?Me? Really? Come the fuck on."

"Well, you are kind of the obvious choice."

"That's bullshit and you know it. This is bullshit. Fuck all of this shit. Fuck you. Fuck you all."

They have to drag me away amid a stream of curses and vitriol.

?

"Hey, are you going?"

"Going to what?"

My friend gives me a blank look. "You don't remember? The lock-in's this Friday!"

Ah, right. Now I remember. The annual senior lock-in- the night where the senior class is locked into the school all night, with zero supervision. The only real rule is 'don't break shit.'

Well, that and 'don't beat the shit out of your classmates'. That's generally frowned upon. Of course, there always ends up being at least one fight. Even if it's just because a couple of students in every class just fight for fun, the fights end up being the main event. The traditional rule is 'first one to bleed on the floor loses.'

It's stupid.

It's stupid but it's fun.

My friend pokes me while I'm thinking. "Well?" she wheedles.

I hold up my hands in surrender. "Sure, sure. Whatever. I'll go."

"You get time off from your boss?"

"Who, Eiki? Yeah, she'll give me the time off if I ask. Even on such short notice."

My friend and I sit down at one of the tables in the Commons with our lunches. On Friday night, all the tables will disappear, and be replaced by sleeping bags, students, and one makeshift fighting arena. As I dig into my lunch, my friend is staring at me, trying to keep her smile down.

She's an awful gossip and I know that look. She's got something particularly 'juicy' and will, in her words, 'explode if I don't tell you.'

"Out with it," I say.

"Okay, so. They say the lock-in's haunted."

"That's dumb."

"No, really! Because someone goes missing every year!"

"Except they don't."

"It's happened every year, Komachi!"

I shake my head and put down the french fry I was idly fiddling with. "Look. Every year they do this and none of the students go missing. If the students went missing during this and were never found, they wouldn't keep doing the lock-in. It's a dumb rumor and you know it's a dumb rumor."

"But that girl last year disappeared!"

"For like a day. She'd run off with her boyfriend. She said she wanted to 'elope'. She was not the smartest knife in the drawer- she left her damn cell phone on."

My friend frowns, crosses her arms across her chest, and huffs. "You sure do know how to kill a good story."

I shrug. "It wasn't a good story. It's dumb gossip that never actually happened."

"Do you hate atmosphere building, Komachi? Just askin', because it seems like you do. Someone telling a good story? Nope, not while the Reaper of Fun is around."

I roll my eyes. "Look, I just want to go, see some good fights, maybe get into one myself. The Midnight Fight Club is much more interesting than any 'oh god hurr people disappear' rumor."

"Yeah, yeah." She agrees, but she doesn't seem happy about it. I may have crushed her dreams.

"Tell you what. Let's see if we can convince the people who go that there is actually a disappearance problem?"

She immediately brightens. "What, really? That sounds like fun!" She stops to think about it for a moment. "But do you think we should do that? Just go to the lock-in and tell lies?"

"Hey, you were gullible enough to believe it. It might just be fun."

She smiles. "Yeah. It might just be fun."

--

Who is your friend?
[ ] Write-in.

And:

Suggest up to ten other 2hus. (You really don't have to actually write in all ten. I intend to take the ten with the most votes, and if they don't have enough votes to differentiate themselves [and they won't] I'll just take the first ones that aren't outright winning.)