CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

“I should try again,” Gabby said. It was almost midnight, and she and Justin were sitting on top of her comforter, Devon’s red-and-black flannel shirt in the middle of them.

“Are you sure? You just tried five minutes ago. Maybe you need a break,” Justin replied.

When she didn’t have a vision the first few times, she wasn’t too discouraged. The same thing had happened with Lily’s prescription bottle before she finally saw something. But then she got the text about Sabrina’s accident and the urgency became even clearer.

“I need to keep trying. We have to find this guy. After what happened to Sabrina —”

“We’ll find him. But you’re putting way too much pressure on yourself.” Justin was trying to hide his anxiety for Gabby’s sake, but what happened to Sabrina had rattled him, too. With Gabby’s parents out of town, he refused to leave her house that night and he kept glancing out the window every few minutes. He never said why, but they both knew he was looking for the white van.

Justin stood up, presumably on another excursion to the window, but he tripped over an overstuffed box of Gabby’s trophies beside the bed.

“Are these all from ice-skating?” he asked, picking up one of the dusty gold-colored statues. “You’ve got so many in here, you could fill a museum.”

“I just packed them up,” she answered. “I’m finally going to throw them out. I should’ve done it years ago.”

She was surprised yet relieved to find she had zero emotional attachment to those trophies when she’d thrown them in the box the night before. They just reminded her of giving up everything for her parents’ approval and then her subsequent fall from grace when the trophies stopped coming. Throwing them out felt like a final act of liberation from her OCD — and from that girl she had let herself become for way too long.

“You think you’ll ever skate again?”

“Maybe just for fun. I hated those competitions.” She’d never said that out loud to anyone, but confiding in Justin was as easy as saying it to herself. “I want to find something else I really like now.”

“Besides me?” Justin said, grinning.

Her cheeks burned pink as she smiled. “Yes, besides you.”

“So what else do you like to do?” he asked with such intense curiosity that it made her realize just how much she liked him.

Gabby considered it for a minute. “I used to love creative writing. But I had so many rules for myself when the OCD started that it was too stressful to keep up with it. The only things I could manage to write were papers for school.” All the short stories she’d written were in an untouched folder on her computer. She remembered trying to finish one a few years ago, but she hadn’t been able to write a sentence without going over it a dozen times.

“Well, if you want to start back with it, you’ve got some pretty great material from the last two weeks,” Justin said.

He was right. But it was only a good story if it had a good ending. She eyed Devon’s shirt. Maybe now that Justin had distracted her for a few minutes a vision would come. She picked the shirt up, clinging to the worn piece of fabric like a lifeline. She closed her eyes.

Nothing.

When she opened them, Justin could easily read her frustration.

“You’ve got to relax. You’re psyching yourself out, Gabs. You’re too in your head,” he said. He grabbed a stuffed bear off her shelf and started tossing it in the air like a ball. “This happens all the time in football. Coach Brandt always says, ‘Keep your focus away from the uncontrollables.’ ”

“Uncontrollables?”

“All the things that are out of your hands. Like when I’m on the field, I can’t control the crowd, or the outcome of the game, or who the coach puts in.”

“And I can’t control when my visions come.”

He sat back down next to her. “Exactly. So focus on something else. You can control your thoughts. Think about something other than having a vision and maybe it’ll come to you.”

“How do I do that, though? If I’m not thinking about having a vision, I’m thinking about what happened to Sabrina and then I immediately think about how I need to have a vision again.” She sounded as frantic as she felt.

“Lie down, close your eyes and go to your happy place,” Justin instructed. “Then in ten minutes, you can try again with the shirt. I’m not letting you try again until you relax.”

Maybe he was right. She lay down and let her head sink into the pillow. Where was her happy place?

Justin moved closer and brushed back a jumble of her hair that had fallen over her eyes. The sweetness of the gesture — a sweetness she never saw him bestow upon anyone else but her — incited an eruption of butterflies in her stomach. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d pulled him closer and pressed her lips onto his. Nothing in her life had ever felt as good as kissing Justin. She grabbed him, pulling his body on top of hers, and for a split-second, he stopped kissing her. The look in his eyes suggested Gabby’s sudden brazenness had surprised him as much as it had her. But then he was kissing her again. She shivered with a desire she hadn’t known she was capable of.

Her hands reached for his shirt, about to pull it off, when her phone buzzed loudly next to her, jarring them both. She forced herself to pull away to glance at the text. It was from Z requesting a vision status update and it instantly brought Gabby back to reality.

“We should stop,” she whispered, finding it difficult to speak. The only thing better than Justin kissing her, was a shirtless Justin kissing her. But she had to refocus. “You said I can try again for a vision after I relax for ten minutes, right?”

“Did I say that? I think I meant we should do this for ten minutes instead.”

She grinned, then planted her hands next to her sides to keep from pulling him back on top of her. “I think I can relax now.”

“Well, that makes one of us,” he grumbled, but then smiled and kissed her forehead. “You can do this, Gabs. Go to your happy place and I bet in a few minutes you’ll be relaxed enough to try for a vision again.”

She closed her eyes. Her happy place was easy to find. He was sitting right next to her.

*    *    *

A few hours later, she woke up with a start. When did she fall asleep? She sat up and tried to get her bearings. The room was bathed in early morning light. Her attempt to not focus on the uncontrollables must have worked better than she expected. Justin was asleep next to her, and she was actually grateful her parents had left her alone in the house. They probably wouldn’t even notice if a guy slept over. When they left for Denver, all they said to Gabby was to remember to set the alarm.

She reached across the bed for her phone to see what time it was, but her fingers grazed Devon’s shirt instead. As soon as her hand touched the worn flannel, she was no longer in her body. She was in Devon Warner’s body, at last.

She was lying on the ground, outside, in the darkness, gasping for air. She could feel his body was freezing cold, yet at the same time, it was burning. What was that smell? It was like rancid beef.

And then she realized what it was. Devon’s body was on fire.

She felt her fingers, Devon’s fingers, claw at the dirt, trying to sit up. It was useless, though. Devon wasn’t going anywhere. He was on the edge of consciousness.

She froze when she saw a man coming toward her. It had to be Devon’s killer. She couldn’t make out his face because he was too far away.

Stay awake, Devon. Please don’t pass out.

She strained her eyes to see the figure, but Devon’s eyelids were so heavy … She willed him not to shut his eyes. The second he did, she was afraid it would be the last time.

The figure stepped toward her just as her eyelids fluttered closed. She felt the man reach into Devon’s pocket and pull something out. It had to be the serum. Devon couldn’t move and he was panting, trying to say something. He finally managed to whisper to the man who was inches from his face. “‘Nature teaches beasts to know their friends.’ You were my only one.”

“I’m sorry it had to end like this,” the man replied.

Open your eyes, Devon. Open your eyes.

Just as the man turned, Devon’s eyes opened. The man was walking away, but Gabby tried to memorize as many details as she could. He was wearing faded jeans and a green windbreaker. And just as she’d thought, he was holding the large vial of serum in his right hand.

She took a breath, Devon Warner’s last breath.

Her body shot straight up and her eyes popped open. She was gasping for air.

She knew that green windbreaker.

She’d seen it a million times at school. It was the jacket all the teachers had received after a school-wide retreat over the summer.

Whoever killed Devon Warner was a faculty member at Cedar Springs High.