The package shows up on a Tuesday, halfway between lunch dishes and my third cup of coffee gone cold.
I hear the metal slap of the mail slot in the hallway and the quick shuffle of envelopes. The dryers downstairs hum through the floor, a steady white noise under the clack of Theo’s abandoned LEGO bin near the door. My laptop sits open on the table in front of me, audio waveforms from the reenactment frozen mid-spike, Hailey’s voice about “destroying someone important” caught on a jagged peak.
The envelope in my mailbox is bigger than the usual bills. Padded, thick, and decorated within an inch of its life. Pastel washi tape, tiny skull stickers, one holographic rose that throws flashes of green and purple up my stairwell. My name and address are written in bubble letters.
The return address just says: SADIE Q. with a little heart over the i.
I carry it back to the kitchen like it might meow. The paper crackles under my fingers. My stomach does that weird little twist it does when downloads spike or a voicemail sounds too personal—excitement braided tight with dread.
“Okay, Oracle-fandom pen pal,” I say to the envelope. “What did you just spend your money on?”
I tear the top carefully so I can keep the stickers intact. Inside, there’s bubble wrap, then more bubble wrap, then tissue paper printed with tiny cassette icons. Sadie has nested this thing like a Russian doll of Etsy finds. A whiff of synthetic berry perfume rises when I peel the layers back, clashing with the detergent and faint fried-oil smell drifting up from the street.
At the center sits a plastic cassette case.
My throat goes dry. For a moment, I’m fifteen again, sitting on Juliet Reeves’s bedroom floor while she flips tapes over with chipped pink nails, telling me which songs are for making out and which are for crying in the shower.
I flip the case open.
The tape inside is clear with white reels, the kind you’d buy in a ten-pack at CVS in 1997. On the A-side, in metallic purple pen, someone has written:
JR + ? PROM
Little stars dot the corners. The question mark has a tiny heart for a dot.
“You have got to be kidding me,” I whisper.
Under the cassette lies a folded stack of notebook paper, front and back crowded with Sadie’s handwriting, paragraphs leaning into each other. In the top corner, she’s drawn a tiny glass rose.
I skim, my eye catching on key phrases.
Dear Mara, I hope this isn’t too much but I HAD to send it. I was on this late-night collectors’ auction (don’t judge, insomnia + ADHD + PayPal = chaos)…
Further down: The seller is from two towns over, user name “CresBayBaby97,” and she listed it as “90s prom mixtape from CT coast, possibly famous case adjacent???” The track list photo she posted—Mara. It matches like, 70% of the lyrics Oracle keeps referencing. I checked my spreadsheet three times.
My chest tightens.
She’s copied the track list out for me in neat rows:
SIDE A: Truly Madly Deeply / The Freshmen / Crash Into Me / I’ll Be / Foolish Games / Bittersweet Symphony
SIDE B: …
Of course Oracle built their puzzles out of this. Of course.
At the bottom of the page, Sadie’s excitement tilts into something rawer.
I used my rent buffer for this, so please tell me it matters? Even if it turns out to be nothing, I wanted YOU to have it. You were there. You’ll know if it feels like hers. Also, selfish request: can I be “archival producer” in the episode credits if you use it? LOL only half joking.
My fingers linger on that last line. The letters dig into the paper like she pressed the pen too hard. The line between listener and collaborator keeps getting thinner, a piece of tape pulled until the strands separate.
On the outer edge of the cassette, someone has written PROM ‘97 in block letters. Underneath, on a thinner line, “Play Me, Mystery Boy” loops in smaller script.
My heart knocks against my ribs. JR plus question mark. Mystery Boy. The wrong boy Mr. Cooke saw in the hallway. The boy Hailey swore would be “destroyed” if Juliet talked.
I check the time. Theo is at my ex’s until dinner. I have the apartment, the table, the tape, and a hole in my stomach where courage ought to sit.
There’s just one problem.
I don’t own anything that can play this.
###
My mother answers my call on the third ring, salon noise buzzing in the background—hair dryers, pop radio, someone laughing too loudly over a foil crinkle.
“Hey, Ma,” I say. “Do you still have that old tape deck? The one you used to blast Mariah while you did prom hair?”
“Baby, what kind of question is that?” she says. “Of course I still have it. You never know when music will go out of style and come back again. Why?”
“Podcast thing,” I say, the automatic deflection at this point. “Can I borrow it for a day?”
She lowers her voice. “This about the dead girl again?”
“Juliet had a name before she had a case number,” I say, sharper than I mean to.
There’s a beat of breath. “I know that,” she says. “Come by after I finish Mrs. Harrow’s blowout. The deck’s in the back closet.” She hesitates. “Don’t let this eat you alive, Mara.”
I hang up before my throat closes.
The walk to her salon takes ten minutes. Salt air curls around the corners of the brick buildings, bringing with it a faint thud of bass from the waterfront where crews are setting up speakers for tonight’s charity cruise. Same town, same donors, different year.
Inside the salon, the air is a chemical cloud of hairspray, shampoo, and nail polish. A framed photo of the 1997 Prom Throwback fundraiser hangs by the desk—grown adults in satin and taffeta, lifting plastic champagne flutes under a banner with glass roses printed along the edges. My mother grins from the background, hands buried in some woman’s curls.
“Back room,” she mouths, hands busy in a teenager’s hair.
I squeeze past shelves of product into the supply closet. The tape deck sits on a low shelf between a box of old perm rods and a crate of retired magazines. It’s heavier than it looks, gray plastic warm from the nearby water heater, buttons worn slick.
I run my thumb over the RECORD button, stained faintly pink from nail polish remover. How many girls’ secrets poured into this little machine before prom? Crushes, harmonized ballads, whispered vows about never letting some boy make them cry?
I tuck the deck under my arm and weave back through the salon. My mother catches my eye in the mirror.
“Be careful with that,” she calls over the whirr of dryers. “It knows a lot of sins.”
I don’t ask whose.
###
Back home, I clear space on the table, nudging my laptop aside. The tape deck thumps down, heavier than my sleek little audio interface. Old world meets new—buttons versus touchscreens, hiss versus lossless audio.
I shut the window halfway to muffle the traffic. The laundromat’s heat seeps through the floor, turning the room into a low-grade sauna. Outside, somewhere near the waterfront, a soundcheck mic squeals and then cuts; bass lines thud in test bursts, ricocheting off the buildings like distant heartbeats.
I click the cassette case open with my thumb. The plastic creaks. The tape smells faintly like dust and someone else’s bedroom, the way old plastic does when it’s been shut away too long.
“Okay, Juliet,” I murmur. “What did you put on here?”
The cassette slides into the deck with a satisfying clack. I plug the tape deck’s audio out into my laptop so I can capture everything. No way I risk relying on my ears alone. The waveform window pops open, blank and expectant.
I hit PLAY.
There’s a second of hiss, then the opening notes of “Truly Madly Deeply” bloom through the tinny deck speaker—and through my podcast headphones, richer, layered with tape noise. My skin prickles. I’m back in the old gym, watching Juliet and Noah sway under cheap chandeliers, her hair catching the light.
I close my eyes and listen to the whole track, letting the hiss and warble fill in the edges where my memory thins. My fingers drum the table in time.
The song ends on a soft click.
For a second, there’s silence.
Then a faint rustle. A suppressed laugh.
“Is it going?” a girl’s voice asks, slightly distant, playful. “Did you hit record or what?”
I freeze.
Hiss swells, then a thumb thumps the mic. “Yeah, yeah, it’s on,” a boy mutters. Deeper, closer. The tone has that practiced boredom rich boys wear like cologne.
My heart lodges somewhere behind my sternum.
The girl laughs again, that bright, bell-clear sound I have heard in other people’s memories. In Katie’s voice when she got close to crying. In my own head at two in the morning when I write scripts and think about the way Juliet twirled there in the hallway the week before prom, spinning gold out of thin air.
“Okay, Mystery Boy,” she says. “Mixtape rules. Side A opens with hands-down favorites, no skipping allowed. Side B is for making out and crying later when you ruin your eyeliner.”
Juliet.
Her name thrums in my veins.
The boy mutters something I can’t make out under the hiss. My software’s meters spike green. I lean in, headphones clamped tight.
“Say it again,” she teases. “You love my taste. Admit it.”
“I love parts of you,” he says.
The way he lingers on parts makes my stomach knot. It could be any of them—Noah, Elliot, some other boy with a trust fund and a badly concealed arrogance. The tape blurs the edges of his consonants, smears the syllables into suggestion.
The first track on the tape blares in without warning: “The Freshmen.” The argument disappears under the opening chords.
I yank the headphones off, pulse hammering, and hit STOP. The room snaps back in: dryer thumps below, an argument from the sidewalk, the faint shriek of a seagull over the parking lot. The tape deck clicks under my hand, patient.
I rewind slowly, eyes on the waveform scrolling backward, then press PLAY again and watch it crawl forward, ready to punch out the music when the voices end.
This time I record it into its own track, isolating the hissy little slice wedged between songs.
“Okay, Mystery Boy…”
I mouth the words along with her. My knee bounces under the table. My hands tremble on the controls.
Juliet recorded this. She hit RECORD on Side A, introduced her own mixtape, and captured the boy on the other end of it. For fun? For flirtation?
For proof?
The song runs through, then a couple more, pure music. Crash Into Me, then I’ll Be. Each one hits like a timestamp, a pinned butterfly on a bulletin board labeled 1997. Oracle has quoted nearly all of them in their riddles. The coincidence shrinks from ocean to puddle.
Halfway through Foolish Games, the audio wobbles and cuts. I hear the faint clicks of buttons being pressed; the mic rattles near fabric.
“Stop it,” Juliet says. Same voice, different angle. Closer to the mic now. “You’re not funny.”
“You like it,” the boy says.
A shuffling noise. The edge in his tone slices through the tape murk.
“Not right now,” she says. “Seriously. Stop.”
Something solid hits something else—hand against wall, maybe. The mic overloads with a pop. I jerk back.
“It’s private,” he says. “That’s the whole point.”
“Private is not the same thing as secret,” she answers. The bright lilt is gone. Her words come out measured, like she has rehearsed them in a mirror. “You keep mixing that up.”
My throat tightens. I scribble the line down on the back of Sadie’s letter with a dull pencil.
Background noise filters in under their voices—distant music muffled through walls, a crowd murmur, one high laugh. It sounds like they’re in a hallway just off a party, somewhere between the public and the tucked-away.
“Someone could hear,” he says. “You don’t want that.”
“Maybe I do,” she says.
Silence, thick and charged. My heart counts it out: one, two, three.
When she speaks again, the words land with the clarity of breaking glass.
“I’m not your secret anymore.”
Hiss rushes in after the sentence, like the tape needs a breath too.
My own breath comes out shaky. I hit PAUSE without meaning to, freezing her in the space between that declaration and whatever he says next. My reflection wobbles in the black gloss of the tape deck window—headphones askew, eyes too wide, mouth a line carved tight.
Juliet recorded this. Not an accident, not a pocket dial, not someone else sneaking a mic into a room. Her voice carries awareness. She knows the tape is rolling. She uses it.
For twenty-six years, this plastic rectangle sat in a box, her fear and defiance looped and rewound in the dark.
I press PLAY again.
A rough scrape, like someone turning away.
“Don’t be dramatic,” he says. The boy’s voice thickens with annoyance. “You know how this works. People talk.”
“Let them,” she says. Louder now. “You think I care if everyone finds out I…?”
The rest blurs under a surge of crowd noise. Someone must have opened a door near them, letting the gym’s music and chatter flood in. The tape saturates, overloaded. My waveform spikes red.
I rewind. Play. Rewind. Each time, the same wash of sound washes out the crucial words. No amount of squinting at digital peaks gives me clarity.
“I…they’ll…freak out…” the boy’s voice cuts through in fragments. “…ruin everything…”
Then the sharp click of STOP, and silence. After a beat, Bittersweet Symphony starts, its strings rolling out like nothing happened.
I sit very still, hands firm on my knees so I don’t shake the table.
Juliet had a secret about “someone important.” She planned to go public after prom. She told at least one boy she refused to be hidden. She pressed RECORD on a mixtape labeled for Mystery Boy and captured an argument where she used the word secret like a weapon.
This isn’t Oracle’s narrative. This is hers.
I glance at my laptop, at the new file name blinking in my project folder: JR_PROM_TAPE_RAW.wav.
If I put this on the podcast, her voice will come roaring back into town. Everyone will dissect every breath, every clipped consonant. The fandom will pull the file apart, run filters, accuse half the graduating class of being the boy in the hallway. They’ll make their own edits, their own remixes and TikToks and conspiracy threads.
And whoever once leaned against a wall, telling Juliet she was “private,” not secret, will hear her say, I’m not your secret anymore in thousands of earbuds.
My pulse pounds so hard my vision goes fuzzy around the edges.
I hit SAVE anyway. Then I unplug the tape deck, hands careful, and tuck the cassette back into its case like I’m putting a match away in a drawer full of dry paper.
The little heart over the question mark on the label stares up at me.
The question isn’t whether this tape matters.
The question is who hears Juliet’s voice next—the listeners hungry for content, the cop who still has to smile at Calder in the hallway, or the man who thought he had buried his secret on a rock shelf beneath a pretty cliff.