“I don’t . . .” Maria shook her head. “It doesn’t matter. It was just a game.”

“Just a game my ass. You took it seriously.”

Maria kissed Brandon on the cheek, the way she did when she wanted to make him laugh. It didn’t work this time.

He shrugged. “We can talk about this later, I guess.”

Maria nodded and promised to meet him during dinner tomorrow at the corner table by the salad bar, where they could talk without being overheard.

She’d have to figure out some way out of it between now and then. There was no way she could tell Brandon the truth.

Maria wished she’d never told him about any of it. The mirror on her grandmother’s porch—or the strange things that had happened when she was younger.

It was just that before Lily came along, Maria had never had anyone to talk to. Not anyone who actually understood her. Brandon was so good at listening.

It had been that way ever since he’d first come to Acheron. They’d put him at the bio table next to Maria’s, and when he’d been too squeamish to slice open his fetal pig, Maria had snuck over and done all his incisions at lightning speed. Maria, it turned out, was something of a fetal-pig-dissection prodigy.

They sat together at lunch after that. Brandon gave Maria his yogurt as a thank-you present. He told her she had the prettiest eyes he’d seen since Enrique Iglesias’s. Maria asked who Enrique Iglesias was. They’d been best friends ever since.

That was before she got to know Lily. Before she understood what it meant to really care about someone. To feel like you’d disappear into the air if that person wasn’t always right beside you.

But it took years for Maria to understand that. In the meantime, she told Brandon about all of it. The voices that whispered outside her room at night when she was little, low enough that she couldn’t make out the words. The time in kindergarten when she woke up in the middle of the night to see her Raggedy Ann doll laughing at her from the shelf over her bed.

About how sometimes, even in the middle of August, she’d walk past a certain spot in a room and feel an icy chill, the room growing so cold she could see her breath. She’d know someone was watching her, but when she turned, she saw only her own shadow.

She’d told Brandon about the worst time, too. She’d been eight years old then. She was fast asleep when she felt a weight settling onto the edge of her bed. She opened her eyes, expecting to see her mother, but the room was empty, save for that icy chill. And the faint outline of a little boy with black eyes sitting on the foot of her bed.