Page 45 of She Haunts Me Still

He hooks the rosary beads around her neck, carefully tucking the cross into her sweater, right between her breasts. His other hand slips beneath her skirt, fingers grazing dangerously close to where she still wants him.

“I don’t start something unless I mean to finish it.” He leans closer, his whisper fanning across her mouth as he adds, “And I know exactly how I’m going to finish this.”

11

Juliet’s balcony is littered with nails.

Mallory nudges the screws as she climbs to the top of the arch-shaped set that afternoon, wearing her nightgown costume. As she positions herself for the balcony scene, she tries not to think about how she’s dressed just like her mother on that December morning.

How she’s dressed just like Lily, too.

Rehearsal has barely begun, and it’s already off to a rocky, distracting start. She’s so close to something, but every answer keeps slipping out of reach. Mallory was sure the chapel would lead somewhere, but all it did was make her question her own sanity and nearly have sex in a church.

How embarrassing.

It’s time, she thinks, to start looking in new places.

“From the top!” Hendrix booms.

Someone turns on the spotlights, bathing the stage in mercury white. Raf enters from the wings, dressed in an olive-colored tunic and breeches, a narrow rapier against his side.

Familiar happiness surges inside her, and for a moment, Mallory remembers what it’s like to be onstage and not think about dead women with missing hearts. What it’s like toperform her favorite vanishing act and disappear into a world that isn’t hers. She can do this.

Despite not being fully memorized, Mallory nudges her script closed with the toe of her ballet slipper. And somehow, Juliet’s soliloquy spills perfectly out of her mouth. She doesn’t miss a single beat, breathing life into the meter, the prose, filling ancient words with new sound. She was built for this, was made for blazing lights and the hum of applause. For peeling back the layers of a haunted girl called Mallory and stitching together the pieces of someone stronger.We don’t have to be ourselves today.

“My name, dear saint, is hateful to myself, because it is an enemy to thee,” Raf calls from below. “Had I it written, I would tear the word.”

“My ears have yet not drunk a hundred words of thy tongue’s uttering, yet I know the sound,” she replies. A strange itch sparks to life at the back of her throat. She ignores it. “Are thou not Romeo, and a Montague?”

“Neither, fair maid, if either thee dislike.”

Mallory’s chest clenches as she clears her throat. “How camest thou hither, tell me, and wherefore? The orchard walls—”

A sharp cough rips through her, siphoning her words.

“The orchard walls are high and hard to climb,” she tries again. “And the place—”

Juliet’s lines evaporate as Mallory’s shoulders heave. She gags around a soft, thin object, like a piece of food caught in her throat.There’s something in there.

The lights begin to sway. The balcony suddenly seems very high off the ground, her lines impossible to recall. Panic takes hold, both at the terrifying choking sensation and thedevastating awareness that she’s fucking up the scene. She can’t lose this role. Shewon’tlose this role. Without theater, she’ll have nothing left, she’llbenothing at all.

“Mal?” Raf calls, breaking character. “Hey, Mal. You okay?”

“Ms. Webb!” Hendrix this time.

Mallory sinks to her knees, grasping the railing. Her throat erupts in stinging pain as she works whatever it is up and up and finally out, spitting it into her palm as Raf sprints across the stage.

She has just enough time to register the matted black feather in her hand.

It spans from her fingertips to well past her wrist, and the pointed end of the quill is coated in mud. The barbules are sleek and ink colored, as though it once belonged to a raven.

Like the statues around campus.

Like the drawing she scribbled the other day.

“Mal!”

Raf appears on the ladder, and she shoves the feather into her nightgown pocket.