Golden Chains

FRED POV

Friday night, the party

I never noticed the exact moment the music died. One second the bass was a living thing, thudding up through the soles of my sneakers and into my teeth. The next, there was only a ringing hush, like the whole world had been dunked underwater and held there.

I was still on the back stairwell, where I'd been hiding for the last half hour. The service stairs are the one part of my parents' mansion no designer ever touched: bare concrete, a single caged bulb, a cold that seeps through my jeans from the step below. Somewhere past the fire door the party carried on without me. I could feel it through the wall, a muffled heartbeat of laughter and bottle clinks, with the faint chlorine sting of the pool drifting in underneath.

I hadn't moved since the kiss.

Since Eli.

My own pulse had gone missing. I pressed two fingers to my wrist to check, and it took a long time to find it. Maybe the music had stolen it. Maybe the moment had. Maybe it had been Eli's mouth, warm and sure against mine in front of half the school.

"I didn't mean to mess it up," I said. My voice cracked on mess, and I hated that it did.

Eli crouched on the step beside me, close enough that I caught the soap-and-laundry smell of his oversized grey sweater, the one with the fraying cuffs. "You didn't mess up anything."

I stared at my hands. They looked like my hands. "They all saw."

"Yeah." He let out a slow breath. "And maybe that's not the worst thing that could've happened."

"They don't know what it means."

"I don't think you do either."

My head snapped up.

"I don't mean the kiss," Eli said, quieter. "I mean the other thing. You've been soaking everybody up all night. Haven't you felt it?"

I blinked. The bulb above us buzzed.

He didn't look away. "I watched you with Lena earlier. She was crying, and five seconds later you were. Then Paige's friends were screaming with laughter and you started spinning in the middle of the living room like you'd swallowed something. And now..." He trailed off. "Now you're freezing. Empty. Because everybody else emptied into you."

"I'm not crazy."

"I know you're not. But something's happening to you."

I let my head thump back against the cinderblock. It was like carrying too many people around inside my ribs, every one of them talking at once. "It's like I'm wearing a crowd," I said. "A coat made out of other people's moods."

"Yeah."

"You think it's a... what? A power?" The word felt ridiculous in my mouth. It also felt true.

Eli gave a small nod. "Feels like it."

My fingers curled. "I don't want to feel this much. It's drowning. It's drowning in somebody else's water."

"You don't have to carry it forever," he whispered. "We'll figure out how to handle it. Control it."

"You're way too calm for someone who just came out in a room full of drunk, hormonal teenagers."

A faint smile tugged at his mouth. "Maybe I was tired of hiding too."

We sat in the quiet. I focused on my lungs: in, and a little of the fear came with it; out, and a little of someone else's sadness left. Maybe some of my own, too.

"Do you regret it?" I asked.

"No." No pause. No flinch.

"Even if they talk? Even if your dad hears?"

"My dad hears everything." His lips twisted. "I don't care anymore. The only thing I care about is whether you disappear on me again."

I studied him for a long moment: the shadows under his eyes, the stubborn line of his jaw. "You're good at this. The talking thing."

"I'm the friend nobody listens to. So I learned to listen back."

I almost laughed. "Then listen now. I think I need you."

His eyes didn't waver. "Then I'm not going anywhere."

The fire door swung open onto a different party than the one I'd left.

My house looked like a movie set after the cameras cut: the double staircase draped in streamers, the chandelier in the foyer throwing fractured light over a marble floor tacky with spilled soda and tequila, neon strips pulsing violet along the baseboards. Somebody had lit a vanilla candle in the hall, and it was losing a slow fight against sweat and cheap cologne.

I stepped into it with Eli's fingers wrapped around my wrist, and the crowd pressed in.

I felt them before I saw them. Heads turned and then jerked away. Eyes lingered too long. And underneath it all, like static under a radio station, came the attempts: dozens of people, without even knowing it, trying to offload onto me. A prickle of fear from a sophomore by the coat rack. Smug judgement from a clump of juniors. Curiosity, hot and sticky. Even lust, from somewhere on my left, that made my face burn.

I felt it all knock on the door of me.

And for the first time all night, I didn't let it in.

It was small, just a clench somewhere behind my sternum, like closing a fist. The feelings slid off and scattered. I almost stumbled from the sheer surprise of it.

I chose that.

I'd never chosen anything about this before. It felt like finding a light switch in a room I'd been stumbling around in for weeks.

"I want to go home," I said, when we reached the foyer.

"Want me to come?"

I hesitated. "You don't have to."

"I want to."

My fingers tightened around his. "Okay."

A blur of silver cut across the foyer in front of us.

Paige.

She didn't glance at me, or at Collins, who was slumped against the banister with his drink untouched and his eyes on nothing. She just snatched her clutch off the console table, slid into her heels without breaking stride, and shoved out through the front doors. Her exit sliced through the room like a paper cut: quick, small, and somehow it stung everyone.

Through the tall glass panels beside the door, I watched her cross the gravel with her phone clamped to her ear. Her shoulders were rigid. I couldn't hear a word, but I could read her mouth from here. Fine. I'm on my way.

"Where's Paige going?" Lena asked the air.

I shrugged. "Probably to pee in Paris. Girl's dramatic like that."

Nobody laughed. Collins didn't even look up. I knew that look. Guilt, thick and sour, replaying the same scene on a loop. I'd seen his face when Jess slipped back downstairs earlier, wide-eyed, avoiding everyone. Collins wasn't going to chase anyone tonight, least of all his own girlfriend.

Outside, a car door slammed. Headlights swung across the foyer ceiling and were gone.

I noticed Milo then, near the foot of the stairs, a red cup in her hand and a restless bounce in her knees. She was watching a tall girl in a copper-toned dress giggle her way up toward the bedrooms. Milo said something to her, grinned, and after a beat followed her up.

I didn't think anything of it.

I thought about it later. A lot.

"Give me five minutes," I told Eli. "I'm going to find my keys, tell the bartender to cut everyone off, and then we're out."

I made it three steps toward the kitchen.

The grief hit me like a wave breaking over my head.

It came out of nowhere: raw, heavy, enormous, a loss so complete my knees buckled. It wasn't mine. It wasn't anyone's in the room. It poured down the staircase from above and filled me to the brim. A girl's grief, I thought, absurdly. A girl who had just seen something she could never unsee.

Eli caught my elbow before I went down. "Fred. Hey. What is it?"

"Something's wrong." My voice came out thin. My pupils must have been blown wide; his face swam. "Something's really wrong."

Then the scream tore through the house.

High, piercing, female. It cut straight through the bass line, and the music stuttered and died.

Milo.

She came stumbling down the staircase with one hand strangling the railing like it was the only thing holding her up. Her cup was gone. Her jacket had slipped off one shoulder.

"There's... she's... Zara Delle," Milo gasped. "Upstairs. She's dead."

The foyer went silent in a way I could feel: a hundred people holding the same breath.

I didn't move. I looked up the stairs, then at Milo's face. "You're sure?"

"She wasn't breathing. She wasn't moving." Milo's arms wrapped around her ribs. She was shaking so hard her teeth clicked.

Collins pushed through the crowd. "What happened?"

"I followed this girl. She said she was going to hook up with some senior in one of the rooms, and when I got there the door was open and there was nobody. Just Zara. Face-down on the carpet." Milo swallowed. "She wasn't supposed to be there."

Jess materialized at the edge of the crowd, her face the color of paper, eyes wide. Her gaze flicked to Collins and away so fast it might have been a trick of the light.

"Where's Paige?" a voice asked. I couldn't tell whose.

"She left," Lena said. "She didn't say anything. She just walked out."

Milo turned to her, slowly. "That's the room Paige said she was going to use tonight. She said she wanted to hook up with someone random. I asked who, and she said, surprise me."

My stomach dropped. "Zara's dead in Paige's room?"

Milo nodded.

And then someone said it. Quietly, but not quietly enough.

"She killed her."

"No." Jess shook her head. "Paige wouldn't..."

"But she left," another voice cut in. "Right before the body got found."

"She claimed that room."

"Why would you run if you didn't do it?"

"Maybe she knew."

The voices wound around each other like vines, tightening. I felt it all arrive at once: suspicion, fear, a greedy, ugly thrill. It gathered at the door of me, and I felt that old pull to open up and let it pour in.

I held the line. My jaw ached with it.

Beside me, Eli said nothing at all. He just stood there with his hand still locked around my elbow, grey sweater sleeve rolled to his wrist, eyes moving from face to face to face.

Watching.

Upstairs, in a room I hadn't seen yet, a girl was lying very still on a bedroom carpet. And down here, in the cold bright wreck of my own party, a name had already started to travel from mouth to mouth like a spark across dry grass.

Paige.

I looked toward the door, at the empty gravel and the open dark beyond the gates, and thought, with a clarity that scared me:

Whatever's happening to us, it didn't start tonight