That was true, sort of. All day long, Lily didn’t leave Maria’s side if she could help it. She was afraid of what Maria might say if Lily wasn’t there to keep her quiet.

Lying didn’t come naturally to Maria. Neither did keeping secrets.

And they couldn’t afford to let something slip. Not now, when everything was going so much better than they could’ve hoped.

The league championship had been postponed, but it was only a few days away now. Even if Delilah woke up she’d be in no shape to play. Maria had been made team captain—“acting” captain, the coach said, but close enough—and she was running the team through drill after drill, even when the rain pounded on them or the heat left them drenched in sweat. Some of the girls muttered that she was a tyrant, but Lily knew Maria was only making sure the team was at its best. They’d lost one of their key players, but they weren’t going to lose the championship. Not as long as Maria had breath in her body.

Lily had gotten a promotion too, from student body vice president to “acting” president. So far she’d run one student council meeting. It consisted mainly of planning which days they were going to take turns sending flowers to Delilah in the hospital. No one seemed to care that Delilah couldn’t even see them.

Sometime in the next few weeks, the school would post the updated list of Kingsley finalists from the second round of judging. Then everyone would know for sure that Maria had taken Delilah’s place. With so much uncertainty lingering, though, it was hard to be happy about the good things that had come.

Was this all Lily’s fault?

No. She hadn’t known what would happen. Austin was the one who’d given her the acid instead of the liquid X he’d promised.

After Maria left the room earlier that night, Lily had started looking for clues. She kept thinking back to that night with the Ouija board. She’d tried to search for Ouija boards and prophecies, and that phrase the board had said to Brandon: “Memento mori.”

But with the way her screen kept freezing up, it was useless. She might as well try to get some work done. Lily turned the computer back on and pulled up the preliminary paper she was working on for her senior thesis.

She started typing a new paragraph. Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s story is a clear demonstration of the repression suffered by women at the hands of their husbands, doctors, and other patriarchal figures in the late nineteenth century. . . .

Lily’s eyelids were getting heavy. Maybe tonight she’d be able to get some sleep after all. She should at least finish this page, though. She shouldn’t get behind. They couldn’t have people thinking something might be wrong.