Black flakes like falling ash scattered across the moon as bats swirled through the sky.

"Sure," I said. "But you don't have to worry about me. I'm really good at taking care of myself."
"I know," he said softly, looking down at his plate. As though he regretted that fact.

Everybody knew that Daniel's mom took food stamps and his dad and three older brothers were in prison. But I knew him another way. He occupied a line in my book of lists, kiss number four from the time I played spin the bottle. The first three were classmates who never paid any attention to me at school, and one of them was so embarrassed to be kissing me that he only pecked me on the cheek. Daniel had been sitting outside the circle the entire time, not participating, but when the bottle pointed in his direction, he grudgingly came forward and slid his hand along my jaw, gazing down at me with a grim expression before leaning in. It was awkward at first, but almost immediately something shifted, and for the first time in my admittedly brief experience with boys, I felt a kiss beyond the reach of lips; it spread through me, warming, loosening, and my insides fluttered, thwap thwap thwap, like a deck of cards collapsing in a dovetail shuffle. I'd clutched his shirt to pull him closer. Everyone laughed when he gently—firmly—pushed me away, but I was too stunned to care what they thought.

His laugh was husky and soft as he studied me, half-delighted, half-confused, as though I were some mythical creature he had heard about but wasn't sure existed.

"She's from Iowa," Gabby said, as if it was equivalent to Oz.

I slept so hard I didn't remember my dreams, and I liked it that way.

I thought about what Mrs. Stoddard had said about being haunted by Cheri's ghost. If I didn't find out what had happened to her, she would always be drifting somewhere in the ether, a life that never quite materialized. She would haunt me in a quiet, ghostless way, the knowledge that in life I had neglected to save her, and in death failed to bring her peace. I would have preferred to see her ghost, in the way that I'd always hoped to be visited by my mother's. But ghosts never came when you wanted them to, and I didn't know how to stop wanting.

Everything that came after hinged on her lie, a door swinging open on a future that hadn't existed until that moment.

I waited for Ransome to say something more, but she was staring into a past I couldn't see, images that no longer existed anywhere except in her head.

As I left Ransome in the place she'd never get out of, a warren of stale, dark rooms, I wondered what she'd done that she felt deserved such penance.

I didn't feel safe—memories of the attack hung over me like storm clouds—but somehow, in the bright bedroom, I felt a little less afraid.

Gabby stared at me the way people do when you have a spider on you but they haven't figured out a good way to tell you.

Time stopped as all the different pieces came together.

I felt too hollow even to summon up tears.

He didn't have to worry about that now, and freed from worry, he had plenty of room for guilt.

Cheri and Lila, two lost girls, bookends with a lifetime of mysteries between them.

It occurred to her then that there was a reason age drained the pleasure out of life, slowly stripping away all the things you enjoyed or took for granted. It was so you wouldn't need convincing when the time came. You'd be ready, because everything good in life was gone.