There’s Someone Inside Your House
Stephanie Perkins
For Jarrod, best friend & true love
People live through such pain only once;
pain comes again, but it finds a tougher surface.
WILLA CATHER,
The Song of the Lark
CHAPTER ONE
The egg-shaped timer was on the welcome mat when she came home.
Haley Whitehall glanced over her shoulder, as if expecting someone behind her. Far in the distance, a red combine rolled through the sallow cornfields. Her father. Harvest time. Her mother was still at work, too, a dental technician at the only practice in town. Which one of them had left it here? The decaying porch boards sagged and splintered beneath Haley’s shifting weight as she picked up the timer. It rattled in her hand. The day had been cold, but the plastic eggshell was warm. Faintly so.
Her phone rang. It was Brooke, of course.
“How’s the blood?” Haley asked.
Her best friend groaned. “A nightmare.”
Haley went inside, and the screen door banged closed behind her. “Any chance that means Ms. Colfax will drop it?” She marched straight to the kitchen, slinging her backpack onto its black-and-white checkerboard floor. Sustenance. This afternoon’s rehearsal had been particularly grueling.
“Never.” Brooke snorted. “She’ll never drop it. Who needs common sense when you have ambition?”
Haley set the timer back on the countertop—where it belonged—and opened the refrigerator. “Normally, I’d argue for ambition. But. I’m really not looking forward to being drowned in corn syrup.”
“If I had the money, I’d buy the professional-grade stuff myself. Cleaning up the auditorium will be hell, even with all the tarps and plastic sheeting.”
Most theatrical productions of Sweeney Todd used at least some amount of fake blood—razors with hidden squeeze bulbs, gel capsules in the mouth, false clothing-fronts to conceal bloodstained doubles underneath. Additional mayhem could be implied with red curtains or red lights or a frenzied crescendo of screaming violins.
Unfortunately, their high school’s musical director, Ms. Colfax, had an unquenchable zeal for drama by all its definitions. Last year’s production of Peter Pan, for which she’d rented actual flying harnesses all the way from New York City, had resulted in the broken bones of both Wendy and Michael Darling. This year, Ms. Colfax didn’t just want the demon barber to slit his customers’ throats. She wanted to shower the first three rows with their blood. She referred to this section of the auditorium as the “Splatter Belt.”
Brooke was the stage manager. An honor, for sure, but it came with the impossible task of trying to steer Ms. Colfax toward sanity.
It wasn’t going well.
Haley held the phone to her ear with her shoulder as she loaded her arms with packages of deli-sliced turkey and provolone, a bag of prewashed lettuce, and jar of Miracle Whip. “Shayna must be flipping her shit.”
“Shayna is definitely flipping her shit,” Brooke said.
Shayna was their temperamental—often volatile—costume designer. It was hard enough to find decent costumes in rural Nebraska with a budget of zero, but now she had to deal with bloodstain removal on top of it.
“Poor Shayna.” Haley dumped the ingredients onto the counter. She grabbed the closest loaf of bread, wheat with some kind of herb, which her mother had baked the night before. Her mother baked to relax. She used a bread maker, but still. It was nice.
“Poor Brooke,” Brooke said.
“Poor Brooke,” Haley agreed.
“And how was Jonathan today? Any better?”
Haley hesitated. “You didn’t hear him?”
“I was running splatter tests in the parking lot.”
Haley was playing Mrs. Lovett, and Shayna’s boyfriend, Jonathan, was playing Sweeney, the female and male leads. Still only a junior, Haley had been getting leads in drama club and solos in show choir for the last two years. Both as a performer and powerful contralto, she was simply better than her peers. A natural. Impossible to overlook.
Jonathan was . . . above average. And he was charismatic, which helped his stage presence. However, this particular musical was well beyond his capabilities. He’d been struggling with “Epiphany,” his most challenging solo song, for weeks. His transitions held all the smoothness of someone stumbling across a bull snake in a tool shed, but even those were nothing compared to the way that he’d been massacring his duets.
Brooke seemed to sense Haley’s reluctance to gossip. “Oh, come on. If you don’t spill, you’ll only make me feel guilty for venting about everybody else.”
“It’s just . . .” Haley spread a gloppy coat of Miracle Whip onto the bread and then tossed the dirty butter knife into the sink. She’d wash it off later. “We spent the entire rehearsal on ‘A Little Priest.’ And not even the whole thing! The same few bars, over and over and over. For two freaking hours.”
“Yikes.”
“You know that part where we sing different lines simultaneously? And our voices are supposed to be, like, tumbling over each other in excitement?”
“When Sweeney finally figured out that Mrs. Lovett wants to dispose of his victims by baking their flesh into her pies?” Brooke’s voice was a wicked grin.
“It was a disaster.” Haley carried her plate into the living room, but she didn’t sit. She paced. “I don’t think Jonathan can do it. I mean, I seriously think his brain can’t do it. He can sing in unison, he can sing harmony—”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of,” Haley conceded. “But if someone else is singing different words? He keeps stopping and restarting. Like he’s trying to work through an aneurysm.”
Brooke laughed.
“It’s why I left early. I felt like such a bitch, but God. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“No one would ever call you a bitch.”
Haley swallowed a huge bite of turkey. It was a balancing act—cradling the phone, holding the plate, eating the sandwich, pacing the room—but she didn’t notice. She was worried. “Jonathan would.”
“Jonathan shouldn’t have gotten the part.”
“Do you think I should call him and apologize?”
“No. No. Why?”
“For being short with him.”
“It’s not your fault he can’t handle Sondheim.”
This was true, but Haley still felt ashamed for getting so frustrated. For walking out of rehearsal. She plopped onto the ancient corduroy couch, one of the many relics from when the farmhouse had belonged to her grandparents, and sighed. Brooke said something else in best-friend solidarity, but Haley’s phone chose that moment to do its usual thing.
“What’d you say? My connection is going in and out.”
“So call me from the landline.”
Haley glanced at the cordless, which was perched on an end table only a few feet away. Too much effort. “It’s fine now,” she lied.