While I'm here for detention, Emma 'Your Junior Class President' Conroy is here to get extra credit.

She smiles from the front of the classroom like she's a new student Mr. Dennison has to introduce to the whole class. Except, the whole class is me. I'm the only one in this stupid classroom after last period on a Monday afternoon.

I slump. I slump aggressively. I can be teenage goo puddled on the floor. Even if Emma Conroy and I were both puddles of goo on the floor, Emma would still be a better one. She's just good at everything. School, sports, clubs. 

"I've got a special assignment for you. The school's converting the old science lab. You get to clean it out. Emma's already been working on it," Mr. Dennison says, "she'll fill you in."

"What are you going to do?" I ask. It's not like Mr. Dennison is my favorite person in the world, but he ranks a whole lot higher than Emma.

"I've got essays to mark," Mr. Dennison says.

That's it. He doesn't care the Emma Conroy is basically the anti-Delaney. When Emma looks in the mirror, I'm her evil alternate reality. Light and dark. She is in control of her destiny and I can't even control myself. 

"You might want to put on some rubber gloves," Emma says. Oh, God. This just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?

This is how Emma and I end up walking down the hall, side by side, donning matching yellow rubber gloves up to our elbows, carrying a bucket of cleaning supplies. Emma has perfect posture. It's only walking next to her that I realize I am slouching. My muscles don't know how not to slouch. They complain when I try, confused by this sudden attempt to... what? Why do I care about being anything like Emma?

We don't talk. I want to ask how bad this is going to be, but I can't bring myself to. I'll find out soon enough, I guess. We walk until the very end of the hall in a wing mostly used for science classes. I've never been this far into the void. I just remember the rumors. This has to be Ms. Isaakov's room.

Emma flicks her blonde hair over her shoulder as she unlocks the door, being the exact kind of person a teacher would willingly hand a key to.

The door creaks when it swings open, like it knows Ms. Isaakov's science room is the closest thing the school has to a haunted house. For a second, we peer into the darkness. The blinds are drawn over the windows, making it feel like we are stepping into nighttime when it's only 4 o'clock.

"What are they converting this into? A morgue?" I ask.

"A photography dark room." If Emma recognizes a joke when she hears one, she doesn't show it. "We have to clean out all the cabinets, rinse out all the lab equipment, and box it up for storage."

Great. I look around the room. Above us, most of the fluorescent lights are burnt out. The one left is flickering so frantically Mr. Dennison should've made me sign a waiver promising I'm not epileptic.

It buzzes. For once, I'm silently praying that Emma will just say something so I'll have something else to listen to. She doesn't. We just stand there, soaking in the fact that this is clearly the job nobody else wants. It's the work that's been shuffled off to the unwilling detentionee and the girl who'll later write about the hardship in her college application essay.

"Well," Emma says, losing enthusiasm fast, "I guess I'll start on these cabinets." We both look. She's graciously volunteered to sort through the inventory of plain old beakers, leaving me the option of, oh look, fetal pigs in jars or goat eyes staring lidlessly at me. Awesome. Thanks for taking one for the team there, Conroy.

I shrug, like it's no big deal, like a cool girl. Yeah, no problem. I have no qualms about having a staring contest with disembodied eyeballs. I have to clench my teeth together just so I won't make any expression.

I take one of a rag and a spray bottle of disinfectant from Emma's cleaning supply kit. Ms. student council president gets to work meticulously polishing each individual beaker out of a rack.

For the longest time, the only sound in the room is the squee squee of the spray bottles and the buzzing of the overhead lights. I swear it's getting louder. It sounds like flies have laid eggs in my ears and the little larvae are humming insistently in the canals.

The weirdest thing about Ms. Isaakov's science room isn't the specimen jars. It's the fact that there are still workstations set up, bunsen burners arranged on the counters. It gives it that unsettling aura like every zombie apocalypse movie I've ever seen where it looks like everybody picked up and left. Life stopped all of a sudden.

"Does anybody actually know why Ms. Isaakov got fired?" I ask.

Emma has an innocent face, but it's a pretty well-known fact that kids like her know all the gossip because they're the ones who end up printing off handouts for student council and overhear teachers talking by the office and whatever. They're the best eavesdroppers out there.

She purses her lips. Jackpot.

"I heard they found out she had vials of her students blood hidden in her office," Emma says. God, the way she delivers, like she had never been more serious about anything in her life.

I laugh. How can you not laugh at the idea of a teacher bottle up kids' blood?

Emma does not laugh.

"Oh, come on. Do you really believe that?"

Emma shrugs. "What do you believe? Tommy D's story about how she had a voodoo doll of him in her car?"

When she puts it like that... the vials of blood thing does seem more likely. I scrub at a jar containing something alarmingly unidentifiable. That somehow makes it worse.

"I don't know. I figured she did one of the normal things like sleeping with a student or secretly running a neo-Nazi blog. You know, the average kind of off-the-deep-end shit."

Staring into the milky abyss of the specimen jar, it's easy to imagine how quickly voodoo and blood sacrifice popped into people's minds. Maybe I am, in fact, currently holding a submerged voodoo doll of Tommy D.

"I don't know which is worse," Emma says, spritzing yet another beaker.

"Depends on what she needed the blood for," I reply and that genuinely startles Emma. The beaker slips from her hand and rolls across the counter before she hastily snatches it up again.

"Do you... like, know anything about that kind of stuff?" Emma asks, but she doesn't look at me. She works a shred of paper towel over the glass in a flurry. Taking a leap here, but I'm guessing she's not asking if I'm really into biology and genetics. 

"Jesus. I'm a little Irish so you assume I'm a druid or something?" I shoot back, making Emma flush such a deep pink I'm worried it's draining all the blood from the rest of her body.

"N-no. That's not why," she stammers.

"So, what? Eyeliner? Is that witchcraft now?" I urge her on, but Emma loses her nerve and turns back to her work.

I wish I could smirk, mock her for being afraid, but it doesn't come. Do I really put out a Satanic vibe? Is that really what Emma thinks of me? Oh, God. Does the whole school think that? Are they making bets on what kind of curse I lay on Jesse and Lena in the aftermath of lunch?

I scrub harder than I need to. Maybe if I take my sweet time, I won't have to touch too much of this stuff before my time in detention is up.

"He deserved it," Emma says quietly. Eye contact is definitely not her thing unless she is reciting rehearsed class president speeches.

"What?" I ask. Since she isn't looking up, I don't either.

"Jesse. He deserved it."

I stare at the sad snake coiled inside a jar.

"Cool," I say because I honestly can't think of anything else to say. The buzzing hums louder and louder above us.

It pops.

Emma and I both scream, the light firing out and plunging us into complete darkness. I wheel around and my elbow thunks against something hard.

Glass shatters hard against the floor, liquid splashing up my legs. Oh, God. Snake water. I double over, gagging on air just imaging the sight of it all over me.

It is dripping down my calves. This is the worst goddamn day of my life. Thanks a fucking bunch, Jesse.

"Are you okay?" Emma asks.

"I'm fine," I say.

"I'm going to get Mr. Dennison," Emma says and before I can protest, her footsteps shuffle across the room. A sliver of light flashes across the floor as Emma props open the door. She wedges it open, the ambient hallway seeps in, only about as far as Emma's beakers.

I am getting the hell out of here. I'm covered in snake slime, I'm newly single, and I'm miserable.

I twist, my wet shoes squeaking underneath me. They give, I reach for a countertop, but my slide across the surface uselessly. My body slams into the floor, a shudder of nothing washing through my body. The shock bobs in first, then the pain. The sharp, stinging pain of open skin inviting in gross science slime.

It takes all my willpower not to throw up right there. I don't move, sprawled on the floor and broken glass. What if the slimy ass snake is right by my hand? What if I touch it.

What if I bleed out? I can't actually see them, but I can feel the sting of formaldehyde or whatever it is. I can't just lie in a pool of blood and chemicals until Emma tears Mr. Dennison away from his marking.

I reach up, groping blindly in the dark for anything. My fingers find the handle of a cabinet and I pull myself up from the floor, trying very hard not to touch a dead jar snake in the process. I get my legs back under me. The counter under my fingers is already slick with slime. Mr. Dennison should see this whole thing. The dude needs to seriously be ashamed for making a bunch of teenage girls clean out this awful, cursed classroom.

Now I believe in curses! That's what this stupid detention has done to me.

My hand bumps into something on the counter. Kind of round, with a sort of spout. I pat my pockets for my lighter. My hands shake as I try to strike it up and I hate that. I should not be this frazzled. This is not good for my reputation. Well, the whole blood and snake and darkness is kind of on brand. The nearly tossing my cookies and pretty much wanting to sob my eyeliner into a streaky mess is not.

The tiny lighter flame flickers the surroundings into a dim glow. It's the bunsen burner. I find the dial on it, dipping my lighter flame until the burner lights up like a modern day science lab creepy ass candle.

Glass glints all over the floor. I sidestep it and nearly bump into another bunsen burner. Without the lights, they're probably the best bet for shining a little light on the damage I've done. I reach over, lighting up another.

In total, there are five. I flick them all on, their little science-y fires burning just bright enough that I can walk around the counter without sliding on a gooey snake and shredding the rest of my porcelain skin. I bruise like a peach and I bleed like a stuck pig and I don't even really know what that's supposed to mean.

The glass shredded up my legs and my left arm, little specks of blood dripping into the murky puddle creeping over the tile. Why couldn't all detentions be like the breakfast club instead of a gong show of a horror movie?

I look up and my reflection is vivid in the glass doors of the cabinet. Dark and pale and for a second, I honestly don't blame Emma for thinking I might be a practitioner of the dark arts. I am a literal bloody mess, fluids everywhere and makeup bleeding.

I rake my fingers through my hair. Wait. No. That didn't help.

My reflection blinks.

I blink.

Just... not at the same time.

Head injury?

I squint. Which is better: my reflection blinking at me or me hallucinating about it? I stare, doubting my cognitive function every second that goes by.

Until a slow, sinister smile spreads across the glass Delaney.

Then, all at once, the bunsen burners go out.