Sometimes you shoot so wrong, you end up making a shot Fate called a miss.

A baller on the other team once said that to Kit in a game.

She lifts her phone. Scrolls. First text is from Dana. It says exactly what Kit knew it would. Exactly what she doesn’t want to see, read, hear, think about right now.

It says:

Is this real?

“Kit,” Mom says. “Sit down.”

She’s scared. Mom is. Not of any local legend, of course not. And is this even a local legend? It’s more like a local secret. A Samhattan subconsciousness. Do Mom and Dad even know who Daphne is? Have they ever heard a story, any story, about the woman?

Have they been hiding her from Kit?

Has everybody?

She thinks about the time she called 911 on herself. How the ambulance came. How the paramedics actually took Kit to the hospital because she was short of breath, kept saying she was dying.

Kit looks from Mom to Dad. He’s not talking into the phone now. He’s looking at her. Both of them. Worried.

“It’s gonna be okay,” he says. But Kit is past okay right now.

“I need…” she says. “I need…”

“Kit,” Mom says. “Hey, honey.”

“I need to go upstairs.”

“Okay. You can do that. I’ll walk you—”

“I need to…write this down.”

Mom and Dad exchange a look and between them seems to be a road at night, upon which an ambulance travels, Kit hyperventilating in the back, not yet knowing she’d met Panic that night, first time, not yet knowing they’d become so close.

She walks, dizzy, to the stairs. Mom comes to her as Dad starts whisper-yelling into the phone. Mom touches her elbow and Kit pulls back. It felt, for a second, like Mom’s hands weren’t Mom’s hands. Like they were twice the size.

“Upstairs,” Kit says. Is she breathing right? She’s trying. She doesn’t know. “Write it down.”

Mom follows her up the first few steps. But soon Kit is in the hall upstairs, alone, brushing that feeling from her elbow, the feeling of greasy fingers upon her, no warning.

“Kit,” Mom calls from downstairs. There’s a crack in her voice. “We love you, Kit.”

Kit nods. I love you too. Okay, Mom. Nods. Makes it into her bedroom. Thinks of Tammy Jones in hers. Thinks of Tammy Jones’s young face. Different now.

Did she turn blue?

Did she wear makeup?

“We love you, Kit,” Dad yells upstairs.

As if this might save the moment. As if this might calm her down.

As if these words could possibly stop what’s coming.

Kit Lamb’s Journal—Tammy Jones Is Dead

I can’t think straight. Are these sentences making sense? I read about a man who shoved a woman in front of a train and when the cops asked him why he did it he said, “Sentences stopped making sense.”

Am I going mad?

Can I hear it now? Oh my God. I can feel it. All over me. ALL OVER. All over the bedroom, all over the bed. I tried closing my eyes and that just made me sick. I can’t sit still. I’m standing while I write this. I’m burning up.