Chapter 6
Priscilla
Anyone who says everything changes has never paid a visit to my old high school.
Wilbur Reed High School even smells the same, like hospital-grade disinfectant and those chocolate chip cookies they bake in the cafeteria every morning.
And my god, Marlowe Jenkins still has that bite to her, doesn’t she?
Down the hall from Dallas’s office, there’s an entrance to the backstage wings.
Since Marlowe so theatrically kicked me out—and she used to say I’m the dramatic one—I decide to escort myself here and conduct my own investigation into his disappearance.
I may play a doctor on TV, but I would make a good detective, too.
A TV detective, that is. I don’t know what real detectives do.
Frankly, that’s none of my business. I just know the TV detective’s name would be Jane.
Scripts love to have wildly specific names you’ve never heard before or overly vague everywoman names.
Detective Jane has a personal connection to the missing person that no one else on her team knows about.
Something so secretive the team can’t ever find out, which is why Jane has to be the one to solve this case on her own, working at odd hours, doing whatever it takes to get the answers.
Jane never gives up, no matter the cost.
Before stepping into the WRHS wings, I perform one of Dallas’s many rituals—spinning clockwise three times and knocking at the edge of the stage as I ask aloud for permission to enter.
I wait a respectful amount of time before deciding the stage not only has permitted me, but is actually thrilled to have me return, then I thrust myself back into the world that used to feel like my only home.
Tears well, and I force myself to hold them back.
Jane the detective wouldn’t cry. Maybe her whole deal is that she can’t cry.
They love to do things like that in scripts.
This is a woman who cannot cry. For Jane, I decide it’s not that she can’t cry.
It’s that she chooses not to. No pain can break her, no matter how extreme.
Jane of the shriveled tear ducts runs her hand along the walls of the stage, remembering.
It’s easier to be her than it is to be me, because Priscilla Covington-French is a person who only exists in Garden Meadows.
Standing on this stage, I sense her threatening to wake from hibernation. Stoic Jane will keep her at bay.
The Memory Machine is right where it was when I last stepped foot on this stage. It even looks the same—a gigantic upright coffin you could live inside, with a four-digit-code-locked doorknob preventing entry.
Lucky for me, and also for Jane, I know the passcode.
Inside the machine, there is only a single button and the smell of old wood. Not sure what I expected, but I hoped for more than this. I close the door to rest my head against it.
What now? I ask Jane. What’s next?
Behind me comes a scathing, sarcastic “Really?”
“Oh Marlowe,” I say, my head still pressed into the Memory Machine.
“You had to know I wouldn’t leave, or you wouldn’t be back here looking for me, would you?
” I turn. “Been a while since you and I stood on this stage together, hasn’t it?
I seem to recall us sharing a very memorable moment right he—”
“Stop it,” she hisses. “Don’t you dare bring that up.”
I smirk. “Hmm. You know, maybe you’re a suspect in Dallas’s disappearance. That would be the real twist.”
This is Jane talking. I like Jane. She has the right instincts. Cold, unflinching Jane. If I let Priscilla speak, she’d apologize for overstepping. That kind of behavior never goes over well with Marlowe Jenkins.
“Yep, you got me,” Marlowe says, playing right into it. “I wanted so badly to have one last chance to act, so I kidnapped Dallas. I have him held hostage in my parents’ basement, and I’m only telling you this now because you’re next.”
Marlowe Jenkins used to love acting more than anyone I’ve ever met, and that’s saying something, considering the sixteen years I’ve lived in Los Angeles surrounded by actors.
Marlowe would read plays like scripture, marking up every single line of dialogue with notes and opinions, even using other plays as references for her decisions.
It was encyclopedic and scary how much she seemed to know about “the craft.” She was a lot of things in high school—bossy, aggressive, unforgiving—but she was never a cynic about acting.
That was something I admired in her. She loved it without reservation or embarrassment or any kind of self-conscious joking, no matter who prodded.
Somewhere between then and now, it seems as though she’s lost that.
I open the door to the Memory Machine, and she storms up to it in the exact way I knew she would, full of huffing indignation. “How did you do that? No one knows the passcode except for Dallas.”
I toss my hair over my shoulder to look back at her, enjoying the fact that she’s gotten so close that my waves brush her face along the way.
“I figured it out my freshman year, but you know me. I’m a discreet person.
I didn’t share that information. The mystery was so much more fun for everyone.
The truth is, as usual, ugly and boring. ”
“You definitely told Jaz,” Marlowe challenges.
She’s right. There was nothing that Jaz Sinclair didn’t know about me back in high school.
But Jaz is another piece of my life that got left behind when I moved to Los Angeles.
We still do occasional check-in texts, and we never miss a birthday message, but it pales in comparison to the bond we once shared.
Marlowe stares at the 9-2-9-5 on the padlock. “What do the numbers mean? It’s not a birthday. Dallas’s is August fifteenth. His mom’s was January eleventh. His dad’s was…” She pauses. “I’m pretty sure it was sometime in June. I want to say the twenty-fifth?”
“I have no idea what the numbers mean,” I tell her. Leave it to Marlowe to memorize Dallas’s family tree.
“How’d you learn it, then?” she asks.
“The same way I learn a lot of things I don’t understand,” I say. “Through observing. Just like I once observed you stealing costumes from the dressing room freshman year. I still don’t understand that one either.”
This lands like a grenade. I’m not playing fair. Then again, when has she?
And really, I spent so many of my high school years trying to understand why she’d done it that I’d enjoy getting some closure on the matter while I’m home.
She never wore those clothes to school. Where did they go?
What did she need them for? Why was she willing to risk everything for them when being prized by Dallas was what she valued the most in the world?
I can see every tendon in Marlowe’s neck as she forces herself to speak. “The costumes were—”
“I’ve got it,” I interrupt. The clouds have parted. The sun is shining. On me. On Jane. On the sacred WRHS stage. “I know how we can find out more about Dallas.” My brain finally catches up to my mouth, and I double back. “Wait. Hold on. Tell me about the costumes.”
“I wasn’t going to tell you anything,” she insists. “You tell me about Dallas.”
We stare.
Full gridlock.
No ground made on either side.
“Okay,” I relent. “What’s the first thing Dallas ever said to us about acting?”
“You have to think like the character to understand them,” she replies.
“Exactly. A-plus student, as always.”
She waves her hands, urging me toward the point.
“We need to think like Dallas to understand where he went,” I say.
She rolls her eyes, already walking away. “Brilliant. I’ll be sure to do just that.”
“Here’s what we know so far,” I continue, undeterred by her rejection.
“Dallas told me he figured out how to walk through universes. The Memory Machine is a mysterious project he has never fully explained to anyone. His phone was found on top of it, which means this must be one of the last places he went before he disappeared. The door was closed when you checked it. So…what if he went inside?”
Marlowe embraces exactly zero percent of the revelatory emphasis I’ve sprinkled atop the last sentence, but she does stop leaving, instead folding her arms across her chest as she says, “And did what?” Her words ooze skepticism. “Disappeared like a magician?”
“Maybe,” I say. “Perhaps there’s a trapdoor beneath our feet that will send us into the dark underbelly of the stage, where Dallas plans to haunt the auditorium like the Phantom of the Opera.
I don’t know. Anytime I ever went into the machine as a teen, I never closed the door.
But I wasn’t thinking like Dallas would. Now I am.”
Marlowe’s caterpillar brows can’t hold the tension of her glare. There must be a kernel of truth in my idea that she recognizes. Something just irritating enough that she can’t ignore it outright.
“And really, what do we have to lose?” I ask, hoping to sweeten the pot. Throw in some joie de vivre.
“Our dignity, our sanity, our reputation as upstanding adults in this community,” she fires back, like she’s been waiting for this very question, forever anti–joie de vivre.
“Do any of those things even matter if Dallas is gone?” I ask. It’s supposed to be a tennis ball thwacked back to her side of the court as hard as she hits them into mine, but it’s too sobering a thought for either of us to keep up the game.
Marlowe bites her bottom lip as she looks at the Memory Machine.
“If we get stuck inside this box and have to scream until someone lets us out, I will never forgive you,” she says, relenting in the way only she can, saying yes by finding a way to assure me I’ll still be at fault in the end.
“When have you ever forgiven me anyway?”
She glares. And glares. And glares.
“You first,” she tells me, opening the door wider.
The thrill of her agreement lights me up. Even better when I catch the faintest hint of interest on her face. Whether this is ridiculous or brilliant, it’s happening.
I climb inside, angling myself a little sideways so there’s room for her, too. Then I reach for her hand the same way I did during our final bow, as we walked downstage together for the last time. Her palm is warm and soft and not very willing, but she grabs on.
“Here goes nothing,” I say, pulling the door shut.