Free Almost Final Curtain by Tate Hallaway

rang, I had an excuse to hang around while Bea and everyone else filed out. Mr. Martinez had placed the note on the corner of his desk. He was putting files into his briefcase when I stopped to pick it up. “You are coming to tryouts tonight, aren’t you, Ana?”
    Taylor loitered near the door, clearly waiting for a chance to talk. I nodded for her to wait up just a second. “Yeah, I guess,” I said.
    Mr. Martinez feigned horror. He placed a long-boned hand on his slender chest. “You guess? Surely you can muster more excitement. Thanks to Ingress, this should be the social event of the season.”
    “Yippee.”
    He frowned at my sarcasm, and seemed ready to ask me more.
    “I have to go. Don’t want to miss my bus,” I said.
    “See you tonight?”
    “Yeah,” I agreed. That was, if Mom had washed my lucky shirt and I had decided I could face seeing Nik for the entire run of the show.
     
     
    “I can’t believe Bea,” Taylor said as soon as we’d rounded the corner from Bea’s locker. She shot a glance over her shoulder, as if she worried that Bea could somehow hear anything over all the clamor of students at the end of the day. “You only broke up with Nik last night.”
    “It was supposed to be a break, not a breakup,” I kept insisting, though clearly I was the only one who thought so.
    “Oh, breaks never work,” Taylor told me, unhelpfully. “Unless you really talk about what it means, you know, lay some ground rules. Did you do that? Did you decide if it was going to be monogamous or how long it should last?”
    “No,” I said miserably.
    “Trust me, boys need clear rules.”
    Taylor exclusively dated the nerd-gamer set, which was particularly fond of rules, especially if they involved hit-point charts, but I could see her point.
    “I don’t really understand how Bea can horn in; I thought you said that this was about Nikolai’s family. They wanted him to date inside the gene pool, right? Bea’s last name is ‘Braithwaite.’ She’s not Russian or Romany, is she?” Taylor continued. We stopped at her locker. It was weird not to have Bea there. The end-of-the-day debriefing had been such a long-standing tradition.
    “She’s a witch,” I said, even though I probably shouldn’t. Taylor knew that much, though she thought we were the gardenvariety Wiccan types. “They’re in the same coven.”
    Where most girls had pinups of the latest teen heartthrobs, Taylor had character sheets from favorite role-playing campaigns and screen shots from the online game she obsessed over.
    “Oh,” Taylor said, giving me a confused look. “I thought you were a witch too.”
    “I failed my graduation test,” I admitted. “I’m kind of on the auxiliary team now.”
    Taylor had been around, though on the outside, when all that had gone down earlier this school year. Her thin eyebrows knit together. “That distinction matters?”
    “Oh, yeah,” I said, especially since I failed the Initiation because I was half vampire, and oh, an entire troop of vampires showed up and crashed the show and declared me their princess. “A lot.”
    “No offense,” she said, “but religions can be really stupid, especially when it comes to stuff like this.”
    “I hear ya, sister,” I said with a soft smile.
     
     
    I pressed my cheek against the window of the bus and watched the trees roll by. The rain had made the leaves pop, and everything was covered in a haze of green. The sidewalks and road had been stained a darker gray, but light reflected off every wet surface.
    My phone trilled with a received text. I hadn’t remembered switching the phone on, and the bus driver shot me a dark scowl. Dragging my backpack into my lap, I dug through everything until I found my phone.
    When I saw it was from Nik, I almost didn’t open it. I mean, did I really want to read a hostile reply to my angry note? Oh! That reminded me—I still had the note from Bea.
    Gee, which horror to open first?
    I could guess what Bea’s