Whenever Allie skinjacked Miranda, the girl never knew that Allie was there, because Allie was such a masterful skinjacker. She only jacked when Miranda was drowsy, putting her instantly to sleep. She always freed Miranda in the same place she started, and never spent more than half an hour within the girl’s body at any given time. After each skinjacking, Miranda simply assumed she had nodded off again.

“Honey, you really need to get more sleep,” her mother would say, and Miranda would always protest, saying things like “I’ll sleep when I’m dead” and such. The irony was that most of the dead—at least those in Everlost—rarely slept at all.

Allie used Miranda to take care of living-world business, such as creating a map of all the Everlost deadspots she found, and all the places she had explored in her search for Nick. She couldn’t create such a map in Everlost, since on the rare occasions that she found paper and pen, she would always use them for something much more important: refuting the things that Mary had written in her self-serving and deceptive books. Allie had no idea if anyone read the “books” she herself wrote, but all the same, she always left them in highly visible deadspots for anyone who might find them.

Each day Allie searched Everlost for clues of the whereabouts of Nick, Mary, and even Milos and his cohorts—for if the Neons hadn’t pushed them down, they could still spell trouble in any number of ways. Yet each day, Allie spent less and less time in that search. The more she skinjacked, the more compelling the living world became and the less important Everlost seemed to be.

Even observing the daily activities of Miranda Womack become obsessive. The girl’s life was so full of ridiculous drama, it was like watching a soap opera; fairly inane, but totally mesmerizing. Like the time her boyfriend, a somewhat sincere but woefully hormonal boy, confessed to kissing one of her friends at a party and tearfully asked Miranda for forgiveness. Apparently this was not the first time it had happened. Well, Miranda might have been forgiving of a multiple offender, but Allie was not—and saving Miranda from herself was the least Allie could do in payment for the use of her body. Allie skinjacked Miranda just long enough to tell him to go grow a spine, and she broke up with him. Then Allie skinjacked Miranda in school, and flirted a bit with a boy who Allie had already scoped out and knew was much more worthy. He asked Miranda out, they became the perfect couple, and that was that. In this way Allie had cast herself as the girl’s fairy godsister.