“Hey,” he says, stopping me.

“Yeah?”

“Natalie—that’s your name?”

I nod. His face is etched with shadows, but I can still see the corners of his smile. “Natalie Cleary,” I say.

“Nice to meet you, Natalie Cleary,” he says.

“Nice to meet you too, . . . ?”

“Beau,” he tells me.

“Beau.”

He nods.

Beau.

“See you around.”

When I get back out to the parking lot, Matt Kincaid is saying the words “How ’bout Hooters?” and that’s how I know it’s time to go to bed.

“I think I’m just going to go home,” I say, and all four of them jump.

“Jesus, Natalie.” Rachel clutches her chest, and her eyelids flutter dramatically.

“Yeah, seriously, did you float here?” Derek says.

“Where were you?” Matt asks, and immediately I feel guilty. For hiding from them, for letting them look for me, and, if I’m being honest, for flirting with someone who isn’t him.

“At my locker.” I lift up my purse like it’s evidence.

“We went to your locker,” Rachel says, digging her hand into her hip. “You weren’t there, and by the way, you missed out on seeing the Band Room Ghost.”

“I stopped at the bathroom.” Now I’m outright lying, and I can tell by the arch in Megan’s thin blond eyebrows she knows it. That’s fine—I plan on telling her everything, but I’m not going to ruin everyone’s ghost story, and I’m not going to talk about boys with Matt Kincaid.

“We don’t have to go to Hooters,” he offers. “We could go to BW3’s.”

“What’s wrong with Hooters?” Rachel says.

“Literally everything,” I say.

She gives a harsh laugh. “You honestly think you’re too good to eat at Hooters.”

“Rachel, anything with functioning taste buds is too good to eat at Hooters,” I say. “Their food is gross, and I’m tired.”

“Or Barleycorn’s,” Matt suggests. “We haven’t been there in a while.” Matt was the type of boyfriend to accommodate me, or to at least stand by my side in public. The I don’t get why you couldn’t just go along with it/were offended by that/don’t want to do the things we used to do would always come later, when we were alone, but I got the feeling he genuinely wanted to understand.

“I’m suddenly feeling exhausted too,” Megan says.

“Let’s just go drink at Rachel’s,” Derek tosses out.

“I don’t really feel like drinking,” Matt says.

“Since when, man?” Derek says.

“You used to eat at Hooters,” Rachel says, still on me. “Before you went all uptight feminazi Ivy Leaguer.”

“And you used to wear blue mascara,” I throw back. “People grow up.”

“Yeah, you know, I remember that blue mascara. My slut sister got that for me—the one who works at Hooters.”

“Rachel,” I snap, “I don’t care if Janelle wants to work at Hooters. I don’t care if you and the rest of the world want to go spend your money on dried-out chicken and ketchup-based sauces. And least of all—less than almost anything else I can imagine—I don’t care how much sex your sister is or isn’t having. That’s kind of the deal with the whole uptight feminazi thing—we don’t care when other women want to wear stupid orange Soffe shorts with white tennis shoes and have a lot of sex, or when they want to wear habits and live in a convent, or if they want to walk around in pasties and never French kiss, so long as they’re allowed to do what they want. And right now, all I want is to go to bed. Okay?”

She crosses her arms and glowers silently, so I turn and stomp across the parking lot back to my car. I don’t know what’s come over her lately, but Rachel never lets anything I say go without a fight anymore.

“Call me later,” Megan shouts after me.

I climb into the Jeep and look back to where they’re standing under the bright white floodlight at the back of the lot a few rows over. “Tomorrow,” I call back.

Tonight I need to find answers.

I speed out of the parking lot, past Matt’s farm, past whitewashed churches, over dark narrow roads lined in lush foliage that roll and curve as determined by the buffalo herds that shaped them long ago. I think about Beau and his song, whose sounds I can’t remember but I can still feel.

I spilled whiskey all over your school.

I said like ah. I think about him all the way home.

Nice to meet you, Natalie Cleary.

Nice said like nahs. I think about him until I fall asleep.

Three months.

5

I spend all weekend sorting through Alice Chans, without any conclusive results. By Sunday night, I’m still uselessly tossing and turning in my bed, mulling over every last word Grandmother spoke, and replaying the disappearance of Matt and everyone else at school and the appearance of Beau on the football field, in an attempt to make sense of it.

Before the eye movement desensitization reprocessing therapy, I’d had horrible nightmares, several recurring. The worst one involved a vast, shapeless darkness that chased me and Mom down a country road, eventually slamming into us so hard the car spun off the pavement and careened into a tree, folding in half. That dream woke me up gasping for breath sometimes, but it still wasn’t the worst part of nighttime. That would be the hallucinations. I’d had two different kinds, hypnopompic and hypnagogic, but I don’t see how what happened with Matt in the hallway or Beau on the field could be one of those.

Hypnopompic hallucinations happen when you’re sleeping: Your body wakes up—eyes and vision included—before your mind fully does. Thus you may see your bedroom, exactly as it is, except there’s a torrent of spiders crawling all over you, or blood pouring down your walls, or an ancient American Indian woman sitting in your rocking chair. These hallucinations can be a sight, a smell, even a sound or sensation.

Hypnagogic hallucinations are nearly the same as hypnopompic—but hypnagogia occurs when you’re falling asleep instead of when you’re waking up: Your body, eyes, and vision remain awake though your brain’s already dreaming.

You know when you’re drifting off, when you’re nearly there, and suddenly your bed gets yanked out from under you, and you’re falling? You jerk awake and realize you’re safe—you were in bed the whole time.