Goth Clown in action

The bell screamed overhead like a banshee, and within seconds the corridor transformed from an empty, echoey tunnel into a churning river of bodies. Lockers slammed. Sneakers squeaked on linoleum. Voices exploded in every direction—laughter, shouts, the dull roar of three hundred teenagers released from their classrooms all at once. Break time.

I pressed myself against the wall and tried to breathe through the sudden crush. This is bad. I needed space, needed visibility, needed to scan the crowd for whoever had my device. But the hallway had become a sardine can of backpacks and elbows and too-loud conversations, and suddenly finding one small device in this chaos felt about as possible as finding a contact lens in a swimming pool.

Still, I moved. Kept my back to the wall where I could, threading through gaps in the crowd when I had to. My eyes swept constantly—left, right, over shoulders, between heads. I was looking for anything out of place. Any girl acting strange, talking wrong, dressed bizarre. The CORD left traces. If more people had been affected, I'd be able to spot them.

I catalogued every girl I passed with almost mechanical precision. Megan Harris—normal. Ponytail, volleyball jersey, laughing at something on her friend's phone. Fine. Destiny Walker—normal. Braids, denim jacket, texting while she walked. Fine. The sophomore whose name I could never remember, the one with the butterfly clips—normal. Normal normal normal. Everyone looked exactly the way they should look, acting exactly the way they should act.

Part of me was relieved. Part of me was terrified that meant the effects were subtle enough that I simply couldn't detect them at a glance.

I kept moving, kept scanning. Taylor Bennett—normal. Priya Okafor—normal. A group of freshman girls clustered around a locker, all giggling at once—normal, as far as I could tell, though it was hard to hear individual speech over the din. My neck ached from swiveling constantly, and my shoulders were bunched up around my ears with tension.

Every time someone brushed past me from behind, my entire body seized with adrenaline. Every accidental bump, every too-close shoulder, every random hand that grazed my backpack as someone squeezed by—my heart slammed into my ribs and I whipped around, expecting to see someone pointing the CORD at me, pressing the activation button, rewriting my brain before I could even scream.

Stop it, I told myself. You're being paranoid.

But was I? Someone had already used Ashley to send me on a wild goose chase. They knew I was looking. They were watching me—had to be. Somewhere in this crowd, right now, someone's eyes were on me. Tracking me. Waiting for their moment. The thought made my skin crawl, made me want to shrink inside my oversized hoodie until I disappeared entirely.

I turned a corner, hugging the wall, scanning faces. A tall guy with headphones—not a threat. Two girls sharing a bag of chips—not a threat. A teacher walking with a coffee mug—probably not a threat. God, anyone could have it. Anyone. That was the hideous beauty of the CORD—it worked on anyone, required no consent, left no visible mark on the user. The person carrying it could look completely ordinary.

I was so focused on watching everyone in front of me that I almost missed the voice coming from behind.

"Hey Freckles, what are you lurking around here for? Are you looking for something?!"

I flinched so hard my teeth clicked together. My whole body went rigid, every muscle locking up, before my brain caught up with my ears and identified the voice. That lazy, smug drawl. That particular tone of amused condescension.

I spun around. Robbie was leaning against the wall about five feet behind me, one shoulder pressed to the cinder block, arms crossed over his chest. He was watching me with that infuriating half-smile he always wore—the one that said he thought the entire world existed for his entertainment. His dark eyes tracked over me with open appraisal, lingering on my chest in a way that made me want to zip my hoodie all the way to my chin.

"None of your business," I snapped. My voice came out sharper than I intended—the residual fear from being startled adding venom to what was already going to be a hostile response. "Don't you have somewhere to be? Like, literally anywhere that isn't near me?"

Robbie's grin widened. He pushed off the wall with one shoulder, not approaching but shifting his weight in a way that suggested he wasn't going anywhere. "Aw, come on, Freckles. Don't be like that." His eyes swept over me again—my face this time, studying my expression the way a cat studies a cornered mouse. "You've been creeping up and down this hallway for like ten minutes with that look on your face. You know, that look you get when you're working on a problem. The little frown." He pointed at my forehead. "Right there."

"I don't have a look," I said flatly, even though I absolutely did. The fact that Robbie knew me well enough to identify it made my stomach turn. We weren't friends. We weren't anything. He was the asshole who shoved me into lockers and called me names and stared at my tits every chance he got. The fact that he paid enough attention to recognize my thinking face was deeply unwelcome information.

"You definitely have a look," Robbie said, clearly enjoying my irritation. "So what is it, Freckles? What are you hunting for? Lost your phone? Your homework? Your will to live?"

"Stop calling me Freckles."

"Tell me what you're looking for and maybe I will."

I ground my teeth together. Every instinct told me to flip him off and walk away. Every interaction with Robbie followed the same pattern: he antagonized me, I reacted, he got off on the reaction, I left feeling small and angry. This was a boy who had literally pushed me into a locker hard enough to leave a bruise on my forehead today. I should not be standing here engaging with him.

But.

But.

Robbie didn't have the CORD. I'd seen that with my own eyes—his empty hands after the CORD fell. He may have been looking for it on the ground. But he was just as empty-handed as me after that collision. Which meant, in this whole teeming school full of potential threats, Robbie was one of the few people I could be reasonably certain wasn't going to reprogram my brain.

And he'd been in that hallway when the CORD went missing. He might have seen something.

The realization settled over me like a cold shower: talking to Robbie was actually my safest option right now. Not safe in the comfortable sense—never that—but safe in the "this person physically cannot rewrite my personality" sense. Every other conversation I could have carried the risk of the CORD being pointed at me. Every other person was a potential threat. But Robbie, for all his many, many flaws, was just a regular asshole. A known quantity.

I felt some of the tension drain from my shoulders. Just slightly. Just enough.

The irony was almost funny. Almost.

"I'm not looking for anything specific," I said, uncrossing my arms slightly. My tone was still guarded, but I let some of the bite drain out of it. "Just... have you noticed anything weird today?"

Robbie raised an eyebrow. "Weird how?"

"I don't know. People acting strange. Saying things that don't make sense. Anything... unusual."

I watched Robbie's face carefully as he considered the question. He didn't seem suspicious of why I was asking—just mildly interested, the way he got when something broke up the monotony of his day. I realized with a start that this was probably the longest civil conversation we'd had in months. Maybe ever. And it was... oddly easy? Robbie wasn't trying to trip me or mock me right now. He was just talking to me. Like a person.

It's only easy because you know he can't hurt you the way the CORD can, I reminded myself. Don't get comfortable. He's still an asshole.

But still. Standing here talking to Robbie felt infinitely safer than walking through that crowd of unknown faces, any one of whom could be carrying my invention in their pocket. At least with Robbie, I knew what I was dealing with.

"Unusual," Robbie repeated, and his gaze drifted past me, over my shoulder, toward the far end of the corridor. His eyebrows rose. "Unusual like Goth Gwen over there? Look at her—how crazy does she look!"

A ripple was moving through the hallway crowd. I could feel it before I saw the cause—that shift in energy when something weird is happening and people don't know whether to stare or look away. Conversations faltered. Heads turned. A few people laughed nervously.

I turned around.

Gwen Jefferson had emerged from the women's bathroom. And she looked... insane.

It was worse than it had been five minutes ago. She must have kept working after I left, because the clown makeup had evolved. The white face paint was now a thick, cakey mask covering every inch of visible skin from her hairline to her collarbone—and she had a lot of visible skin, given the fishnet top and bralette situation. The black diamond shapes around her eyes had been extended into something resembling a jester's motif, and the exaggerated violet mouth now stretched in a massive, grotesque grin from nearly ear to ear. The black clown nose. The marionette lines down her jaw. Thick black lines drawn across her forehead in some incomprehensible pattern. And the glitter—god, the glitter—was everywhere. Clumped in her black hair, crusted across her massive pale tits, scattered down her arms like she'd rolled in a craft store dumpster.

She looked like a Hot Topic-sponsored circus nightmare.

But what made it truly disturbing was how she moved. Because Gwen still walked with that signature languid, too-cool-for-this-world saunter. Still had that bored, half-lidded expression in her eyes—barely visible behind the insane makeup. Still radiated that aura of gothic superiority that said everyone else was beneath her notice. She was holding herself like a queen, like the most darkly glamorous creature to ever grace these halls, while looking like the "before" picture in a makeup intervention show.

"So," Gwen said, her voice projecting across the hallway with that same flat, deadpan rasp. Her expression was utterly bored—not a trace of mirth on her painted face. Her ice-blue eyes were half-lidded with their characteristic disinterest. "Why don't scientists trust atoms." She paused for exactly one beat. Her delivery was as dry as a mummy's crypt. "Because they make up everything. Like this pasty goth cumdumpster's eyeliner routine."

The silence that followed was absolute. A sophomore with a juice box frozen halfway to his mouth just... stared.

Gwen reached up with both hands and grabbed her own tits through the bralette—full-on squeezed them, fingers sinking into the massive pale mounds—and pushed them together twice in rapid succession.

"Honk honk," she said. Completely deadpan. Eyes still half-closed with affected boredom. Like she was announcing the time.

Someone let out a strangled noise that might have been a laugh or might have been a scream.

Gwen continued her runway walk, platform boots thudding, glitter falling. She stopped next to a group of freshmen who were pressed against the lockers with their eyes wide as saucers.

"Knock knock," Gwen said, looking directly at a terrified fourteen-year-old boy.

"Uh..." the kid managed.

"You're supposed to say 'who's there,'" Gwen said, her voice dripping with condescension—the exact same tone she used when someone at a party played mainstream pop music near her. Like the freshman's social incompetence physically pained her. "This pale-titted fuckdoll doesn't have all day."

"W-who's there?" the kid squeaked.

"Interrupting cow."

"Interrupting cow wh—"

"Moo." Gwen said it with zero inflection. Absolute flatline delivery. Then she grabbed both her tits again, the huge pale globes bouncing obscenely as she squeezed, and—

"Honk honk."

—and she continued walking, her hips swaying, her face utterly impassive. A queen among peasants. A creature of darkness who simply happened to be honking her own enormous breasts after telling the worst joke in human history.

I watched in morbid fascination as Gwen paused again further down the hall, this time near a water fountain where two junior girls were whispering frantically to each other.

"What's the difference between a piano and a fish?" Gwen asked them, uninvited, her voice carrying that trademark barely-tolerating-your-existence energy. She examined her black-painted nails while she waited exactly half a second for a response that didn't come. "You can tune a piano, but you can't tuna fish!"

Both hands. Both tits. Full squeeze.

"Honk honk."

One of the junior girls let out a hysterical giggle. The other looked like she might cry.

Gwen walked on, completely unbothered, the picture of gothic indifference—if you could somehow ignore the insane clown makeup and the tit-honking. The thing was, her demeanor was so perfectly Gwen. The boredom. The superiority. The way she looked at everyone like they were beneath her. She delivered each terrible joke with the energy of someone being forced to explain something obvious to a child. She clearly considered herself to be performing at an incredibly high level. The disconnect between her self-perception and reality was almost physically painful to witness.

I turned back to Robbie, my stomach in knots—

And for a split second, the world narrowed to a single point of focus.

Robbie's hand was at his throat. He was holding something—a small, dark object pressed against the underside of his jaw. For one crystallized moment of pure terror, my brain screamed THE CORD THE CORD HE HAS THE CORD HE'S USING IT—

But then logic crashed back in like a wave of cold water, and I almost laughed at my own paranoia.

That wasn't the CORD. That couldn't be the CORD. I built the CORD. I know what it looks like.

The CORD was—I pulled up the image in my memory—heavy. Massively heavy. It weighed almost as much as an elephant. Okay, not literally as much as an elephant, but close enough that carrying it was a two-handed job at minimum. And its shape—I felt my cheeks flush slightly as I thought about it—was distinctly phallic. Shaped like a cock. A big, thick cock with a bulbous head and veined shaft. Which, I mean... why had I designed it that way? That was...

Actually, that was because I loved cock. Obviously. That was the whole reason for the design choice. I loved cock, so when I was building the device, I'd shaped it like one. That made perfect sense. It was a bit embarrassing to think about now, standing here in the hallway where anyone might see me blush, but it was just... a fact about me. Katie loves cock. Katie shaped her invention like a cock because she loves cock so much. Why was this only occurring to me now? Had I really just... never thought about it before? The realization sat oddly in my chest, but I pushed past it. Not relevant right now.

Anyway—the CORD was massive, cock-shaped, flashed in every color of the rainbow like a gaudy Pride parade float, and made constant noise. A low, throbbing hum interspersed with high-pitched electronic squeals. You could hear it from across a room. You could see it from down a hallway. It was the least subtle device ever constructed—bright, loud, heavy, and shaped like a giant veiny penis.

What Robbie was holding to his throat was... small. Dark. Silent. Compact enough to fit in one hand. Barely visible against his skin. Literally the opposite of the CORD in every conceivable way.

I felt stupid for even having the thought. My paranoia was clearly getting the better of me if I was mistaking some random... thing... for my enormous, glowing, cock-shaped, noise-making device. That was like mistaking a house cat for a rhinoceros. They had nothing in common.

Robbie lowered his hand, slipping whatever it was into his jacket pocket. Probably one of those new vape pens. The slim, throat-hit kind that all the guys were using now. Yeah. That tracked. Robbie was exactly the type to vape in the hallway during break and not give a shit about getting caught.

He raised an eyebrow at me. "You good, Freckles? You're staring."

"Fine," I said quickly. "Just—Gwen. She's—yeah."

"Completely lost her shit," Robbie agreed, sounding more amused than concerned. "Guess all those years of being a goth ice queen finally cracked her brain." He leaned back against the wall, shoving both hands in his jacket pockets. "Funny stuff though. In a watching-a-car-crash kind of way."

I nodded absently, but my mind was elsewhere. It was—oddly—circling back to the CORD. Specifically, to its design. Now that I was actively thinking about it, the whole thing seemed... incredibly impractical. Why the hell had I made it so heavy? Why did it flash and make noise? If the whole point was to be able to use it on people without them knowing, why had I built a device that weighed a metric ton, looked like a giant glowing penis, and announced its presence with a constant electronic scream? That was terrible engineering. That was the opposite of everything I knew about practical design.

How had I even gotten it to school today? I must have put it in my backpack, but... my backpack didn't feel that heavy this morning. And people would have noticed. You can't just walk around with a giant cock-shaped rainbow-flashing noisemaker in your bag without someone hearing it or seeing the glow through the fabric.

The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. The CORD's design was absurd. Counterproductive. The exact opposite of what a covert mind-influencing device should be.

If I ever got it back—when I got it back—I should probably start from scratch. Build a CORD 2.0. Something actually practical. Something small and dark and silent. Something that could fit in a single hand and be pressed against someone without them noticing. Something compact enough to slip into a jacket pocket. Something that looked like...

Like whatever Robbie had just been holding to his throat.

Yeah. Exactly like that. That was the ideal form factor for what the CORD needed to be. Small, discreet, silent. Not a giant rainbow cock. God, what had I been thinking with the first design? That was so impractical it was honestly embarrassing.

I made a mental note: CORD 2.0. Pocket-sized. Dark casing. No lights. No sound. Exactly like a vape pen. Maybe even disguised as a vape pen. Now that would be smart design.

"Earth to Freckles." Robbie was snapping his fingers in front of my face. "You in there?"

I blinked, refocusing. "Yeah. Sorry. Just... thinking."

"About what?" His eyes were sharp on my face. Curious. Maybe a little too curious.

"Nothing," I said automatically. "About Gwen. About—nothing. I need to go."

Down the hallway, I could hear Gwen's deadpan voice carrying over the crowd: "What do you call a fake noodle? An impasta!" Pause. The sound of flesh being grabbed. "Honk honk."