The Devil I Chose

I'm sorry, I had to do it :/ I got inspired and even though I have an ongoing story, I want to share everything I write even if I never finish it. I had drafts that I never felt confident enough to share, ideas that I never fleshed out and gave up. I went on a deleting spree a few years ago and I regret it. Because, I feel they could serve as inspiration for others. And that's what I love about creativity. So... here's another idea.

── ⋆༺𓆩☠︎𓆪༻⋆ ──

Standing at my dorm window, watching the first red leaves spin down onto the stone courtyard below, I told myself it would be different this year. Seniors at St. Vesper’s didn’t pull the same stupid pranks, didn’t whisper the same tired insults in the library, didn’t arrange themselves in cafeteria tables like territorial birds whenever I walked by with my tray. Four years at this place, and I was still making bargains with the empty air.

The first week back had been quiet. Almost suspiciously so. No one had dumped my backpack into the lake, no one had stolen my notes before a test, no one had stood outside the bathroom stall and listed, in excruciating detail, every reason I didn’t belong at a school for “exceptional students.” Maybe they’d finally run out of material. Three years is a long time to hate the same person.

Or maybe we’d all just grown up.

The text came on a Saturday night. My phone buzzed against the wooden desk where I’d been pretending to read Milton for two hours, and I nearly knocked over my mug of tea reaching for it. The screen showed a group chat I had been added to: party @ collins house 9pm seniors only dress cute. No emojis. No explanations.

Collins House was where the wealthy girls lived. The ones with parents who owned second homes in places with unpronounceable names and who sent care packages full of expensive chocolate and cashmere scarves. The same girls who, last November, had locked me in the old greenhouse during a thunderstorm because, according to the note they slipped under my door, I “looked like someone who belonged with the plants.”

I’d sat there for three hours, shivering between pots of dead geraniums, until a groundskeeper found me. I never told anyone. What would have been the point? The teachers would have called a meeting, the girls would have apologized with the sincerity of people reading from a script, and nothing would have changed. I’d learned that lesson in freshman year, when reporting a stolen textbook had resulted in a week of being called “tattletale” in the hallways.

This time would be different. We were seventeen, practically adults.

I spent forty-five minutes deciding what to wear. Not because I cared what they thought, I told myself firmly, but because showing up looking like I’d made no effort would be its own kind of surrender. In the end, I chose black jeans, boots that made me two inches taller, and a sweater the color of red wine that my mother had sent me last Christmas with a note that said This will make you look like you belong.

The sweater had been hanging in my closet for almost a year. I’d never worn it.

My dorm room was small enough that I could touch both walls if I stretched my arms, but it was mine. I’d hung a map of Vermont on one wall and a print of a painting I liked the colors of on the other. The window faced east, which meant the morning sun hit my bed at an angle guaranteed to wake me up no matter how late I’d been studying. Tonight, the glass reflected a version of me that looked almost confident. Shoulders back, chin up, hair brushed for the first time that week.

“Don’t be an idiot,” I told the reflection. “Just go, have one drink, leave if it’s weird.”

I walked across campus with my hands in my pockets and my breath making small clouds in the cool air. The path from the dorms to Collins House cut through the main quad, past the library with its tall windows glowing amber against the darkening sky. Fall at Vesper was the school’s only good feature. The maples turning violent red, the birches going gold, leaves crunching underfoot like something breaking. For a few weeks every year, the place almost deserved its reputation as elite.

Collins House was lit up like a birthday cake. Music spilled from the open windows, something bass-heavy that made the ancient floorboards vibrate under my boots. I could hear laughter, the particular shriek of girls who were already several drinks in. I hesitated at the bottom of the steps, my hand on the iron railing.

Then the door opened, and Meredith Cole was standing there.

Meredith had been the architect of most of my worst days at Vesper. She had the kind of effortless beauty that made teachers forgive her for turning in assignments late and boys stumble over their words in the hallway. She also had the strategic cruelty of a chess player who enjoyed watching pieces get knocked off the board.

Tonight, though, she was smiling at me.

“Lyssa! You came!” She reached out and took my wrist, her fingers warm through the sleeve of my sweater. “Everyone’s inside. We were starting to think you’d bail.”

“I almost did.” Honesty felt like the only armor I had.

She laughed, and it didn’t sound like the laugh I remembered from the library or the cafeteria or the time she’d “accidentally” knocked my entire chemistry experiment into the sink. This was warmer.

“Come on. We’ve got decent vodka for once, and Jason Kim brought his speaker, which is a miracle because usually he just plays sad indie music that makes everyone want to jump out the window.”

She pulled me inside, and the heat hit me like a wall. Dozens of bodies, cheap candles, someone’s aggressively floral perfume. The common room had been cleared of furniture, the rugs rolled up, the ancient fireplace lit and throwing wild shadows across the plaster walls. Girls I’d spent three years avoiding waved at me from the kitchen. Boys I’d never spoken to nodded like we were old friends.

Someone handed me a red plastic cup. The vodka tasted like rubbing alcohol and lime juice, but I drank it anyway because my hands needed something to do.

“We’re seniors,” said a voice beside me. Eliza Chen, another member of Meredith’s inner circle, was leaning against the bookshelf with her own cup. “Can you believe it? One more year and we’re out of this place.”

“Thank god,” I said, and she laughed.

“Remember freshman year? God, we were such children.”

I remembered. I remembered every second of it. The way they’d circled me in the bathroom after probation week, the way they’d taken turns inventing new reasons I didn’t belong. The time they’d Photoshopped my face onto a meme and sent it to the entire grade. The time they’d convinced a boy I liked that I had a contagious skin condition.

But Eliza was looking at me with something like nostalgia, and Meredith was across the room, dancing with her arms above her head, and no one was watching me with that particular expression I’d come to recognize, the one that said I’m about to ruin your day.

So I drank my terrible vodka and let myself believe, just for one night, that people could change.

“To senior year,” Eliza said, raising her cup.

“To senior year,” I echoed, and clinked plastic against plastic.

The music changed. Someone turned up the lights. I found myself by the fireplace, warming my hands and listening to a boy from my calculus class explain why he thought the school’s grading system was fundamentally unjust. He was wrong, but he was passionate about it, and I nodded along because it felt nice to be included in a conversation that wasn’t about me.

Meredith appeared at my elbow, her cheeks flushed from dancing, her hair coming loose from its ponytail. “Having fun?” she asked, and her smile reached her eyes.

“I am, actually.”

“Good. That’s the point.” She squeezed my shoulder. “We’ve got a whole year ahead of us. Might as well enjoy it.”

For a stupid moment, I believed her.

The moment it happened, I was laughing. The kind that comes from your stomach and makes your shoulders shake, at something Jason Kim had said about our English teacher’s collection of novelty ties. My guard was down. A mistake I wouldn’t make again.

The music cut out first. The sudden silence was so complete I could hear the fireplace crackling, someone’s nervous giggle from the kitchen, the soft hiss of the radiator under the window.

I turned, and that’s when I saw that the room had rearranged itself. People were no longer scattered in conversational clusters. They were in a loose circle, and I was at its center, though I hadn’t moved. Meredith was by the door, her phone in her hand, recording. Eliza stood beside her, arms crossed, a smile playing at the corners of her mouth that I’d seen before right before she said something designed to leave a mark.

“Senior tradition,” someone called from the back. A boy’s voice. I didn’t turn to see who.

“What tradition?” I asked, and my voice came out steadier than I expected.

No one answered. The circle tightened. I felt the first real prickle of fear slide down my spine. This was the feeling I’d been waiting for all night, the one I’d pretended wasn’t lurking beneath the vodka and the laughter. My body knew before my brain did, something was wrong.

Then came the smell.

Copper. Iron. Something metallic and wrong, undercut with a sweetness that made my stomach turn. I knew that smell from biology lab, from the dissection trays, from the time a boy in my class had cut his hand on a broken beaker and the classroom had filled with the particular tang of exposed blood.

But this was stronger. This was everywhere.

I looked up.

The bucket was small, one of those galvanized metal things the groundskeepers used for collecting fallen branches. It hung from the ceiling beam on a length of fishing line, directly above my head. Someone had rigged it with a trigger. Someone had planned this.

The bucket tipped.

The first sensation was warmth, like stepping under a shower, except the liquid was thick and smelled like death. It hit the crown of my head and poured down my face, into my eyes, my mouth, my nose. I gasped and got a mouthful of it, hot and salty. My body tried to reject it immediately, my throat closing, my lungs seizing.

Pig’s blood. They’d filled a bucket with pig’s blood and hung it from the ceiling and waited for me to stand underneath it.

It soaked my hair, my sweater, my jeans. It ran in rivulets down my arms, between my fingers, pooled in the creases of my palms. It dripped from my eyelashes. I could feel it sliding down my back, inside my clothes, warm and slick against my skin. The red wine sweater my mother had sent me was no longer red wine. It was just red, dark and saturated and clinging to me like a second skin.

The silence lasted exactly three seconds. Then the chanting started.

One voice first, low and rhythmic, then others joining in, overlapping, building into something that filled the room and bounced off the plaster walls. The words were stupid. Ones you’d make up at a sleepover when you were twelve and trying to scare each other.

“Sacrifice to the gods of the school. Sacrifice to the gods of the school.”

Over and over. The same four words, gaining speed, gaining volume. Some people were clapping. Someone had turned their phone flashlight on and was waving it like we were at a concert. I stood in the center of it all, dripping blood onto the hardwood floor, and listened to my classmates chant about sacrificing me to gods that didn’t exist.

I should have been crying. I should have been screaming. I should have been doing anything except what I actually did, which was stand perfectly still and let my face go blank.

Because beneath the shock, beneath the revulsion of having another creature’s blood cooling on my skin, something else was happening. Something colder and clearer than anger. I was counting. I was memorizing. Every face in that circle, every voice in that chant, every person who was laughing while I stood there in a puddle of my own humiliation.

Meredith, phone raised, her mouth forming the words with theatrical precision. Eliza, clapping along, her eyes bright with the particular pleasure of someone watching a plan unfold exactly as intended. Jason Kim, who’d made me laugh five minutes ago, now chanting with the rest of them. A girl from my history class who’d never said a word to me, now shouting like she’d been waiting three years for the chance.

I would remember all of it.

The blood was starting to cool. The warmth was gone, replaced by a clammy, congealing chill that made my skin prickle. A drop fell from my hair and landed on my boot with a soft, final sound.

The chanting reached its peak, and then, on some unspoken signal, stopped. The silence that followed was worse than the noise. It was the silence of everyone holding their breath, waiting to see what I would do.

What I did was take one step forward. My boot slid slightly in the blood on the floor. I caught my balance. Another step. The circle parted. No one wanted to get pig’s blood on their clothes.

“Where are you going?” Meredith called. Her phone was still recording. “We’re not done. The ritual’s not finished.”

I turned to look at her. Blood had dried along my hairline in a stiff, dark line. I could feel it cracking when I moved my face.

“What’s the next part?” I asked. My voice was flat. A voice I didn’t recognize coming out of my own mouth.

Eliza grinned. “We take you to the lake. For the actual sacrifice part.”

“The lake is half a mile away,” I said.

“That’s why we have to go now. Before the blood dries.” She reached for my arm, her fingers closing around my wrist just above where the blood had congealed in the creases of my skin. Her grip was tight.

Another hand grabbed my other arm. A boy I didn’t know, tall, with a baseball cap on backward. His fingers dug into the muscle above my elbow.

“Come on,” he said. “It’s tradition.”

I looked at his hand on my arm. I looked at Eliza’s hand on my wrist. I looked at the circle of faces watching us, phones raised, smiles fixed, waiting for the next part of the show.

And I decided I was done being the show.

I moved the way prey moves when it stops being afraid and starts being desperate. One sharp twist of my wrist broke Eliza’s grip, her nails left crescent moons in the blood on my skin, and my elbow caught the boy in the ribs hard enough that he let go with a surprised grunt. Then I was through the door and into the cold night before the first shout reached me.

The cold hit like a wall. The October air carved through the wet fabric and found every patch of exposed skin. I didn’t care. I was running.

Collins House dropped away behind me. I cut across the quad, boots skidding on wet grass, my breath coming in clouds that the wind tore apart. The blood in my hair had started to pull at my scalp with each step, stiffening the strands into ropes that slapped against my cheeks. I could smell the stink rising off me with every movement, clinging to the inside of my nostrils.

Someone shouted my nickname, something they’d made up freshman year. One that sounds friendly if you don’t know it was invented specifically to remind me I didn’t belong. I didn’t turn around.

The main building loomed ahead, its stone face pale in the moonlight. I ducked through the arched doorway into the corridor, where the old hardwood floors caught the sound of my footsteps and multiplied it, sending echoes bouncing between the walls. The hall was empty, everyone was at the party or in their rooms. I ran past classrooms with their doors locked, past the administrative office with its frosted glass, past the portrait of some long-dead headmaster whose eyes seemed to follow me as I passed.

Behind me, the shouting had organized itself into something coordinated. They’d split up. This was a game to them, and they’d played it before.

I took the side exit near the library, the one that led to the service path behind the science building. The gravel crunched under my boots, each step broadcasting my position, but speed was the point now, not stealth. I heard footsteps on the main path, voices calling to each other.

I knew this campus in a way they didn’t, the blind spots, the shortcuts, the places where the architecture made no sense because the school had been built in pieces over two centuries. I cut through the gap between the science building and the old gym, a narrow alley barely wide enough for my shoulders, where the walls were close enough to touch on both sides. The stone was cold and rough against my palms as I steadied myself. At the end of the alley, I paused, listening.

They were behind me, moving toward the quad. I’d bought myself seconds, not minutes.

The blood on my clothes had reached that particular stage of drying where it stopped being liquid and became cracked and stiff. My sweater weighed twice what it should have. My jeans chafed where the fabric had hardened. I was shivering, not just from cold but from the crash of adrenaline leaving my system, my muscles starting to ache from the sudden sprint across campus.

I needed to get somewhere they wouldn’t follow. Somewhere they’d assume I was too afraid to go.

The woods.

The boundary between campus and forest was marked by nothing more official than a change in the ground, manicured grass giving way to wild undergrowth, stone pathways dissolving into dirt tracks. I crossed it at a run, and the darkness swallowed me whole.

It was a different kind of dark under the trees. The only light came in fragments through the canopy, moonlight broken into silver coins scattered across the forest floor. The air changed too, losing the particular dust-and-polish smell of the school buildings and replacing it with pine resin and wet earth and the sweet rot of fallen leaves.

I slowed to a walk. My lungs burned. My legs shook. Behind me, the sounds of pursuit had faded to nothing, just the occasional distant shout that the trees muffled into irrelevance. They wouldn’t follow me into the woods at night. The forest was off-limits after dark, according to school rules that everyone ignored during the day and suddenly remembered when the sun went down. Too easy to get lost. Too many stories about students who wandered in and didn’t come back the same.

Or didn’t come back at all.

I kept walking. The blood on my clothes had dried completely now, a stiff, crackling shell that made every movement sound like someone stepping on dead leaves. I could feel it on my face too, tight across my forehead and cheeks, pulling when I frowned. I probably looked like something from a horror movie. I certainly felt like it.

The anger was still there, but it had transformed. I wasn’t just furious. Every face from that circle was filed away in my memory, cross-referenced with three years of humiliations, organized by severity and date and whether the person laughing had once pretended to be my friend.

I would remember.

But remembering wasn’t enough. I’d been remembering for three years, and where had it gotten me? Standing in the woods at midnight, covered in pig’s blood, with nowhere to go except back to a dorm room where I’d lie awake staring at the ceiling and adding tonight to the list of things I’d never forgive.

I needed to do something. Not tomorrow. Not next week. Tonight.

The path beneath my feet was barely a path, a suggestion of packed earth between the trees, winding deeper into the forest. I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was going. My body had chosen the direction while my brain was still cataloging insults.

Then I saw it through the branches, the chapel.

It sat at the far edge of the school grounds, half-forgotten, its stone walls the color of old bone in the moonlight. The chapel had been deconsecrated decades ago, when the school stopped being religious and started being merely expensive. Suffered a fire about eighty years ago. Students called it haunted because what else do you call a building that everyone avoids?

I stopped walking. The chapel’s crooked spire pointed at the stars. Its windows were dark. Its door, heavy oak, banded with iron, was probably locked.

The legend surfaced in my memory like something rising from deep water. I’d heard it freshman year, during orientation, from an older student who’d been assigned to show me around. She’d been bored, going through the motions, and when we passed the chapel she’d paused and said, with the casual authority of someone repeating gossip they didn’t believe, “That’s where the desperate ones go.”

“What desperate ones?” I’d asked.

“The ones who want something bad enough to ask for it properly.” She’d shrugged. “There’s a story that if you break in after midnight and perform the right ritual, you can get whatever you want. But it costs you something.”

I’d rolled my eyes. “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Probably.” She’d already been walking away. “But every few years, someone tries it. And every few years, someone gets expelled for breaking into school property.”

I’d forgotten about it until now. Standing in the woods, shivering in blood-stiffened clothes, with the chapel waiting in the darkness ahead.

It was stupid. It was exactly the kind of desperate, superstitious nonsense that belonged in a teen horror movie, not in real life. I was a rational person. I got good grades in science. I didn’t believe in rituals or ghosts or deals with whatever might be listening in abandoned chapels at midnight.

But I believed in being powerless. I’d had three years of practice at that.

So I walked toward the chapel, and with each step, the dried blood cracked a little more, and something cracked with it.

── ⋆༺𓆩☠︎𓆪༻⋆ ──

I hope you liked the first chapter. This is way out of my current comfort zone. I haven't written a YA book in years, and I never really dabbled in dark academia(if I don't count the Harry Potter fanfictions I wrote when I was twelve). This was inspired by the song ME & THE DEVIL by Soap and Skin that I usually have on repeat while I write.

Anyways, feel free to give me your feedback.

*SPOILER ALERT*

I wanted to write a villain arc story(even though that's basically what I write anyways). I have a lot of villain arc ideas that I haven't fleshed out, but I always loved the "selling of souls" and "deal with the devil" trope. I wanted to wait until I finished the Woman He Never Chose because the character's voices are very different. If you are a writer, you know how hard it is to switch from one personality or narrative style to another. But in the end, I couldn't help myself. After going on a writing spree for the book, I needed a reset and a small break. To not fall into a slump, I changed projects. I don't know how consistent I will be with this story. My priority is finishing The Woman He Never Chose.