Eli woke up early like he usually did most days. He brushed his teeth, grabbed a piece of toast for breakfast, and walked to school. No matter what the weather was, he walked to school. Though if it was really bad, a friend would call him in the morning and ask to pick him up. Unless it was as bad as she claimed it to be, Eli would refuse.

He didn’t want to be a charity case. People shouldn’t treat him with sympathy just because his family wasn’t doing as well as others. His dad did everything he could to keep them together as a family, his mom did the same, and his little sister never minded a boy’s hand me downs. Life wasn’t as bad as everyone else thought it was.

After he reached school, he immediately went to the library and sat down at a table with his friends. Mackenzie would drop a sandwich in front of him and go to talking to Julia, the others would filter in afterward, and Mio would always be last. But she also brought rice balls three times a week, so no one ever really cared if she chose to sleep in.

That was life in AP Club. Well, AP Club and intruder Julia. The one who claimed to be too busy working on other projects, but was always hanging out with them anyways. Eli knew the reason why, because her friends were here, but that is what made it nauseating.

“I got the Thompson Scholarship!” Mackenzie was nearly vibrating in her seat from how excited she was. She immediately dropped an egg and bacon sandwich in front of Eli after saying it.

“You mentioned it in the group chat five times last night,” muttered Eli.

“Yeah, but Julia isn’t in the AP group chat.” Mackenzie forced a big squeeze on him before tackling Julia as she walked in. “Thompson Scholarship!”

“You texted me about as soon as you got the call,” replied Julia in a weary voice. Mackenzie replied by pouting at her. She continued to pout until Julia gave her a peck on the forehead.

The two sat at the table and Mackenzie immediately began to gush and fawn about the scholarship. It took a lot of effort to earn once one was accepted. They acted as the student representative on the local school board. After the year was up, they got the money, which was worth far less than what the work should pay for, but it looked great on college applications.

It was the one scholarship that Eli coveted. One that could propel him to the school of his choice. Mackenzie did sort of deserve it, but he was the one that was at nearly every single local charity event. The scholarship was a local one, not one for someone who ran off to Portland every weekend. She had only gotten it because she had higher grades than he did.

“You’re coming over after school?” Julia looked over to Eli. When he didn’t respond, she began to snap her fingers at him.

He blinked a few times as he tried to process what she had said. “Yeah, sure… Uh, why was I doing that again?”

“I need you to record a few voice lines for a video I’m working on. You can hit those low gravely tones I need for a narrator,” she replied with a smile.

Julia made commercials in her free time. She wanted to go into advertising, and Portland had a marketing program. Though helping her out with it made him nervous. He glanced over to Mackenzie, who held up a finger to her lips.

Mackenzie had recently confided in the AP Club that she was looking at the University of Washington because they had a program focused on social work. She had already promised Julia that she was going to go to Portland so that they could stay together after high school. Eli… Didn’t want to be in the middle of that. They had another year of high school left, and maybe they would break up before then.

“Yeah… That’s fine. I’ll help out.”

He had been to Julia’s house a few times, so it wasn’t a big deal or anything. The only problem was that they’d have to wait after school for her sister to be done with cheerleading practice before going home. It wasn’t all bad though. Julia often had her laptop and a set of controllers with her, so she could play games while waiting for a ride.

After they got a ride, he’d spend some time recording lines for a made-up product. This was apparently for a project in Julia’s English class. She gave him a thumbs up and he sat on her bed playing more games until it was time for dinner. That’s how anyone usually paid him for anything, with food.

Eli wasn’t fat or anything, but most of his meals were the same at home. Mostly lentils, beans, or anything that packed a high amount of nutrition for very little cost. Tonight it was fried chicken, which seemed to be the only thing that he had whenever he was at Julia’s house.

“It’s because mom wants you to be my boyfriend,” muttered Julia. She was sitting at her desk and editing the audio that Eli had recorded for her.

“But I don’t remember ever saying that fried chicken was my favorite food.”

“I know, but she claims it’s the recipe she’s best at, so she makes it to impress anyone that comes over. Mom, I know we are one of the only black families in town, but that doesn’t mean you have to always serve our friends fried chicken.”

Eli smirked to himself. “It is the best-fried chicken I have ever had.”

“It’s amazing, but that’s not the point,” she muttered.

“It might be worth it to be your boyfriend just to get more fried chicken.” He started to snicker to himself as Julia turned around in her chair to glare at him. “You’re the one that said you were bisexual.”

“And my mom thinks bisexual means that I’m just in a phase and I’ll settle for a penis eventually. I should have done what dad suggested and lied about being a lesbian.”

Eli was about to say something when Kara peeked her head through the door, asking if he was ready to go home. He reassured Julia that she didn’t need to go with him and got into the car with Britney and Kara. The whole time, the two of them were arguing back and forth. Kara was saying something about wanting to wait for Mio, but Britney wanted it tonight.

“Settle a bet for me,” said Britney as she turned around in her seat. “You’re unhappy, right?” Eli glanced up from his phone, glared at her, then looked back down at it. “You know what I mean, right? If you had a chance to fix it, you would.”

“I am going to fix it by having good grades and going to a good college,” he replied coldly.

“Yeah, but what if you can get that Tomtom scholarship or whatever? I know how you can take it away from Mackenzie.” Britney grinned as she clearly caught his attention. “It’s a win-win. You and I know that Mackenzie is going to choose the school of her dreams over Julia, but this way you can help keep them together and end up at the school you want.”

“That sounds illegal,” muttered Eli.

Kara’s eyes flicked to his through the rearview mirror for a moment before she looked back at the road. “It’s a demonic ritual,” she said in a flat tone.

“And it’s a no bad cost sort of ritual! All we have to do is tell other people that we did the ritual and that it worked. It doesn’t have to be in person, my cousin got it offline. She tried it, and she lost so much weight at once and became a super hotty!” Britney’s eyes lit up as she talked about it. “But it needs three people to do it.”

“Then why not ask your friends? You have plenty of them.”

“Because they’re selfish bitches. Take Austin for example, he’d probably ask to sleep with Kara, right? Then there are all those backstabbers in cheerleading. Anyone of our friends is going to use their wish against us, but Julia’s friends are all free game. Julia would refuse since she doesn’t believe in any of that crap, Mackenzie would end up hurting Julia on accident, so we thought either you or Mio would be good.”

Eli took the time to consider her proposition. He took exactly have a second to carefully process the request. “No.”

Kara interrupted Britney before she could start an argument. “We’ll owe you a favor if it doesn’t work. What would you want?”

Eli needed even less time to think about that one. “I need help talking to girls.”

“Which one?” Kara raised a brow.

“Any girl.”

“No guy asks for help talking to girls if he doesn’t already have a crush on a particular girl,” replied Kara.

Eli down at his phone and began to mutter quietly. “The red-headed sophomore in your squad.”

“Deal,” said Kara.

And that’s how the three of them attempted to summon a demon together. Britney was turning heads at school, Kara’s parents started to fight more, and Eli had the power to erase people from other’s minds. But it turned out to be a terrible gift.

He only wanted to make people forget that Mackenzie had the scholarship. They instead tossed her out. She left the AP Club, and since she and Julia also forgot each other, neither of them showed up in the morning. Julia even forgot both Mio and the rest of the AP Club. Mio stopped showing up in the mornings, and now everyone there was cranky because there were no rice balls three times a week.

Eli became riddled with guilt. He was awarded the scholarship, but he didn’t want to break up his friends because of it. None of them remembered each other, and he was starting to believe he was forgetting things too. When he tried to pressure Kara into doing the ritual again, he forgot who the third person was. All he knew was that there was a third person.

Then Mackenzie died.

He was convinced that it was an accident, but he often wondered. She had a newer car. It shouldn’t have failed on her, and the rain wasn’t bad enough that she couldn’t have made it to Portland. Eli wondered… What if she did it on purpose? What if loner Mackenzie, with no friends and no ambitions, had decided that enough was enough? And she didn’t want to deal with it anymore?

When Kara died, he did try to figure out who it was. It could have been the mysterious third person or even Julia. She certainly wasn’t the same since Mackenzie left. But that meant that he needed to keep his guard up. He was the one that had threatened Kara, and that might make him a target.

His suspicions worsened after Austin’s accident. He thought that it might have been Kara’s ghost, but then Julia attacked him. It seemed like she had done the ritual as well, which meant that he had no choice but to protect himself. There was a time when they could’ve worked it out, maybe she wouldn’t understand it was an accident, but there wasn’t time for that anymore. Eli needed to make certain he wasn’t going to be a target.

Days passed with no sign of Julia. He didn’t know where she had gone to, but that didn’t matter. She didn’t seem to have special powers other than moving herself around. Eli had attempted to erase her from the world, thus it was likely that she was wandering about with amnesia and no way to get herself home.

With no worries weighing him down, Eli carried on as though everything were normal. No one asked him about his nose bandage. It was a gift from Julia stabbing at him with a mechanical pencil, but the norm was that people ignored him, so he dealt with it. However, something was off about today. The school was having electrical problems, and the morning announcements stated that classes would be canceled if they couldn’t fix it by lunch hour.

They should’ve just canceled them completely. The lights cut out during the second period. With no windows in the classroom, everyone was suddenly in the dark. The teacher was telling everyone to remain calm, but the girls were already making a racket. Phones were being pulled out… Then the panic set in.

“It’s not turning on!”

“The hell? Were we hit by an emp or something?”

“Who the fuck would emp a small town in buttfuck nowhere?”

“I’ve read that nukes cause electromagnetic pulses.” The room fell silent for a moment. “That means emps.”

“We’re still in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. No one is nuking us.”

“There’s a considerable amount of range that the pulse travels from the nuke and-”

“No one is nuking Portland!”

“North Korea might?”

“North Korea. Nuke Portland. Portland. Por-ta-land...”

“Well, they aren’t the brightest country, right? Maybe they thought-”

“They have fucking nukes! Who cares how smart someone is if they have nukes? If someone asks, you say they are smart enough!”

Eli had already pulled out his phone and was banging it against his hand. It wasn’t working. Which meant that Julia was finally making her move. He was more inclined to believe that there were demonic forces at work here over the fact that Portland had been nuked.

The intercom system let out a sharp squeal, which either forced some of the students to be silent or sent them into a screaming panic. Static cut in. This was followed by several female voices talking over each other in low, melancholy tones. It was difficult to make out what any of them were saying. As the static grew louder, so did one of the women’s voices, till the static cut out completely, and only her voice was the one to be heard.

“You murdered me, Eli Strumm. You murdered me.”