“I cannot wait, man.” Austin lit a cigarette and took a long puff. “I cannot wait to graduate and get the hell out of this place.”

“What else have you seen?” Lily asked him.

Austin looked up, startled. Lily realized she’d grabbed his arm. She didn’t let go.

“Are there . . . others?” she asked him.

Austin looked at her hand and took another puff. “Is this why you wanted stuff that night? To drown it all out?”

“Uh.” Lily hesitated. But Austin nodded, as if he understood.

“Anyway, after what happened to Bran . . .” Austin glanced over at Felicia, then cut himself off. “Up until then, I didn’t think they could actually hurt us. But now I’m not spending another second down at that school that I don’t absolutely have to.”

“What do you mean?” Lily’s heart was pounding so loud she was sure he could hear it. “Brandon had a heart problem.”

“Sure he did.” Austin inhaled another whiff of smoke. Felicia’s face was stony.

Lily gazed around at the darkened tombstones. This was why she’d come up here, wasn’t it? To see if it could be true? If there really were dead people who rapped on windows and sent photo frames crashing to the ground?

“What else have you seen?” Lily asked again.

“Once I saw a shadow moving outside my room.” Austin kept his eyes fixed on the tombstone under his feet. His voice shook. “And I’ve heard rustling outside my door, near the top of the stairs. Sometimes I go in my room and I swear there’s stuff there I’ve never even seen before. But mostly I just, like, feel it. You know? Like at the dance tonight. It’ll get really cold all of a sudden, and the air goes funny. It’s like looking into a cloud, or a fog, except you’re inside.”

A fog. Lily wondered again about the capsules Austin had given her. These sounds. These feelings.

“And then there are all those stories,” Austin said slowly.

“Hey.” Felicia’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s time to stop talking.”

“What stories?” Lily said.

“Oh, you know,” Austin said. “The townies tell them. Like the one about that dead teacher.”

“Seriously,” Felicia said. “Stop. We can’t trust her with this.”

Lily pressed on, hoping Austin wouldn’t listen to his sister. “What teacher? When?”

“Well, it was in the fifties.”

Lily nodded. That explained a lot.

No one ever talked about Acheron in the fifties. Back then, the school had been exclusive, Christian, and all white. The holdouts were trying to come up with ways to keep their kids from having to go to school with black people, no matter what the Supreme Court had to say about it. Eventually, they lost, but not without a serious fight.

The Acheron brochures never mentioned why the school was founded. They just said, “Acheron Academy is proud to maintain a diverse student body.”