Page 13 of In What World

“It’sSpring Awakening.”

“A high school in Iowa is putting onSpring Awakening?” Matt asks. “Isn’t it about sex and suicide?”

“That’s reductive,” Erik tells him.

“My drama teacher is known for his bold choices,” I say. “He made me who I am.”

Everyone laughs. Once again, the chicken costume carries a little more weight than I want.

Marlowe:You’re not coming, are you?

It hasn’t even been a minute since her last text. What a leap for her to have made. Instead of answering, I call Dallas. He’s the one who matters anyway. He will understand that returning to Iowa is not a real option right now. What if they need me for another car insurance commercial here? I have to pay my bills somehow.

The phone rings only once before someone picks up. That someone being Marlowe.

“Hello?” The urgency in her voice is plain, even in her short greeting.

“Surprise! It’s your favorite person!” I say.

She lets out a frustrated sigh. “Why are you listed in his phone as Darling?”

“Same reason you’re in there as Nuisance, I’d imagine. What’s going on? Why do you have Dallas’s phone?”

“He left it backstage,” she tells me.

“You saw Darling flash on the screen and had to know who’d finally captured Dallas’s heart after so many years of him choosing to be single?”

“He’s missing,” she says.

I laugh.

“I’m serious,” she insists.

It isn’t any funnier the second time than the first, but I still laugh again. “I just talked to him this morning.”

“As far as I know, you’re the last person to have talked to him,” she tells me.

Something cold and prickly floods my veins—the awful tingle of dread, a feeling determined to find me, no matter how well I hide from it.

“His phone is locked,” she says. “I was able to answer this call, but I can’t get into his text messages without the passcode.”

“Where did he leave the phone?”

“On top of the Memory Machine.”

Oh, the Memory Machine. Dallas’s never-ending, not-so-secret passion project. It rests in the depths of the WRHS auditorium wings—backstage right, in the space between the second and third side curtains, behind a pile of old set pieces Dallas has long claimed he’ll one day repurpose. It’s more than seven feet tall and made of scrap wood. It looks like…well, it looks like a gigantic coffin. When I last saw the machine, it was painted a nondescript brown. Just a big box with a locked door.

Back in my day, everyone knew about the MemoryMachine. Other teachers. Students. Parents. It was an endless source of curiosity and a dead-end conversation with Dallas. He wouldn’t explain to anyone what it was supposed to be, except to give it a name and ask us politely to leave it alone.

Seeing as we were teenagers, we werenevergoing to do that.

We once wore him down enough to get him to admit that he had to work on the Memory Machine at school, because if he did it at home, he’d never sleep. That got everyone vibrating. We’d finally unearthed new information! We were making real progress!

Then Dallas said, “That’senough,” in his scariest, most definitive voice, and everyone went very quiet, knowing that to bring it up again would be to get all of us in real trouble. I liked to bend boundaries, but I knew better than to break them.

“How did you reach the top?” I ask Marlowe. It’s the wrong question—a detail that doesn’t matter—but it’s all that comes to me in the moment. Dallas’s scary voice may have ended our questions, but it did nothing to kill our curiosity. There were so many rehearsals where someone stood on lookout, making sure Dallas wasn’t nearby, so I could make myself into a human bench for Jaz to step on my back and examine the top, hoping to uncover something that revealed the secret meaning of the machine.

“One of my students heard the phone ringing. I wouldn’t let him touch it, though. So I got a ladder,” Marlowe tells me.