Some nights, when I couldn't fall asleep despite my best efforts, I'd put on the extended version of Lord of the Rings and drop off before Frodo even left the Shire.

Not tonight. Tonight the ring could have fallen into the lava a thousand times, and I still wouldn't have slept a wink.

As I tiptoed to my bedroom, tense every time my sneakers squeaked, I almost tipped over the elephant statue which guarded the mid-stair landing. Fear and panic had me paralyzed in place as I listened for any signs of movement. My mother could have slept through the sound of a dozen jackhammers drilling a blast hole, but Maddie was a light sleeper, and it wasn't once that she had snuck into my bed and pressed her small, warm body against my back, whispering about a nightmare that was still haunting her. Luckily, the house remained silent.

The door closed after me, and I let out a grateful sigh. I stroked the soft material I held in my hands like a kitten, half-expecting it to purr. After folding the bull costume and evening out the creases, I safely pushed it in the left drawer of my captain's bed and tucked myself in.

My alarm was supposed to ring at six-fifteen, but I changed it to seven a.m., convinced those extra forty-five minutes would give my teenage face that natural glowing look of seven layers of makeup. I knew I would only get about three minutes to shower in the morning, but it seemed like a solid plan. My mattress was soft, my pajamas smelled of my favorite fabric softener, and my eyelids were becoming as heavy as if a tiny dumbbell was hanging from each of my lashes.

But it didn't last long. On the brink of the dreamland, just as the last imaginary sheep jumped over the wooden fence I knew every chip and detail of, my eyes suddenly flew open.

I had to check. I just had to.

I snatched my phone and detached it from its charger, content with its two-thirds filled battery. As soon as the results showed up, I clicked on the first link and found what I was looking for.

"In the State of Arizona, unlawfully entering a public services facility is considered a class six felony, and it is punishable with up to two (2) years in prison."

My hands turned clammy under the screen light, and I scrolled down a little bit more, ignoring the greasy fingerprint marks on the glass.

"Additionally, the defendant may also face up to one hundred and fifty thousand dollars ($150,000) in fines."

In layman's terminology, I was doomed. In Liz's terminology, a first-degree murder charge was bound to be added to the list of my charges as soon as I had a little chat with Amber.

By the time I exited the tab, the defense attorney's number shown at the top of the website was permanently carved in my mind.

I tossed and turned all night, soaking up every cold inch of my pillow and trying to drift off to sleep again. It didn't work. The mugshot I had envisioned seemed more and more likely to happen, and tears slowly welled up in my eyes, stinging and digging their path to my deepest insecurities.

Criminals got suspended or kicked out of high school. They didn't get accepted to NYFA. And they certainly didn't receive Academy Awards for the Best Screenplay. This prank wasn't going to make me famous – I wasn't Frank Abagnale Jr., and Steven Spielberg was never going to make a movie about my life.

Scenes from the last few hours kept replaying in my head, and I grasped at straws to cope with the visuals. Amber had promised to shred all the forms as soon as she woke up. Her parents, both of them unfortunate victims of the long commute, left for work at the crack of dawn. If I stopped her – if I called her and convinced her to put all those forms back where we found them and somehow made Baby successfully face her climacophobia – maybe we could pretend this had never happened?

I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand and looked up her name in my contacts. My thumb hovered over the 'call' button, stiff from hesitation as my gaze veered to the upper right corner.

3:57 a.m.

She was definitely sleeping, and my valor had a short fuse.

A car swerved somewhere in the distance, breaking me out of my trance. I left the phone on my counter and rose up from the creaking bed. Carefully and delicately, I felt for sandals with my bare feet until the smooth hardwood was replaced by chilly EVA foam.

The humidity – or perhaps simply the increasing sense of panic that had already spread to my fingertips and toes – was killing me. Drops of sweat slid down my back as I made the beeline for the only source of oxygen in the room. The night air was hot and sticky, and when I leaned against the windowsill to take a deep breath, its dryness scratched my tongue like sandpaper.

Phoenix was ruthless in summer. It coated its residents in languor and swelter and extracted all the color out of the brick and concrete. The air conditioning units masked its barbarity, but it was always lurking, ready to devour you as soon as you stepped outside. Judging by how parched my throat felt at four o'clock in the morning, I could already tell it was going to be a blazing hot day.

Wearing tight jeans or knee-high dresses in this weather was asking for a heat stroke. Yet we had a principal who didn't give a damn.

Please, Baby, I thought. Please don't chew up all his cables. I don't want damaged equipment added to my record, too.

I propped my head against the thick frame, thinking how quiet it was. Uncanny, almost; only crickets chirped restlessly.

But no; a coyote howled.

And then another one.

I perked up my ears, alerted and engrossed in their incomprehensible debate. It was rare to hear them so deep in the city; I supposed a diet of garbage can leftovers and roof rats wasn't exactly their first choice of fine cuisine. But maybe I was wrong. I was known to be wrong about a lot of things.

Thanks to her vivid interest in zoology, Maddie had once educated me on their behavioral patterns. Although their wilder cousins preferred to be active in daylight, urban coyotes had changed together with their strange new habitat and became nocturnal. The desert might have been their original home, but they had adapted and shaped the new territory into something they were comfortable with. And although humans had protested and tried to get rid of them, there was absolutely nothing that could have been done – they were here to stay.

They didn't howl again that night, but they didn't have to. Something inside me had already stirred, growls stuck in its tiny throat.

I changed my mind, Baby. Feel free to decorate his office with as many cow pies as physically possible.

⁂

Four and a half hours later, I still hadn't been arrested, and I was almost starting to hope I never would be.

The homeroom had been surprisingly uneventful. When the speakers crackled in preparation for the morning announcements, I gripped the table so hard, my fingers had turned white. Mel was the only one who noticed this, and merely two minutes had passed before I received an adorable cherry-shaped post-it note, its two small googly eyes gliding in different directions. A small foil blister pack was attached to its sticky side.

I hate periods :( hope this helps!

I glanced up at her and was met by a friendly smile, so I tried to mirror it to the best of my abilities. I wasn't exactly in need of a painkiller, but I also didn't want to raise any extra suspicion. I tightened the grip on the crinkly package as Jeffrey's voice blared above our heads.

I worried for nothing after all. The announcement had been about replacing the broken bicycle parking racks.

Something finally happened while we were learning about the Mayflower Compact in our US History class. A commotion was roaring just outside the closed door, and puritans were quickly forgotten as everyone rotated their necks in the same direction.

Aiden raised his hand. "Excuse me, Ms. Green, but could I get a bathroom pass?"

Instead of scolding him for his obvious lie, she simply laughed and handed him the coveted item.

"Make it quick. This will be on your test."

He saluted and winked at her before gliding out of the classroom, causing her to blush. A cow, the cow, mooed in the distance. A buzzing, excited murmur spread through the air, and I framed my temples with my hands, desperately trying to focus on my textbook. The words on the yellowish pages blurred in front of my eyes.

"I've never seen you so invested in a history class before," Grace joked behind me. I plastered a grin all over my face and turned sideways to look at my friend, a lie already ripe on my lips.

Pretty sure the devil stamped my one-way ticket to Hell at that moment.

"Oh, you know. I'm trying to boost my GPA this semester."

Grace opened her mouth, but she never got the chance to reply. Aiden burst into the classroom like a Kansas tornado, his eyes shining from excitement.

"Ladies, gentlemen," he bowed to everyone, eliciting belly laughs. "You are not going to believe what I've just seen."

As a true entertainer, he paused for the effect.

"A cow, a real-life, giant-ass cow just came out of the staff elevator with Principal Jeffrey."

Gasps rippled through the classroom. Only Troy remained unaffected, and he spun his eraser on his desk like it was a fidget spinner.

"Good for him," he smirked. "He finally got a date."

Ms. Green's mouth twitched, but she didn't tell him off. Curiosity wrinkled the lines around her mouth. "What happened, Aiden?"

He shrugged. "Seniors. They started early this year, though."

"Was Jeffrey pissed?" Troy asked just as his eraser tumbled off his desk.

"Principal Jeffrey to you, Troy," Ms. Green warned him.

Aiden slid back into his seat, and a corner of his mouth turned up in a lopsided grin. He delivered his answer nonchalantly, with the wisdom of a rare man who'd had the honor of peeking into the usually hidden side of the principal's personality.

"Oh, no. He was amused. I heard him tell Ms. Adams this was the best damn prank he had ever seen in his life."

⁂

"Kid, I need to pop out real quick," George addressed me, abruptly pulling me back into the present. I blinked a few times until he was back in focus, the movie theater lights trembling in his background. "Can you two handle this?"

"I don't work here," Julia reminded him, raising a half-eaten Strawberry Twizzler as a baton. George stared at the red stick like there was a glitch in the matrix, and for the first time in my short life, I found myself connecting with my coworker.

It didn't last long.

"Right," he cleared his throat before looking back at me. "Well, it should be a slow night."

Not sure I heard him correctly, I surreptitiously checked the time on the wall clock behind him, confirming it was indeed half past eight.

The audacity of this man.

"It's Friday," I let out a nervous laugh. "And my shift ends in half an hour. You know that."

He sighed like I had just told him Christmas had been canceled.

"Fine. I'll be back in thirty," he scowled, clearly unhappy with my pointless existence. "I really need to check up on Marty and Biff."

As he stormed out of the movie theater, Julia chewed through the last inch of her candy, munching like a hungry koala.

"I didn't know he had kids."

"He doesn't. He named his snails after the Back to the Future characters," I explained as I filled the popcorn machine with kernels. "He's concerned because Marty and Biff have been acting fishy lately. They refuse to leave poor Doc alone."

Julia furrowed her brows. "Why do you know so much about his pets again?"

"I spend twelve hours a week with the guy. What do you think?"

She shrugged and took another Twizzler out of the package. All the talk about pets made me think of Baby again. From what I'd heard, she had been happily reunited with the owner, a jovial, carefree rancher who happened to be a prankster himself. He shocked Jeffrey with a joy buzzer when they shook hands, and they both laughed like it was the funniest thing in the world. Nobody was getting sued. Nobody was getting suspended. It was all fine and dandy.

So why couldn't I get rid of this uneasy feeling in my chest?

"Well, to be fair, the dude's got his ducks in order," Julia reflected, her mind still set on George. "He's getting paid for staring at snails. Meanwhile, we are sixteen, we both just had four-hour shifts after our school let out, and we're sniffing popcorn instead of bath salts."

"That doesn't sound like such a bad alternative."

"True, but it's Friday night. Most people our age are currently either on a date or at a party," she pointed out. I took a sip from my Hydro Flask and smiled at an arriving patron.

"Well, the Olsen twins are having a shindig—"

"Forget it. Only if you push me through the door in a coffin," she snorted. "Also, a shindig? You know as well as I do those are basically orgies." She finally noticed the man who was now standing right next to her. A Cheshire smile spread over her face. "Besides, I've heard that you have to pay a hundred dollars to get in, and you know we're broke. If only we could find a gentleman to accompany us..."

She bat her eyelashes at the astounded patron. "Well, hello there."

I choked on my water as the man clutched the pamphlets he was holding, did a full one hundred eighty, and bolted for the entrance. Julia simply shrugged at my incredulous glare.

"I did you a favor there. That one was either a cult recruiter or a pyramid scheme enthusiast."

Hiding my amusement, I focused my attention on the fresh popcorn pieces falling out of the electric popper. "Maybe George was right. It's a surprisingly slow evening."

"So let's gossip instead. Did Amber tell you who she went on a date with?"

"No," I bit my lip. I had barely caught a glimpse of her today – even then, she simply put a finger on her mouth and disappeared into the fast-paced crowd. I only found out she had a date when she sent us several enthusiastic GIFs.

"Weird. I hope it's not with George. Maybe the snails were just his excuse to slip out."

We both glanced at each other and snorted at the thought.

"That's going to be one speedy date then," I noted. "And hey, what about that girl you've started seeing? You had your second date yesterday, right?"

"Right," she confirmed, looking slightly uneasy. "I'm not sure we're right for each other. She was a little bit too handsy for my taste."

"Handsy how?"

"She kept playing with my hair. Telling me she should dye it the same color," she shuddered. "And my earlobes. She said I have hot elf ears. Do I have hot elf ears?"

I strained my neck to properly inspect them. "Not that I've noticed, no."

"Anyway, it was just weird. I might go out with her again to see if her ear obsession was just a short-lived phase." She tapped against the counter glass like she was knocking on wood. "Dating is hard."

"Agreed," a tiny voice said behind her, and Julia abruptly turned around. Grace stood there in a beautiful shell top blouse and a checkered pencil skirt, her date outfit finalized by a pair of black ankle-strap heels. In comparison to the two of us, it was like a goddess had come down to Earth to mingle with the mortals. The black eyeliner she was wearing was a little bit smudged around the corners, but I wouldn't have noticed it at all if it hadn't been for her red eyes.

"What happened, Grace?" I asked her gently, immediately handing her a Snickers as a consolation prize.

She managed a laugh as she tore open the wrapper, but it didn't sound sincere. "Nothing. Rob and I cut our date a bit short."

Her delicate fingers hauled out the chocolate bar, and I admired her aquamarine manicure. As I peered closer, I noticed tiny little goldfish swimming on each nail.

Julia had other things on her mind.

"Just say the word, Grace," she said in a deadpan voice. "We can have him killed before dawn."

Grace raised her hand, asking for a pause as she bit off a chunk of the candy. A soft, appreciative moan left her lips. "Lord, just what I needed. And no, Julia. We didn't break up. We just... I don't know. I don't want to talk about it."

She never wanted to talk about it.

"Your shift will be done soon, right?" she asked me as she pulled down the wrapper, revealing even more of the sugary heaven. "What are we doing? Movie night? Waffles?"

"The Olsen twins are having a party," Julia piped up, taking both of us by surprise. "I've heard it's supposed to be fun, and I'm raring to go. Please, Grace?"

She glanced at me for a single moment, signaling to help her. I wasn't sure what her endgame was, but Julia never asked me for things, so I naturally jumped at the opportunity.

"Oh, yeah," I nodded fervently, playing along. "The Olsen twins. A total full house. I heard John Stamos might drop by, too."

Grace sniffled, eyeing me suspiciously. "Are you making a movie reference again? Because I can't always tell."

Her phone pinged before I could educate her on the matter. Instead of checking the message, Grace ignored the device in her pocket and took another bite of her Snickers instead. A bit of chocolate smeared against her peach-colored lipstick, gone as soon as she licked her lips.

The device sounded again. And again.

She took it out and switched it off.

"There. That's taken care of," she concluded, throwing the now-empty wrapper into the nearest trash bin. "So, the party? Are we going?"