I Took A Curse For My Rival Roommate, And Her Kiss Was The Only Cure

The air in the conservatory was always thick, heavy with the scent of damp earth and the cloying perfume of night-blooming flora. It was a place I typically enjoyed, a curated exhibit of nature’s more poisonous inclinations. Today, however, there was a new exhibit, one not planted by the botany professor.

She stood amongst a bed of wolfsbane and belladonna, a perfect statue of grey stone. It was one of the gorgon girls—Gia, I believed. Her serpentine hair, usually a writhing mass of green scales and flickering tongues, was now a frozen cascade of carved rock. Each tiny scale was rendered in exquisite detail. Her mouth was open, a silent scream captured for eternity, and her eyes, wide with a terror that must have been absolute, were fixed on some unseen horror. Her fingers were curled into claws, her body twisted in a futile attempt to flee.

It was, objectively, a masterpiece. A morbid tableau of fear and artistry. While other students who had stumbled upon the scene were retching into the carnivorous pitcher plants or fleeing back into the main hall, I felt a familiar, cold thrill unfurl in my stomach. This was not a simple murder. This was a statement. A puzzle laid out with precision and flair.

I stepped over the yellow tape Sheriff Galpin’s deputies had hastily erected, ignoring their protests. The air around the statue was cold, unnaturally so. I knelt, my eyes scanning the point where her stone feet met the dark soil. The petrification was flawless, extending even to the hem of her uniform, the fabric now a rigid, textured stone.

“Oh my god, Wednesday, isn’t it awful?”

The voice, a nauseating blend of sunshine and glitter, sliced through my concentration. I did not need to look to know Enid was standing behind me, her hands likely clasped over her mouth, her eyes wide and wet with unmerited sympathy for a girl she barely tolerated.

“It is a suboptimal outcome for Gia,” I stated, my gaze still fixed on the statue. “For the perpetrator, however, it is a resounding success.”

A choked sob escaped her. “How can you say that? She’s… she’s a statue! Look at her face!”

I finally turned my head, my eyes meeting hers. They were swimming with tears, her brow furrowed in genuine distress. Her colorful knitted sweater seemed offensively bright against the gothic gloom of the crime scene.

“I am looking,” I replied, my voice flat. “Her terror is the most captivating element. The artist chose their medium and their subject with exceptional care.”

Enid shook her head, pulling out her phone with trembling fingers. Her thumbs flew across the screen. “I’m starting a group chat. For support. Everyone is going to be so freaked out. We need to be there for each other.”

I turned back to the statue, dismissing her. Her emotional hysterics were irrelevant static. This stone dahlia, frozen in its bed of poison, was the only thing that mattered. It was a riddle composed of flesh and fear, and I intended to be the one to solve it.

I pulled a pair of tweezers and a sterile evidence bag from my kit. The leaves of the belladonna plant closest to Gia’s feet were also petrified, their delicate veins preserved in stone. A fascinating magical bleed. I carefully snapped off a small piece of a stony leaf. It was cold to the touch, a deep, unnatural chill that had nothing to do with the ambient temperature of the conservatory. This was the sort of evidence that mattered—tangible, scientific.

“I just can’t believe it,” Enid sniffled, moving closer to the yellow tape, her phone now put away. “Gia was a total viper, you know? She told everyone I used black-market fur brightener on my hair last month. Which, for the record, was a lie. It was a salon-grade, cruelty-free product.”

I placed the leaf fragment into the bag and sealed it, labeling it with precise script. “Your vapid social squabbles are of no interest to me, Enid. They are not evidence.”

“But maybe they are!” she insisted, her voice rising with earnestness. “People don't just turn into lawn ornaments for no reason. She just had a huge, screaming fight with Kent last week. He said she was seeing someone else. Everyone heard it.”

I ignored her, my attention drawn to a discolored patch of soil. I scraped a small sample into another bag. The gossip of adolescents was a chaotic, unreliable variable. A distraction. I dealt in facts, in the physical remnants of a crime.

“And Bianca said the weirdest thing happened yesterday,” Enid continued, her voice lowering conspiratorially, as if we were sharing secrets over a midnight snack instead of standing at a crime scene. I continued to ignore her, but she pressed on, her need to fill the silence apparently overwhelming. “Gia got a flower delivered to her. Just one. Bianca saw it on her desk. She said it was this black dahlia, but the stem was covered in these really sharp, black thorns. Gia thought it was from some secret admirer, but she told Bianca it felt… wrong. Cold, she said.”

My hand, reaching for another sample bag, paused for a fraction of a second. A single black dahlia. Thorny. Cold. The description was… specific. It was an anomaly in the messy narrative of teenage drama Enid was weaving. A piece that felt sharp and clean, like a shard of obsidian in a pile of cotton candy. It resonated with the chilling elegance of the crime itself.

I finished collecting my soil sample and stood, turning to face her fully. Her eyes were wide, expectant, hoping she had finally contributed something I would deem worthy. I offered her nothing.

“Your anecdotal hearsay is irrelevant,” I said, my voice as cold as the stone leaf in my evidence bag. “I have work to do. Alone.”

The hope in her expression collapsed. Her shoulders slumped, and the vibrant colors of her sweater suddenly seemed less bright. “But, Wednesday, what if—”

“What if you ceased your incessant chattering and allowed me to focus?” I cut her off, turning my back on her before she could respond. I walked toward the other side of the conservatory, leaving her standing by the police tape. The image of a thorny black flower, however, was now imprinted in my mind, an unwelcome but persistent detail in an otherwise perfect puzzle.

That evening, the rhythmic clacking of my typewriter keys was the only sound punctuating the oppressive silence in our room. Enid was on her side, buried under a pastel duvet, pointedly not speaking to me. The quiet was a welcome reprieve. I had spent hours analyzing the stone leaf and soil sample under my microscope, finding traces of an unusual alkaloid compound mixed with a distinct magical signature I did not yet recognize. The facts were beginning to assemble themselves, forming the barest skeleton of a theory.

I finished a chapter of my novel, my protagonist having successfully dispatched her rival with a rare Amazonian poison dart frog. A satisfying, logical conclusion. I leaned back, my fingers still resting on the keys, and my eyes fell upon it.

Resting on the paper I had just typed, placed with a surgeon's precision directly in the center of the page, was a flower.

It was a black dahlia, its petals the color of a moonless midnight, so dark they seemed to absorb the light from my desk lamp. The stem was thick and unnaturally straight, and it was covered, just as Enid had described, in a dense spiral of needle-sharp black thorns. It looked like something that would grow in a demon's garden.

I did not touch it. I simply stared. This was not a clue left behind at a crime scene. This was a delivery. A message. The perpetrator had been in my room. They had stood here, at my desk, and left this calling card for me. A cold, sharp sensation, something akin to exhilaration, pierced through my usual apathy. I was no longer just an observer of this elegant puzzle. I was now a piece on the board.

My gaze flickered to the other side of the room, to the lump that was Enid. Cold, she said. Her words from the conservatory returned to me, no longer sounding like inane gossip but like a vital piece of testimony. A single black dahlia... covered in these really sharp, black thorns.

She had known. Her connection to the vapid social web of Nevermore had yielded the single most important detail of the case thus far, a detail I had arrogantly dismissed. A detail that was now sitting on my typewriter, a direct threat. The killer was not just taunting the school; they were taunting me. And they had used the same method of communication they had used with their first victim.

A low growl of frustration built in my chest. To solve this, I needed information. Not just the physical evidence I preferred, but the chaotic, emotional, and infuriatingly relevant social data that only Enid seemed capable of collecting. My solitude, my preferred method of operation, was now a liability. The thought was galling. To be reliant on another person, particularly one whose worldview was a saccharine assault on my own, felt like a tactical failure.

But the flower on my typewriter was an undeniable fact. The perpetrator saw me, and to see them in return, I needed a different kind of lens. I needed a perspective awash in nauseating color. Slowly, I turned my head, my eyes fixing on the still form across the room. Her proximity and her knowledge were no longer an irritation. They were a necessity.