Then I understand: Ricky left me a goodbye note. He couldn’t comfortably hold a pen, so his letters are different sizes with tremorous shakes in the lines. Still, his message is clear:

HELP CONNOR.

My lips open but no breath comes. I flip to the next page. Across the acknowledgments section, Ricky has scribbled another word: NIGHTLIGHT.

It doesn’t stop. On every page, splattered over the cast bios:

NIGHTLIGHT. NIGHTLIGHT. HELP CONNOR. NIGHTLIGHT.

The Playbill falls onto the tangled shirts in my open bag, and I scamper backward as if it were a bomb. Pins and needles flood my fingertips as goose bumps sail across my shoulders; the night breeze coming in my window isn’t cozy anymore. I try to pull on my sleeveless hoodie, but my arms have become clumsy slabs. In my struggle with the shirt, panic detonates inside my head like a nail bomb, bits of anxiety shrapnel flinging this way and that, lacerating every nearby thought.

Something isn’t right.

Hairs prickle on the back of my neck as Ricky’s message swirls, echoes like a scream: HELP CONNOR. NIGHTLIGHT. Ricky gave me this message in his will. Not when he was alive. What did he think I could possibly help him with once he was dead? He died from an infected bedsore, nothing weird or suspicious. He had the Reverend, his mom, and a million other people who helped him with anything he wanted or needed. Why me? Why now? And what does Nightlight mean?

My chest suffocates with paranoia. I no longer feel alone in my empty room. I pivot around quickly to my bedroom door, expecting to find the sallow, pleading face of Ricky reaching for me, a ghost, the living dead. There’s no one. Jumping, I pivot again toward my open window, expecting that sweet man’s rotting, soil-matted corpse to be crawling inside. Nothing.

Yet the feeling of eyes surrounding me won’t go away.

In a way, Ricky’s ghost is here. His message is trying to reach me from beyond the grave.

A plea for help. Ricky’s scrawled writing looks so pained.

I welcome in a clean breath of rationality to slow my heartbeat.

Ricky is dead, Connor. Whatever this is about, you can’t help him anymore.

I need to get out of here.

The grip on my chest doesn’t relax, but is instead buried under the heavy blanket of worry about what the hell I’m going to do about tonight. I think she wants to kick me out, I text Ario rapidly. Once again, I curl on the floor and wait thirty minutes for my phone to light up and teleport me out of this shit.

I fall asleep waiting.

“Connor, you need to wake up,” says a tough British voice.

“Dad…?” I moan. My dreams have been a blizzard of footsteps and people whispering. I’m still sprawled across the floor, but my room is filled with strangers dressed in black. Two men stand over me, night shadows obscuring their faces. Not shadows—ski masks.