Lily dropped her hand and gazed out across the lawn. Maria had to be out here somewhere. She was always disappearing, alone, mumbling about needing to “work on something.”

Lily couldn’t imagine what. Maria used to study four hours a day, but Lily hadn’t seen her touch a book since Brandon died.

Sometimes, at night, Lily lay awake in her bed listening to Maria whisper in her sleep, and she wondered if Maria was on drugs. If some night she was going to find Maria’s broken body, the way she’d found Delilah’s.

When she finally slept, Lily’s dreams were always about blood.

What was Maria doing? What had she already done?

Had she done something to Brandon?

No. She wouldn’t. He was her best friend. And nothing Maria could’ve done would trigger something as serious as a heart attack.

If it had really been a heart attack.

The truth was, Lily didn’t want to know what had killed Brandon. If she was wrong . . . if Maria had done something . . . did that mean it was Lily’s fault?

She remembered the conversation they’d had the night before he died very, very clearly.

We’ll think of something, Lily had told Maria that night.

What if Maria had thought of something?

Before, when all this was just an idea, it had seemed simple. Like math. There were problems to be solved. Lily had always been very good at solving problems.

Now Brandon was dead. Delilah might die too. It wasn’t just moves on a board anymore. This was real life.

Tears rolled down Lily’s face as she approached the lake. She brushed them away and kept walking.

Maria hadn’t cried the day of Brandon’s funeral. Her best friend was gone and never coming back, but Maria’s eyes had been dry all week.

The only time she’d seen Maria react to anything since then was that morning, when they’d gone to check the new list of Kingsley Prize finalists. It was supposed to go up by nine a.m., but the bulletin board by the dean’s office was bare. Maria and Lily and half the senior class had waited until they were almost late for second period before a secretary finally poked her head through the door and told them the list’s release had been “postponed indefinitely.”

A few people wandered away, whining under their breath about how everything didn’t have to be postponed just because one kid had bought it. Others walked off in silence, sneaking glances at Maria and looking away before she noticed.

Lily had heard snatches of another nasty rumor going around. According to this one, Maria had posed for that photo at the funeral on purpose. She’d known the prize committee would see it, and she was relying on the sympathy vote.