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[Transcript]

        Penny Spender sighed as she attempted to scroll a reply into existence on her phone, where an unanswered message had sat in its lead balloon speech bubble since the sun rose.

        “No luck, darling?” asked Phantomime. Penny was in near-constant conversation with her spirit. Entering the trance that let them speak was second nature; Penny would pay frequent visits to her partner, hidden in the span of a single blink, while idling in class, or flipping burgers, or sweeping floors, or rushing from one vulturous app’s delivery route to its rival’s next assignment.

        “...Alas!” Penny lamented, giving her sigh a second take with still more pathos. “I lost fortune’s favor long ago! If I may be so bold, which I am told that fickle mistress finds attractive, I daresay that nobody in this world has worked harder than I to win the love of Lady Luck, and I am therefore due a second chance at serendipity!” The spectral’s shoulders slumped. “Y’know what? Forget a lucky break. I’ll settle for, like, any break at all,” she grumbled, fitting more unwritten swears between each word than you would guess. 

        “You’re still my pretty Penny. You can make your own luck, darling, with me here to pick you up when you have fallen. You need only put your tale’s misfortune behind you, and keep your head held high.” Phantomime raised her spectral’s downcast chin for her with one free-floating finger. “I’ve never known a more pleasant cent. You’re as good as gold to me, darling, a priceless, shining treasure!”

        Penny sighed for a third time and held her arms aloft to hug her spirit in a ballerina relevé. Phantomime was more her fairy godmother than her fairy tale’s love interest, but every Disney princess deserved to be platonically flattered by their patron from time to time... and Penny deserved it constantly.

        “Thank you, Phantomime. That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me... which is a very high bar to clear, but you do flip with such flourish. I don’t care how I land, so long as you’re catching the coin toss!”

        Phantomime smiled at her, or at least seemed to sparkle slightly. Her face was much more like a mask than flesh and bone, and lagged behind the earnest light that twinkled in her eyes.

        “I’m never spent for good with you to save me, Phantomime,” Penny wistfully pronounced. “You make me feel like a million bucks and counting, babe.” Penny suddenly scowled: she’d remembered her woes. “I sure would like to earn EQUAL interest, though, from the OTHER bond that I once held in trust and high regard... but HE seems to believe I’m worth the wait that’s gonna KILL me! My feet hurt from having to STAND for the INDIGNITY of GETTING GHOSTED by a dork like MASTER GUERRA!”

        It had been like three or four whole hours and Ángel STILL hadn’t texted her back. She’d even CALLED HIM, like some kind of ELDERLY DINOSAUR. She’d LEFT A MESSAGE AFTER THE TONE, like it was the NINETIES or the DARK AGES. What had happened to his promise to drop everything the moment that she needed supernatural assistance?! It wasn’t like Ángel had anything ELSE going on lately; Penny’s master was just as divorced and carefree as he had been when they’d first met... right after that life-changing gift had been dropped upon her doorstep by some kid she’d never seen before or since.

        Penny groaned. She shouldn’t have been so worried about Master Guerra getting mad at her for unleashing her white spectral energy in public (she blamed her biological father figure’s volatile discipline). She shouldn’t have hesitated, decided to sleep on it, and waited until the morning to text him “are vampires real like in real life” and “not a joke im being so for real (like vampires?)”. Ángel was definitely out of cellphone range on Nevermoor again, meditating under a waterfall or doing naked yoga on a beach. Of course he would disappear for some blameless reason and make it entirely her fault that she couldn’t get in touch with him. It was entirely his fault! 

        Penny flicked away the frustrating sight of Ángel’s last message (a broken Pinterest link that he had labeled “Food for thought ....”) and clicked on her phone’s flashlight. There was no rest for the weary, and Penny had other tasks on her to-do list besides surviving and sorting out why Ritz Price-Lee, of all people, had sprouted fangs and tried to suck her blood. Bayview Academy’s Theater Club (a deeply distinct group from its hated rival, the Drama Club, which had seceded from its more queer, more experimental counterpart with most of its funding and very little of its talent) had been putting together a slapdash summer production of THE SHREW: UNTAMED, a send-up that was mostly just sword fights and tragic death scenes. Penny was playing Dark Bianca and needed her zweihander to properly rehearse... but Bayview Academy’s bigwigs had shut down the main auditorium for “spring cleaning but in summer” (a huge amount of dust had somehow accrued in the ballroom overnight).

        Luckily, Penny had a knack for picking locks (it had only taken months of grueling practice to reveal she was a natural savant). She’d been able to sneak backstage, therefore, with some Theater Club friends keeping watch at the door. Penny’s flashlight rippled on the surface of the ballroom’s velvet curtains. Her production’s props were somewhere back here... but everything had been rearranged for the rich donor soiree that had apparently been held here at the school the night before.

        “Whoa, check it out!”

        Penny’s spotlight had fallen on a very strange set piece indeed: a scale model of the Bayview archipelago, damaged and thrown to one side of the stage (perhaps by the rage of a vampire, which Penny now knew were quite possibly real). Penny kicked it for fun, just to feel like Godzilla.

        “Hey, I can see my house from here,” she said, noting the wilted West Island mansion she reluctantly returned to every night. 

        It looked soggy and saggy, as though splashed with water, which had captured its dilapidated state much better than its modelmaker. A torn plastic bag (the sort someone might store a goldfish in) was draped over its roof, too. 

        “That’s strange,” Penny mused aloud. 

        It didn’t seem as though the bag had been placed there with much intention... and yet it was an accurate depiction: one wing of her parents’ house was currently wrapped in impassible plastic. Its halls were being fumigated for roaches that her father had attracted (he’d built a butter statue of himself in lieu of budgeting for therapy). It was Penny’s first excuse in months to leave her cage and couch surf, though her mother was demanding she return tonight for dinner. For as little hope as they had for her (now that she’d been “consumed by the fires of the culture war” or whatever), Penny’s parents were still far too insistent on controlling every aspect of her life. Ever since Richard had run away from home, her mother and father had been afraid she’d do the same... as if she hadn’t yet deprived them of the only son they had left to inherit their warped values. It wasn’t like they still had anything else that she could steal on her way out.

        “You know, darling,” Phantomime hummed in Penny’s ear, “this does seem a rare opportunity for a bit of dramatic catharsis...”

        Penny underlit her smirk with her phone’s flashlight.

        “You know I live for drama... and I’ll happily destroy for it as well!”

        With a flick of her wrist, Penny ripped her parents’ mansion from the model, reared back, kicked a leg high, and hurled her hated home across the room. It bounced off the far wall with a satisfying splat, careened off a curtain, and cleanly sank into a big hole in the middle of—

        Wait, why was there a big hole in the middle of the floor?!

        “What scumbag carved a PITFALL in the stage?!” Penny hissed in a furious whisper, deploying different, sharper words I shan’t repeat. “If those Drama Club snobs are trying to Phantom of the Opera our performance...!” she fumed, trailing off into a growl.

        Before Penny could raise her torch to the ceiling to inspect it for masked saboteurs, an eerie scuttling at her feet stole back the spotlight. Penny Spender blanched in fear. Something had darted from the shelter of the pit into the dark beyond the curtain, disturbed by the house she’d thrown into its hiding place.