A dark figure leaped in front of her. Lily screamed and dropped the candles, the flames flickering and going out.

“Grr!” Austin shouted, holding his black-gloved hands in front of him like claws. “Boo! Scared you!”

“Jesus freaking Christ, Austin!” Lily would’ve hit him if she hadn’t had to grip the doorframe to keep from falling. “Why do you have to be such an asshole? What were you even doing in there?”

Austin’s laugh was too long, too full. He was laughing so hard he couldn’t speak.

“It was you, wasn’t it?” Lily said. “You moved the chairs.”

Austin picked up her extinguished candelabra and handed it to her.

“I wouldn’t go in that dining hall if you paid me a bajillion dollars,” he said. “God, the look on your face just now! People here act so funny when the lights go out.”

Lily glared, but Austin just kept laughing.

“People act funny here all the time,” Lily told him, and pushed him out of her way to limp back down the hall.

Lily turned to glare at him again as she left, but he wasn’t watching her anymore. He was standing at the doorway to the old dining hall, gazing into the dark room.

Austin had come to Brandon’s funeral. No one had expected him, but there he’d been, sitting in a pew with his sister Felicia, wearing a rumpled designer suit, with his hair half-combed. He hardly talked to anyone, even during the long walk from the church to the cemetery, except to grumble, “This is messed up, man,” over and over.

It figured that Austin got stoned even at funerals.

The school had planned to have a memorial on campus, but Brandon’s parents said no. They wanted a funeral in their church back home and nothing more. Most of the students hadn’t bothered to go, because the funeral was supposed to have been the same day as homecoming. But homecoming, which had already been pushed back once thanks to Delilah, had been delayed again. Now the dance was tomorrow night.

Everything else had been delayed, too. The league soccer championship had been rescheduled for next week, if it wound up happening at all. No one was sure what to expect anymore. Delilah still hadn’t woken up, and there were murmurs about Acheron forfeiting the game to Birnam altogether.

Maria wouldn’t hear any talk of a forfeit. Whenever anyone mentioned it, she muttered that no one would ever have tried to forfeit the boys’ game, no matter how many people died. She was right, of course.

The problem was, it was hard to get Maria to say much of anything else now. She never wanted to talk to Lily. She never wanted to talk to anyone. When she did talk, she muttered, and Lily didn’t understand most of it. She kept saying her old nanny’s name, as though she were talking to her.