Chapter 5: Halloween and The Halloween Ball

My first term at New Bedford College had started off smooth enough—like the calm before a storm you don’t see coming until it’s rattling the windows. Things settled once I dropped Statistics—a numbers class that felt more like a slow death by chalk dust—and picked up Public Speaking instead. That was more my speed. The instructor, Ms. Laughton, had this theatrical flair to her, like she was always one breath away from delivering a monologue to an invisible spotlight. Turns out, she moonlighted in community theater around the area.

One afternoon, somewhere between a lesson on eye contact and how to own the room, she mentioned she was in a play running in a town called Fall River—just a twenty-minute drive from New Bedford, though something about the name had the faint chill of bad history to it. She said the show was winding down, and if we wanted to catch it, we’d better go soon.

It was a local production, a dark little number called The Fatal Wound, written by some homegrown playwright with a reputation for the macabre. Ms. Laughton swore we’d love it—said it was “haunting in all the right ways.”

If I’d had any sense at all, I would’ve passed. But I didn’t. And worse—I took Deszi with me.

That was the night everything changed.

I asked Deszi to go with me, back when I was still blissfully ignorant of what The Fatal Wound was actually about. If I’d known, we would’ve stayed on campus, ordered greasy pizza, and watched reruns of The X-Files like any sane college students. But I didn’t know—not then.

Turns out the whole bloody production revolved around the Lizzie Borden murders—told through the eyes of the coroner, no less, as he tried to piece together how the fatal blows landed, where the blade bit deepest, how many times the axe fell before silence swallowed the room. It wasn’t just a play—it was a slow, deliberate vivisection.

As soon as I figured out what we’d walked into, I leaned toward Deszi and whispered, “Do you want to leave?”

I should’ve known better.

The second the name Lizzie Borden drifted from the stage like a cold breath from a cracked coffin, Deszi lit up. I mean lit up—eyes wide, breath caught in her throat, lips curling into a grin that didn’t belong in a room full of simulated bloodshed. She looked like a kid seeing snow for the first time. No—Christmas morning doesn’t even cut it. It was deeper than that. Primal. Like she’d been waiting for this exact moment her whole life and didn’t know it until it arrived.

The play unfolded in three acts, and during intermission she could barely stay in her seat. She rattled off theories, praised the set design, giggled over every “gruesome little nuance,” as she called them. I just nodded, chilled to the bone.

It was like watching someone you love slip behind a mirror and wave at you from the other side—same face, same voice, but something ... off.

That night, I saw Deszi become her Wednesday Addams self—not just play at it, not just cosplay with eyeliner and deadpan humor. She wore it like a second skin.

And if that transformation ever stuck—if she turned toward the dark and decided to stay—I knew exactly whose fault it would be.

Mine.

After the final curtain fell and the applause faded into murmurs and shuffling feet, the audience began trickling out into the cold New England night. But not Deszi. No, she was on a mission. Her eyes swept the theater like a hawk circling a field mouse, scanning every lingering soul until they landed on a thin man in a corduroy blazer, standing near the front row with a half-drained coffee cup and a face that looked carved out of sleepless nights and obsessive rewrites.

The playwright.

Deszi beelined toward him like metal to a magnet, and once she got him in her sights, she clamped on with all the subtlety of a pit bull. She fired questions like gunshots—sharp, rapid, relentless—about his process, his research, his inspiration. She wanted to know why he structured the second act around the coroner’s notes, how he captured Lizzie’s ambiguity so perfectly, whether he’d ever felt haunted writing it.

To her, the man wasn’t just a writer. He was a goddamn rock star. And she was his front-row fangirl, bright-eyed and feverish.

I stood off to the side like an afterthought, watching it all unfold with the sinking feeling you get when you realize a house you thought was yours already belongs to someone else.

At one point, I seriously considered telling her I was heading back—alone. I imagined it clearly: her turning to me with that dazed little smile and waving me off like an Uber driver.

“Have a nice night,” she’d say, already half-turned back to her idol.

Only the presence of the playwright’s wife—sturdy, small-eyed, holding her purse like a loaded weapon—kept things tethered to reality. She noticed the spark in Deszi’s eyes too, and her grip on her husband’s elbow tightened with a sort of marital authority that spoke volumes. Between the two of us—me with a hand on Deszi’s shoulder and her with a subtle tug at her husband’s sleeve—we managed to separate them like two magnets being forcibly pulled apart.

We made it to the car without a word. The twenty-minute drive back to campus felt like a funeral procession. Deszi stared out the window, the glow of passing streetlights strobing across her face, and I kept my eyes on the road, every mile stretching out like an accusation.

When we reached her dorm, I walked her to the door without speaking. There was a tension between us now—something brittle, sharp-edged. And beneath it all, I felt that old, familiar warning signal humming in my bones.

Deszi reminded me too much of my ex back in Ohio—someone who took more than she gave, who fed off attention like a lamprey. A user.

And I wasn’t signing up for that ride again.

I made damn sure she knew it.

Sunday morning broke gray and damp—the kind of New England gray that seeps into your bones and makes you feel like you’ve been underwater your whole life. I left my dorm early, earlier than usual, craving the quiet solitude of a half-empty coffee shop and a hot cup of coffee I didn’t have to share.

Sundays had always been our time—mine and Deszi’s. Breakfast before the world woke up, before I headed down to the docks to work on the Pequod II. That boat had become more than just maintenance duty. It was a kind of therapy—rust, grime, grease beneath my nails. The smell of salt air and old rope, the groan of wood and hull. The work calmed me. It was honest. Unlike the way things had begun to feel with her.

It was mid-morning when I heard it—my name, carried on the briny air like a warning bell. A woman’s voice, high and tight, drifting down from the deck.

I knew it was her. I knew.

And I dreaded what I had already decided to do.

Mom’s voice echoed in my head like a ghost in an attic: “End it before it sinks deeper. Before it gets inside you and takes root.”

So I wiped the grease from my hands, climbed the ladder up from the engine room, and stepped onto the deck—heart pounding, gut heavy.

Deszi was waiting.

She looked like she’d been standing there for a while, shoulders squared in defiance, but her eyes betrayed her—red-rimmed and glassy, shimmering with unshed tears.