The air seems to be rousing Rennie. Her eyes are dark with anger and her fists are clenching and unclenching. She stares at me, but thankfully she doesn’t fight me.

I turn the car on and blast the heat, even though it’s cold at first. The whooshing sound makes it so neither of us has to talk. I gun it out of the parking lot, and as I turn past the party, I look again for Mary. Where the hell is she?

Rennie says, “Where do you think they went?”

“I don’t know,” I say truthfully. “Let’s swing by my house and regroup. We’ll figure out what to do.”

Rennie stares out the window; her eyes are laser beams. “When I find them, they’re so dead.” Every car that passes, she looks to see who might be in it.

To be honest, I feel bad for her. Not getting to enjoy her own party after she worked so hard on it. I don’t even know what to believe right now, but I can’t help feeling pissed at Lillia.

This better be a huge misunderstanding. I can’t even think about the alternative, if Rennie somehow has this right in her head. If Reeve and Lillia have something real going, I’ll kill Lillia myself. Because doing that to Mary would be the most f**ked-up thing in the whole world.

We get to my house. Rennie and I both get out of her Jeep. She slams her door loud, and with too much force. She’s still pissed. Really really pissed.

“Give me my keys,” Rennie says. “I’ll drive by the cliffs. You check the dunes.”

I have this feeling, this terrible feeling that something bad is going to happen.

I squeeze my hand around her keys. The ring is full of charms and shit that dig into my hands. “Are you sure you’re okay to drive? You’re so upset. And you’ve been drinking.”

“I’m fine.” She takes the keys out of my hand. As she does, she looks up at me and gives me a half smile. I get the feeling that she’s happy I’m not giving her a guilt trip or a hard sell or offering to sleep over so I can babysit her. We never had that kind of friendship anyway. So it seems weird to try and have it now.

I get in the car as Rennie peels out.

But I don’t drive to the dunes, like she wants. I drive back to the party. I have to get those pictures, before anyone else finds them.

I hope Lillia knows what she’s doing. ’Cause if she doesn’t, we’re dead.

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

I don’t know how I make myself get up off the ground and go to Rennie’s party. I’m in such a fog; I feel like I’m floating outside my body, watching myself move down the streets. Snow has started falling, tiny gentle flakes, dusting the ground and the trees and the dead grass. I can’t even feel the cold. I try to swallow, but my throat is closed. What happened to my dad? Why didn’t my mom let me go with her? Did they really leave me all alone?

My powers couldn’t stop them.

When I get down to T-Town, I break into a run, all the way to the gallery. I need to find Lillia and Kat. They’ll help me. They’ll help me find my mom and Aunt Bette.

I reach the gallery door and come face-to-face with a bouncer in a black pinstripe suit and black fedora pulled low over his eyes. I think about trying to slip right past him, but he’s so big, he fills the door frame like a human wall. Just beyond him I hear music and laughter and merriment, and it makes my chest hurt, because I’m so far from any of that right now. I doubt I’ll ever laugh again.

“I need to find my friends,” I say, desperate, breathless. “They’re inside.”

He doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even raise his chin so I can look him in the eyes.

Crap. The stupid speakeasy password. What was it? I had it written down, in my purse. I rack my brain but I can’t hold on to any thought. It’s all a jumble. “Please, sir. Please. This is an emergency.”

Again the bouncer doesn’t say anything. I wonder how many kids he’s turned away tonight. People Rennie didn’t think belonged in her company. I pull on my hair, hard, but it doesn’t hurt, and I concentrate all my energy on willing myself to remember. “I know there’s a password to get in. My friend told me. I . . . I even know the special one where I don’t have to pay a cover charge. Rennie invited us herself. But I—I . . . My friend Kat, she’s definitely inside. She has short black hair.” The bodyguard arches his back into a deep, long stretch, and then fishes a flask out of his jacket pocket.

I think about trying to ask for Rennie, but she probably wouldn’t let me in. Not after the way I acted when Aunt Bette came to the gallery to get her paintings back. I can’t even bribe my way in with money because I don’t have a red cent on me.

It finally comes to me. “Moonshine! Moonshine! Moonshine!” I shout it as loud as I can, but the bodyguard still pretends not to hear me. It’s like I’m not even standing in front of him. My lips quiver and the tears come. What’s happening? “Please,” I’m begging. “Please let me in.” Only it’s no use.

I walk backward away from him and try peeking through the foggy glass in the front window. I don’t see Kat or Lillia inside, can’t make either of them out in the crowds of revelers. But I know they are here. I can feel it. I sit down on the curb and touch for my heartbeat, because it feels like it’s pounding in my chest, but I can’t feel a thing. Probably because it’s broken.

And then, suddenly, I turn my head back to the gallery door, and there’s Lillia standing out front on the curb. She’s shivering in a thin dress and her stockings. Is she looking for me? She must have felt that I needed her.

I step toward her, but then Reeve appears, carrying her coat. He wraps her in it. They run across the street, and Reeve picks up Lillia and puts her inside the cab of his truck. They seem like they’re in a hurry.

They kiss on the lips before they drive away. A tender, slow, warm kiss.

Oh no. Oh no.

I turn around; I’m spinning. I can’t breathe. It’s like I’ve been kicked in the stomach. From out the back of the store, Rennie’s white Jeep goes flying down the road in the other direction. Kat’s behind the wheel.

I lift a shaky hand and push my hair behind my ears. I’ve got nowhere to go, no idea what’s going on. My whole world is falling apart.

Maybe I can catch Mom and Aunt Bette before the ferry leaves. I can make them take me with them. So I run. I run as fast as I can, my shoes slipping on the slick roads, and scream, “Wait for me! Wait for me!” until my throat is raw. I know they won’t hear me, I’m too far, but I have to do something.

I get to the ferry landing. Normally bright, tonight it’s cloaked in darkness. I search the parking lot, but it’s empty. A thick metal chain ropes off the entrance. All the white lights running along the planks are turned off. The ferry has stopped running. Mom and Aunt Bette must have boarded the last one.

They’re gone.

I don’t even know what to do. I head up the hill, sobbing. I don’t know how long I walk for.

A white Jeep pulls up beside me. Inside is Rennie. I can tell she’s been crying, the way her makeup raccoons around her eyes.

“Are you okay?”

I stumble up to the Jeep. I see myself reflected in the glass. I’m not in my party dress, but in a pair of still-damp jeans and a wet white T-shirt, speckled with gravel and dirt, clinging to my rolls of fat. I look down, and there are my old sneakers, soaked through with water.

I try to answer Rennie but I can’t. I’m choking on my tears.

She tells me to get in. I don’t move. She opens the door for me and I finally climb in.

“Where do you live? Where are your parents?”

Maybe she knows where Kat is. Or Lillia. Maybe she can take me to them. I try to ask her, to make words, but nothing comes out of my mouth. It’s like I’m choking. Like something is around my neck, squeezing it closed. I can feel my eyes bulge out of my head. My lungs burn for oxygen.

Rennie’s scared; I can tell she’s scared. “Just breathe. It’s going to be okay. Just breathe.”

“Breathe! Breathe!” I want to. I want to suck in a deep, cool breath, but all I can feel is the burn of the rope around my neck. I’m dizzy from lack of oxygen. That and the way I’ve been swinging, to and fro from the beam in my ceiling, before she cut me down.

“My beautiful baby!” Mom sobs. She leans forward; she kisses my face. Hers is wet with tears. “Why? Why would you do this to yourself?”

I turn to Rennie and am finally able to choke out, in a strained whisper of a voice, “Reeve.” Rennie’s eyes go wide. “Reeve did this to me. This is his fault.”

I watch her hands tighten around the steering wheel. She can’t look at me; she’s too frightened. “I . . . I’m taking you to the hospital.”

“Hold on, baby!” Mom is screaming herself raw. “The ambulance is coming! Hold on. I’ve got you.” I try to do what she wants, but it’s hard. I feel myself slipping away. I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die. But that’s exactly what’s happening.

And then, with one last rush, I’m pulled out of my body and up to the ceiling. I can see my mom holding me as the ambulance arrives. I see them grab at me, but my mom won’t let me go. She knows. She already knows.

I’m gone. “What are you doing!” Rennie screams. She’s terrified. She’s scooting over as far as she can away from me. She’s not looking at the road, not looking at the turns.

I feel myself heat up, a fire. Hotter than any other time before. I close my eyes and everything goes white, like the center of the sun.

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

Reeve and I drive around in silence, except for a few times when one of us says, “Oh my God,” because of how crazy this all is.

I don’t ask where he’s going. I just let him drive.

We end up parking in the woods. It’s so dark and quiet. Reeve pulls to a stop and clicks off his headlights, but leaves the car running so it can stay warm.

Not that it matters. For once I’m not even cold. It’s like we’re in our own real-life snow globe.

He unbuckles his seat belt and then I unclick mine, too. And in a second we are completely going at it. I am pressing my lips as hard as I can against his, and his arms are around me, squeezing me so tight. I feel a rush of everything I’ve been trying so hard to hold back. And I can tell he does too.

I can’t kiss him enough; I can’t hold enough of him in my hands.

I pull his coat off his shoulders and then I wriggle out of mine. Reeve lifts me clean out of my seat and puts me in his lap, my back pressed into the steering wheel. The horn keeps honking, but neither of us cares.

He pulls his face away from mine and says, in a panic, “After I left your house that day, I went up to my room and lay in my bed listening to depressing music.”

I keep kissing his face. His eyes, his cheeks. “Like what?”

His eyes roll back in his head. “Like . . . um . . . damn.” He laughs nervously. “Radiohead . . . Beck. I don’t remember now.”

I plant kisses on the side of his neck, up to his ears.

Reeve shivers. “If I had known you came over, I would have run downstairs. I would have showed you off to my whole family.” He pushes me away suddenly, so he can stare me straight in the eyes. “I want you to know that I didn’t invite Rennie. She came on her own.”

I drop my head to his chest and cling to him. I don’t want to, I don’t want to do anything to ruin this moment, but I have to confess. I have to be true to him. “That stuff she was saying at the party . . .”

He lifts my face to his. “Forget it,” he says.

“Reeve, please. Let me finish. I—”

But his mouth comes up my neck and over my lips and then we’re kissing again. His lips are urgent, like all we have is tonight. And I don’t even remember what I was going to say anymore, it’s that good. We kiss over and over and over again. This time there’s no one around to stop us.

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

It’s easy to get the pictures. I sneak in to the gallery, grab them out of the bathroom sink cabinet, and sneak straight back out. And then I go find my brother.

Pat and all his friends are camping. I know roughly where the spot is, a wooded clearing near the bluffs that he found on one of his dirt-bike rides. I park as close as I can get, on the side of the road, and head through the woods in my dress and my heels. The trees are so dense the snow barely hits the ground.

I find them. They’ve got a fire going, and everyone’s festive and drunk and cold as shit.

“Kat,” Pat says, standing up from the log he’s sitting on. “What’s up?”

I walk straight up to the fire and toss the stack of Rennie’s photos on the flames. “Someone pour me a whiskey.”

Ricky passes me his bottle. I down what’s left in one thick, smoky gulp.

I sit quietly for a while, while everyone else parties. Every few minutes I send Rennie a text like, Where are you? and Let me know where you are? and Rennie, WTF?!!

Then, through the crackle of the logs and the conversation and the Led Zeppelin, I think I hear a siren. Like a fire truck or an ambulance. I can’t tell. But it sends a shiver down my spine. I glance down at my cell. Rennie hasn’t answered my texts, not a single one.

I’ve got a feeling. A bad feeling.

“Everyone shut up a second!”

Pat laughs at me. He’s sitting across the fire on his sleeping bag, cooking some nasty-looking hot dog on a stick. “You hear Big foot out there?”

The rest of the group either laugh at his lame joke or ignore me and keep talking.

I take a few steps away from them, pull off my ski hat, and strain to hear. Now it sounds like two sirens. Maybe even three. I run over to the radio someone brought and shut it off in the middle of a killer Led Zeppelin guitar solo. Someone whines. I say, “I’m not kidding! Shut up.”