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Story: Electricity

“Mostly,” he said. “Let’s go in.”

Darius popped his trunk first, so we could grab assorted flashlights and Lacey picked up a grocery bag of snacks.

“Way to think ahead.”

“There’s tissues too,” she said, ducking into the path of Darius’s flashlight.

The door swung forward with an ominous creak, but everything inside seemed normal. There was a pump sink from a sunken well and a pot-bellied stove, along with an unplugged radiator and some electrical blankets, folded up on a ratty futon that’d clearly seen most of its use as a bed.

“My uncle brings a genny up here for longer trips, but I didn’t know how to safely haul it in my car,” Darius said, knocking a layer of dust off a card table with his sleeve. I swung my flashlight around and spotted a way out of date calendar on the wall, edges crinkled with time, and realized it’d been made in honor ofBison Baseball 1999.

“Even here?” I said, and went over to tear it off and toss it in the sink, bison-side down.

Lacey pulled fake candles out of the grocery bag, the kind that looked like tea lights but with no real flames, and turned them on. She put two more in each small window, which made the cabin look more welcoming and less murdery. And then after that, we sat on the futon and waited. Lacey checked the time on her phone—I grabbed some Doritos instead of attacking my fingernails—and we all heard the sound of a slow car driving up.

“What do we do?” I whispered.

“Just wait. We don’t want to scare her off.”

“Or him,” Darius said.

There was a foot on the stair as every urban legend I’d ever read downloaded into my head, and then the front door opened.

“Hello?”

It was a female voice—attached to a girl I recognized. “Hey—Shana, right?” She was wearing a hoodie from the college three towns away, baggy jeans and flip-flops, and her blonde hair was in a messy bun.

“Yeah.” She seemed surprised that I knew her. If only she knew how I knew her. “Is this the right place? My sister told me this was happening.”

“It is,” Lacey said, standing up. “Please, come in. We’re waiting for a few more to get here.”

Her eyes ran over Darius. “Who’s he?”

“I’m just a friend of a friend. But this is my uncle’s place.” He looked around between the three of us, the odd man out. “I can leave though, if you want me to.”

I wanted him to stay but— “That might be best,” Lacey answered him.

“Sure. I’ll just take a flashlight and go wait in the car.” He stood and turned, looking directly at me. “I will just be outside, if you need me. Don’t use this as an excuse to leave me out.” He grabbed a handful of chips on his way out the door.

Shana gave him a wide berth and then took his place on the futon. When the door closed she said, “I always knew there were more.”

“That’s why we’re doing this,” Lacey said. “We’ve got some evidence and we wanted to let everyone know.”

“Evidence?”

“Mason Green’s going to be here in an hour.” She winced as I said his name. “We got some leverage on him—he’s giving us the photos he took.”

“That lying sack of shit.” Her whole body tensed as she cursed.

“He took them of me, too,” Lacey said. “You’re not alone.”

I watched Shana grapple with what to say after her admission. “Thanks?”

“We’re gonna take the photos to the police tonight. And as many people who’d like to go in with us, if they do.”

Shana’s looked away, as though she were more intimately concerned with the cobwebs on the walls than either of us. “You know I told myself I wouldn’t think about it anymore. You think it didn’t happen—you wish it didn’t happen, so you pretend it didn’t happen, you know? I was so messed up in the head I even went out on a date with Danny afterwards. Because some part of me wanted to make what’d happened normal again. If we were dating, then he couldn’t have raped me, right? Then that messed me up even more and I just left. For college.

“I thought everything was behind me but—my sister—she’s beautiful. And one of the guys on the team started asking her to parties.” Shana put a hand to her mouth. “I couldn’t not let her know. But it—it was so hard. The hardest thing I’ve ever done. And then I got mad, at myself, that I was letting some asshole from a year ago have so much power over me.”