Two
With the sleepover canceled, I find myself concocting a lie of my own.
I tell my friends that a coworker at the horror museum I work at part-time asked me to cover a closing shift.
I take my food to go and head over to the Mystic Museum.
The museum’s situated off Magnolia Boulevard in Burbank, a stretch of mostly mom-and-pop shops featuring an abundance of vintage secondhand stores, movie stores, and horror stores.
It’s the kind of street where you wouldn’t blink twice seeing a group of folks dressed head to toe in black despite the temperature always ranging hotter than other parts of Los Angeles.
Ordinarily I’d go home to let the emotional sting settle, but I don’t want to face my family yet.
It’s not that I’m uncomfortable with them, but they’re…
well, they’ve got more typical brains. The Mystic Museum is a haven for the outcasts.
Even if my coworkers and the customers aren’t necessarily neurodiverse like I am, there’s more of an empathy to stumbling through social situations.
My breathing slows down here. No one ever cares if I hang around here, whether I’m on shift or not.
Tonight, though, I can’t help but feel ill at ease in my own skin as I park my car around back and walk through the front door.
As if my own workplace wouldn’t want me here just because of what happened with the sleepover.
At least I’ll be able to easily dismiss that feeling after a conversation with my coworkers.
When I walk inside the gift shop section of the museum, I find my coworker Amari refolding novelty horror T-shirts. The store boasts only a handful of customers.
“Hey,” I say to his turned back.
Amari startles, hand on his heart, before turning to me. “Jesus, Emma, you scared me.”
I motion around us. “Part of the job description.”
He blows air out into his cheeks. “There’s something creepy in the air tonight.” He runs a hand through his short green fade. “You’re not working, are you?”
“No,” I motion to my food. “Thought I’d come by.”
Amari usually works Friday nights, so there was a decent shot I’d see him. He’s always talking, and right now I’d love to listen to him explain what creepy vibe has overtaken the museum. Nothing’s better than someone who has so much to say that you only need to nod your head to engage them.
“Great.” He picks up a pair of keys. “Ugh, pray for me. I have to go put the haunted eye in the back.”
The museum is small, with just one featured exhibit that rotates every six months.
The back section of the building is converted into a wonderland of horror props and objects themed around different subsections of horror—’80s horror, ’90s horror, teen horror, and right now, occult horror.
We’ve got immersive rooms themed after every movie that has the word “witch” in its title, including the owners’ personal collection of their strangest occult oddities.
Then, once customers leave the museum portion, there’s every version of tarot cards, incantation books, and cursed objects for sale before they exit.
“I swear last time I went into the back I wasn’t alone,” Amari continues.
I eye the keys, contemplating if I really want to risk my food getting even colder to do Amari a solid.
It’s not that I’m not sympathetic to the ghosts that supposedly haunt this store, but isn’t it too coincidental that there are ghosts in a horror museum?
I’d be more inclined to buy it if the cat-themed thrift shop down the block also claimed to have a ghost.
“What do you think’s here?” I ask as I lean on the empty counter space adjacent to the cash register.
Not so close that we’re leaning into each other but close enough to chat.
We’ve occasionally had to climb over each other in a store as small and jam-packed as this one, but my preference is always a safe, friendly distance that no one can misinterpret as me pushing some personal space boundary.
Amari shoots a glance at the door leading into the museum portion of the store, just past me. “Some presence that makes you feel physically ill being in the room.”
After tonight, I think I could recreate the same experience at Bob’s. “How delightful.”
He hits the wooden countertop, psyching himself up. “I swear to god, if something touches me, I’m quitting.”
I chuckle. Amari’s mom makes him spiritually cleanse after every shift because of the “energy” our witchy white owners pump into this place with all the spooky objects.
Amari, a bigger horror fan than me, has been trying to convince her for years that there’s nothing spiritually wrong with the place.
A genuine smile spreads across my face as my muscles relax. “Your mom would be pretty vindicated if it’s true,” I say. My voice always has the most life in it in places like this.
“Ugh.”
I open my to-go box from the cashier counter and take a bite of my burger. Amari steals a few of the wilted fries for his ghost hunt and disappears into the exhibit in the back. For a moment, I’m engulfed in silence, and I can’t help but think about the diner again.
Could all that sneaking around and the texting have really just been because Opal canceled our sleepover? It can’t be, can it?
But before I can think about it a second longer, someone new enters the store. With Amari out and me not legally allowed to work right now, my social anxiety sets in with a kickstart to my heart.
When I see who it is, my heartbeat only gets faster.
Beck.
Rebecca “Beck” Horne is Paisley’s sister.
She’s a senior at our high school, ten months older than Paisley and her polar opposite down to the way they style themselves.
Unlike Paisley’s long blond curls and designer aesthetic, Beck’s got a shaggy haircut she’s dyed black for as long as I’ve known her and tattoos along her arms that she must’ve gotten the second she turned eighteen.
Today, she’s decked out in black Docs, high-waisted jeans, and a home-cut cropped Iron Maiden shirt that looks both effortless and perfectly curated.
Despite Paisley and me being friends for so long, I’ve only ever interacted with Beck in passing.
Beck is most famous for having punched Brendon Hayes in the school parking lot so hard last fall that no plastic surgery could get his nose back in place—and she then proceeded to win the state semifinals for the volleyball team right after.
Hastings couldn’t expel her because she’s too good of a player and they couldn’t risk their championship streak by getting rid of her.
I’ve always kind of wished Paisley would invite her to hang with our group, but Beck has better things to do than listen to us bounce around ideas for movies we could make together when we become an actress, costume designer, producer, and graphic designer respectively.
Beck approaches the gift shop counter, perfectly at ease.
“Hey,” she says in a voice that can only properly be described as earthy. “Do you know if you still carry those Xenomorph socks, or did those go away when the cosmic exhibit ended?”
I find myself unable to do anything but blink at her.
One, because why can’t I remember Beck ever coming in to see the cosmic exhibit.
Two, because we’ve never been this close before.
Her eyes are blue, so rich they almost seem black in these lights.
They’re so unlike Paisley’s eyes, which are always a crystal-stream blue.
“Uh, I’m not actually working tonight,” I say.
Beck springs back from the counter, palms forward. “Oh. Is someone else working?”
“Someone else” is fighting off some supposed demon, and I feel like an asshole. “No, wait! I’ll show you.”
I move from behind the counter, feeling very unfashionable in a boxy T-shirt and jersey shorts. The store is tiny, and the seconds are ticking down before Beck will leave as quickly and mysteriously as she showed up.
“Are you a big Alien fan?” I cringe as soon as I ask it.
“The biggest. Ellen Ripley made me who I am today,” Beck replies, not missing a beat. “I was sitting in bed and all of the sudden had this flash memory of seeing those socks here. I figured I’d see if they were around. I thought you’d be working tonight.”
A wave of giddiness hits me. Beck Horne thinks about my work schedule? Paisley doesn’t even remember I have a job. “You knew I’d be here tonight?”
Beck’s liner-smudged eyes widen a moment. “Let me try that again. I figured since you’re not with Paisley and Harlow and Opal, you’d probably be here.”
The disappointment seeps back into my chest like a weight “Yeah, the sleepover was canceled.” We arrive at the sock section. I locate the Xenomorph socks tragically fast. “Our last pair. The universe wanted you to have these.” I punctuate my response with a smile.
Beck smiles back. “Thanks! Yeah, these’ll be perfect for bed rotting.”
Beck and Paisley’s family lives on the opposite side of the Valley in a 7,000-square-foot home with an extremely picturesque pool.
Even with all of the times I’ve been to their house over the years, I’ve never been in Beck’s room and therefore can’t imagine what the rest of her evening bed rotting will look like.
“Be safe,” I say.
We walk back to the counter, where my food is only getting more shriveled. It’s the most disgusting representation of how this night is going mentally for me. Beck eyes the whole scene on the counter almost curiously, hands sunken into her purse, but she’s not looking at it to find her wallet.
“You guys do the sleepover every week, right?” Beck says. Her eyes are on my food. “At Opal Bushida’s house?”
I shift my weight onto my right foot but quickly shift back to my left. Time seems to slow as I process the questions that feel unnatural for Beck to be asking. She’s never cared about what her little sister and her friends did before.
“Yep.”
Her eyes are still on the counter.
And why is she not making eye contact with me? She was practically unable to keep her gaze off me before this moment. The metal playlist Amari put on suddenly pounds in my head, the sound of the instruments too sharp.
“Do you…want my food?” I ask around the tightness in my throat. “It’s kinda gross now.”
Beck straightens back out, as if awakening from a trance. “No, I’m good. I was just spacing.”
She rubs the back of her neck with one hand while fishing for her wallet with the other. Finally, she drops a blue debit card down. I flinch at the sound of the plastic hitting the wooden countertop.
Both Horne sisters are acting weird. This can’t be a coincidence.
“Hey, do you know why Paisley’s been acting all mysterious today?” I ask.
And at that, Beck goes ghost pale. My heart clenches. “Emma, do you…know where Paisley and Harlow and Opal are right now?”
Somewhere in the corner of my eye, I see Amari return from the exhibit artifact-free.
“At home?” I reply. “Maybe Opal’s with Paisley while her dad’s party’s going on?”
Beck takes a deep breath, eyes shut before looking me right in mine. “Oh my god. They didn’t fucking invite you, did they?”
The tightness extends down to my stomach. “To what?”
My food goes from “vaguely uninteresting” to “downright stomach-turning” as the grease smell hits me. I move to throw it away, but the trash can usually by the register isn’t here right now. I’m still holding Beck’s debit card. I blink, and I swear the lights blink with me.
“They’re on some camping trip this weekend. Paisley told me you were working a couple shifts this weekend you couldn’t get out of. They drove off right before I came here.”
Every instinct in me wants to clutch at my throat and force myself to breathe normally before my body fully processes what’s happening. But I swipe Beck’s card, forgetting that I could get in trouble for doing even five minutes’ worth of work.
“Emma, are you okay?” Beck asks.
I asked Paisley that so many times like a fucking idiot.
The exhibit exit door bursts open, snapping our attention away.
“Oh, fuck that place,” Amari says as he massages his chest.
My head is swimming and nothing makes sense.
Amari just entered the room, but I thought I saw someone exit from the door before him—someone I’d thought was Amari—minutes ago.
Paisley went into the bathroom for over twenty minutes and Harlow and Opal gaslit me when I thought something was up.
They didn’t invite me on a weekend-long camping trip.
“Do you know where they were going?” I ask. I thought my voice would come out strained, but I sound unnervingly stable. I hand Beck her receipt.
“Some place called Kingston National Park. Up near Lake Arrowhead.”
And the home of the Kingston Ghost Town.
They didn’t invite me on a trip I planned.