I heard it but didn’t react. I barged out into the bright sunlight, me on the front steps of the rec center and Jackie and her friends behind the fence near the pool area, watching me.

I ignored them; they were nothing compared to this. Jackie was a girl who was jealous for no reason.

I was a girl who was either being haunted or going crazy.

No one could tell, because they couldn’t hear my thoughts, but inside, I was screaming.

chapter 13

My entire life, drawing had calmed me—and I craved calm now.

Drawing had been something I could do well for as long as I remembered. I was quiet about it, but people noticed, like when the elementary school principal had selected my sketches to be on the cover of the yearbook three years in a row or when my science teacher had asked me if he could use my diagram of a frog as a teaching tool for all of his classes.

Back at the cabin, desperate for anything other than ripping my hands and lips to shreds, I took my sketch pad, charcoals, and a full can of bug spray to the rocker on the front porch.

Driving back from the rec center, Aunt Maureen had asked if I wanted to talk, and when I said no, she respected that. Right now, she was inside playing a matching game at the kitchen table with Kane. Uncle Bran had taken the day off work so he and Kennedy could go fishing.

A blank page on my lap, a pencil in my right hand, I rocked, still buzzing inside, staring at the landscape. If I jumped the four feet from the porch, I could walk across the freshly mowed, prickly, brownish-green prairie grass until I ran into the hip-high, rickety wood fence. Just beyond that was the highway, then more prairie grass. Here and there, with tons of land between, gravel driveways led to houses dwarfed by their detached garages. Beyond the houses were shadowy gray-blue hills in front of white-capped mountains. Above it all, the dramatic sky.

Earlier, the day had been bright blue enough for sunbathing, but now menacing clouds moved in fast motion, climbing on top of each other, fighting for the best spot overhead.

I could tell it was already raining a few miles to the east—at least I thought that direction was east—because the space between the clouds and the grass was smudged, vertical streaks that made it so I couldn’t see the hills and mountains there, the sun finding breaks in the clouds to sneak through.

I inhaled the fresh, heavy, therapeutic smell of rain on the range.

Looking down at the sketchbook in my lap, I brushed away a gnat that’d landed on the paper.

I needed to draw.

I couldn’t draw.