I looked for Jordan at school the next day, hoping to see him every time I turned a corner. Besides homeroom, we didn’t have any classes together, and he hadn’t been there this morning. I searched for him in the hallway between classes. I lingered near his locker, but he never appeared.

Since I knew we had the same lunch period, that was my last big hope. If he wasn’t there, that meant he wasn’t at school today, either. I’d forgotten to ask him why he’d been out one day last week, too.

The truth was, I still didn’t know that much about him. Other than the truth about being a Spiritwalker and about his brother, he hadn’t told me anything else about his family or where he’d come from. I had a feeling his cover story about taking care of an ailing grandmother was a big fat lie.

I wasn’t even sure exactly how old he was.

I entered the lunchroom at eleven-thirty, my stomach full of knots. Nicole babbled on about some concert she just had to get tickets to, but I was only halfway paying attention and hoping she wouldn’t notice.

“Hello? Earth to Marayah,” she said, tapping my forehead. “Are you even listening to a word I’m saying?”

I sighed.

She noticed.

“Sorry, I’ve been a little bit distracted lately.”

“A little bit?” she asked. “First, you bail on our project last weekend. Then, you lie to your parents and I have to cover for you. You refuse to tell me what you were doing all afternoon yesterday. Now, you’re walking around like a zombie, completely ignoring me.”

I winced. I wasn’t being a very good friend these days.

“I’m so sorry,” I said as we sat down at our usual table near the windows. “It’s just that my mom is driving me crazy. She’s hovering over me all the time and being so strict, she won’t even let me out of the house most of the time. It’s stressful.”

“But you did get out of the house yesterday,” she said. “Where were you, anyway? You still haven’t told me.”

I breathed in through my nose. I really didn’t need this third-degree right now. And I didn’t need my one good friend judging me for spending time with a guy she thought was a drug dealer.

I reached for the best lie I could think of. Half-lie, really.

“You promise you won’t tell anyone?” I asked, leaning forward across the table.

She looked around, a glimmer of excitement in her eyes. Everyone loved a good secret.

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” she said.

“I went back to the bridge,” I said softly.

Her eyes widened, and she didn’t take a breath for a full ten seconds. “The bridge?” she asked. “Alone? Why would you do that?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “It’s just been really hard not remembering what happened that night. I thought if I could go back out there for a little while, I might be able to remember something.”

She cleared her throat and pushed her corn around her plate with her fork. “And did you?”

“No, not really,” I said.

“Not really isn’t a no,” she said, her eyes now locked on my face. She looked scared for me. It was similar to the way my mother looked at me sometimes, like I was fragile and one tiny memory might break me forever.

“No, then. I didn’t really remember anything important,” I said. I couldn’t very well tell her about the dark, shadowy figure. She wouldn’t have believed me, anyway.

She let out a breath. “Well, maybe it’s better that you don’t,” she said. “Maybe it would just upset you. Maybe it’s better if you just try to move on.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” I mumbled. “Everyone in my life keeps judging me based on what they think I did that night. They all seem to think I was some suicidal drug addict, but you’ve known me forever. Have you ever seen me high on drugs?”

“I know it wasn’t normally like you to get messed up, but you were totally out of it when you guys left the party,” she said. “You both were.”

She inhaled sharply, as if she’d just realized what she’d let slip. When I first asked her about it, she’d told me she didn’t remember seeing us at the party that night.

“You never told me you saw us before we left the party,” I said, my heartbeat suddenly racing. “You specifically said you didn’t remember seeing me at the party much that night. You told me you didn’t even know we’d left until you heard about the accident. Were you lying?”

She closed her eyes and set her fork down.

“Nicole, you have to tell me what you remember. The truth this time.”

“Look, I didn’t want to tell you, because I know you’ve been hell-bent on insisting that you guys weren’t doing drugs,” she said. “I didn’t want to make this any harder on you than it already is.”

“The hard part of this whole thing is that I can’t remember what really happened,” I said. “If you know something, you need to tell me.”

My hands were shaking, so I clasped them together and set them in my lap. I couldn’t believe my one friend in all of this had lied to me about something so important.

“Maybe we should talk about this later,” she said, glancing around at the crowded cafeteria.

“No, I want to talk about it now,” I said. “What do you remember from that night?”

“Most of us showed up at the party that night around seven,” she said, finally. “You guys both got there a little bit late. I’m not sure where you were before you got there, but Hailey was already buzzing on something. Her eyes were all red and she kept laughing at everything like it was the most hysterical thing on the planet.”

I listened, not wanting to believe a word she was saying. I could hear the judgment in Nicole’s voice, but I did my best to listen for clues about what happened.

If Hailey was high, it wasn’t her fault. I knew that now.

“You seemed like you were annoyed with her,” Nicole said. “I tried to talk to you, convince you to have a drink or something and just chill out and have a good time, but you said you didn’t want to relax. I think you were mad at her for being messed up. I know you don’t remember it, but Hailey had been doing a lot of reckless things that summer.”

“Like what?” I asked. A vision of the symbols in the back of her closet flashed through my mind.

“Like getting drunk and hanging out with some of the college guys from Springfield,” she said. “She was acting different all summer. You really don’t remember any of that?”

I shook my head. All I could remember were long summer days at the public pool and going to the movies a couple of times. I didn’t remember her being reckless or different at all.

“You followed her around most of the night, and I lost track of you guys for a while,” she said. “There were a lot of people there. Pretty much our entire class, plus a bunch of the seniors. The whole place was crowded.”

“But you said I was messed up when we left,” I said. “What did you mean by that?”

“Well, I didn’t see you guys again until about eleven that night,” she said. “I’d been dancing out by the pool with Michael, and I’d come in to get another drink when I ran into Hailey in the kitchen. I asked her where you were and if you were doing okay.”

Nicole hesitated, a sour look on her face.

“Just tell me,” I said.

“She said that you’d been a real downer all summer, but that she’d slipped something into your drink and you were finally learning how to have a little fun for a change.”

I swear my heart stopped beating for a full minute. What Nicole was saying was unbelievable. There was no way the Hailey I’d known and loved all my life would have intentionally drugged me like that.

Hot tears welled up in my eyes.

She was being controlled by someone else. Some kind of dark force. That was the only explanation.

Hailey probably had no idea what was happening to her, and from her note, I could tell that she’d been terrified. She said she couldn’t control herself, anymore.

But if Nicole was telling the truth, that meant the doctors and the police had been right all along. We really did both have drugs and alcohol running through our systems that night. Drugs my best friend had purposely slipped into my drink.

All along, I’d believed it had to be some kind of mistake. I’d thought that it was possible someone had slipped something to us that we didn’t know about, but never in my wildest dreams had I thought Hailey was capable of doing something like that to me.

I couldn’t breathe. It was like my lungs were blocked somehow, and I could only draw air into my throat. The entire room went fuzzy, and I blinked furiously, trying to make it all come back into focus.

“Marayah, are you okay?” she asked, reaching over the table to grab my arm.

The moment she touched me, the room began to spin. Darkness grew at the edge of my vision and the whole world caved in on itself.

I tried to answer her, but the words wouldn’t come.

Nicole shouted for help as I fell, the darkness finally taking over.