It had been a two-hour drive, and the rain had poured the whole time. It was strange leaving town. Like something in a dream, or a movie. Acheron was the only world that really existed for any of them anymore.

Maria was the only one of their group who’d met Brandon’s parents before, so at the cemetery she stood up front by the grave with them, leaving Mateo, Lily, Austin, and Felicia to stand awkwardly with the middle-aged mourners in cheap Kmart suits and fraying black skirt hems. The bottom corner of the front page of the Lennox Daily News had featured a close-up of Maria with her head bowed and her eyes closed, looking more beautiful than Lily had ever seen her. The headline said “Grieving a Life Too Brief.”

Mateo had driven up for the funeral by himself in Tamika’s brother’s car, even though Dean Cumberland had offered him a ride along with Maria and Lily. No one seemed to know how Austin and Felicia had gotten there.

Mateo hadn’t spoken a single word that day. He just stood there, still and silent, the rain pouring onto him and into the open grave below, while the others in the crowd grumbled to one another and huddled under umbrellas.

When they got back to campus a grief counselor met them in the common room and told them, in that condescending voice the guidance staff always used, that it was okay to talk about their feelings. Lily and Felicia nodded and thanked her. Mateo and Maria stared straight ahead and kept their mouths shut. Austin laughed out loud.

There was an hour left until lights-out. Lily needed to work on her dress, but she couldn’t bear the thought of going back to that dark, frigid dorm room by herself. She set the candelabra down in a corner and swung over to the front door. A walk across the grounds would hurt her legs, but it would clear her head.

Lily waved to Tony, the security guard sitting in the booth facing the lawn. He didn’t wave back. Most of the new guard stations were on the opposite side of the house, facing the main driveway, since that was supposed to be the only way you could get onto campus from the outside. Only Tony, who’d been working at the school longer than anyone could remember, was watching the side facing the lake and the woods.

The Acheron kids liked Tony, and he liked them back. He joked around with them between classes, pretending to take out his Taser gun like the cops did on TV. Usually he worked the day shift, but with the new security measures his schedule had been flipped. The only way Tony could stay awake all night was by playing games on his computer, so he didn’t see much going on outside his guard booth.