Page 2 of She Haunts Me Still

Most people might roll their eyes, but Arden was the first person who made Mallory want to memorialize parts of her life. Everything that came before is best buried, sealed. Forgotten.

“Are you nervous?” Arden asks, taking the knife.

“No.” The lie is bitter on Mallory’s tongue. “Are you?”

“Extremely.” Arden’s blonde-streaked hair spills forward as she bends, scratching out a messyATnext to Mallory’s initials. “I know it’s Shore’s policy to make us complete a show before we officially become theater majors, but anentireShakespearean play with less than a month of rehearsals? On top of classes? It’s diabolical. But we won’t mess up. We’re gonna get lead roles.”

“Stop. You’ll jinx it.”

Arden nudges her. “We’remanifesting,bitch.”

Mallory fidgets with the brass locket at her neck. Arden doesn’t reel in her hopes; she names them, weaves them with intention into prayer. But Mallory knows better than to let her own thoughts run wild, lest they push her toward an inevitable cliff of disappointment.

Noticing her expression, Arden presses the knife handle into Mallory’s palm.

“Fine, I’ll play by your rules. But just know I’m silently conjuring great success for us both.” She slaps the pocket of her denim jacket. “There’s rose quartz in here.”

Mallory shakes her head and slides off the counter, now engraved with a roughMW + AT, 1999. She thinks of the same letters scratched into the bench outside their old boarding school in New Hampshire, lit up at night by the cigarettes they’d sneak out to smoke after curfew. They’ve been a unit ever since they met in seventh grade, when Mallory was alone in the cafeteria, wrapped in an ill-fitting uniform and sagging knee socks. While other students hadn’t paid any attention to the strange new girl, Arden had. Plucked her fromthe shadows, as though she were a scrawny kitten in a shelter. From that moment on, it was them against the world.

By winter that year, their special pact was written on paper, sealed in a folded triangle. Going to the same college, rooming together—it was all part of their agreement, forged beneath a stretch of ivy and brick.Never leave each other behind.

Arden slings her bag over her arm. “Did you finish the reading for psych?”

Mallory sighs at the reminder. “Not yet. We could get pizza and work in the lounge.”

“Perfect. I wasn’t able to eat dinner. Too nervous.”

“I…” Mallory starts folding the pocketknife. “Do you smell that?”

“Smell what?”

“Did you leave your curling iron on?” She eyes the cluttered counters. “I smell smoke.”

Arden frowns, scanning plastic Caboodles of makeup. “I don’t smell anything.”

Mallory pauses in the doorway, sniffing again. This time, there’s no mistaking the tangy, ashy scent. It curls under her nostrils in bitter gray tendrils. Smoke, like from a campfire, but with an undertone of something rotten.

Like skin burning.

Most people would shrug it off. The theater is an old building with an array of unpleasant odors. Surely there’s an explanation—a failing furnace, perhaps.

To Mallory, however, the smell means something else.

It conjures images of the blue house she once called home, a forgotten cottage at the end of a dirt road where she lived for five short years with a mother she can barely remember.

But there is one memory of her mother that’s crystal clear. The final one, tinged with this exact odor: something burning, something rotting.

Something more dead than alive.

Mallory takes another deep breath. Another. Another—

“Mal— Oh my god, yourhand!”

Arden’s voice is like a burst of cold water, and Mallory snaps her gaze to where she’s still clutching the knife—the knife she didn’t close all the way.

She’s squeezing the blade like a stress ball, completely unaware she’d sliced open her hand. As if the pain were secondary to the memories threatening to break free.

“Shit,” Mallory mutters, dropping the blood-slick object with a clatter. Her knees buckle at the sight of her palm slashed down the center, the edges of the wound puffy and raw. She flexes her fingers, and pain follows in a zigzag, crimson trickling toward her wrist.