of stuff with a lot of guys, but nothing ever serious for her. If guys could play the field, she’d told me time and time again, why couldn’t she do the same? I guess I understood where she was coming from… sort of.
Me? I hadn’t even had my first kiss yet. And that wasn’t to say I hadn’t tried. I’d gone out on an ice cream date with Rob Turner one day late spring last year, but by the end of it, I’d decided he wasn’t my type.
The guys I tended to like I liked from afar.
I stayed over Alexa’s house until it was time for me to go home and prep dinner. Mom would be on her way home from her first job, and she’d pick up Cleo on her way home. By the time they got home, I’d have dinner pretty much ready. Mom would eat, shower, and then go in to her second job to stock groceries until two in the morning.
Waitress by day, stocker by night. It’s what she had to do all these years to keep Cloe and I fed and clothed, with a roof over our heads. Our dad was pretty much useless; I’d met him only a few times when I was younger. He up and left before Cloe was even born, which was… what? Over eleven years ago now?
I hadn’t seen him in years. He didn’t pay child support, and the courts were useless in going after him. He was as dead to me as any other random stranger could be. I might’ve wished things were different when I was younger, but now that I was older, to him I simply say: whatever. If he could move on, I could, too.
Alexa had to drive me home. We lived only ten minutes apart. As she pulled into the driveway with her old beater car, she pulled right behind someone else’s car—a vehicle neither of us recognized.
“Who’s here?” Alexa said, glancing at me.
“I don’t know,” I answered. I spotted someone standing near the front door. A woman, by the look of her, with long frizzy black hair and sunglasses that hid half her face. The clothes she wore told me she didn’t frequent this area of town.
And what area was that? I wouldn’t call us a poor area, but we weren’t exactly overflowing with three car garages and well-manicured lawns around here, either.
“Need me to grab Donny?” Alexa asked, helpful as ever. Donny was the metal baseball bat she kept in her backseat. Couldn’t ever be too careful. As much as she postured about using Donny on people, she’d never actually done it, and a part of me wondered if she even could.
“No,” I said. “Just wait a second while I see what she’s here for.” Alexa leaned over and asked if I wanted her to come with me, but I shook my head no and got out of the car.
The woman was dressed in fancy clothes, even though her hair was a little wild. And the car that was parked in front of our garage was sleek and small—some type of sportscar, maybe? Whoever this woman was, she had some money and she wasn’t afraid to show it.
Whoever she was, she didn’t even glance up when I approached her. Whatever was on her phone was just so interesting that she didn’t hear me when I asked, “Can I help you?” I had to say it a second time before she finally looked up.
The sunglasses on her face hid everything except her nose, her jaw, and her mouth, and that mouth of hers frowned somewhat as she studied me. Her hand curled around her phone, and she was slow in lifting her glasses so she could see me unobstructed. A pair of black eyes stared straight at me.
“Are you Maggie Stiefer?” She pronounced it sty-fer and not stee-fer , a mistake which most everybody made if they didn’t hear our last name spoken out loud.
“Stiefer,” I repeated it with the correct pronunciation. “Yeah, why?” She wasn’t the only one scrutinizing the other here. I had zero ideas who she was or why she was here, asking for me, of all people.
She suddenly thrust out her phone-free hand, offering it to me. “The name’s Ramona. Are your parents home? There’s something we all need to discuss.” Now that her glasses were off, I put her at about thirty-five years old. She could be older, though; she was wearing a lot of makeup.
I thought it was weird she was offering absolutely no details about who she was or why she was here, and the way she said her first name, like she expected me to know it… who the hell was she?
“It’s just my mom,” I said. “And my sister. They should be getting home any minute now.” A bit of a lie, but she didn’t need to know that. There was nothing inside our house that this Ramona woman would want or steal—she had money, by the looks of her, so what on earth was she doing here?
“Right,” Ramona nodded once as she said, “Cleo, right?”
How did she know my sister’s name? How did she know me? I’d never seen this woman in my life. I was rooted in place, completely at a loss for what to do or what to say, and it must’ve shown on my face, because Ramona said, “Why don’t you let me in, and I can tell you why I’m here?”
“No offense, but you’re a stranger. I’m not letting you into my house.”
She smiled—and by smiled, I meant her lips pulled tightly over her face, like she wasn’t used to smiling. “Maggie, I understand you don’t know me from a random stranger off the street, however, if all goes well, that will be changing very soon.”
And then she gave me a quick run-down why she was here, how she knew me and my sister. It didn’t really make sense to me. Most of it flew right over my head as I tried to disassemble the new information.
With a quick glance to Alexa, I motioned for her to go. She’d rolled her window down to try to eavesdrop, but with how loud her car idled, I doubted she heard anything. If she had, I didn’t think she’d be staring at me with a clueless expression.
What did Ramona say, exactly?
“You’ve won your ticket to the stars. Out of thousands of applicants, you were selected to become the fourth member of Black Sacrament.”