There was something in the way they looked at them, Lyn thought, in the way their eyes followed her and her friends in their walk down the corridor.

    Yet she found no reason for the looks the other students were giving them, the whispers that echoed softly around her and the guys she walked to school with. Max's bloody incident had happened three weeks ago, too old to be buzz-worthy in Ravenwood, or in any school she knew of.

    And so Lyn thought back: everything went as normal as it could go on a Friday morning in late October. The ringing of an alarm at a little past five o'clock, the warm water waking her from her half-doze, the mechanical way she put on her school uniform, her hands reaching for her backpack and her oversized black hoodie before she made her way downstairs. Breakfast alone in the dorm cafeteria; waiting alone on the front porch; a glance up at the cacophony of voices she knew well enough by now, catching sight of Damien, Sander, and Max's familiar figures walk down the road. And with each step they took, closer and closer to where she stood, she felt her heart drum a quick silly rhythm of its own, her face flush a little despite the cold, the deliberate effort to ignore these sensations completely, as she made her way down the steps, down the cobblestone pathway, and onto the pavement where she joined them. Their conversation as they sauntered past the foliage of red, orange, and gold that lined the road—seemingly misplaced objects, warm and optimistic in color, set against the pale gray expanse of somber clouds. Then Jack caught up with them later on, after early morning basketball training, when they passed the raven statue on the front grounds of the school.

    And before that, for the past three weeks, there had been nothing unusual, nothing Lyn could think of no matter how hard she racked her brain for a sensible answer to her question.

Or you're just being paranoid again, Lyn thought to herself. That was probably it: the psychiatrist had warned her about her dangerous thought patterns. That if this habit were to go on, unchecked and untreated, it could lead to even worse problems, with full-blown paranoia a likely one at that.

Then came another memory, a sudden interjection into her stream of consciousness: her father pulling her out of the therapy program she was enrolled in—because she didn't need it, because his daughter wasn't crazy, telling her this mental health business was all just make-believe concepts psychologists invented to make more money out of therapy sessions and pharmaceutical sales. An excuse for people to act the way they want. An excuse to feed their desperate want for attention. An excuse, an excuse, a pathetic excuse . . .

    "Hey, Lyn!" A huge hand waved in front of her. She shifted her eyes up. "You okay?" Max asked, his pale blue eyes wide, staring straight into her hazel ones.

    Lyn blinked, as though she had been yanked out of a trance. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm all right," she managed to say, feeling her cheeks flush. "Just zoned out again. It's cold this morning, gets me into this daze."

    Lyn then gave her head a little shake, wondered why she was so embarrassed about this, her spacing out. There was nothing to be ashamed of, really. Max had seen her like this about a handful of times by now. But why was it—no, not the air, not external temperature—why was she so warm? And why was her heart beating so fast, pounding erratic rhythms within her chest it almost hurt?

    Was this some kind of bad omen? Some manifestation of a sixth sense? No, no, anxiety, just anxiety, Lyn thought to herself. The sadistic little thing that lived in her mind like a parasite. Stupid anxiety and nothing more.

    She drew in a few deep breaths, and looked up at Max again, then glanced over at her other friends. They seemed unperturbed, she observed. They didn't seem to have noticed the looks people were giving them, the whispers that echoed as they passed. Maybe it was just her. Maybe this was all a trick of the mind. Besides, most of the students she had seen look in their direction were girls. Maybe some of them were crushing on her friends.

    It was likely: although the guys looked nothing like male models seen in magazines and clothing ads, nor did they look like those famous celebrities girls in her old school would gush over on Instagram, and although she felt no attraction to any of them, she had to admit her friends didn't look that bad. Each of them, in one way or another, possessed a particular charming quality of their own: Damien and Jack had a certain charisma that drew people to them; although he only stood five-six, Sander had this Peter Parker, boy-next-door look and vibe to him; Max could pass off as Adonis, but a lanky teenage version of him, like Disney's Hercules before he got into training.

And so Lyn shrugged the thought off, or at least tried to shove the fear into the back of her mind. There was nothing to be afraid of. Nothing to fear . . .

A hand grasped Lyn's shoulder. Lyn flitted her eyes up off the floor, off her black leather shoes. Before them stood a crowd, gathered around a sort of spectacle, unseen from the angle in which Lyn and her friends stood.

"Isn't that where your locker is?" Max said, his voice soft against the buzz of the crowd. His hand remained rested on Lyn's shoulder.

And Lyn realized then that he was right, and that their other friends had now shifted their eyes over to her.

"You think that—" Sander began, but he said nothing more, and after some agreement they exchanged wordlessly—all it took were the knowing, scared looks on their faces—Lyn, Damien, Jack, Sander, and Max plunged into the sea of people and made their way to the heart of the commotion.

    Damien pushed forward ahead of them, the first to make it out into the small clear space surrounding the object of the crowd's attention. The other boys stopped short behind him; Lyn halted, but only for a moment, and slowly walked over to her locker, reaching a pale hand out to touch the huge symbol painted in white on the navy blue metallic surface: a five-pointed star, a circle enclosing it. Runes, she believed them to runes of a kind, were drawn in the same white paint around the pentagram. And written above the symbols in huge, ugly letters were the words BURN THE WITCH.

    Lyn drew her hand back, feeling a thick stickiness on the pads of her middle and forefinger. The world around her began to spin, then—a blur of white walls and white floors and navy blue lockers and a cacophony of faces atop dark blue blazers—and she felt herself float up, out of the physicality of her body, the sensation of hanging midair, untethered to anything but those words that persisted to echo in her headspace.

Burn the witch, burn the witch, burn the witch . . .

    "They know," Lyn whispered to herself, a sound barely escaping her lips. They know. Her knees shook and folded beneath her weight, and she stumbled back. Sander caught her by the arm just in time. Lyn shut her eyes, then, as the world went on whirling—ceaseless, merciless—around her. Breathe in, breathe out. Breathe in, breathe out.

    But she couldn't be so weak. No, no. She had to get up. She shouldn't give them—whoever found out, whoever did this—any satisfaction. No room for tears. No room for weakness. The words her father would tell her if he saw her now.

    Lyn opened her eyes, and steadied herself on her feet as best she could, pulling her arm away from Sander's grasp.

    "You okay?" Damien asked, beside her.

    Lyn nodded.

    Damien's hand then slid into his pants pocket. Lyn watched as he produced his phone, watched as his thumbs quickly flew across the screen, before he handed her the device.

    Lyn, acting as nonchalant as she could, received the item, yet her hands wouldn't stop trembling as they reached out to take it, and her knees still felt like they would give way beneath her anytime soon. Once the phone was in her grasp—despite her fingers shaking she held on to it as tight as she could get herself to—Damien nodded down at it, and in turn Lyn looked down at the screen: typed out in his Notes app were the words

your locker combination

    "Just in case they put something in there," Damien said.

    Lyn shifted her eyes up to him, shook her head. "No, no, no."

    "We'll open it real slowly," Jack said. "Well, Damien will. And if he sees something in there, he'll give us a signal. If he opens it too quick, I'll be right behind him. Pull him back and away if I've got to."

    "You don't—" Lyn began, and drew in a sharp breath. Her head was throbbing at the temples, a pulse that seemed to beat in sync with her heart, loud and torturous. "You don't have to do this."

    "Relax, Lyn," Jack said, smiling that signature toothy smile of his—although his reassurance of a smile didn't make her feel any better. "It'll just be like the movies," he went on, "when the bomb goes off and Damien and I jump out of the explosion like a couple of Power Rangers. It'll be fun."

    No, it won't, Lyn thought.

    "We promise we'll be extra careful," Damien said, giving her a thumbs up.

Lyn sighed, head still throbbing, hands still shaking, legs still threatening to collapse suddenly beneath her—then she typed in her locker combination, convinced they'd still persist if she continued to refuse. A waste of her time, a waste of theirs. She handed the phone back to Damien, and he and Jack walked over to her locker, Jack standing behind Damien as planned, as promised.

But first Jack turned to the crowd, and announced, "Move back! Move back!"

"Everyone, dudes, get back!" Max said, his voice loud over the noise. He waved his hands in the air, his long arms swinging like inverted pendulums, putting his fellow students standing around him in danger of accidental swatting (at this they moved back and away from him without question). "We don't want this to get messy. No one wants to get soaked in blood, trust me, been there, done that."

    Damien turned the lock dial—clockwise, counterclockwise, clockwise, counterclockwise—glancing at his phone screen with each rotation. Jack stood behind him, his eyes on the crowd, watching them back away like the tide of the sea receding from the shore. He could hear Damien grunt with each mistake, then resume in trying to open Lyn's locker. Then finally—

    A click. "Got it!" Slowly, very slowly, almost as cautiously as the madman moved in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", Damien opened the door ajar, peeked inside at the darkness. Jack was on the alert, his hand ready by Damien's shoulder, ready to pull his friend and throw them both back away from the probable detonation if need be.

    Damien scanned the inside of the locker door. No balloons, no mysterious solid shapes attached to the edges or on the inner surface, save a couple of hooks provided in every locker. Yet even those presented themselves bare, with nothing hung onto them. Damien then pulled his phone out of his pocket with his right hand, his left still holding the door ajar, and turned on the flashlight. He shone the flashlight through the narrow gap he afforded himself, his eyes searching deeper in for anything suspicious. Besides the usual pile of textbooks and notebooks and a box of unused, spare pens and a stack of pocket tissue packets, he found—nothing.

    Damien drew a sharp breath in, and went on to open Lyn's locker, slowly and carefully. He could sense Jack standing behind him, sense Jack's eyes fix themselves on him and the locker door, sense Jack's hand hovering over his shoulder. And he could hear no sound but his own heartbeat pounding in his chest.

It seemed an eternity until Damien finally pulled the locker door the entire way, all its contents displayed before him—no balloons filled with blood, no explosive prank mechanisms, nothing but Lyn's school necessities; it was safe, they were safe—and Jack, who had never left his back nor turned his eyes away, heaved a loud sigh of relief. Damien released a breath he hadn't realized he had been holding, and chuckled to himself, feeling the nerves leave him.

    "Bruh, for a moment there I was freakin' out on the inside," Jack said, looking at Damien. "Defo expected something to blow up right in our faces."

"Yeah. Same here," Damien breathed out, listening to the hallway slowly buzz back to life, the noise of voices and footsteps growing louder by the second.

"Wasn't she just beside you?"

Damien and Jack turned to Max, who stood a few paces behind them. They recognized his voice instantly, recognized the frantic edge to it when he was in a state of low-level panic. And they knew then that something wasn't right.

"I don't know," said Sander, standing next to Max, his eyes glancing around the hallway. "She just—she just disappeared."

Damien and Jack walked over to them, and the second they came close enough, Jack said, "What's up?"

"Lyn's gone," Max said. His brows were drawn together, and his eyes scanned the place, probably in search of their raven-haired friend.

"So you think Ronny and his posses might've kidnapped her or something?" Jack asked, putting his hands in his pockets.

Max shook his head. "It's not that," he said, the tone in his voice a mingle of anxiety and urgency. "Lyn, she—she must have gone somewhere when you were opening her locker. And I'm scared she's—" He suddenly fell silent, as if deciding to bite his tongue over something he thought the better of, thinking now wouldn't be the best time to say it. He shook his head again and said, "Never mind. We've just got to find Lyn."

Sander drew in a breath, and turned to Max. "Max, I don't think Ronny and his friends would've—for a lack of better terms—kidnapped Lyn in broad daylight. They're known bullies and all, but Ronny isn't that stupid. Well, knowing him, he's smart enough not to make things obvious, with all those people clustered here just moments ago—he knows they would've been seen—"

"I know, Sander, I know Ronny and his gang of jerks wouldn't have done that, not here, not now. I'm just . . . worried." Max shifted his eyes off Sander, and looked around, scanning every passerby and lingering figure in the hallway.

"So what are you so worried about?" Damien asked.

"It's just—I just know how it feels," Max said, the lie—the half-truth, really—smoothly rolling off his tongue, to his own surprise. "I know how it's like to get jumped at like that. I want to make sure Lyn's okay, that's all."

"Seems a little too late now," said Sander, who had been looking down at his watch when Max was speaking. "We've got less than five minutes before the bell rings."

"I wouldn't worry about Lyn, then," Damien said, with a shrug, nonchalant. "Lyn's not the type to miss out on her classes. She might look like some low-key goth, but beneath all that, she's still a goody-two-shoes. I'm sure I'll see her in class. She'll be fine . . . I think."

"Man, I hope so," Max murmured. He looked back at Lyn's locker, vandalized in pagan symbols, that stupid warning blaring out in large white letters at every passerby. And Max hoped, and had been hoping since her sudden disappearance, that Lyn wasn't secluded somewhere at that moment and running a blade across her wrist again.

Damien was both right and wrong about Lyn. He did see her in class, seated in her usual place, somewhere near the front row—that, he was right about. But what he was wrong about was her being fine—she had a faraway look to her, as if she was in this almost catatonic state (and maybe she was). She went through the motions as everyone else did, but Damien noticed she went through them lifeless and perhaps internally perturbed, like a zombie that actually felt emotions but seemed to hold them back, afraid to show any trace of humanity. She wouldn't talk to anyone, not to Damien, not to Talya.

    When Damien approached her on their way to second period, all Lyn told him was she was fine, and that he and the guys shouldn't be worried about her. And just like that she walked ahead quickly, plunging herself into the sea of students until she disappeared from Damien's sight and reach.

But Damien had already seen the truth—the red swell around her eyes—before she turned away.

"Is Lyn all right?" Talya asked Damien. There were a few minutes to spare before the bell would ring, and nearly everyone was in the classroom by then. Damien had just sat down when he spotted Talya walking toward his direction, her steps quick, worry etched into her features. Then she laid the question out right away, and added, "I heard what happened. And it seems like everyone in school got a private message from the Ravenwood Academy Facebook page. Well, everyone except me and Sander, as far as I know."

Damien shook his head, perplexed. "Didn't get a message, either," he said.

"Someone must've hacked the page," Talya said, her brows knit together in thought. "But who would do such a mean thing?"

"What does the message say anyway?" Damien asked, leaning forward in his seat.

"It's a link to an old Twitter post," Talya said, pulling her phone out. "A Twitter thread, actually. From a student in another school, from early this year. Jan told me about it right before first period. I asked her to forward me the message. I'm going to forward it to you right now." And with one final tap, she slid her phone back into her pocket, and said, "It's such a cruel thing for someone to do that to Lyn—to anyone, really." She sighed. "I really hope they find out who did this to her, and to Max, too."

Damien chuckled at a sudden realization. "It's funny how we're having a real conversation for the first time, Talya."

Talya shrugged, she didn't seem to mind the comment. "I'm worried about her. She's my roommate, and I was thinking, you guys are closer to her than I am, and I just want to know how she is. How she really is. I mean, I tried talking to her, but—"

"She just told you she's fine and walked away?" Damien said, leaning back in his seat. "Don't get your hopes up. She did the same to me, too."

Talya sighed, opened her mouth to continue the conversation, but just then the shrill sound of the bell filled the air, and Mr. Grisham strode into the room, headed straight to the teacher's table.

And the last two things Damien saw—before Mr. Grisham began to drone on about some French meeting in a tennis court in the eighteenth century—were Talya's retreating figure, and the slumped shoulders of a pale, raven-haired girl seated near the front of the room.

Jack handed the phone back to Damien. He shook his head, and looked back up at his friends. "I'm telling you, Ronny and his posses are seriously sick in the head—legit psychopaths. First Max, now Lyn."

    Damien, Jack, Sander, and Max were seated at a table in the cafeteria, having finished their lunch just minutes ago. Lyn didn't join them, and was nowhere in sight since she slipped out the classroom door when the bell rang for lunch.

    "I don't think Lyn could ever do something like that," Sander said, arms folded on the table. "She can get sarcastic, and she has this dark, dry humor, and that's about as far into darkness as she goes, but she's not dangerous. She's too timid to pull off something that terrifying—that is if what happened with her and those girls is even possible."

    Damien turned to Max. "Any luck?"

    Max placed his phone down on the table, shook his head. He had been texting Lyn between classes, asking her how she was, yet she had given no reply to any of his messages. "Nada. Not even a 'I won't be meeting you this lunch,' or 'I'm okay, but you all really know I'm not'." He exhaled a breath. "I'm worried about her."

    "We all are," Sander said. He looked at Damien. "Do you think she knows?"

    "About?"

    "The Twitter thread that's been spreading around school like wildfire."

    Damien shrugged. "Don't know. She hasn't told me much except she's fine and that we shouldn't worry about her. She wouldn't even talk to Talya about how she really is. I don't know if she's learned about the whole Twitter thing from someone else; all I know for sure is the writings on her locker were enough to tell her that this rumor about her from Immaculate Heart is out in the open here in Ravenwood, and she couldn't hide it from the rest of us in this school anymore."

    "You think that's the reason why she transferred?" Max asked. "To get away?"

    Damien shrugged. "Ma didn't tell me much. Or maybe she didn't know. All she told me was Lyn was going to transfer to Ravenwood, and I thought it was just this looking-for-greener-grass-over-the-fence kind of thing."

    "Well," Sander said, taking his glasses off, polishing them with the fabric of his uniform shirt, "that Twitter thread's pretty nasty in and of itself. If bullying was the reason why Lyn left her old school, I imagine they might had done a lot more than that Tweet alone. Either they were already mean to her even before the rumor started, or they went on bullying her after. And if that's the case, I think it was a wise—"

    "Sander!"

    Sander perked up immediately at the voice, pushed his glasses back onto his nose, and turned around. Damien, Jack, and Max almost snickered at Sander's sudden change of mood until they saw the look on Talya's face when she came close enough. She was catching her breath, as though she had run from someplace else all the way to the cafeteria without stopping; in her hand was her phone, clutched tight within the smothering cage of her fingers, and her eyes screamed both distress and urgency, and she said quickly, "You guys have to come with me."

    "Talya, what's up?" Sander asked; the small smile on his face had faded as well.

    Talya drew in a breath, then said, "It's Lyn . . . She's in trouble . . . "