Theo falls asleep before the credits.
We start with a movie he picked—something loud and CGI-heavy that makes the thin apartment walls vibrate—and by the third act his head droops onto my thigh, popcorn kernels stuck to his T-shirt. The dryers below us turn steadily, a low mechanical purr under the explosions on-screen. The room smells like butter, dust, and the faint tang of laundry detergent rising through the floor.
I let the movie run to the end, partly because my legs have gone pins-and-needles under his weight, partly because I’m afraid that once I move, the spell breaks. When the final battle blurs into credits, I click the TV off and everything drops into a softer dark, the only light coming from the streetlamps outside and the blue rectangle of my laptop on the coffee table.
Theo snuffles once and shifts, mouth open, lashes dark against his cheeks. I slide a folded quilt under his head and ease my leg free inch by inch. He makes a grumpy noise but doesn’t wake.
“I’ll be right here,” I whisper, just in case he’s half-listening in dreamland. “Doing nerd stuff.”
The nerd stuff is waiting in my inbox.
I sink onto the other end of the couch, tug the laptop closer, and refresh the Glass Roses dashboard. Downloads tick up in real time, a tiny digital heartbeat. A new icon flashes in the corner: Voicemail: 17 new messages.
“Okay,” I murmur. “Show me what you’ve got, Internet.”
The voicemail feature cost extra, another line item on my ever-growing “how bad do you want this” list. I justified it as engagement; now it’s a little glowing hope button. I pop in my earbuds instead of putting on the big headphones, glancing at Theo to make sure the cord won’t catch him if he rolls over.
The first message is a breathless woman with a Midwest accent.
“Hi, Mara, long-time listener, first-time caller! I just wanted to say, your new season gave me chills. I grew up in a town like Crescent Bay and we had our own version of Juliet—”
I smile, even as my shoulders tense. People love their parallel tragedies. I thumb a star next to her message anyway; sincere praise pays the same as the more interesting kind.
The second voicemail is a man whispering in a car.
“You’re so brave, doing this. They’re going to hate you there. Don’t stop.”
The bravery comment wedges between my ribs. I skip past the part where his breathing gets… personal, then delete and block his callback number with a sharp flick. The line between support and fetish is paper-thin in true crime, and I’m not in the mood to be somebody’s edgy bedtime story.
The next one is a teenager, voice squeaky with excitement.
“My mom went to Crescent Bay High, class of ’99. She says Juliet was, like, perfect, but also that Noah was trouble. I think maybe your theory about the town making him into the villain is right? Anyway, I made you cover art fan art…”
I pull the phone away from my ear long enough to see the attached image: a crudely drawn glass rose dripping what looks like blue paint. My chest tightens in a weird, tender way. I tag the message to respond later, maybe feature the art if it doesn’t look too much like blood.
I move through them: praise, half-baked theories, audio quality ranging from studio-clear to potato-in-a-windstorm. A woman from Florida shares a story about her own prom night scare; a man insists all rich towns breed killers; someone plays what sounds like their own guitar ballad about Juliet that I’m definitely not airing without a lawyer.
With every ping, a part of me swells: proof that I’m not talking into a void, that Juliet’s name has left my kitchen table and landed in strangers’ cars and bathrooms and earbuds. My foot taps out a jittery rhythm. I want to text my mother a screenshot of the stats just to wipe the “get a real job” line off her tongue.
Then I hit play on message number twelve.
Static slashes through my earbuds first, a harsh crackle that makes me flinch. The waveform on the screen jumps high and ragged. For a second I think it’s a butt-dial near a TV, but then a voice pushes through: flattened, robotic, the kind of distortion you get from cheap voice-changing apps or someone dragging audio through a dozen filters.
“You’re telling the story wrong.”
The hairs on my arms stand up. The voice is low and genderless, words slightly slowed, like they’re speaking through a fan.
I glance at Theo. He’s still out, one arm thrown over his eyes, toes peeking from under the superhero blanket.
“Who are you?” I whisper, even though they can’t hear me.
On the recording, there’s a faint background sound: reverb, like a big room, plus something rhythmic I can’t quite place, too muffled to be sure. A gym, maybe. Or a train station. Or just my imagination draping the old gym’s shadow over everything.
“Juliet didn’t die where they said,” the voice continues. “You keep talking about the cliffs and the rock shelf, like the bay just reached up and took her. That’s their story. Not the real one.”
The mention of the rock shelf drops my mind straight to the place beneath the overlook—the slick stone, the jagged edges, the roar of water that swallows screams. I know that geography in my bones. Hearing it reframed, dismissed, scrapes something raw.
I pause the voicemail and check the metadata. Caller ID is blocked, area code masked. The podcast host only labels it “Unknown.” The timestamp is twenty minutes after I posted episode one.
“You were waiting,” I murmur. “You jumped the second you heard your opening.”
I hit play again.
“You remember the gym, don’t you, Mara Lane?” the voice asks, and my lungs forget their job for a beat. “You remember the lights.”
My thumb twitches toward the pause button again, but I don’t press it.
“They always play the same songs,” the caller goes on, almost musing. “Slow dance under the fake moon, the cliffs backdrop, the glass roses on the tables. And then…”
There’s a tonal shift, like they lean closer to their phone.
“Love me, love me, say that you love me…”
The lyric is faint, almost sung, the words lifted directly from the Cardigans track Juliet made my mother replay in the salon that afternoon. I can hear her voice over it in memory: “One more time, Celeste. That’s my song.” My fingers dig into my knee hard enough to hurt.
I whisper, “You were there.”
The caller doesn’t answer me, obviously, but they do something worse.
“The gym lights went dark at two,” the voice says. “Not midnight. Two. That’s when it started.”
The recording clicks off mid-breath. No goodbye, no name. Just a hang-up in digital form.
My own breath blows hot against the underside of my earbuds. The room feels smaller, the ceiling lower. Below us, a washer door slams, a metallic bang that jolts me back into my body.
I replay the last line.
“The gym lights went dark at two. Not midnight. Two. That’s when it started.”
On the third listen, I scrub back a few seconds and isolate the phrase, trimming everything else away so it stands alone in my editing software, a little waveform island. I loop it.
“Two,” I say under my breath, matching the cadence. “Two, two, two.”
Theo mutters in his sleep and rolls to his side, one hand reaching blindly until it lands on my thigh again. His fingers curl in, anchoring. I slide my palm over his hair, the strands warm and damp from the shared blanket.
“It’s okay,” I whisper. “You’re okay.”
I’m not, though.
Because I remember that night in pieces: the shuddery breath outside the gym when Juliet found me, the drive home with “Lovefool” playing low on the radio, my mother’s voice at dawn saying, “They found her by the rocks.” No part of my memory hits two a.m., the gym, the lights.
The official story doesn’t either.
I know because I read it last week, sitting in this same spot with my laptop propped on a stack of moving boxes. I scroll now, fingers quick, pulling up the digitized articles and court summaries I bookmarked: Crescent Bay Herald, June ‘97; state trial records; a scanned PDF of the police press release.
My eyes skim the familiar lines.
Prom at Crescent Bay High concluded at approximately 11:45 p.m… witnesses report seeing Ms. Reeves leave the gym between 11:30 and midnight in the company of her boyfriend, Noah Pike… altercation observed near the clifftop overlook shortly after midnight… body discovered by a jogger on the rocks below at approximately 5:40 a.m.
Midnight. Midnight. Midnight. Over and over. The narrative pins itself there, like if you say it enough, it becomes true.
Nothing about two a.m. Nothing about lights staying on that late in the gym.
I open the PDF of the police report, the one I had to request from the state archives with a fee that still makes my stomach knot. The scanned pages load, the text a little crooked, grayed at the edges. I zoom in on the “Event Timeline” section.
- 18:00: Prom setup begins in school gym
- 20:00: Event start
- 23:45: DJ reports beginning final set
- 00:15: School staff begin clearing gym, lights remain on
- 00:30: Gym locked by assistant principal
- 05:40: Body located at base of cliff
I read the midnight times twice. I trace a finger along the line that says “lights remain on.” No mention of two. No mention of anyone being in the gym after the assistant principal locks up.
My mouth dries out. I lick my lips and taste salt from the air seeping through the window—salt and the faint chemical sweetness of someone’s hairspray below as they get ready for a night shift.
“You’re telling the story wrong,” the caller said.
If they’re right, if the gym lights went off at two, not 12:30, then either the official report shaved ninety minutes off the night or somebody rewrote it after the fact. Ninety minutes is time for a lot of things: an argument, a disappearance, a cover-up.
I scroll further down the report, hunting for any reference to lingering students, chaperones, anyone still in the building past midnight. The pages blur. I lean closer until the words double.
Nothing. Just boilerplate language about compliance with curfew, “no known incidents” during the event, and gratitude to the PTA for the “beautiful decorations and glass rose centerpieces.”
There it is again. Glass roses. Pretty, hard, dangerous if they shatter.
Theo’s hand slides off my leg as he curls inward, pulling the blanket tight. I tuck it around his shoulders, feeling an irrational urge to drag him into my lap, to build a fort of quilts and keep the whole world out.
Instead I unplug the earbuds and let one bud rest in my own ear, the other in my palm. I hit play on the isolated line again, this time out loud, volume low.
“The gym lights went dark at two. Not midnight. Two. That’s when it started.”
The distorted voice fills the narrow room, wrapping around the hum of the dryers and the faint bass thudding from a distant waterfront party. A car passes outside, tires hissing on damp pavement. For a brief moment, I swear I smell the old gym: floor wax, sweat, perfume, hairspray hanging in the air like fog.
I stop the playback and sit very still.
If I put this in the next episode, listeners will latch onto it. They’ll transcribe every word, run it through filters, dig for the caller’s identity. Someone brave or reckless could get dragged into the spotlight, their late-night confession turned into content—clipped, meme-ified, dissected by people who never stood under those gym lights.
If I don’t use it, I’m hoarding a potential break. And whoever left that message might not call back.
“What do you want from me?” I whisper to the silent speakers, to the cliffs beyond the window, to Juliet in her ivory dress and Noah in his orange jumpsuit and whoever distorted their voice to sound like a ghost.
The laptop screen reflects my face back at me, blue-tinted and tired. Behind my reflection, the prom photo leans against the mic stand, Juliet’s glass rose corsage catching the light in a frozen spark.
I glance at my phone, at the unread DM from @CBAlum97 still sitting in my inbox like a bruise. Leave this alone.
Someone who knows the town wants me to stop. Someone who knows the music and the lights wants me to keep going, but quietly, through a scrambled voice and a half-sung lyric.
I drag the voicemail into a new folder labeled TIPS – VERIFIED? and sit there, hand on the mouse, heart pounding, caught between two versions of responsibility: reporter, entertainer, witness, mother.
The cursor blinks over the file name, waiting.
I can’t tell yet whether this caller has handed me a lifeline or a lit match.