An hour later I returned to the car, with two mugs full of black coffee.

“Hey,” Solomon said. He was lying there, eyes open, looking past the ceiling. Holding his guitar, picking out haphazard strings of notes.

“Hey,” I said, handing him back his coffee. “Did you nap?”

“Yeah,” he said. “It was nice. You’ve been crying.”

“Yeah,” I said, and left a little silence, in case he wanted to talk about it, but he just kept strumming. I felt weird, light-headed. Powerful.

I need to do some research, my father had said. Talk to some people. See what we can do about this.

I’ll call Jocelyn, Mom had said. She’s a lawyer. I’ll give her the general info—nothing specific—and see what our options are.

Promise me, I’d said. You won’t do anything without telling Solomon first. Making sure he’s okay with it. We can’t hurt him any worse than he’s already been hurt. And they’d promised. My parents hadn’t fixed anything, but Solomon and I weren’t in this alone. That made a difference.

“I’m going to Justin’s house now,” I said. “I’m confronting them all. The whole team, one at a time, for what they’ve done.”

“Why?” Solomon asked. “That seems totally crazy.”

I opened my mouth to answer, but realized I didn’t have one.

I thought of Mr. Barrett. Whatever he was, he hadn’t always been like that. He’d been a kid once, and full of magic like all children are. Somewhere along the line he got broken, twisted. And started hurting people.

“Because I want to believe that people have a choice,” I said, struggling not to whisper. “Whether to become monsters. I want to believe that if you give them a chance, they’ll choose not to continue hurting people.” I paused. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe it is totally crazy. Do you want to come?”

“Where you go I go,” he said.

Which was lucky, because if he had said no, I might not have been able to do it on my own.

We went.

I wish I could say that I walked in there knowing exactly what to say, how to make them see the light, how to get them to do the right thing. But that’s not the way it was. I was scared, and awkward, and didn’t know what the hell to do.

Justin’s house smelled like steamed dumplings, and his mom was supernice to us and I felt really awful handing him the photo I’d developed with my eyes shut, channeling (the other side) whatever gave me the ability to see things that weren’t there, but were still real.

He stared at it for a long time, and then handed it back to me. Looked from me to Solomon and then back again. “How did you get this?”