I let the next clip hang on the cue pad without firing it, my finger suspended over the glowing square. The masked figure in the middle section shifts again, head cocked toward the stage, and the hairs along my arms lift.
“We’re going to open the floor,” I say into the mic, throat dry. “We set up a Q&A for tonight, and I meant it. If you were on Harrow Island, if you worked that investigation, if you loved Juliet or Noah, this is your chance to speak on record. There’s a portable mic in the center aisle.”
A rustle runs through the gym, fabric and plastic and programs all fluttering at once. For a second no one stands. The smell of sweat and hair spray grows heavier, layered with the faint salt tang drifting in through the cracked windows high above the bleachers.
Then the masked figure rises.
They’re in a dark hoodie, jeans, and a cheap black half-mask that covers the top half of their face, the kind sold in bulk packs for last-minute costume parties. They move down the aisle in stiff steps, hands jammed in their pockets, shoulders hitching slightly with each breath.
Sadie, at the edge of the sound table, goes absolutely still. Her eyes track the figure the way a ship tracks a reef.
The volunteer holding the portable mic offers it out with a nervous smile. The masked person takes it, fingers white on the handle, and angles it toward their mouth.
When they speak, my lungs forget their job.
“Good evening, Crescent Bay,” they say, voice run through a mild distortion app on their phone, but the cadence punches straight through. “Broadcasting live from the land of regatta trophies and PTA war rooms. Long live the mixtape. Long live dial-up. Long live girls who deserved a better prom-night playlist than this town ever gave them.”
The gym reacts like someone plugged the floor into an outlet. Gasps, whispers, someone in the back actually says “Oh my God.” My chat window on the laptop erupts into scrolling hearts and caps-locked ORACLE ORACLE ORACLE.
I grip my mic harder.
“For those listening at home,” I say, keeping my tone level, “a masked audience member just spoke in a voice a lot of you will recognize from voicemails and DMs. They’re calling themselves—”
“Oracle,” the figure finishes. “You called me that first, Mara. I just leaned in.”
The distortion can’t smother the familiar rhythm, the little hop over certain consonants, the way they land 90s references with too much precision to be random. This is the voice that dropped grainy photos into our Discord, that used lyrics from old ballads to send us chasing the dock, that fanned the fandom’s worst instincts and then tried to steer them back.
“I’m going to ask you to stick to specifics,” I say. My heart hammers so hard the mic picks up the tiny vibration of my breath. “Where were you the night of the 1997 prom? And what did you see on Harrow Island?”
The mask tips back slightly. I watch their throat move on a swallow.
“That night?” Oracle says. “I was the girl in the rhinestone Chuck Taylors who thought she’d pulled off the heist of the century because she’d smuggled a microcassette recorder under her shawl. I thought I was making a documentary about the greatest after-party this town had ever seen. Boat rides, secret docks, the whole glossy Harrow production.”
A weird laugh leaks out of them, clipped and sharp. People in the chairs turn toward each other, murmuring names, trying to slot that description onto the mental seating chart of their memories.
“Where exactly?” I ask. “Walk us there.”
“Fine.” They tighten their grip on the mic. “Picture the cliffs everybody loves to turn into a postcard. Now rotate about ninety degrees in your head and step down toward the water. Past the rope fence kids used to climb during those ‘Prom Throwback’ fundraisers, past the cigarette butts on the rock shelf where chaperones pretended not to see. Keep going until the sand disappears and the only thing under your shoes is wet plank and barnacle.”
The gym noise drops to a low hum. I hear the faint buzz of the projector, the whirring fan above my head.
“I walked down that dock at around eleven,” Oracle says. “Glass roses on the drink tables, same as in this room. Juliet joked that Crescent Bay only owns one centerpiece and just keeps passing it around. ‘We’re trapped in a Diorama,’ she said. ‘Shake the fake snow.’”
My throat tightens. I remember Juliet’s voice from the old tapes, her dry humor, the way she undercut her own beauty with jokes about product and static-cling.
“You spoke to her?” I ask. “On the dock?”
“Yeah.” Oracle exhales into the mic. “She grabbed my hand and made me spin so the skirt would flare, told me I looked like a backup dancer in a No Doubt video. I told her I was recording the whole thing for future blackmail, then tapped the mic hidden under my wrap.”
A ripple of laughter moves through the crowd, shaky, unsure whether it’s allowed.
“Then she got serious,” Oracle says. “She leaned in and said, ‘If this goes wrong, tell the truth later. Don’t let them turn me into an accident story.’”
Those words land in my chest like the echo of the tape I played at the top of the show. “If this goes wrong…” The same phrase, in the locker room, on the dock. A chorus she sang to anyone she trusted for half a second.
“Did she tell you what ‘wrong’ meant?” I ask.
“She didn’t have to,” Oracle says. “I watched Elliot working the crowd. Making sure the ‘right’ girls got pulled toward the house, toward the empty rooms with beds still made up from summer, toward the balcony where nobody could see who went inside with them. I watched boys whose surnames match those plaques treat Juliet like she was a slot on a schedule.”
My hand shakes on the table. I steady it flat against the wood.
“Did you see Elliot and Juliet together?” I ask.
“Yes,” Oracle says. “Behind the boathouse. She told him she was done letting him rewrite her life. That she wasn’t his secret or his story or his anything. He grabbed her wrist. I didn’t hear all the words, just enough. ‘I can fix this.’ ‘You’ll ruin everything.’ Then Calder’s patrol boat did a useless little loop around the island and Elliot switched back into host mode, pouring drinks for donors in their twenties who should’ve known better.”
A sharp intake of breath cuts through the seats—someone hearing the retired chief’s name and reassigning him in their mental script. I clock it, file it away for later.
“You didn’t go to the police,” I say.
“No.” Oracle’s shoulders hitch. “Instead, I respected Juliet’s other request.”
The room leans forward.
“She cornered me in the kitchen right before midnight,” Oracle continues. “She knew about the recorder. She took it off me, rewound it to where you hear that argument on the dock, then handed it back. She told me to hide the cassette in her yearbook if anything happened. ‘You like puzzles,’ she said. ‘Make it hard for them to bury me.’”
My stomach flips. The air in the gym tastes like metal.
“So I did,” Oracle says. “Next day, after everything, I got into the school under the cover of kids signing banners and dropping off flowers. I slid the tape under her senior photo and pressed the cover back down. And then I did the opposite of what she asked.”
Their voice cracks on the last word. The distortion app glides over it, thinning it out, but I hear the break.
“You stayed silent,” I say softly.
They nod. “For years. I watched this town hang Noah in effigy at PTA meetings and charity balls and whispered conversations on that cliff path. I listened to Calder’s press conferences. I watched Elliot stand under balloons at Prom Throwback events talking about ‘healing.’ And I swallowed the proof in my own throat, because I knew what they could do to me. To my family. To anyone who said the rock shelf wasn’t where she died.”
The gym’s air feels heavier, thick with breath and dust and the sweet, stale perfume of stored decades.
I look over at Elliot. His jaw is set, lawyer leaning in close, lips a tight line at his ear. His gaze never leaves the mask.
“Oracle,” I say, returning my attention to the center aisle, “you’ve spent a year feeding my show breadcrumbs. Sometimes you gave me real clues. Sometimes you spun me in circles and people got hurt. Why tonight? Why live? Why here?”
The masked head turns toward me. I don’t see eyes, just twin holes and the flush of skin under the edges.
“Because,” they say, “rumor always had the edge online. I needed a room where the people who built the story had to sit in the same chairs as the people they hurt. And because I got tired of hearing my own voice in your episodes without ever standing next to the harm I helped cause.”
In the front row, Sadie grips the back of the chair in front of her. Her knuckles stand out sharp and white. Her eyes flick back and forth between me and the mask, and her throat works like she’s trying to swallow glass.
“One more thing,” I say. “Oracle isn’t your legal name.”
A thin, strained laugh rises from a few seats. The person in the aisle gives a tight little bow.
“No,” they say. “It’s my shield. And I owe Juliet more than a shield.”
Slow, shaking, they lift their free hand to the elastic band at the back of their head.
The whole gym holds its breath.
Fingers fumble, catch, pull. The mask comes away.
My brain supplies the name before my mouth does.
“Hailey,” I whisper into a live mic.
Hailey Pierce stands in the aisle, bare-faced under the harsh gym lights. Her hair is pinned up in a glossy knot that looked effortless an hour ago and now lists to one side, bobby pins slipping. Black eyeliner streaks down from her eyes, carving paths through foundation toward the sharp line of her jaw.
The room erupts, a low roar of whispers and exclamations. I hear “the country club panel girl,” “she was on that morning show,” “Calder’s favorite volunteer” ricocheting from seat to seat.
Sadie presses a fist to her mouth. “No,” she says under her breath, not to deny, but like she’s watching a beloved avatar dissolve in water.
Elliot’s facade cracks, not in a big way, but enough—his eyes narrow, his lips flatten, his fingers tighten on his knee. His PR rep places a hand on his shoulder, a reminder of cameras and optics.
I bring the focus back to the aisle.
“Hailey,” I say, keeping my tone even. “You’ve been on my show before. You told me about Harrow Island when you were drunk at the bar. You’ve also defended Elliot in public. Why should anyone here believe this version of you?”
Her laugh comes out harsh. “Because this is the only one that might let me sleep before I hit fifty.”
She swipes at her eyes with the heel of her hand, wiping eyeliner onto the back of her fingers.
“I was there that night,” she says. “I saw more than I told you. After Juliet fell—or was said to have fallen—Elliot pulled a handful of us into the boathouse. He said, ‘We’re going to tell the truth in the way that protects everyone.’ He laid out the cliff story beat by beat. Juliet storms off with Noah. She ignores warnings about the fence. She goes over. Tragedy. That’s the phrase he used. ‘Tragedy plays better than scandal.’”
A murmur ripples. I hear the word “spin” hissed near the media row.
“Calder backed him up,” Hailey continues. “He told us there’d been…complaints about the island, about parties. That if this turned into a criminal thing, they’d have to look at us too. Underage drinking, drugs, parents blindsided. He looked right at me and said, ‘You were serving drinks, Miss Pierce. I’d hate to see your college plans derailed.’”
She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear with shaking fingers.
“Elliot drove me home the next day,” she says. “He told me my blackout in the upstairs bedroom could turn into a problem if certain people decided I hadn’t been able to consent. He said he’d keep my name out of it, make sure any stories that surfaced framed me as a good kid who just had too much to drink, as long as I stuck to the script and never mentioned the dock. Or the tape.”
My stomach churns. The paradox I talk about in episodes—stories as both weapon and shield—stands in front of me in heels and smeared mascara.
“So you protected him,” I say, more statement than question.
“I protected myself,” she says, voice rough. “Elliot just rode in the same lifeboat. I gave interviews years later talking about the cliffs, nodding along with Calder, sitting next to donor parents at fundraiser dinners while they repeated the same tidy sequence in between bidding on yacht packages.”
She looks up at the banners lining the gym walls: regatta wins, Prom Throwback sponsors, scholarship donors. Her mouth twists.
“And then your podcast happened,” she says, swinging her gaze back to me. “You started poking holes in the story. Kids started talking about Harrow Island in the Oracle server. And I panicked. I wanted the truth out, but I couldn’t walk into the police station and say, ‘Hi, I lied for two decades, please believe me now.’ So I put on a digital mask.”
I keep my eyes on hers. “You became Oracle.”
“Yeah.” She nods. “I sent you the dock clues. I dripped out the yearbook bit. I used old lyrics and inside jokes so certain people from that night would know it had to be one of them. I thought I was forcing their hand. I didn’t plan for the Reddit dogpiles, the misidentifications, the teacher who landed in the hospital. That blood belongs on my hands too.”
Sadie shuts her eyes, jaw clenched. She lowers herself slowly into her seat like the floor turned unstable.
“Hailey,” I say, “I need to ask this clearly. Did you see Elliot hurt Juliet?”
The gym sound drops to a low, thrumming pressure, like the distant bass you hear across the water from a waterfront party.
“No,” she says. “By the time the screaming started, I was back on the shuttle boat, pressed against the railing, trying not to puke. I heard somebody yell her name. I heard the splash on the far side of the dock. I saw Elliot on the planks, waving his arms, shouting at Calder’s boat. I watched them transform what happened into a cliff story in real time. So no. I did not see his hands on her. But I saw his fingerprints on every narrative decision that followed.”
My pulse beats in my ears. The lawyers in Elliot’s row exchange low, urgent words.
“And the assaults we heard about earlier,” I press gently. “The survivor who described those upstairs rooms. Does your memory match hers?”
Hailey’s face pinches like she’s bracing for impact.
“Yes,” she says. “Down to the music bleeding up from the dock, down to the way girls were steered toward certain hallways. Elliot knew. He curated the guest list. He set up the rooms. He told us who to invite and who to keep away. He didn’t just know there were assaults in his orbit. He created the orbit.”
A sharp intake of breath surges through the chairs nearest Elliot. For the first time tonight, his composure frays visibly. His lips peel back from his teeth for half a second, a flicker of the man who snarled about “the dock incident” on that tech ethics panel.
Hailey clutches the mic harder.
“I’m not the hero of this story,” she says. “I’m the proof that the good-girl chorus went along with the cover-up because it protected us. I am not the killer. But I am one more piece of evidence that Juliet tried to warn us and we chose the version of her that fit on a plaque.”
My chest aches. I want to cross the space between us and press a hand to her shoulder, to offer something that isn’t a microphone and a roomful of eyes. Instead I plant my hand on the table, feel the groove in the wood under my palm, and remember that every second of this goes out to listeners who will replay it a hundred times.
“Thank you,” I say. “For saying on tape what you couldn’t say to a camera back then. For owning your part. This doesn’t erase the harm. But it does something the original investigation never did—it puts a complicit witness on record, under her own name, tying Elliot Harrow directly to the narrative that protected him.”
Hailey nods once, sharp, like a verdict.
In Elliot’s row, his lawyer jolts to his feet.
“This is defamatory,” the man calls out, pitching his voice toward the cameras. “My client has cooperated fully with every official inquiry. Ms. Pierce has admitted to lying for years. You can’t trust a word she says now.”
The audience erupts into overlapping shouts—“Let her speak,” “Of course you’d say that,” “Lawyered, how original.” The gym fills with sound, hot and restless, like the roar of waves funneled between rocks.
I step closer to my mic.
“This is a live public forum,” I say. “We have recordings, transcripts, and corroboration from multiple sources. The question isn’t whether Hailey ever lied. The question is who benefited when she did—and who benefits if she stays quiet now.”
I look straight at Elliot. For the first time tonight, he looks back without a practiced expression. Something hard and cornered looks out through his eyes.
Hailey stands alone in the aisle, mask dangling from her fingers, the gym’s stale air pressed tight around her. A glass rose on a nearby table throws fractured light across her shoes.
I feel the shape of the story locking tighter around Elliot, every tape and timeline and survivor lining up behind this shaking woman who finally stripped off her disguise.
The thought that follows slams into me with the force of cold surf: now that Oracle has a face, that face has a target painted on it.
I lean into the mic, heart racing.
“We’re going to take a short break,” I say. “When we come back, we’ll talk about what accountability looks like when the town storyteller sits in the defendant’s chair instead of the boardroom.”
I cut Hailey’s mic before panic can ripple across her features, signal to Sadie and the off-duty officers we planted in the crowd, and watch Elliot rise to his feet, rage and calculation wrestling openly across his face, wondering how many more minutes we have before he stops spinning and finally snaps.