This Delicious Death

by Kayla Cottingham

Genres: YA Horror; YA LGBT & Pride; YA Mysteries & Thrillers

Synopsis

This summer is going to get gory.
Two years ago, a small percentage of the population underwent a transformation known as the Hollowing. Those affected were only able to survive by consuming human flesh. The people who went without quickly became feral, turning on their
friends and family. Luckily, scientists were able to create a synthetic version of human meat that would satisfy their hunger. As a result, humanity slowly began to return to normal.
Cut to Zoey, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine, four hollow girls living in Southern California. As a last hurrah before graduation, they attend a musical festival in the heart of the desert. They have a cooler filled with seltzer, vodka, and Synflesh
… and are ready to party.
But on the first night of the festival, Val goes feral and ends up killing and eating a boy in one of the bands. As other festival guests start disappearing around them, the girls soon discover someone is targeting people like them. If they can’t figure
out how to stop it, and soon, no one at the festival is getting out alive.

Release date: April 25, 2023

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Print pages: 281

Content advisory: This book contains many triggering topics such as gore , violence, cannibalism, death, and suicide.

Sample

One

Am I still a monster

If I run my fingers through your hair

And kiss you to sleep?

Baby, you’re in too deep.

—“Monster” by No Flash Photography

When my parents asked if I wanted a Mini Cooper for graduation, I didn’t think ahead to whether or not it would have enough trunk space to accommodate my cooler full of organs.

Also, the cooler with all the sparkling waters, but that was less of a priority.

“Can you stack the coolers on top of each other?” my best friend, Celeste, suggested, pointing to my trunk with a finger that ended in a sharp pink acrylic nail. “Or put one of the back seats down?”

I shot her a look, one eyebrow raised. Celeste Fairbanks was white, with pink hair, a slim build, and long legs that seemed to go on for miles. She was taller than me by a good half a foot, accentuated by the fact that she was currently wearing white platform heels. They paired nicely with her pink heart-patterned pinafore and pearlescent eyeshadow—both newly purchased using her growing influencer income.

Leave it to Celeste to look cute before 8 a.m., the absolute monster.

“They’re too tall to stack,” I pointed out, crossing my arms. “And unless you want Valeria to sit in your lap the whole way to the festival, we need all the back seats.”

Celeste hummed in agreement, grimacing. We were currently standing in front of the Fairbanks house, packing up the Mini for our first-ever road trip to Desert Bloom, a music festival in the Mojave Desert a few hours’ drive away. The house was a modest box-shaped bungalow with a lush garden of desert plants adorning the front. Solar panels glinted on the roof, unlike most homes in Aspen Flats, whose occupants were far too stubborn to consider converting to sustainable energy—despite recent proof of the consequences of not doing so.

“You’re gonna have to consolidate,” said Wendy, Celeste’s mom. She was nearly a foot shorter than her daughter, but she made up for it by wearing tall leopard-print heels. Despite living in California for decades, her thick Jersey accent still clung to every syllable she spoke. “See if you can fit it all in the bigger cooler, and I’ll take the other one back in the house.”

Celeste sighed. “It feels…kind of wrong to put seltzers in the flesh cooler.”

“The flesh cooler,” I repeated under my breath, biting back a smile.

Celeste’s lip twitched for a moment before she cracked and broke into laughter.

Which immediately made me break too, with an inelegant snort that made Celeste laugh even harder. Something about seeing her double over trying to catch her breath only made it worse. Playfully, I shoved her shoulder and she batted my hand away, giggling behind her hand.

“All right, all right.” Wendy opened the cooler with the sparkling water and added, “Help me consolidate these. You’re burning daylight and I don’t want you to have to drive out there in the dark. That’s when all the creepers come out.”

Celeste and I both groaned—though we were both still smiling—and stooped down to the other cooler to gather an armful of plastic-wrapped organs. We took turns tossing them in the cooler with the drinks. Each one was branded with the required LAB-GROWN SYNTHETIC TISSUE, FOR CONSUMPTION ONLY sticker across the front—I guess to dissuade someone from attempting an at-home organ transplant. They each made a faint crunching sound as they landed atop the ice.

“Sweetie, you sure you don’t want a few more livers?” Wendy asked Celeste. “You know I got a whole bunch from Costco during that half-off sale—”

“Mom,” Celeste said. “We’re fine, seriously.”

“All right, all right, I get it. My little girl is all grown up now and doesn’t need her mom telling her what to do all the time.” Wendy leaned over to me, her big blond curls nearly smacking me in the face. “But the offer stands if you want any more, Zoey. You just let me know.”

I flashed her a toothy grin.

 “Thanks, Wendy.”

Wendy was one of the few people who could actually make me smile and mean it. She’d been like a second mother to me since Celeste and I became friends in elementary school. She was always the first to offer me a place to stay or someone to talk to when I needed it. Whenever June rolled around, she drove me and Celeste to LA for the pride parade, and she was always the one yelling the loudest, wearing trans and bi flags in celebration of her daughter. She wasn’t the perfect mom, but she was pretty damn close.

It took a few minutes, but the three of us managed to shove all of the SynFlesh into the other cooler and wrangle it into the back without much incident. I closed the trunk and exhaled a breath, sweat already beading on the back of my neck even though the sun had barely risen. I prayed I didn’t have pit stains.

“One more thing before you go,” Wendy said, taking a few steps back. She pulled her phone out of her pocket and tapped the screen. “I want pictures.”

“You’re the one who just said we’re burning daylight,” Celeste said.

“That was when you were dawdling! This’ll only take a second.” When Celeste scowled, she added, “You’re going on your first road trip by yourselves! And your first music festival! You’re gonna want to look back on this when you’re my age, I’m telling you. Now get together and look cute—I’m putting this on Facebook for your Nana.”

Celeste sighed and shook her head, but the smile never left her face. The two of us stepped together as I held up a peace sign and did my best not to squint too much when I smiled. Then, Celeste put her arm around me and leaned in next to my face. The heat from her cheek sunk into mine.

My heart puttered and my stomach flipped itself into knots.

“Say hot girl summer!”

Celeste grinned and said, “Absolutely not,” at the same time I repeated it, voice cracking.

“Beautiful!” Wendy beamed at the screen and then held it out to us. “You look great.”

If by great she meant tense and sweaty, then yes, I did. My hazel eyes were wide, pale cheeks flushed, my chin-length chestnut hair stuck to my sweaty forehead at a weird angle. I was smiling, kind of, but it was lopsided and forced. Celeste, meanwhile, had a sweet smile on her face while her hair fell in soft waves down the front of her shoulders. I looked like I was her fan and this was a picture from an extremely awkward meet-and-greet.

Celeste withheld a snicker. “Nana will love that.”

“You’ll be the talk of her nursing home, without a doubt.” Wendy tucked her phone into her pocket. “Well, you two should get going. But be safe, okay? You take care of each other no matter what.”

“Always have,” Celeste said brightly.

Her mother went on her tiptoes and kissed Celeste’s cheek, then turned to me and pulled me into a big hug. “I love you girls.”

“Love you too,” Celeste and I both said.

“All right, get out of here before I cry.” She sniffled. “Safe travels.”

Celeste and I said our goodbyes before climbing in the car and driving away, Wendy waving behind us as we went. 

***

The mid-June sun beat down on the roof of the Mini as we crossed town to pick up Valeria and Jasmine, the two remaining members of our high school friend group. Before the Hollowing, Valeria and Jasmine had both been infinitely more popular at school than Celeste and I, and our paths only crossed because Aspen Flats was a tiny three-stoplight town where everyone knew each other. Before the Hollowing, Valeria had been a cheerleader for the Aspen Flats Rattlers and Jasmine was already taking college-level courses in addition to playing on the softball team. Meanwhile, Celeste and I were the sort of people who ate lunch in our freshman year English teacher’s room through most of high school and spent most of our time sending each other TikToks and fan fiction links under our desks. If it hadn’t been for the Hollowing, Jasmine and Valeria probably never would have given us the time of day.

When we got to Valeria’s house, I threw the car into park, the cooler rattling in the back seat. Clearly, I hadn’t closed the lid all the way when I snatched a SynFlesh heart out to eat on the drive over.

Eighteen months ago, SynFlesh—a substance made by using human stem cells to bioprint large organoids, which were close to, but not quite, the same as real human organs—was dubbed the greatest invention of the twenty-first century by TIME magazine. Which made sense, considering the fact that it wound up being humanity’s only solution to deal with the Hollowing, dubbed the greatest disaster of the twenty-first century by, well, literally everyone.

The worst part was that the Hollowing was kinda our fault. Kinda being the operative word, because the pathogen that made people Hollow came out of melted permafrost, and we’d all learned by now we could mostly blame corporations and the military for electing to sauté the Earth in toxic fumes for profit. But there was always that thought: Maybe the last coffee cup that I threw in the trash instead of recycling was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back and sent us into a borderline zombie apocalypse two years ago.

The sound of someone tapping on the window snapped me out of my thoughts. Outside, Valeria Vega stood waving in a yellow sundress with a huge smile on her face. Valeria was Latina, with warm tan skin and bouncy brown curls pulled back from her face.

“Good morning!” she sang as she climbed into the back seat. Her smile faltered a bit as she pointed to a spot on her face and said, “Zoey, there’s a blood clot on your chin.”

“Really? Ah, shit.” I rubbed it away with the back of my hand. “My bad.”

“She ate a SynFlesh heart with her bare hands while we were driving over,” Celeste said from the passenger seat, twisting around to better convey her feelings on the matter to Valeria. “A truck driver saw and nearly drove off the road.”

Valeria jerked back. “While you were driving, Z?”

“What? I woke up late and needed to eat on the go. Regular people do it all the time.” Over Valeria’s shoulder, I spotted another figure approaching from the house next door and waved out the window. Once she was close enough to hear me, I added, “You get what I’m saying, right, Jaz? If regular people can get away with eating a McMuffin on the way to work, I can take a few bites of SynFlesh.”

“I mean—sure. Until some poor kid in their car seat looks over and sees you unhinge your jaw like an

 anaconda to swallow a human heart whole,” Jasmine Owusu said, crossing her arms. She was Black, with a soft but muscular build and rich dark skin. She’d recently woven her curls into long box braids with light purple streaks laced in. She wore a raglan shirt with the words ASPEN FLATS HIGH SCHOOL SOFTBALL written across the chest, plus ripped denim shorts.

As she climbed into the back seat, she raised an eyebrow at Celeste. “What were you doing while this happened?”

“Sitting in the passenger’s seat trying to look normal so the neighbors don’t come after us with torches and pitchforks,” Celeste groaned, rubbing her temples. “As usual.”

Jasmine withheld a snort at that while Valeria sighed and rolled her eyes.

Soon after, everyone buckled in, and the traditional fight for the aux cord began and ended with Valeria sweetly telling us we had terrible taste. She stole the cord and plugged in her phone, blasting some obscure indie pop band that would be playing at the festival.

I rolled down the windows as we hit the open road out of Aspen Flats, the breeze ruffling our hair and sun streaming in. Music throbbed from the speakers, the bassline heavy like a pulse. I pulled my dark sunglasses down while Valeria sang along to the song, Jasmine swaying back and forth while Celeste tapped her foot beside me. A pleasantly effervescent feeling coursed through me like my blood had turned to soda water. My skin was warm and my cheeks flushed.

After what we’d been through the last two years, we deserved to feel good.

***

Celeste took over driving just outside of Bakersfield, and I started to drift off in the passenger seat.

One moment I was staring at the brush on the side of the road, and the next I was surrounded by redwood trees. I was suddenly fifteen again, with two scraped knees and my dark brown hair—which I’d recently cut myself for the first time—hanging sharply around my jaw. In the silence of the woods, my stomach growled like a starved animal. The trees were massive and silent around me, without even a whisper of a breeze or birdsong to make it feel alive.

“Celeste!” I shouted for what felt like the hundredth time. I pressed a hand to my stomach as hunger pangs shot through me again and my knees threatened to give out. “Where are you?”

A twig snapped beneath my shoe, making me jump. I was nearly a mile away from Camp Everwood, the summer camp Celeste and I had been going to together for the last four years in the northern California woods. It was supposed to be a summer of outdoor activities, staying up late in our cabin, and spending time together.

Instead, half of the kids and counselors had just come down with a weird stomach bug. Some of the kids who smuggled in cell phones shared rumors that people everywhere were coming down with a weird stomach bug. But for the most part, they were all back on their feet and normal as ever after three days in bed.

But Celeste and I weren’t getting better, and suddenly she’d disappeared into the trees.

The weight of my feet dragging through the underbrush suddenly felt unbearable, like someone had filled my shoes with cement. I stopped, leaning against a tree as I tried to catch my breath, stomach letting out another pained groan. I’d spent days trying and failing to keep down food, only to throw up anything I managed to swallow. What I didn’t tell anyone was that the bile that came back up was black and viscous like oil.

As I brushed against a tree, I felt something wet.

Gingerly, I pulled away to discover blood and dirt smeared down my arm. I yelped, immediately assuming I must have cut myself. But as I ran a hand down my skin looking for a wound, I realized it wasn’t me.

The blood was already on the tree.

“Celeste!” I screamed ever louder, heart hammering. If she was hurt, I had to find her. “Celeste!”

That’s when I heard the soft sound of slurping to my left. A chill settled into my skin as I turned. I smelled it before I saw it: the cloying scent of coppery blood staining the air.

Hidden among the ferns was a man’s corpse, jaw hanging agape in a frozen scream. A pool of blood soaked into the mossy soil around him and stained his torn khaki cargo shorts and Camp Everwood T-shirt. It leaked from his torso, which was sliced open, revealing the soft pink entrails inside.

I recognized him: Devin Han, one of our camp counselors.

I also recognized the figure slumped over him, licking her fingers.

“Celeste?” I whispered.

When she turned to look at me, it took all my power not to gasp. Her face was smeared with blood, and her teeth were sharp and elongated. Tears cut through the blood, which dripped off her chin and onto her hands where a chunk of…something was clutched between her fingers. Her nails, typically short and grubby back then, had curved into lethal-looking talons.

Her lower lip quivered with a sob. “I-I don’t know what’s happening to me, Zo.”

I barely heard her over the sound of blood roaring in my ears as the scent of carnage became stronger and stronger. My stomach snarled, and I felt something poking into my tongue. I began to shake, vision darkening at the edges.

I dove at the body.

Before the dream could progress any more, a hand shook my shoulder. Valeria’s voice broke through my sleeping brain.

“Zoey, get up. We made it to the hotel.”

I shot up, dazed as my vision came back to me. I was in the Mini Cooper, Celeste, Valeria, and Jasmine all staring at me with furrowed brows. I quickly smoothed my hair and straightened up, shaking my head.

“Sorry,” I muttered. “Dozed off.”

“Nightmare?” Celeste asked.

I nodded.

“I keep having those too,” Val said, a shiver going down her spine. “Like, I keep dreaming that Patricia from EHPA calls me to say that my application to leave Aspen Flats for Desert Bloom was denied and I’m stuck there all summer. It’s awful.”

“As if Patricia pays enough attention to us to give a shit if we don’t get proper sign-offs to leave town,

” Jasmine snickered. “Who knows, maybe your dream version of the Emergency Hollow Preparedness Association has enough government funding to not watch Netflix on the job and actually monitor us.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “That was, ah, pretty much the nightmare. The horrors of our misused tax dollars.”

That seemed to placate Jasmine and Val, who offered their sympathy and slid out of the car to check in at the reception desk. Celeste, though, wrinkled her brow and frowned sympathetically.

“Camp Everwood?” she guessed.

I nodded.

She bit her lip. “Yeah. I get those too. But hey”—she nodded outside toward the hotel—“what better way to get our mind off things than having some vodka I stole from my mom at the pool?”

I cracked a smile. “You’re a visionary, Fairbanks. Thanks.”

The Hollowing is over, I reminded myself. And you’re okay.

I opened my door and slid out to follow my friends, doing my best to shove the memory to the back of my mind where it belonged. Two

If you or a family member has been stricken with Hollowness, remember to add your name to the United States National Hollow Registry. Registration will ensure timely delivery of viable nutritional protein to your home from one of our verified distributors. You’ll also be sent a link to download the HollowLife app, which allows for local EHPA representatives to remain abreast of your location and for you to log your weekly SynFlesh intake.

Any Hollow person found unregistered is subject to arrest and detention.

Remember: community safety is everyone’s business.

—Emergency Hollow Preparedness Association PSA

Checking into the hotel was easy, so it wasn’t long before Celeste and I were dragging the flesh cooler to our room. Val strutted beside me humming the lyrics to one of the songs she’d played in the car while Jasmine looked up takeout places nearby that might have SynFlesh options. After a deeply unflattering climb up the stairs, Celeste and I dropped the cooler on the floor of our room, gasping for breath while Val squealed and ran for one of the queen beds.

“This is so cool!” she shouted, flopping down on the pile of pillows near the headboard and splaying out her arms. “I’ve never had my own hotel room before.”

I let my duffel bag slide off my shoulder and onto the floor next to the cooler, surveying the room. The carpet was a dingy shade of mustard yellow, and the beds had floral duvets that may well have been manufactured in the ’70s. Still, it smelled like piney cleaning solution and the windows had a nice view of the pool, plus the Joshua tree–speckled desert beyond it, so I couldn’t complain.

“You should have been on the softball team,” Jasmine said, dropping her hard-shell suitcase, which was covered in BLM, feminist, and lesbian flag stickers, in the corner of the room. “We stayed at hotels all the time. Made for a truly incredible amount of queer drama.”

“As fun as sharing a bed with every softball butch in Aspen Flats sounds, I’ve sworn off activities that require sweating.” Val rolled over onto her stomach to look at me and Celeste. “So, you two sharing a bed?”

Celeste and I exchanged a look. At the sight of her faintly quirked eyebrow, something fluttered in the pit of my stomach, which I quickly shoved down.

I said, “I can ask for a rollaway bed at the front desk.”

“Why?” Celeste tilted her head to the side and stared at me from under her long, dark eyelashes. “We’ve been sharing a bed at sleepovers since middle school.”

My shitty gay heart did a backflip in my chest.

The thing is, she was right. This wasn’t supposed to be weird, because it hadn’t been for a long, long time. I’d lost count of the number of times we’d shared beds, either at sleepovers like she said or camping or just hanging out after school and doing homework. It wasn’t anything special or noteworthy.

Until a couple weeks ago, when my horrible little lizard brain decided the absolute hottest person on the planet was my best friend.

I opened my mouth to explain myself, but Jasmine cut in, “Maybe this is Zoey’s way of finally admitting that she kicks and snores.”

I started to roll my eyes until it occurred to me that Jaz might be onto something. “Uh—yeah. Sorry, Celeste. I just don’t want to keep you awake.”

She scoffed. “I’d like to see you try. I sleep through fire alarms.”

I forced myself to examine the curtains across the room as my heart sped up. I could feel my face burning, which meant the others could definitely see it. Despite living in SoCal my entire life, I was too pale to hide even the faintest hint of a blush. Sweat beaded on my forehead.

“Um.” I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry. “Well. If you’re sure—”

Val hopped off her bed and said, “That settles it. Jaz and me here, Zoey and Celeste there. Now, can we please get some takeout and go to the pool? We’re on vacation; we should act like it!”

“There’s a diner a mile fr

om here with SynFlesh options that’ll deliver,” Jasmine reported.

Celeste’s shoulders slumped. “There’s a whole cooler of SynFlesh right there.”

“And you both looked very strong and capable carrying it up the stairs,” Val said. “But I hate cold SynFlesh.”

Celeste fell onto what was, apparently, our bed with a heavy sigh, her eyelashes fluttering and her hair falling in rosy waves around her cheeks.

I gulped.

God, I’m so screwed.

***

As much as I hated to admit it, Val was right—cold flesh didn’t compare to the warm stuff.

I ate a warm SynFlesh steak while sitting cross-legged on the floor, teeth lengthening in sharp fangs as I bit into it. I used my free hand to open the HollowLife app on my phone to log my dinner—I’m sure Patricia, our Emergency Hollow Preparedness Association representative back in Aspen Flats—who was in charge of monitoring us—would appreciate her millionth picture of raw synthetic meat that proved my friends and I weren’t out killing innocents. It was kind of a pain to have to log all of my meals, but I understood that it was the government’s condition to let Hollow people walk around like everyone else. Sure, it was a little invasive to have to be tracked all the time, and to have to submit applications to leave Aspen Flats, but I much preferred that over the alternative, which was keeping ghouls in prisonlike facilities like at the beginning of the Hollowing.

Meanwhile, Val made an excuse to grab something from the car with her own SynFlesh steak in a Styrofoam box. No one said anything—Val never ate with us. I knew for a fact that it was because she hated people seeing her in her ghoul form, so it didn’t exactly warrant much worry so long as she was still eating in general.

When she returned from the car post-dinner, she’d already changed into her swimsuit. The rest of us had to rush to catch up with her as she led the march to the hotel pool. Celeste produced the bottle of vodka that she’d stolen from Wendy, and we poured it into half-full soda bottles we’d bought at the vending machine in the hallway. While we couldn’t eat solid human food without getting sick, liquids were the exception to the rule—which was great, because that meant we could still get blasted on vacation.

I took a hearty swig of Fanta and vodka and nearly gagged—okay, maybe a little too strong.

The pool was empty when we arrived, much to our cheering delight. The water was pale blue, rippling softly in the low afternoon light. Val took a running start and cannonballed into the deep end while Jasmine readjusted her braids into a bun atop her head before getting into the hot tub. Celeste followed Jasmine, and in an attempt to distract my racing heart, I jogged to the edge of the pool and dove in.

The water was cold enough to bite into my skin, the chlorine burning my eyes as I opened them. Everything underwater was tinged blue, the bubbles rising from my mouth sparkling in the sun. A wicked smile cut across my face as I kicked toward where Val stood in her bright yellow swimsuit. I grabbed her ankle, bursting into bubbling laughter as she thrashed and shrieked overhead.

I surfaced with a gasp just as she shouted, “Oh my god, you asshole!”

She splashed me and I threw my arms up to shield my face, cackling. Val dove at me to try and shove me underwater, and I pushed off from the bottom to glide out of her range. She continued laughing and cursing me out, swimming as fast as she could to catch me.

Before we could get very far, a deep voice from behind us cut in, “Wow. Didn’t expect a girl who looks like you to have a mouth like that.”

Val and I froze. I flicked away a strand of wet hair and found a boy standing over us at the edge of the pool, a lopsided smile on his face. He was a skinny white guy with black and gray tattoos up and down his arms and on his chest. His hair was dyed black and hung slightly in his eyes. If I had to guess, he was probably in his early twenties.

I tilted my head sideways, frowning. “Can we help you?”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to intrude—I just thought it was funny.” His smile grew wider. “I’m Eli, by the way.”

“Ignore Zoey—it’s nice to meet you. I’m Val.” She held eye contact with him, even as I did my best to catch her eye, mentally begging her to tell him to piss off. I spotted the tiniest hint of a blush in the apples of her cheeks, and I nearly groaned out loud.

Val never picked decent guys—it was always assholes like this.

From behind Eli, three other boys came running, diving into the pool with varying amounts of grace. I held up a hand to shield against the spray, scowling. Two of them immediately began trying to dunk each other underwater while another floated on his back.

Of course there’s more of them.

“So, what brings you to a nowhere hotel like this?” Eli asked, sitting down at the edge of the pool. His focus was so acutely on Val, it made me feel like I’d turned invisible.

“Going to Desert Bloom with my friends,” she said, a small smile beginning to warm her face. “Sorry, this is kinda weird but you look…familiar almost. Do I know you from somewhere?”

Eli flexed his eyebrows. “You know No Flash Photography?”

Suddenly, Val’s face lit up like Eli had just admitted to personally spit-polishing the stars every night. “No way! You’re Eli McKinley?” She clapped her hands together. “Oh my god, I love you!”

“Special guy, huh?” Jasmine appeared from the hot tub, dark skin still steaming as she tied a towel around her waist. “Usually, it takes longer for her to say I love you. Like, a week or so.”

“Jaz, come on! This is the Eli McKinley! He’s the lead singer for one of my favorite bands that’ll be at Desert Bloom! And he writes some of their songs which are, like, beautiful lyrically—”

“All right, all right, simmer down.” Jasmine held out a hand to Eli. “I’m Jasmine.”

“Pleasure.” Eli shook her hand and gestured to the pool, where the other boys had stopped trying to drown each other and were laughing about something. “These are my bandmates, Kaiden, Raj, and Cole. I guess you already know we’re playing

at Desert Bloom.”

The boys waved. They had fewer tattoos and looked a little younger, closer to our age. One of them, a redhead with green eyes and freckles—Cole, maybe—held out his hand to me.

“Hey,” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

I stared at his hand like it was a dead fish floating in the pool.

“This is Zoey,” Val supplemented, putting her hands on my shoulders. “Sorry, she’s shy.”

“No, I’m not,” I retorted. “I just don’t like being accosted by random guys.”

“Not into musicians?” Maybe-Cole asked. Honestly, he was cute in a scruffy, unkempt sort of way, but that didn’t stop me from glaring.

“Not into whatever this is.” I pushed off from the bottom of the pool and floated to the pool ladder, pulling myself out. “I’ll be in the hot tub.”

Cole blinked a few times as his hand slowly sank back into the water. Val didn’t so much as flinch as she swam up the edge of the pool to continue chatting with Eli. Jasmine gave me a little shrug of sympathy as I passed.

I found Celeste on her phone in the hot tub. She was in the middle of slapping a filter over a selfie she’d just taken in her cherry-print bikini top and swim skirt before she posted it to Instagram. Despite the heat and steam, her makeup hadn’t budged—presumably as a result of an expensive setting spray, or maybe a Faustian bargain. Jury’s out.

I descended the steps and sat down across from her, folding my arms.

She raised her eyebrows and I explained, “Val met some boys.”

“I noticed.” She hooked a thumb in their direction. “You don’t want to talk to them?”

I wrinkled my nose. “What? Why would I do that?”

Celeste shrugged. “Because you’re single and it’s summer and they’re probably interested? You can be decently cute when you try.”

I guffawed at that. “Yeah? You’re single too—why don’t you talk to them?”

“Please. It takes a lot for me to be interested in a boy these days. And those guys aren’t my type at all.”

Somehow, that made my pulse quicken—even though Celeste saying she wasn’t interested in those boys had absolutely nothing to do with her hypothetical interest in me. Celeste wasn’t typically the sort of person to talk about her crushes or dating life—the only people she’d been with in high school were girls, as far as I knew.

I grabbed my vodka-spiked Fanta from where I’d left it on the edge of the hot tub and held it out to Celeste. “Cheers to that.”

A small smile crossed her face as she tapped her Sprite bottle against mine. “Cheers. Wanna take bets on how long it is until Val drags those boys over here and forces us to hang out with them?”

“Ten minutes,” I said.

“I’ll give it twenty. Loser drains her drink?”

“Deal.”

***

Celeste was right, as usual, but it was almost worth it to watch the No Flash Photography boys react as they stepped into the hot tub and I instantly started chugging soda

 like my life depended on it.

Val sat down in Eli’s lap while Jasmine curled up against me, probably to avoid the longing stare of one of the boys, an Indian guy with an impressively tall pompadour and a gold septum piercing. Raj, I assumed. Clearly, he hadn’t picked up on the fact that Jasmine was firmly a lesbian.

“This is my friend Celeste,” Val told the boys. “She’s the one who got us tickets to the festival. She posts makeup tutorials on TikTok and YouTube and gets all the influencer perks.”

Celeste blushed a bit. “It’s really not that big of a deal.”

“Come on—you should own it,” Eli said, keeping his eyes on Celeste while he wrapped his arms around Val’s waist. It hadn’t even been a full hour since they showed up and they were already sitting like they’d been dating for years. “People like us have to earn fame. It doesn’t just land in your lap for no reason.”

Maybe I was imagining it, but it almost looked like Celeste’s eye twitched. “People like us?”

Eli leaned forward conspiratorially. “Outsiders, you know? Not those fake-ass Hollywood types. The real people with real issues.”

Celeste bit back a laugh. “Ah, of course. You’re right—I bet you and I have had really similar struggles.”

Val let out a little sigh while Jasmine snorted into her vodka-spiked ginger ale. Naturally, Eli didn’t notice.

“I mean,” he continued, unfazed, “just take the last two years, right? Ever since the Hollowing, art’s been the last thing on people’s minds. It’s ghouls this and ghouls that. Should ghouls be able to go to large public gatherings even with EHPA approval? Was it a good idea to stop mailing ghouls SynFlesh and start selling it in grocery stores next to the regular meat? It’s nonstop. How are we supposed to carve out a niche when all that occupies people’s minds is whether or not they can go for a walk without their neighbor growing jagged teeth and ripping them apart?”

All of us grew quiet. Ghoul was a somewhat pejorative term for Hollow people, and while that’s what we usually called ourselves, it definitely didn’t have the same vibe coming from Eli’s mouth.

Celeste casually said, “Not a fan of Hollow people?”

The other bandmates all averted their gazes at once, not looking at Eli or any one of us. Cole whispered something to his bandmate Kaiden—another white boy with dark hair who’d been vaping more or less nonstop since his arrival—who nodded, while Raj suddenly seemed interested in something on the other side of the pool. If they had any opinions for or against what Eli had said, they didn’t show it. Meanwhile, Eli shook his head, slicking back his hair with a slim-fingered hand.

“Nah, look—I get it. It’s not like people chose to become ghouls. But listen—the Hollowing ruined music for almost a year! Tours got canceled, no one was buying merch—our industry was falling apart. And now people just act like everything is back to normal like ghouls aren’t still everywhere. Who knows how long they’ll stomach SynFlesh, right? What if one day they decide that isn’t enough? Or if the Hollow virus mutates and turns even more people into ghouls? Then we’re screwed.”

For the first time, Kaiden decided to set his vape pen down on the edge of the hot tub and chime in. “We all remember the Hollowing. You can’t honestly look at m

onsters like that and think they should just be allowed to walk around like the rest of us. We never should have let them out of the cages we kept them in at the beginning of the Hollowing.”

Val’s skin took on a pale, waxen hue while Jasmine’s nostrils flared. Jaz glared at Kaiden out of the corner of her eye while examining her nails. Even Celeste, the most even-tempered of us, was pursing her lips.

But none of that compared to the way that I’d begun to clench my teeth and ball my hands into fists so tight that my nails dug into the skin. Really dug in, especially as I thought about how easy it would be to lunge at him and tear out his throat. God, what a bunch of assholes. I bet they’d taste amazing with Fanta and vodka.

A trickle of blood dripped down my palm.

Oh—shit.

“Leave it to these guys to always keep the hot tub banter light,” Raj said in an English accent, his smile doing little to cut the tension. “Ladies, I apologize. Clearly you’re just a little kinder about all that stuff than dicks like us. Why don’t we open some White Claws and talk about something less…gruesome?”

I stood up, something sharp pressing into my tongue. I struggled to talk around my teeth as I muttered, “No thanks. I’m going back to the room.”

Val started to reach out for me, saying, “Zo—”

“Not my scene,” I muttered under my breath, stepping out of the hot tub and snagging my room key and towel off a lounge chair.

I kept walking even as my friends called after me, my face heated and pink. As soon as I was out of sight, I ran the rest of the way to the hotel room. I jammed the key card into the slot above the doorknob and shouldered my way inside. Heart racing, I ducked into the bathroom and slammed the door behind me. I gripped the edge of the sink as I tried to catch my breath.

My hazel eyes stared back at me from the mirror, bloodshot and ringed with red around the iris with dark shadows beneath them. All of the veins around my eyes had turned black, standing out starkly against my pale skin. My teeth had sharpened into two rows of long, jagged fangs, my lips around them purple and chapped. My fingernails, now more like wicked talons, clacked against the sink as I steadied myself against it. The bones of my jaw were pliable, prepared to

unhinge. Behind my teeth, my tongue was an oxygen-starved shade of blue.

Just as the edges of my vision began to turn red, a knock at the door made me jump.

“Zoey?” Celeste asked. “You okay?”

I quickly closed my mouth, doing my best to banish the image of sinking my teeth into Eli’s throat from my mind. I wrapped a fluffy white towel around myself and opened the door.

Celeste stood in the doorway, droplets of water still snaking down her legs from the hot tub. At the sight of me, her mouth rounded into an O.

“No wonder you ran.”

Heat filled my cheeks as Celeste gazed at me. She’d seen me like this plenty of times—including when we literally devoured our camp counselor together—but I still couldn’t stop myself from turning my gaze to the floor. It had been a long time since I let my control slip.

“Sorry. Kinda lost it back there.”

“Hey, it’s okay.” She gently put a hand on my arm, making my pulse speed up. She gave it a soft squeeze and added, “Don’t worry about it. The thought crossed my mind too.”

“Really?”

Celeste stuck out her tongue and pointed to a small cut on the edge of it. “Poked myself pretty good. Assholes would have deserved it.”

I exhaled a little laugh, my shoulders finally retreating from where they’d tensed up against my throat. As much as I wished that Celeste and I could have avoided becoming Hollow, it was nice to have a best friend who immediately got it when stuff like this happened. I never had to worry about being judged around her.

“I just hate guys like that,” I said, tucking a lock of dark brown hair behind my ear. “And the fact that Val puts up with them.”

“She certainly has a type,” Celeste huffed, leaning against the doorframe and crossing her arms. “I’m sure whatever was happening with Eli back there will blow over. Hopefully before the end of the festival.”

“It’s nice you still have a sense of optimism.”

Celeste chuckled. “One of us has to. Oh, totally different topic, but you wanna look through tomorrow’s schedule for Desert Bloom and see what we wanna go to? Val’s definitely going to be at No Flash Photography, but I had my eye on a couple different options.”

“Yeah, definitely.” I hiked the towel up over my chest just a bit. “I’m just gonna put clothes on first.”

She sputtered a laugh. “Oh, you’re not interested in wearing your wet swimsuit in our shared bed? ...