It took forever to break away from Mom’s curious questions about the first day back at school, but I finally convinced her that I had a mountain of homework I needed to get done.

Once inside my bedroom, I locked the door and threw my backpack onto the bed.

I paced the floor, running through everything I knew as fact.

There wasn’t much, to be honest. The doctors and even the police had asked me plenty of questions about the night Hailey died, but they hadn’t been particularly forthcoming about the details of what happened.

Dr. Millner wanted to focus on my recovery, so anytime I brought up my own memories of the accident, she steered me toward what everyone else believed to be true. I’d had no choice but to push my own strange memories to the back of my mind as best I could so that I could move on.

All I’d really been told about that Saturday was that I’d left home around three that afternoon. I’d told my parents I was going to a party over at Leslie Morrow’s house on the other side of town. Most of my class was expected to be there, and I apparently had planned to spend the night there with Hailey and several other girls from my class.

Hailey and I had both had high levels of drugs and alcohol in our system, so they said we must have had access to them at the party.

At some point, though, Hailey and I left the party in her car. No one remembered exactly what time we left, but right around midnight, we’d gone off the edge of the old wooden bridge near the abandoned factory.

According to what I’d been told, we’d both been thrown from the car. Hailey had died on impact, but I had miraculously survived. Police had arrived on the scene quickly, and I had been transported to Twin Rivers Hospital where I remained in a coma for nearly six weeks.

End of story.

Except that wasn’t the real story at all.

I had avoided asking for too many of the details, because I was scared to find out the truth. I was terrified that they were all right about us. In some ways, it was easier not to know.

But now, I had no choice but to face it. I had to hunt down every piece of this puzzle so that I could put them back together and figure out what really happened to my friend. And what was happening to me.

No matter how difficult the truth might be.

I sat down on my bed and unzipped my backpack. I dug out the spiral notebook and lay it and Hailey’s note on my bedspread. This is where I had to start. I turned to the first empty page of the notebook and started to create a timeline for that week.

I didn’t have much to go on yet, but I wrote down the few things I knew for certain:

Friday? Hailey writes note and slips it into my locker

Saturday - 7AM - Hailey’s morning run

3PM - Go to Leslie’s party

12AM - Car goes off the bridge (Medallion?)

It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

I needed to talk to people who saw Hailey the week she died. Her coach. Her mom. Our friends. The clues were out there, I just hadn’t gone looking for them yet.

I tried to think about what else might have happened during the week leading up to the accident. Every day since the previous summer, Hailey had gotten up at five in the morning to run before school. I couldn’t remember her exact schedule, but on school days, she would run three or four miles.

Saturdays, though, she left later and liked to run farther. She would run ten miles or more, choosing some of the rougher trails up in the mountains to increase her endurance. Sundays were her rest days.

She took her training very seriously, and she saw running as her ticket to a full scholarship to college. Something her mother never would have been able to pay for on her own. There was even talk about Hailey trying out for the Olympic team in a few years.

As far as I knew, she’d never missed a single run all summer. That meant she would have run at least ten miles that Saturday morning before the party. Maybe farther if she knew she was planning to eat junk food at the party.

And what about the drugs? There was just no arguing the fact that we both had drugs and alcohol in our system that night, but that wasn’t normal for either one of us. Hailey treated her body like a temple. I’d never even seen her take a sip of soda, much less a beer.

So what had been different about that night?

I needed more to go on, but I wasn’t even sure where to begin. It wasn’t like I could just go downtown and ask for the police reports.

Could I?

I shook my head. Probably not. Besides, if I started asking questions and looking into police reports, that was going to raise too many red flags. My parents would probably send me right back to Longview.

I didn’t even want to think about the rest of it. The dark figure, the medallion, the symbol. The dial on my lock had spun on its own today.

The way I saw it, there were only two options. Either something dark and mysterious was happening around here, or I was quickly descending into madness.

From the beginning, the minute I woke up and found out about the accident, I wondered if I was losing my mind. The images in my memory had felt so real that I couldn’t imagine they were wrong. I had to be crazy.

But now? That note had given me purpose.

That note was proof that there was something else going on.

Still, I needed to be careful. From the outside, anyone watching me would think I was losing my mind, and I couldn’t afford to go back to Longview now. I needed to figure this out on my own, without anyone else getting suspicious.

I bit the fleshy part of my thumb. Damn. There was no way I was going to be able to investigate this without a car. I couldn’t very well ask my mom to drop me off at all these different places and not expect her to ask me a million questions about what I was doing.

I hated the idea of driving, but I was going to have to face my fear. I owed Hailey that much.

I also owed Hailey a trip to see her mother. I’d been thinking about it off and on for the past week since I’d gotten home, but I’d been avoiding it.

Her mother was already a mess when Hailey was still alive. I couldn’t imagine what she’d been through in the past few months and just how far down she’d gone from where she started.

And if people were treating me like I had the plague, I imagined they were ten times worse to Mrs. Feldman. It was awkward to talk to a classmate who’d nearly died, but it was impossible to know what to say to a single mom who’d lost her only child.

Still, I needed to go see her. I’d spent the night at Hailey’s house so many times over the years, I was practically family. And no matter what kind of problems her mom had with drugs and choosing the wrong kind of men, Hailey had loved her and so had I.

She’d been doing the best she could as a single mom in a town like this.

It was too late to go over there tonight, but if I could convince Mom to give me my keys back, I could drive over there tomorrow after school.

I had no idea if Hailey’s mom would have any of the answers I needed, but it was a place to start.

I cleared off my bed and stuffed almost everything back into my bag. I kept the note out and read over it one more time.

I ran my fingers across the page, feeling the grooves of the pen on the paper. What would have happened if I’d seen this before she died? Would I have been able to save her?

I hid the note at the bottom of my jewelry box and walked into the bathroom.

I’d been avoiding this all day, because I hadn’t wanted to face the truth. But now, I had no choice. I needed to know.

I stared into the mirror and lifted the side of my shirt up, exposing the sore area just beneath my bra strap. I swallowed, wanting to close my eyes but not able to look away.

There, in the exact location where the dark snake had bitten me last night in my dreams, were two small, black puncture wounds.

I let my shirt fall and wrapped my fingers around the silver medallion. I hadn’t been able to save my best friend, but I was determined to find a way to save myself.