I closed my eyes. I had been trying to avoid remembering that night as much as I possibly could. It tried to push in on me during every quiet moment—my dreams, my shower, driving in my car, reading a book, watching TV. It was always there. The only times I even kind of let it in was during the few brief therapy sessions I’d gone to. When it became obvious that the therapist really wanted me to deal with that night, I quit going. I dealt by ignoring. That was how I did things. Who said you had to bawl into an entire box of Kleenex in order to come to terms with something horrible? Maybe your best way of getting over something was to push it away until it actually went away.

If only everyone would let that night go away.

God, I hated it, but I was going to have to try to remember.

“Well, I can’t help you if I can’t find—”

“Wait,” I said, my eyes still closed. “Shhh.”

I could hear my heartbeat, louder and louder, as I lifted the fog away from that night. Luna, holding me in a headlock. Bill Hollis’s slithery voice and dead eyes. The noise, my God, the noise. The smoke and the smell and the yelling and the glass shattering. Vanessa, on the floor, crimson closing in. And Luna, running across the parking lot. Jumping into a truck. Candy cane and mustard. VP. Radiant gold with peach highlights. The truck fishtailing as it drove out of the parking lot.

Brown, brown, brown.

My eyes flew open. “One, one, one,” I said. “There was brown. Three of them. One, one, one.”

“Brown? What does—”

I motioned toward the monitor. “Just type.” I was coursing with too much adrenaline to pay much attention to my slip.

He reached forward and typed: VP 111.

A result popped up, and we both leaned forward, my hair draping over his shoulder.

“Blaine Jones?” Chris read aloud. He glanced up at me, his eyes briefly pausing on my hair. He used one hand to brush it away. “Sound familiar at all?”

I had gone numb, my eyes glued to the name of the ghost on Chris’s computer screen. “That’s Jones,” I said, not even feeling my lips move. He didn’t respond, and I realized that he had no idea who Jones was if he didn’t remember the months before the accident. I stood, blew a breath to the ceiling, my hands on my hips. “Jones was my”—boyfriend wasn’t the right word, was it?—“a guy I used to hang out with.”

“Used to? So you stopped hanging out with him. What happened?”