The Night the Lights Went Out at Pepperdine

It was a day like any other, except that it wasn’t. It was a Thursday, Sabrina’s least favorite day of the week. It was also Halloween.

It was like any other in that Sabrina was working. She worked seven days a week, not because she necessarily needed the money, but because she needed the work. She couldn’t stand to be idle. She’d heard people use terms like “workaholic” and “pushy,” but she preferred ambitious, or perhaps driven. She knew where she was going, and didn’t intend to get there on cruise control.

One of her three jobs, the assistant to the assistant to the director, who was also the head of the theater department, was keeping her busy tonight. They were putting on a production of the Rocky Horror Picture Show in the auditorium, and she’d been running errands for the past two hours. She had stopped for a quick bathroom break when it happened.

The building was supposed to be empty; Cedar had caught a door just as a professor was leaving his office and she had hid in the bathroom until everyone was gone. It should have been empty, but she could distinctly hear a piano and a girl’s voice coming from somewhere down the hall. Cedar left her drawing of the New York City skyline on the table and stepped out into the hall to find that voice. She had taken three steps when it happened.

Joy had to prove herself, and she had brought Todd along for the ride. Auditions for this spring’s opera were in two weeks, and Joy had been turned down for too many roles because of her size. At 4’8” and eighty-five pounds, most directors took one look at her and assumed she was just a kid playing a joke. She had just celebrated her twentieth birthday, but most people treated her like a middle-schooler – immature and out of place. It didn’t matter how flawlessly she could hit a high C or how she could fill an entire auditorium with her voice, even without a microphone. It didn’t matter to them, but it certainly mattered to Todd. When it happened, neither of them stopped. Todd’s father had made him practice wearing a blindfold back at home; he didn’t need to see the keys to keep going, and he wouldn’t stop until Joy did.

Scottie snapped his phone closed and smiled. He only had one job: to make sure no one caught his two best friends, Mike and Peter while they performed the prank. It was simple, just a flip of a switch. It was getting in and getting out that was a little more difficult. There were people everywhere, cast members, stray audience members, tech crew kids, and that snarky assistant, Sabrina. The witch, as Scottie referred to her, always showed up in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was one person they couldn’t afford to cross paths with. Mike had just called him, telling him that Sabrina had moved into the music building. He closed the door between the theater and the music building and stood on the other side of it, waiting to intercept her when she decided to go back in. He stood in that one spot as it happened, ready for the screams of the two hundred and fifty people in the audience one room away.