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[Transcript]

        “Mary Rose, PLEASE! Let me out! Let me out!”

        Mina threw herself against the doors of the storage closet, pushing on them in a panic. She groped for the doorknob in the dark, twisting and turning it desperately, but the effort only made her bullies laugh.

        “Say please,” a teenaged Mary Rose Baxter said in singsong, leaning back to brace the door.

        “I did!” Mina frantically protested. “I did say please!”

        “Say PRETTY please, then,” Mary Rose snickered, exchanging a triumphant sneer with her mousy toady, a young and unenlightened Sophie Sybil.

        “P-p-pretty please!” Mina whimpered. She didn’t have much time. It always found her in the dark.

        “Sorry, what?” droned a snide Mary Rose. “You’re kinda muffled. Kinda ch-ch-choppy. What do you think, Sophie? Did Mina say the magic word?”

        “That please didn’t sound very pretty to ME,” Sophie giggled.

        “Well, she can’t help THAT.” Mary Rose flashed the smile she’d been practicing for her inevitable coronation as eighth-grade prom queen, high school valedictorian, and then like president or something else important and prestigious. “Maybe WE can help, though! Keep an ugly bookworm shut up in its cocoon for long enough, and it’ll fly free as a BEAUTIFUL butterfly! You should be grateful, Mina!”

        “Let me OUT! Please, just let me OUT!”

        Mina thumped her fists against the door in impotent frustration. Familiar self-loathing struck as Mina realized that she hadn’t used her full strength; her pleas for help had been restrained, too, a far cry from the most her voice could muster. She wanted to scream at the top of her lungs. She wanted to punch the door so hard it stung. She couldn’t, though. She never could. Even now, fear kept her folded up inside herself—it kept her quiet, shrinking and self-conscious. Why? Why? Why couldn’t she ever shout or dance or speak her heart aloud when she was alone in her bedroom? Why couldn’t she confess a single secret to a diary, if not her parents or Miss Pleezdoo? Tears welled up in Mina’s eyes. She was so tired of being pathetic—of being herself. She wished that Mary Rose’s taunts were true, and she could hide away unseen until she changed to something new... but even with nobody watching, Mina couldn’t find the courage to spread her wings.
 
        Mina’s muffled weeping tied a knot in Mary Rose’s chest. She scowled, too young and proud to meet the guilt that she had earned with anything but sputtering deflection.

        “It’s YOUR fault for tattling on us, Mina!” Mary Rose insisted in a huff, crossing her arms. “It’s your fault we have detention with that creepy freak DuNacht!”

        “I didn’t tattle! You got caught!” Mina protested. “I have detention, too!” 

        “Um, you could have lied for us like last time?” Sophie scolded in reply. “Mary Rose was literally like ‘maybe Mina’s actually cool’? We were literally gonna give you a makeover? We were literally drawing you in art class to, like, plan it?”

        This earned Sophie a death glare from her future fellow Death Cultist, who swiftly scrambled for a less embarrassing angle of attack.

        “You LIKE the library, Mina. We DON’T,” said Mary Rose. “It’s ONLY FAIR that you get EQUAL PUNISHMENT!”

        Mina, in fact, despite enjoying books about the wide world beyond Clayview, dreaded every single moment that she spent inside the library. She and her bullies had been sent to serve their after-school sentence there, in DuNacht’s dusty, cobwebbed domain, thanks to one of Miss Pleezdoo’s less-than-bright ideas. Mary Rose and Sophie had followed Mina out of the library on her state-mandated bathroom break (in fact, her swiftly abandoned attempt to flee the school before the sun set). Then they’d cornered Mina as she scuttled back to detention, spooked by that red-headed woman’s unexpected reappearance, and then tricked her into her current cruel predicament.

        “...I never did a thing to make you hate me,” Mina whimpered in the dark. “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

        Only silence answered. Seconds passed. Mina’s tearful eyes went wide.

        “M-Mary Rose?” she whispered. “Sophie?”

        She listened at the door, then fell to all fours, searching desperately for silhouettes in the sliver of setting sunlight underneath it. She found none besides the night’s approach upon an empty hallway.

        “No! NO! Please, please, PLEASE, I didn’t mean it! Please don’t leave me in the dark all by my—”

        Something clicked in the shadows behind Mina: a twig snapped by a stalking creature’s footstep; an arthritic crackle in the joints of something old and gaunt and carapaced, unfolding to the ceiling. It could have been nothing, and might have been anything. Mina’s worst fears filled the void—a stomach far from satiated. She’d seen the storage closet’s shallow depth, before the shadows sealed it shut; she’d felt its space expand forever in the absence of her senses’ reassurance. Now the creature that was lurking in her prison claimed proximity and mystery with equal greed, ignoring logic’s meek objections to the pairing’s contradiction. It was here, a breath away from her, in claustrophobic reach. It was somewhere out there, hiding, far too vast for her to fathom. 

        Mina froze, and held her breath... but her heart still writhed and struggled like a worm strung on a hook. Something hungry licked its lips and slithered closer.

        “...You think she’s faking?” Sophie asked, looking up at Mary Rose. To their ears, Mina hadn’t said a word since their last round of threats. She’d gone completely silent after they had said that she deserved their torment. Neither girl’s mockery had gotten a response for more than a minute now, and both of her bullies were secretly starting to worry.

        “Faking what? Not talking to us?” Mary Rose scoffed uncomfortably, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “That’s just as good as if she—if she, like, just shut up for good for real. Ha ha.”

        “Ha ha,” Sophie repeated, as if echoing some grave religious mantra.

        “What’s so funny?” asked June Summers from behind them, and both girls nearly jumped out of their skin.