Commander Lucien tore open the plastic wrapper and stuck the end of a licorice in his mouth. “You like when I shove the Twizzler candy up your nose and through your brain cavity, Cadet McDaniels?”
“Um—uh—no, sir. No, sir!”
I could do it. Now would be the moment.
“I didn’t think so.” I let the moment pass without taking the fall for Rusty. It was a small thing, but I worried it meant that the real me was dying faster than I thought it was. Maybe next time, I decided.
Maybe.
I tried not to hate myself. It wasn’t my job to save him or anyone else.
“Cadet McDaniels, how many push-ups do you think the C Barracks deserves for your Twizzlers fetish?”
With the twelve sets of ears straining to listen and twenty-four fists ready to knock a hole through Rusty McDaniels, there was again, no good answer. “Twenty, sir?” he said. I wondered if he could feel me wince beside him.
Commander Lucien bark-laughed. “Twenty? Twenty? Cadet McDaniels is that a serious answer to my serious question?”
“Yes, sir.” Rusty’s voice cracked like he was asking a girl to prom, which he never would, of course, because there were no proms here. “No, sir. I don’t know, sir.”
“Now if Cadet McDaniels had given a serious number,” Commander Lucien began to pace, “for instance, two hundred and twenty, I might have been obliged to accept his offer. But being as it may, let’s make it a nice round number. Drop and give me three hundred. I will be counting, cadets.”
That was another new thing I could do—shut down. Brain on, brain off. As I got down on my hands and toes, I turned it all the way off.
I “woke up” sometime after lunch, when it was time to run laps on the track.
The Twizzlers episode might seem like it made today different somehow, but the truth was it didn’t. Tomorrow we’d be lobotomized all over again. Every day a carbon copy of the last. That was why I had to count them before I lost myself in the pile of never-ending days.
I laced my boots up tighter so they wouldn’t rub my calves raw. The only part of Crane Military Preparatory Academy that I tolerated was the running. To a lot of the boys, this was the worst part and the track was just another manifestation of the mind-numbing monotony at CMPA. But in a place designed to keep us from thinking, it was the only place where I was allowed to be alone with my thoughts. And since I was a decent runner, I let myself enjoy it, as much as I could enjoy anything from inside a cage made of ten-foot-high chain metal fences with spools of barbed wire for ornament.
After three hundred push-ups, I couldn’t be sure that I had shoulders or arms anymore. My chest felt as though it had been assembled with overtightened screws. So the first two laps felt like rolling a barrel uphill. By the third quarter-mile, my breathing had evened out.
It’d be Christmas soon. I hadn’t earned any leave yet, so I’d be spending it here with the other cadets. I tried not to think about it, but that was the problem with running, sometimes the things you didn’t want to think about most insisted on coming along beside you.
On the fourth lap, I thought I caught the hint of smoke. I looked around but didn’t see where it could be coming from. There weren’t chimneys for miles. The smell of smoke and charcoal was there again the next time I rounded the curve. It’d been happening more. Each time a chill worked its way up my neck.
Eventually I couldn’t fight it, and I had to look behind me to the grass field behind the fence. My heart jumped. There she was again. Lena. Angry, red skin distorted the left half of her face and a white slash ran from her temple, across her nose, to her mouth.
But Lena was dead.
Lena was dead.
I had to keep reminding myself. I left her in the burning cabin to die. And the price I paid was my sanity.
I blinked and, as always, she was gone. She was never there. I’d been mistaken. Surely. An overactive imagination transforming one of the trees in the distance. I was going crazy, after all.
But the smell of smoke lingered throughout my run. I was able to clean it completely from my nostrils only after I’d taken a shower.
I was getting better at forgetting about Lena after each incident. Brain on, brain off. Another day coming to an end.
When I returned to my bunk, it was mail call. I tried to keep my hopes down, but I’d been wishing for another letter from Honor since I received the last one a few days ago. That was when I was in a hopeful mood, anyway. When I was at my darkest, I just wanted her to forget about me, for us all to move on from the nightmare of my short-lived Hollow Pines days. Honor had not gotten into the Poncy Sebastian Studio summer intensive.
A younger cadet dropped a large manila envelope on my bunk along with a smaller, yellow envelope. I ran my hand over the bigger one. The handwriting on the front was unfamiliar.
I tore open the seal and pulled out a script. I climbed onto the bunk and angled my body away from the other boys as I turned the first page.
INTO THE HOLLOWS: A PLAY
My eyes moved across the pages.
ACT ONE, SCENE ONE
CHRIS:
HI, I’M CHRIS. I’M SO GLAD I MET YOU. YOU’RE MY BEST FRIEND.
LENA:
WE ARE GOING TO BE THICK AS THIEVES, YOU AND I.
I chewed on my dog tags. I couldn’t turn through the pages any faster. The words were blurring. My mind was racing through the fictionalized versions of the rules, of Mrs. Dolsey’s death, of Drake’s demise.
I didn’t know how long I had been reading when I came upon the final act. The pièce de résistance. The commander had come around to tell us lights out would be in ten minutes. But his voice was an echo from another world. I watched the tremors on the page as my shaky fingers turned to the last one.
HONOR:
CHRIS, PLEASE SAVE ME. CHRIS!
LENA:
LOOK AT ALL I’VE DONE FOR YOU. LOOK AT ALL I’M WILLING TO DO FOR YOU.
CHRIS
(looking between Honor, tied to chair, and Lena):
HONOR, LENA IS RIGHT. LENA, YOU ARE MY BEST FRIEND. THANK YOU FOR BEING THERE FOR ME. THANK YOU FOR BEING THE ONE PERSON WHO TRULY CARES ABOUT ME. I WOULD NEVER LEAVE YOU.
In the text, Honor was consumed by flames so hot that they melted the freckles off her nose. I felt queasy. On the verge of throwing up on an unsuspecting Rusty. I flipped the script over, scared to touch it again. It couldn’t be.
It wasn’t.
Where was my mind going?
First thing in the morning, I would bury the play. No, better, I would burn it. I pushed it with my foot to the very edge of my bed. I felt a sense of dread as strong as if I’d known the date of my own death.
But I was safe.
I was surrounded by a ten-foot fence with barbed wire and military guards.
I was losing it.
Still weak and shaken, I gently tore open the yellow envelope and pulled out a handwritten letter from Honor. I took a moment to hold the note close to my heart. The one bright spot. Through all of this, there had been her. And at least I knew that she would make it. Someday I’d be watching her on Broadway and that was all that mattered.
Chris,
she wrote.
I keep smelling smoke …
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I HAVE SO enjoyed my three-book stay in Hollow Pines. I could not have made the journey without Tony DiSanto. This is truly a brainchild of the whole DiGa Vision Team—Hayley Brooks, Val Elustondo, Tommy Coriale, and more.
Holly West, thank you for your unparalleled knowledge of The Phantom of the Opera and for your hard work and patience every step of the way.
As always, thank you to my agent, Dan Lazar, for working tirelessly for me and to Torie at Writers House for answering all my questions, no matter how inconveniently timed.
Lastly, to my husband and daughter who let me hide away for whole weekends at a time when needed so that I can create fun and scary things. You are both so special.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chandler Baker grew up in Florida, went to college in Pennsylvania, and studied law in Texas, where she now lives with her family and an ever-growing pile of books. Although she loves spinning tales with a touch of horror, she is a much bigger scaredy-cat than her stories would lead you to believe. In addition to the High School Horror series, Chandler is the author of the young adult novel, Alive. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
A FEIWEL AND FRIENDS BOOK
An imprint of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010
HIGH SCHOOL HORROR: TEEN PHANTOM. Copyright © 2018 by DiGa LLC. All rights reserved.
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ISBN 978-1-250-05876-8 (hardcover) / ISBN 978-1-250-16822-1 (ebook)
Feiwel and Friends logo designed by Filomena Tuosto
First edition, 2018
fiercereads.com
eISBN 9781250168221
First eBook edition: January 2018
Teen Phantom Page 20