The phone in Ghostface’s gloved hand felt absurdly small, a plastic thing that hummed with a borrowed authority. He held it to the mask as if the device itself might betray him — as if the smooth white peel with its elongated mouth could crack and show the man beneath. The voice that came through the handset was the voice he’d practiced for nights on end: slow, playful, a soft rasp that promised menace beneath its sugar. “Hi,” he said, and the line picked up the little squeak of a girl settling deeper into the couch.

“Hi,” she answered, voice thin and bright with the kind of warmth that made the world feel softer. “Is— is someone there?”

He should have felt the cold rush then, the planning brain snapping into place, the checklist of how to make a quiet end loud enough for legends. Instead a different, older script rewrote itself under his ribs. He remembered the way she laughed in homeroom when Mrs. Hargreaves mixed up the dates for exams. He remembered the pink knit scarf she wore until March, the way she tucked a stray curl behind her ear with the kind of clumsy grace that made people forgive everything.

“Hey,” he said, and the practiced menace tangled with something else: the low, polished cadence of his public life. To the world he was the golden boy — varsity captain, model for the fundraising posters, the boy who never missed a photo op. He had practiced that voice too: open, friendly, the tone that got him doors and smiles. Tonight it rode a darker current. “What’s your favorite scary movie?”

She giggled, breath catching like a tiny bell. “Oh— um. I don’t know. The old ones, I guess? The campy ones. I like when the costume is silly.” She sounded so pleased with the thought, so unafraid, like the word “scary” had no teeth for her.

He should have felt a step closer to whatever he’d intended to do. Instead his fingers tightened on the phone and for a second it hurt — a bruise blooming beneath latex. Her sweetness hit him like a physical thing, and it rearranged the geometry of the night. He had rehearsed threats, rehearsed the cold distance a killer needed to pull the trigger on anonymity. He had memorized how to wedge a menace into a smile. But sweetness — real, unstudied sweetness — slipped between the cogs. It exposed the smallness of the mask.

“Do you feel safe?” he said, an automatic cruelty tempered with something like curiosity.

“Oh, mostly,” she said without hesitation. “I have my friends. And my mom checks in. Why?” There was the small, practical caution of someone who hadn’t learned to tremble yet.

He should have hung up then. He should have gone through with it, the synthetic righteousness of whatever he’d told himself all week — that the mask made the world clear. Instead his eyes — the real ones, the ones hidden beneath blonde hair in the life he wore by day — burned for a moment behind the white. He could have watched her from a doorway and finished the sentence he’d started a hundred nights in his head. He could have let the persona swallow the boy.

“Nothing,” he said, and his voice cracked like a note held too long. “Sleep well.”

There was a small, sincere “Thank you,” and then the click of the line going dead.

He sat on the edge of the bathtub and let the silence fill the room, the bulky costume making his shoulders feel wrong, like a second spine. For a while he simply breathed — the slow in and out that belonged to another life. The house around him hummed with ordinary things: the refrigerator’s low chatter, the thin scrape of a neighbor’s footsteps. He could have convinced himself of anything in that light. He could have justified everything.

Instead he banged his head against the tile wall, once, twice, the sound raw and stupid. The impact vibrated through the mask, through the voice he’d borrowed, into a hollow place where reasons used to live. He groaned — a small animal sound — and then, with a kind of clumsy ritual, unfolded his hands. He dressed for the party the way other boys put on armor: a blazer that fit too well, a shirt that caught the light, a sharp cologne.