CHAPTER FIVE

Gabby followed Z into the wooded area behind the school. There was a makeshift trail often used by the Cedar Springs cross-country team, but Z quickly veered off that path, passing an empty creek bed where the school stoners congregated. Gabby had never ventured this deep into the trees before, part of her actually believing all the local ghost stories about these woods. Now, though, it wasn’t ghosts that scared her. It was the murderer on the loose. As the foliage thickened around them, she couldn’t help thinking of Lily Carpenter killed in her cabin deep in the woods without a soul nearby to help her. But as nervous as it made her, she really wanted to talk to Z — and they couldn’t at school.

Z weaved left and right around massive trees, pine needles crunching under her feet. As Gabby scrambled to keep up, she realized she had stopped counting her steps. But instead of being seized with panic, she kept moving. She waited for the awful thoughts to surface, the ones that always arrived and told her something bad would happen if she didn’t do things just so. But right now, nothing happened.

She’d have to add it to the ever-growing list of unexplainable strange things going on that day.

They reached a group of cedars nestled around a rock configuration, and Z stopped, perching her long body on top of a boulder. The leaves overhead blocked the day’s sunlight, and Gabby shivered in the cool air.

“So it starts with the loud ringing in my ears,” Z began, her eyes piercing Gabby’s. “And then it’s like I have a thought. But it’s not my thought. Right? Is that how it happens for you, too?”

Gabby frowned, confused. “What do you mean? Whose thought is it?”

“Someone else’s. Like this morning it was my brother’s. Other times I’m not sure.” Z frowned. “I thought you said this was happening to you, too.”

Gabby shook her head. “Not like that. I’m not hearing things.” She looked up at Z, afraid what it would sound like when she said it out loud. “I’m seeing things.”

Z sat up straighter, her eyes widening. “Like what?”

Gabby paused, trying to find the right words to describe what had happened, but it was hard to explain fully when she didn’t even understand it herself. “Let me see if I can do it again. I’m not sure it will work, but …”

Gabby walked to the boulder where Z sat and crouched down, pressing her hands firmly onto Z’s black canvas messenger bag. She closed her eyes, waiting for the sensation from earlier to come over her, but nothing happened.

“What are you doing?” Z asked impatiently.

“Let me try with something else,” Gabby murmured, growing frustrated. She wasn’t sure exactly how to make it, whatever it was, happen again. “Can I open your bag for a second?”

Z nodded and Gabby began rifling through its contents. She took out Z’s chemistry textbook and fanned through the pages. Nothing. “I know it happened before.” Suddenly something occurred to her. “Maybe something you’re wearing?”

Gabby tentatively reached out to touch the worn edge of Z’s black hoodie. The second her fingers touched the soft fabric, her eyes fluttered shut.

The vision was hazy at first, but Gabby could hear the music. Pounding. Raging. As she closed her eyes tighter, the image became more vivid, almost cinematic. There was a thin teenage girl, maybe fourteen, sitting on a queen-size wrought-iron bed in the same black hoodie. A younger Z, before the buzz cut, holding a small bottle of pills in her hand. The room was like something out of a magazine, decorated in soft blues and grays, in direct contrast to the harsh music. In the corner of the room, there was a large glass-fronted cabinet full of eerie Victorian dolls staring out, their eyes wide. Z unscrewed the bottle, the tip of the Washington Monument peeking through the window behind her, and dumped twenty pills onto her nightstand. She paused for a moment, then scooped up a handful and downed them with a few sips of water. Then she scooped up another handful and downed them. And another. Finally, she lay back on the bed and closed her eyes. That’s where the vision ended, fading to black like the end of a film.

Gabby opened her eyes, her heart racing.

Though she wanted to believe the vision was a product of her imagination, part of her already knew she’d just witnessed a private moment from Z’s life.

“Did something happen?” Z looked at her. “What is it?”

“I saw something,” Gabby told her. “It was just a blip. A vision of you.”

“Of me?”

“Yes. You were younger — it must have been a few years ago. In Washington, D.C.”

Z looked at her in surprise. “We used to live there.”

Gabby nodded, less surprised. The vision had been too vivid not to be real. The question was why it had happened at all.

“You were sitting on a bed in a blue-and-gray room. And there were a bunch of old dolls …”

“That’s what my room looked like then,” Z confirmed. “My mom’s decorator convinced her those creepy dolls were perfect for a girl’s room. I was always petrified they were going to come to life and chop me into a million pieces.”

“That’s exactly what they looked like,” Gabby agreed.

“So … you just saw that? Like a vision?” Z looked at her with newfound curiosity.

“Yeah. Kind of like I was watching a movie.”

“What else did you see?”

“That was it,” Gabby said quickly. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she’d watched Z’s suicide attempt.

“But this happened to you before, too? The same way?”

Gabby nodded, the words bubbling up quickly now after being locked inside her all day. “This morning. I was in the science hall, walking to class, and I almost tripped on a scarf on the floor. I picked it up and I had this … vision, like I had with you. First it was kind of fuzzy, but then I could tell I was in the middle of Kohl’s, the one near here, in the Brooks Center, holding the same scarf. But when I looked in the mirror, it wasn’t me. It was Hannah Phelps.”

“Who’s Hannah Phelps?” Z asked, chewing her nails.

“A girl in my grade.” Gabby left out the part about Hannah being one of her former best friends. Or the fact that she used to spend all her precious few free afternoons at that exact mall with Hannah. “Anyway, just now I was more of a distant observer. But earlier it was like I was watching from Hannah’s point of view, like I was in her body. And then both times, after a few seconds, the scene just faded away.”

“And you know for sure it was her scarf?”

“Yeah. I saw her in the cafeteria later and gave it back to her. I told her I’d seen her wearing it earlier that day.” Hannah had easily bought the explanation and Gabby had almost believed it herself.

Almost.

“What do you think is happening to us?” Gabby asked. “Do you think we’re both just …”

“Going insane?” Z finished, and Gabby was relieved that she didn’t have to say the words herself. “Coincidentally, at the same time? I don’t know …”

“This has never happened to you before?” Gabby asked.

“Never. I’ve had a lot of crazy thoughts, but they’ve always been my own.”

Z and Gabby’s eyes locked in the solidarity that comes from thinking the same thing at the same time.

“Do you think anyone else in that group-therapy meeting is having the same thing happen to them?” Gabby asked in a voice she barely recognized as her own.

Z looked at her seriously. “I don’t know, but we need to find out.”

*    *    *

That evening, Sabrina took her time washing the dishes in her family’s small kitchen. The cream-colored tiles, dark wood cabinets and faded burgundy wallpaper were in desperate need of an update, but her mother was hardly in a position to tackle a redecorating project. The house used to be cozy and warm, the smell of her mother’s Japanese dashi broth mingling with the intoxicating scent of her father’s favorite tri-tip. However, in the past six years, no matter how many candles Sabrina lit or windows she opened to let in the air, it never seemed to blow away the scent of staleness. Of sadness. She eyed the cedar-and-cinnamon–scented candle that she’d bought last Christmas from Lily Carpenter, the woman who had been inexplicably murdered. Ever since, Sabrina had been oddly wary about lighting it, as if it would somehow spread misfortune.

She turned her attention back to the dishes, rinsing another plate under the hot water. Though she’d given up on taking care of her parents, she still found washing the dishes cathartic. When her brother, Anthony, was still alive, cleaning up after dinner had been one of their joint chores. He would bring all the dishes to the sink, she would wipe down the table and then together they would rinse and dry. They used the time to really talk, the running water drowning out their conversation so their parents couldn’t hear. Anthony told her about the leather jacket that Angie, the first girl he had ever really liked, gave him for Valentine’s Day. She told him about her idiot fifth-grade teacher who made her stay in the classroom while they were dissecting a squid, even though it made Sabrina throw up and everyone teased her the rest of the day. They were five years apart, but Anthony had always treated Sabrina like an equal.

She and her parents hadn’t sat down for a meal together since that drunk driver barreled into Anthony’s car head-on six years ago. But Sabrina still did this chore every single day. It wasn’t just because her parents seemed incapable of doing the simplest tasks. It was because the activity kept her close to her brother.

She scraped off a plate, setting aside the scraps for Rocket, their German shepherd, who was almost as ignored by her parents as Sabrina was. But she suddenly stopped when she realized something odd. Usually by this point in the night, the acute emptiness of her house would have sent her digging into her bag to take the Klonopin she’d tucked in there earlier. But for some reason, her desire to self-medicate had been dimmed. Actually, it was nonexistent.

She was so distracted by that realization that she didn’t hear her father enter. Doug Ross had the same tall frame as Sabrina, and though he was handsome, the strain of the past few years had etched so many new lines on his ebony skin that he looked a decade older than he really was.

“I’m going back to the office for a bit,” he told her as he passed by, not waiting for or expecting a response. For the past two years, the house had become more like a storage unit to him. He’d stop by briefly between work and meeting the women he used to distract him from his home life. Did he think she didn’t know?

“Sure you are,” Sabrina shot back sarcastically.

Sabrina’s comment surprised her as much as it did her father, who looked at her as though she was speaking another language. Sabrina never questioned or commented on her father’s erratic comings and goings, having long ago accepted her circumstances, the sharp detour their lives had all taken after the night of Anthony’s accident. Her father hadn’t wanted Anthony to go out to the party that night. Her mother, who used to be sweet and funny and vivacious, thought he should go. And from the moment the police officer showed up at their door at two in the morning, resentment and blame began tearing their marriage apart. It wasn’t easy to have a father with one foot out the door and a mother who self-medicated until she was practically comatose. Sabrina thought she’d reached a place of detached observation with the whole situation, though. That therapy meeting must have unearthed a repressed wave of anger she didn’t realize she was still carrying around.

Her father jostled his car keys. “Sabrina, why are you picking a fight with me?”

“I just don’t know why you bother coming home at all,” Sabrina replied. She’d wondered that for years, but it was something she’d pushed to the back of her mind and refused to think about.

“Do we have to discuss this now?” her father snapped.

“Forget it,” she answered quietly.

“I’m late,” her father said, and then he walked out.

As the door rattled behind him, Sabrina’s phone vibrated with a text. She was surprised to see it was from Gabby, that girl with the unsettling OCD. And it wasn’t just for her — it was for the entire group that had been summoned to the therapy session.

It’s Gabby. Need 2 meet. Flagpole b4 school. Important.

What could Gabby possibly think was so urgent? Instead of replying, Sabrina picked up the last dirty plate. She was about to turn on the hot water when a cold blast of air hit her so hard that she shivered. She looked down at her arms and was hit with another cool wave, covering her in goose bumps that felt like scales on her arms. She glanced at the two windows above the sink. Closed and locked. The cold didn’t feel like a gust of wind anyway. It felt as though someone was concentrating a massive blast of air conditioning directly on her body.

She moved toward the kitchen table to grab her sweatshirt, when the three lightbulbs over the table began to flicker, followed by three popping noises. The bulbs had all blown out, one right after the other.

Now shivering in the darkness, Sabrina felt something else.

She wasn’t alone.

Her heart started beating so fast that it was painful.

She heard him before she saw him.

“Hey, Beanie.”

There was only one person in the world who called her Beanie. Anthony. Her brother.

Her dead brother.

She fumbled for the flashlight on her phone. But before she could tap it on, she saw something that ripped the air out of her lungs.

Her brother was standing before her, his skin still flawless, almost glowing. His charcoal eyes bored into hers.

“You need to be careful, Beanie,” he said.

She opened her mouth to try to respond, but the words were stuck in her throat.

And then, just as suddenly as he’d appeared, he was gone.