I tell myself I’m doing this for the audio, not the optics, but the boxes on the floor look like tiny film sets waiting to happen.
Twenty disposable cameras, bought in a late-night impulse order, sit lined up on the warped scorer’s table like fat yellow candy bars. Next to them, I’ve laid out printed 90s playlists—song titles in my messy Sharpie, doodled stars in the margins—because licensing is a nightmare and imagination is free. The old gym smells like dust, old sweat, and the faint tang of sea air sneaking in through the high glass windows.
I check the recording levels again. My handheld recorder blinks a steady red on the folding chair next to me, wired into a shotgun mic perched on a tripod. The headphones around my neck press clammy rings into my skin. Down the hill, I hear a horn from the marina, some yacht coming in from a regatta; the sound carries up through the cherry trees and donor plaques like this is all just part of a summer event schedule.
“Okay,” I tell the empty room. “Let’s make some responsibly exploitative content.”
My voice echoes off the walls, bumping into the faded championship banners and the sun-bleached Class of 1997 backdrop still rolled up over the far exit. A plastic tub of decorations from Storage released one surviving glass rose centerpiece when I pried it open; I set the rose on the punch table for atmosphere. Light catches in the petals, throwing little fractured stars across the warped floor.
The doors creak open, and voices spill in with the salt air.
“Whoa,” someone says. “Throwback.”
The alumni arrive in clusters, exactly the way they moved through the halls two decades ago. A tight trio of women in yoga pants and structured denim jackets. Two dads in golf polos who look like they came straight from the club, sunglasses still hanging from their collars. One woman in a prom throwback T-shirt from last year’s charity ball, the logo cracked from too many washes.
Then Hailey Pierce walks in, late, of course.
She wears white sneakers too clean for this floor and an oversized linen shirt that probably cost more than my monthly groceries. Her hair is shorter than it was in high school, but the blowout is just as glossy; the smell of her hairspray arrives a second before she does, mixing with the gym dust until Crescent Bay’s whole sensory signature presses against my tongue: salt, aerosol, and the ghost of someone else’s party.
“Mara,” she calls, like we’ve always been friends. “Wow. This is… atmospheric.”
“High praise from a woman who color-codes the PTA auctions,” I say.
She laughs, but her eyes sweep the room, cataloguing everything. The mic. The cameras. The glass rose.
“Are we getting makeup?” one of the dads asks. “I thought this was going to be video.”
“Audio first, maybe some supplemental photos,” I say. “I’m not Netflix. I’m one woman and a child who knows how to hit ‘record’ on my phone.”
A ripple of polite chuckles moves through the group; a couple of people glance toward the doors, double-checking their escape routes. I feel the shift, the moment they remember they’re not just doing nostalgia—they’re stepping into a story that turned half the town into background characters and suspects.
I clap my hands lightly. “Okay. Thank you all for coming. Today is about memory. I’m going to walk you through the night of prom here in the gym, and I want you to show me where you were, what you saw, what you heard. We’re recreating the vibe, not glamour shots, so don’t panic.”
“Speak for yourself,” one woman mutters. “My vibe now is lower back pain.”
I grin and pick up the first disposable camera. The plastic feels rough and dry against my fingertips, the little thumb wheel stiff from disuse. “These are tactile prompts,” I say. “I want you to take pictures of anything that jumps out at you as we go—places where you remember standing, people you remember seeing, details you think no one else noticed. No digital filters. No do-overs. Just what your brain lights up for.”
I pass the cameras out, one by one, along with the playlist sheets. “And these,” I add, “are the songs that were on the actual prom DJ set list. I got it from the box the school forgot to throw out. If a track triggers a specific memory—where Juliet was when it played, who she was dancing with, what the room felt like—tell me.”
Hailey flips her playlist over, skims my scrawl. “You spelled ‘Savage Garden’ wrong,” she says.
“Authentic teenage errors,” I say. My palms sweat against the remaining cameras. “Any questions before we start?”
“Are you going to edit us to sound stupid?” one of the golf polos asks.
I meet his eyes. “No,” I say. “But I am going to leave in disagreement. That’s where the truth usually sits.”
That earns me a few raised eyebrows. Hailey rolls one of the cameras between her hands, the plastic clicking softly. “Sounds fun,” she says, but the word fun lands flat on the warped floor.
I hit record.
“We’re standing in the Crescent Bay High old gym,” I say into the mic, voice smoothing into my podcast cadence. “It’s late afternoon, the same slant of light that would have filtered in before they plugged in the fairy lights for the Class of ’97 prom. Around me are some of Juliet’s classmates—Hailey Pierce, Devin Alvarez, Brooke Chang, and a few others—ready to walk me through that night one more time.”
“You’re making us sound way more organized than we are,” Brooke says, snorting. Her camera shutter clicks; she takes a shot of the ceiling, of all things.
“Let’s start with the layout,” I say. “Where was the DJ?”
“There.” Three voices answer at once, pointing in three different directions.
“By the far wall, near the trophy case,” Devin says.
“No, center court,” Brooke says. “They brought in a platform, remember? It shook every time people jumped.”
“It was by the doors,” Hailey says, chin lifted. “They wanted the smoke machine near the exit so the alarm wouldn’t go off. My mom fought with the fire marshal for like an hour.”
They argue with the easy speed of people who have known each other long enough to skip the polite phase.
“You were in the bathroom half the night, Hails,” the woman in the prom T-shirt says. “You kept redoing your lip liner.”
“Because the photographer kept catching my bad side,” Hailey shoots back.
“Great,” I cut in. “So even basic layout is contested. That’s helpful.”
“Helpful?” Devin says. “Doesn’t that just mean we’re old?”
“Or that someone rearranged the story for you later,” I say, too quickly.
The air tightens. I hear the distant muffled thump of bass from the waterfront, someone already sound-checking for tonight’s charity ball at the yacht club. The same last names from these people’s email chains are on the flyers for that event, on the regatta rosters, on the school board minutes, on Calder’s golf trophies in the club lobby.
“Let’s move to where Juliet would have walked in,” I say, backing toward the long-closed front doors. “I want you to put yourselves where you remember being when she first stepped onto the floor.”
We shuffle into position, shoes squeaking. The floor feels sticky under my boots, decades of wax and spilled punch rising through the dust.
“Here,” Brooke says, taking up a spot near the center. “She came in on Noah’s arm, right down the middle. Everyone looked.”
“I was at the punch bowl,” the prom T-shirt woman says. “She came over to say hi to Elliot. They hugged for, like, five minutes.”
“Noah went to the bathroom,” Devin says. “That’s when she danced with Elliot. That’s why Noah was pissed later.”
“You mean before or after the fight?” I ask.
Heads swivel toward me.
“What fight?” someone says.
“Mr. Cooke mentioned seeing her arguing with a boy near the bleachers,” I say. “Not Noah.”
The name lands like I lobbed a live wire. Cameras pause mid-air. Hailey’s jaw tightens; her thumb stops rolling the little wheel.
“I thought you said this was about memory, not interrogation,” she says.
“Those are not mutually exclusive,” I answer. “Walk me through where Juliet was, in your own words. If it lines up with Cooke’s statement, great. If it doesn’t, also great.”
“Cooke was drunk then too,” Devin mutters.
“He was our chaperone,” Brooke says sharply. “He wasn’t supposed to be drunk.”
“Welcome to Crescent Bay,” I say under my breath.
We move across the floor in fits and starts. At each invisible “station,” I ask the same questions: Where were you? Who was near you? What was Juliet doing? The answers tangle.
“She slow danced with Noah to ‘Truly Madly Deeply’ right here,” Brooke says, snapping a photo of the scuffed floor, capturing nothing and everything.
“No, that was ‘I’ll Be,” someone else says. “And she was by the doors. I remember, because the breeze kept blowing her hair into her lip gloss.”
“She and Noah were fighting by then,” Devin insists. “I was in line for the bathroom; I heard him say, ‘You made your choice.’”
“He meant colleges,” another voice says. “He meant Dartmouth versus NYU, not boys. Don’t make it gross, Dev.”
“She was crying in the hallway,” Hailey says suddenly.
The room goes quiet.
“What hallway?” I ask.
“By the girls’ bathroom,” she says. Her camera hangs at her side now. “She had her heels off. I remember because she was barefoot on the tile, and I kept thinking she was going to step on a staple or something.”
The detail is so ordinary it slices through the fog. Barefoot on the tile. No cop report mentioned that.
“Did Noah see her?” I ask.
“He came up after,” Hailey says. She rubs at a nonexistent smudge on her playlist sheet. “They were yelling, but not about what you think.”
“Then what?” I ask.
“Nothing,” she says, shrugging. “Just drunk prom drama. You know.”
I know drunk prom drama does not usually end with a body on the rocks beneath a cliff.
The arguments spiral as we circle the room. Each memory feels like it’s been spun through a tumbler with everyone else’s rumours, edges knocked off, some pieces ground to dust. When I press for specifics, they push back.
“Why does it matter exactly where she was standing?” one of the dads asks. “She ended up in the same place either way.”
“It matters because it tells me who she trusted enough to stand near,” I say. “And who had opportunity to guide her toward those cliffs, or toward a car that took her there.”
“You make it sound like some of us pushed her off,” he says.
“I make it sound like she didn’t walk through a wall and appear on a rock shelf by magic,” I answer.
The word magic tastes wrong. Juliet deserved better than a disappearing act.
Hailey snorts. “You love that cliff,” she says. “You talk about it on your podcast like it’s a main character. The poor rock shelf.”
“The rock shelf didn’t lie,” I say. “People did.”
That shuts her up for a second.
I guide them toward the bleachers next, metal seats folded up against the wall, dust outlining where banners used to hang. “Okay,” I say. “Last sighting. Stand where you were when you last remember seeing Juliet. Don’t overthink it. Just go.”
They scatter. The prom T-shirt woman heads toward the doors. Devin drifts to the edge of the dance floor. Brooke walks straight to the imaginary DJ platform. Hailey hesitates in the middle before turning toward the hallway entrance.
“Interesting,” I say. “We’ve got at least four different last sightings.”
“Memory is weird,” someone offers.
“Memory is convenient,” I say. “For some people.”
“You’re implying we’re all lying,” Hailey says.
“I’m implying some stories got repeated so often they turned into script,” I say. “Scripts usually help someone. I’m trying to figure out who.”
The moment stretches. The gym hums with the distant HVAC and the nearer, human kind of static that lives in throats. Outside, a seagull shrieks over the parking lot. From the waterfront, the faint echo of bass leaks up—tonight’s charity ball soundcheck, the grown-up version of prom where they wear 90s dresses for fun and pretend tragedy is retro.
“Juliet was by the bathroom,” Hailey says finally. “That’s my final answer. She was talking to me.”
My neck prickles. “About what?”
Hailey’s tongue darts out, wets her lip. Her shoulders fold inward a fraction, the first crack in her practiced posture. “You’re going to spin it,” she says. “You’ll cut out the parts that make me look decent and leave in the one line where I sound like a bitch.”
“I leave in the parts that help,” I say. “If you cared about Juliet, this is one of them.”
Something flashes in her eyes—guilt, anger, nostalgia, I can’t tell. “She said she was done,” Hailey blurts. “Okay? She said after that night, she wasn’t keeping it quiet anymore. She was going to go nuclear.”
My grip tightens on the recorder. “Keeping what quiet?”
Hailey lets out a sharp, humorless laugh. “God, she loved drama.”
“Hailey,” Brooke says softly. “Don’t.”
“Why not?” Hailey snaps. “She’s already turned this into a show. Might as well give her a good sound bite.”
She looks straight at me. “Juliet said she had a secret. Something big. She kept saying, ‘After tonight, it’s out. I’m done protecting him.’”
The air in the gym drops ten degrees.
“‘Him,’” I repeat.
Hailey nods. Her knuckles whiten around the camera. “She said it would destroy someone important,” she says. “Her words, alright? Destroy. Someone important in this town. The kind of person whose last name is on everything.”
A few people suck in breath. Eyes dart toward the invisible list: Harrow, Calder, Pierce, maybe even Reeves. The same names etched in brass on the wall outside, printed on regatta sails, sewn into the Prom Throwback banners.
“Who?” I ask.
Hailey shifts her weight; the metal bleacher groans behind her. “She didn’t say,” she lies.
I hear the wobble.
“Did she say where she would go public?” I push. “Who she’d talk to?”
Hailey’s gaze skitters away, lands on the glass rose centerpiece on the table. She walks over and taps one petal with her acrylic nail. The rose wobbles, light fracturing over her wrist.
“She said, ‘After tonight, everyone will know,’” Hailey says. “She said maybe the newspaper, maybe an assembly, maybe…” She glances at me. “Maybe a microphone.”
My throat tightens. “Did you believe her?”
“I believed she could,” Hailey says. “People listened to Juliet. That was the problem.”
“Problem for who?”
“For whoever she was planning to nuke,” Hailey says. Her mouth twists. “Look, we all had stuff. We were kids. Half the guys here were drinking on boats after games. Some teachers looked away. Parents got things fixed. That’s how Crescent Bay works. Juliet knew things she wasn’t supposed to know.”
Silence lays over the floor like a new layer of dust.
“You don’t have to say his name on mic,” I say quietly. “You can write it down. You can tell me off the record.”
Her jaw works. “Off the record doesn’t exist with you,” she says. “Everything here ends up in somebody’s earbuds.”
“That’s not true,” I say. “There’s already so much I haven’t aired.”
Theo’s face flashes in my mind, his small body curled on the couch, whispering that the cliff looks hungry.
Hailey laughs, harsh and short. “You want the truth?” she says. “We all benefitted from her not saying anything. Every single one of us. Maybe not directly, but… the town stayed tidy. Colleges stayed on the table. Parents didn’t have to get dragged through court. The glass house stayed pretty from the street.”
She nudges the glass rose again, harder this time. It topples, clinks onto its side but doesn’t shatter. The sound rings through the empty bleachers.
“And now?” I ask.
“Now you’re in here throwing rocks,” she says. “And you want me to hand you a bigger one.”
Her eyes are shiny, but she blinks the wetness away before it can fall.
“If Juliet planned to go public,” I say, “that means she died with a secret still inside her. That’s not on you. That’s on whoever decided she didn’t get to talk.”
“You don’t know that,” Hailey says. “You don’t know what she would have done the next day. She might have woken up and changed her mind. She did that. She was allowed.”
“You’re right,” I say. “She was allowed. Someone made sure she never got the chance.”
The cameras hang heavy around their wrists now, forgotten prompts. No one is taking pictures anymore. The prom T-shirt woman rubs her thumb over the raised print of the logo, then sighs.
“Are we done?” she asks. “I feel… used.”
Guilt punches me in the gut. “We’re done for today,” I say. “Thank you for being here. You can leave the cameras on the table. I’ll have them developed and pixelate any faces before I share anything with you.”
“Before or after you share it with the world?” Devin mutters.
No one laughs this time.
They file out in low conversation, footsteps echoing. The door thuds shut behind the last of them, cutting off a fragment of gossip about carpool and the Prom Throwback fundraiser next month, where they’ll put on their glitter again and dance on this same floor for charity.
I’m alone with the hum of the lights, the salt in the air, and the red recording light still blinking accusingly on my chair.
I gather the cameras, their weight surprisingly solid in my hands, each one a little sealed box of skewed truth. One of them has a deep thumb dent in the plastic where someone squeezed too hard.
My fingers find the glass rose on the floor. I set it upright on the table. A crack spiders along one petal that wasn’t there before, so faint you’d miss it unless you picked it up and turned it to the light.
Juliet planned to speak, and the town survived by keeping her quiet.
I press stop on the recorder and stare at the silent gym, at the empty space where a DJ once blasted ballads and where my future live episode will stand. If her secret could destroy “someone important,” then whoever that someone is has spent twenty-six years making sure every story in this town bends away from them.
The cameras on the table feel suddenly like grenades.
I know I’m going to pull the pin on at least one.