“Um . . .” I began, but everyone was loving the tour, talking at once, excitedly bombarding Dallas with questions. Their voices bounced off the walls, traveling deeper and deeper into the hill where I did not want to go.

“Workers blasted into the rock in the eighteen hundreds to make this English tunnel,” Dallas said. “Now, it’s called an English tunnel because—”

I didn’t care why. My skin was crawling. We’d gone so far that there was no more outside light at all, and the glow of Dallas’s lantern made everything look an eerie red.

As if she were a mind reader, Kennedy turned and said, eyes devilish, “It’d be the perfect setting for a horror movie, wouldn’t it?”

I stopped walking. Kennedy and everyone else sauntered on, stopping every so often to look at something Dallas had pointed out. But I was frozen.

“I want to leave,” I whispered. My voice wouldn’t get loud. I needed to walk forward, to keep up with them, or I’d be left entirely in the dark.

I checked the walls. They were definitely edging closer. I checked the ceiling, noticing that it, too, was—

Someone touched the back of my head.

Gasping, I spun around to check what I already knew: that no one was nearby.

I screamed the loudest and longest I’d ever screamed in my life.

chapter 7

In my dream, in the dark, I followed Colette down the cabin steps. She didn’t hold on at all; she kept looking back to smile encouragingly at me, and it made me nervous she’d lose her balance, but she didn’t.

Her red hair was long and loose around her face, her freckles had multiplied, and she wore a T-shirt that said ASK ME ABOUT THE AFTERLIFE.

She danced and spun and skipped across the thin, worn, multicolor-striped carpeting to the back door of the cabin, the space barely lit by the porch light still on in front. Colette walked into flip-flops, then went outside, me following, the gravel crunching under our feet.

She put her hand up to side-block her mouth: whisper pose.

“I met a boy today,” she said at a regular volume. She took her hand away. “He’s kind of nerdy but so cute!” She did her signature happy shoulder dance. “He’s hung up on his old girlfriend, but if he wasn’t, I’d be all, ‘I volunteer as tribute!’”

I laughed at Colette’s reference to the Hunger Games, a series she’d read so many times the covers of the books were duct-taped to the spines.

“Did your mom give away your copies?” I asked Colette in the dream.

She shrugged. “Not yet, but she will.”

“Don’t you care?”