VI
I forced a shallow breath, eyes fixed on the space in front of my lips.
Nothing.
Just regular humid air.
“I’m fine,” I lied, my voice thin. “First-day jitters. I think the coffee hit.”
Penny didn’t look convinced. Her eyes flicked to the door where the tall guy in the black jacket had disappeared, then back to me, her brow knitting beneath her sandy-blonde fringe.
“Right. Jitters.”
She looped her arm through mine.
“Come on.”
We cut across the quad toward the East Wing. Groups of students lounged across the concrete planters like lazy cats—iced coffees sweating rings onto textbooks, conversations picking up exactly where summer had left off.
Penny’s pace slowed, her entire aura shifting from best friend to apex predator.
She was hunting.
Sure enough, the target was sighted.
Leaning against a lone tree just past the bike racks was the reason her soul had briefly left her body. He was tall, golden-skinned, and possessed a grin sharp enough to slice through sunlight.
“There he is,” Penny whispered, voice dropping into a register usually reserved for leaking state secrets. “The human serotonin dispenser himself.”
The boy caught her smile and offered a lazy, two-fingered wave. Before her brain could veto the movement, Penny’s arm shot up in response.
“You like him,” I said, nudging her with my elbow.
She practically glowed.
“I respect him,” she corrected, voice tight with suppressed giddiness. “With my entire being. And possibly my reproductive system.”
Before I could laugh, she steered me toward a small pack of seniors gathered near the stairs.
“These are my people,” Penny announced.
She jerked a thumb toward a tall guy with dark curls and an affable grin.
“Nico.”
He lifted a hand in a lazy salute.
Next to him stood a girl in an oversized sweater, her dark hair shaved short on one side.
“Tess,” Penny said. “She runs half the school office during first period.”
Tess barely looked up from the clipboard tucked under her arm, giving me a quick nod that felt more observant than friendly.
“And finally—” Penny turned toward the last boy, her tone dropping into something more cautious. “Julian Roth. He believes in ghosts and thinks your dad is a legit legend.”
Julian looked harmless enough—soft, sandy-brown hair, a faded hoodie, the kind of easy smile that could talk a librarian out of a late fee. His posture was relaxed, hands in his pockets, feet planted as if he had all the time in the world.
A silver ring glinted on his thumb, spinning and restless.
“Penny,” Julian said, eyes never leaving mine. “I was starting to think you were making her up.”
“She’s real, Julian. Lower the intensity by, like, ten percent.”
“And you’re staying at that haunted house too?” His tone was light, but his dark eyes pinned me to the spot like a butterfly under glass. “Hawthorne House, the Echo Lake breach, the Nevada blackout . . . that Harvey October?”
My stomach gave a twist.
Behind him, Penny mouthed sorry with the hysterical energy of a hostage.
I forced a smile.
“Yeah. That’s him. My dad’s . . . very dedicated to his work.”
Julian’s eyes sharpened.
The ring on his thumb came to a dead stop.
“Funny,” he said, voice dropping to a near whisper. “I didn’t think the great Harvey October had any kids.”
There it was.
The rumor.
The thing people whispered in the corners of Mapleton when they thought the Mad Scientist’s daughter couldn’t hear.
“Yeah, well.” I shifted my backpack strap, palm sweating against the fabric. “I prefer staying out of his . . . whatever you want to call it. Spotlight? Rabbit hole? Midlife crisis? Take your pick.”
Penny snorted so loudly that three freshmen turned to stare.
Julian didn’t laugh. He just watched me, head tilted, as if adjusting the focal length of a lens.
“Have you ever seen a ghost, Madeline?”
“Julian,” Penny groaned. “Can we not scare her off before first period?”
“It’s a fair question.”
I shrugged, keeping my voice level.
“If I have, they were very polite about it. We have an understanding: they don’t rattle chains, and I don’t call the exorcist.”
Julian’s mouth pulled into a slow smile.
“Good to know.”
The warning bell shrieked across the quad, metallic and too human against the stillness between us.
“Saved by the bell,” Penny muttered, clamping a hand around my wrist and tugging me toward the humanities wing. “Come on. Let’s survive first period, then I’ll give you the real tour. The one that doesn’t involve paranormal interrogations.”
The group scattered, their laughter trailing off like confetti caught in a breeze, vanishing into the rush of students.
But Julian didn’t turn. He walked backward a few paces, hands deep in his pockets, still facing us. Still studying me, as if he could see something more if he caught me at the right angle.
I glanced back once, eyes darting toward the red brick.
The wall was blank.
The morning air around me thawed, but the warmth couldn’t reach the core of ice lodged inside my chest.
The hallways inside smelled of old paper and citrus floor wax—the official perfume of public education.
I followed Penny up a short flight of stairs into Room 204.
AP Literature.
The desks were arranged in a loose horseshoe, already dotted with students flipping through paperbacks. At the front stood Ms. Dobson, scrawling across the whiteboard in cursive so elegant it looked lifted from a Jane Austen fan letter.
She was tall and angular, with a silver pixie cut and a wardrobe that absolutely had opinions. Today’s ensemble: wide-leg linen pants and a blouse printed with tiny ravens.
Because of course.
“She drinks English Breakfast and definitely knows how to fence,” Penny whispered as we slid into two seats near the middle. “We love her. We fear her.”
Looping calligraphy decorated the walls—Bronte, Dickinson, Poe, Faulkner. Mismatched lamps glowed amber in the corners, giving the room the warmth of a used bookstore.
“Welcome back,” Ms. Dobson said, voice smooth, warm, and edged with authority. “To those of you who completed the summer reading—congratulations. You’re already ahead of last year’s seniors.”
She smiled sweetly.
“To the rest of you, you’ll suffer accordingly.”
Laughter rippled through the room.
Ms. Dobson clicked on the overhead projector. A title slide flared to life.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS: LOVE, MADNESS, AND MOORS FULL OF RED FLAGS
She launched into a theatrical recap, phrases like the architecture of obsession and romantic pathology in stormy landscapes rolling through the room like poetry with teeth.
A few students glazed over.
Penny did not.
“Buckle up,” she whispered. “She gets really passionate about doomed men.”
She passed me a folded square of notebook paper.
Welcome to the deep end. Hope you brought snacks.
I scribbled back:
I brought trauma. That counts, right?
She nearly choked on her laughter.
By the time the bell rang, the board was a battlefield of quotes, character arcs, and haunted metaphors. My hand ached from trying to keep up.
“Boo,” Penny groaned, shoving her notebook into her bag. “You’re off to Coach Baker’s Wild Ride, and I’ve got Ceramics.”
She winced.
“Basically, finger painting, but with anxiety. I’ll see you in Trig—we can suffer together.”
Then she vanished into the tide of students flooding the hall, her floral backpack bobbing like a buoy.
I adjusted my strap and turned the other way.
Next stop: State History.
The hallway was a living current—sneakers squeaking against linoleum, lockers slamming like distant gunfire, voices ricocheting off metal. I wove through the crowd, shoulder blades tight, following the faded directional arrows toward Room 118.
Coach Baker stood like a sentry outside the door, shouting names off a clipboard with the booming cadence of a man who spent his weekends blowing whistles at teenagers.
“Name?” he barked as I approached.
“Madeline October.”
The name felt like a weight on my tongue.
Baker looked up, his weathered face freezing mid-shout.
“October? As in Dr. Harvey October? The Relics and Repercussions Harvey October?”
That familiar ache settled in my chest—the gravity of a dad who was more myth than man.
“Uh . . . yeah. That’s him.”
A grin cracked across Baker’s face, wide and manic.
“Well, I’ll be. Huge fan. Your dad’s a legend around here, kid. Like Van Helsing, if Van Helsing gave TED Talks.”
I offered the polite, well-practiced smile I reserved for fans who saw a hero where I saw a man who couldn’t find his own truck keys without help.
“Thanks. I’ll tell him you said that.”
“Welcome to the domain,” Baker said grandly, ushering me inside. “Find a seat. We deal in actual history.”
Inside, the classroom looked like an antique store had collided with a conspiracy bunker.
Faded maps. Yellowed newspapers. A pair of taxidermy squirrels frozen mid-sprint on a bookshelf. Desks clustered in uneven rows. At the front, a silent slideshow flickered—sepia photographs of ghost towns and weathered gravestones, the projector buzzing faintly like an old TV.
From the second row, Julian tilted his head.
He nudged the backpack off the chair beside him, the invitation clear. Then he grinned, half-lifting a hand, the silver ring on his thumb flashing like a blade beneath the projector light.
But my attention drifted.
Back corner.
Far left.
The black jacket was a monochromatic stain on the room’s color palette.
He sat slouched in his seat, long legs stretched out, utterly at ease. Then he tilted his head just enough for his eyes to meet mine across the room.
Julian’s grin wavered as I stopped dead in the aisle.
A crosscurrent of impossible physics caught me.
Julian’s side of the room felt like a late summer afternoon—bright, easy, and deceptively safe. But the back left was a pocket of deep winter, a static pressure that made the hair on my arms stand up.
I veered into the middle, claiming a desk in the dead center of the room, trying to exist in the narrow margin where neither heat nor cold could reach me.
Coach Baker dropped his clipboard with a heavy slap that made half the class jump.
“Well, folks,” he said, perching on the edge of his desk. “We’re in luck this semester.”
His eyes swept the room.
And landed squarely on me.
“We’ve got ourselves a local legend. Miss October here comes from ghost-hunting stock.”
Thirty heads turned in a synchronized wave.
I sank lower in my chair.
“Not exactly royalty,” I muttered. “More like a family sickness.”
“Don’t be modest.” Baker winked, clearly not picking up on my discomfort. “This semester, we’re diving deep into Utah’s ghost towns—why they rose, how they fell, and what they might have left behind. Mining disasters. Economic collapse. All that gritty, haunted history.”
He grinned wider, tone dropping into something dark and conspiratorial.
“And if we’re lucky . . . ”
He paused for effect, letting the low hum of the projector fill the silence.
“ . . . some of those places might still be active.”
Someone in the back let out an exaggerated wooOOoo, and a wave of easy laughter moved through the desks. The sound of normal people in a normal world, joking about things that couldn’t hurt them.
But behind me—
The pressure shifted.
It felt like standing on a frozen lake just as the ice began to spiderweb beneath my boots. The projector light seemed to warp around the corner where he sat, bending toward him as if he were a black hole disguised as a student.
Coach Baker leaned forward, eyes bright with the hunger of a genuine believer.
“Tell me, Madeline. With all that lineage . . . how many hauntings have you witnessed?”
I felt his chair shift in the back.
The surrounding air didn’t cool.
It crystallized.
I felt the microscopic frost forming on the fine hairs of my arms.
Here we go, I thought, a familiar exhaustion settling across my shoulders.
I thought of the files in my dad’s office. Blurry Polaroids of dust motes. Recordings of wind through floorboards sold as “the voices of the damned” to people too bored with their own lives to accept that when the lights went out, they just stayed out.
“None,” I said.
My voice was clearer and harder than I intended.
I sat up straighter, looking Coach Baker dead in the eye, refusing to glance back at the frost-covered void in the corner.
“I’ve never seen a ghost. Not a flicker, not a shadow. To be honest, Coach, I think it’s just my dad’s way of selling books to desperate people still afraid of the dark.”
The room went deathly still.
A few kids snickered.
Julian looked at me with a bewildered pucker between his brows.
From the corner of my eye, I saw him.
There was no amusement in the back corner.
The silhouette leaned forward into the sepia light of the projector, head tilting, watching me with dark, clinical confusion, as if my answer were a riddle he intended to take apart piece by piece.
“Really?” Baker’s brows shot up. “A skeptic? An October who doesn’t believe in ghosts? That’s like a priest who doesn’t believe in heaven.”
“I believe in what I can touch.”
My voice was steady, even though the chill beneath my ribs screamed I was currently being touched by a gaze that shouldn’t have been possible.
“The rest is just good lighting and bad pipes.”
His stare was a physical needle now, pressing between my shoulder blades, stitching me to my seat.
“Well,” Baker said, clapping his hands together with a crack that shattered the tension.
“This class has converted more skeptics than a Sunday service. You’ll each choose a local ghost town to research—partners required.
We’ll explore what their decline meant for local economies, railroads, and state development. ”
He grinned.
“Might even squeeze in a field trip if I can convince the district we’re not summoning demons.”
Baker turned to the whiteboard and scrawled names in large, blocky letters.
SILVER REEF. GRAFTON. THISTLE. SEGO.
“Next class, you’ll choose your site,” he announced. “And your partner in crime.”
The rest of the period blurred into syllabus talk and reading lists.
I didn’t hear a word.
My entire world had shrunk to the six feet of air between my chair and the shadow in the back corner, a space crackling with silent, predatory tension.
I was a mouse listening for a hawk.
When the bell finally shrieked, I didn’t just move.
I fled.
The world erupted around me. Desks groaned. Backpacks zipped. Coach shouted something about “due dates and doom,” but I didn’t stay long enough to translate.
I burst through the door and into the humid hallway.
But the pressure didn’t fade.
It followed me out like a second skin of ice.
So much for keeping a low profile.