Page 69 of The Pawn

"Great. Chrissy is going to be a dead girl," the blonde smiles and tilts her head, making Mariana's creepy fake eyeball makeup swing towards her mouth, "and Tricia is going to be... did you decide on a zombie or Lizzie Borden?"

"Borden for sure. I've got a fake ax and everything."

"And you all already know I'll be going as Martha Hayes."

Lauren asks, "What about you, Mariana?"

"Mariana is contributing more than enough with her makeup," I point out, swiftly stepping in before things get awkward. "She doesn't have to do jump scares if she doesn't want to."

"Actually, I was thinking I might join. I have a great scary doctor costume. Holly said there was an old stretcher from the clinic I could set up in one of the room to bring 'patients' through and freak them out with needles." Mariana's eyes are positively aglow with wicked excitement. "I think it could be fun."

"Let's do this then. Together, we can scare the absolute shit out of every student on this campus."

* * *

Halfway through the haunted house, after dozens of screams from frightened students and enough jump scares to make me break a sweat, my phone buzzes from inside the old school Coleridge blazer I'm wearing.

I lean up against the fireplace and pull the phone out. My assigned space is the lounge near the lobby, sectioned off by plywood painted black. There's a whole route to force visitors through a disorienting maze on their way to being frightened by yours truly. My station is set up with candles to create gloomy lighting, as well as an upside down cross over the fireplace to really emphasize the story of Martha Hayes' death.

Putting in my lockscreen code, I check my messages and smile. It's Chrissy, letting me know that Blake Lee just walked through the front door—though she has no idea why it is I wanted to know about him in the first place. I text her my thanks and slip my phone back into my pocket, preparing myself.

First I make sure the candles are in exactly the right spot to cast shadows on my face. Then I double check my makeup in the mirror above the fireplace, a trick mirror with dozens of little cracks that throw back a reflection of me over a dozen different times. Mariana really outdid herself with the finishing touches today—I look even scarier than I did during our test run, and that's saying something.

I can hear footsteps further down the maze's path. Most of the students have come in giggly, gasping, and screaming groups, but this particular set of steps don't have any companions. That's a sure sign that it's Blake. Settling into the darkest corner of the room, I pull the stringy, waxy dark hair Mariana gave me in front of my face and tilt my chin down. All I have to do is wait for the right moment, and I'm absolutely sure I can scare the shit out of Blake.

Maybe this is stupid. Childish, even. But I want him to feel a fraction of what I felt when I was running up soft, rain-soaked ground, towards a tree on top of a hill where I knew my brother wouldn't be alive.

Before he even enters the room, I feel his presence. There's a distinct weight to him, as if the air is disturbed when he walks across a threshold. I watch him from the shadows, silent and still. He observes the broken mirror, the ash-filled fireplaces, and the candles burning on the mantle and the ground.

Then his eyes move to the corner, where I'm standing in the shadows, behind a broken pew we dragged here from Hayes Chapel to really set the mood.

A smirk lifts up the corners of his eyes. "A jump scare, really? That's what you thought would get me?"

I don't answer. Instead I stumble forward, out of my shadowed darkness, and stare at him with wide eyes. Then—in a move I don't want to admit I practiced—I grab onto my throat, gasp for air, and fall forward dramatically onto the ground.

A pause. He mutters, "I'm not falling for this."

I hold my breath for all I'm worth. I made sure to land so that my face was only partially obscured, and I let my mouth fall open, a dramatic foam flying from my lips. It's just a little bit of costume makeup Mariana gave me that makes actors look like they have rabies mouth.

"Seriously?" Blake approaches me and kneels down; I can hear him, but I don't dare open my eyes. "It's going to take more than this to 'scare the shit out of me,' Brenna. I'm not a little kid."

He isn't.

But he was one once, a long time ago, in a world full of hospitals and germs. And I haven't been spending the past few months here learning nothing from my observations of the Elites.

All at once, I reach out, grab his hand, and jerk him towards me. Then I lean up and blow the foam at his face before he can react.

He stiffens, eyes wild, staring down at me in shock. Then he shudders all over, a full-body thing that's a sight to behold, the careful expression on his face dissolving into one of pure panic.

Fear. It's there plainly in his eyes. Which means I win.

"See?" I smirk at him as he yanks his wrist out of my hand and wipes his face frantically with the front of his shirt. "I told you that I could scare the shit out of you. Also, it's harmless. If it weren't, I wouldn't have put it in my mouth."

"You're a hateful, wretched thing." He mutters something I don't understand that must be Korean—or Latin for all I know, given how annoyingly studious he is. "That was a low blow, even for you."

I prickle in irritation at his words. "In love and war, anything goes. You tried to get me to fail out of calculus, so I'd say what I did to you was barely anything in comparison." Pushing up to my feet, I dust myself off and stare down at him. "More people are going to come soon, so you should probably skedaddle on to the next station."

"Fuck you," Blake says, with more emotion than I've ever heard from him outside that video. He stands up from his crouch and wipes his face one more time for good measure, then straightens out his impeccably white shirt. "How did you even figure out that would work?"

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