Haunting Margalo

Prologue

Margalo stormed down the hallway.

"Why did you tell Parker I look like a horse?"

Violet looked over at her from behind her locker door. "Because you told him--and everyone else--that I was obsessed with attention. What is your problem, anyways?"

"You are obsessed with attention. You always have been. You made that pretty obvious when you showed up at his party without anyone inviting you."

"He didn't mind. Besides, the only reason he didn't invite me was because you'd start drama. And besides, if you're so sure you were telling the truth, so was I. You do look like a horse."

Margalo's ears reddened, always a sign that she was getting angry. "And you're an attention whore!" 

"Oh," Violet said, slamming her locker icily. "So now I'm a whore?"

Margalo opened her mouth to try to take the words back, but she was interrupted by a piercing alarm. Equally close to two exits, the girls ran in separate directions.

Margalo hadn't known there would be a fire drill today, but she thought nothing of it. After all, her school had emergency drills all the time--they probably didn't announce it so that the students could see what it would be like if there really was a fire. She moved quickly out the door, unconcerned, until she had lined up in the schoolyard with her class. That's when she saw the smoke.

The next few minutes were a blur. The smoke got thicker, and then the first sign of flames flickered up. A siren blared in the distance, growing closer and clearer with every moment. A frantic role call was taken, declaring that every student was safe. Except Violet.

Guilt and fear sending her heart racing a mile a minute, Margalo turned around to her classmates. "Oh my god," she said hoarsely. "The last thing I said to her was that she was a whore."

"What? Why?" one of the girls asked.

"I don't know! I just--she did that thing at Parker's party, and the way she acts, and she said I looked like a horse, and I was mad, and--I'm sorry! I don't know! I'm sorry!"

The girl hugged Margalo as she burst into tears, sobbing into her friend's sweater. "It's okay," her friend said soothingly. "Look, the firefighters are here. Violet won't die. She'll be fine."

Margalo repeated those words over and over in her head. She repeated them as they stood, waiting in awful suspense. "She'll be fine." She thought of them as the school was engulfed in flames. "She'll be fine." She chanted them silently as Violet was carried out of the building by one of the firemen. "She'll be fine." She thought of them over and over at night while she tried desperately to fall asleep. "She'll be fine. She'll be fine. She'll be fine. She'll be fine."

The words circulated in a constant reassuring loop in her head when she woke up in the morning, and when she ate her breakfast, feeling odd not being able to go to school. She repeated them again and again all the way until someone called her and told her the news. Violet was not fine. She would never be fine again.

Violet was dead.