Ignoring Cheryl, in as soothing a voice as I could manage, I said again, “Sortez, sortez, méchants. Venez dans votre nouvelle maison.”

Suddenly, the day went completely still, just as it had when I’d gone to the Portnoys’ house to fetch the brick. Car noises from the nearby parking lot were silenced. Chatter from attendees of the memorial service who were smoking around the front of the building faded away. The rhythm of Henry and Violet’s tapping took on a strange, monophonic audio effect, as if the sound waves were being slightly flattened.

Mischa’s coach pumped his clasped hands upward beneath Mischa’s rib cage as if trying to dislodge whatever she was choking on from her windpipe. She broke free from his tight hold on her, surprising him, and she leered at me. The blood had drained from her face, but her speech was unencumbered, making it obvious that she’d never actually been choking.

“Even after all this time, you think you can outsmart us,” she hissed, no longer sounding anything like herself. “And all you do is just keep making this easier.”

A chill ran through me. I’d never heard the spirits address me directly like that before. Without taking my eyes off of Mischa, and with my scalp burning so badly that all I could think about was scratching it, I shouted to Henry and Violet, “Keep going!”

Their beat continued.

I repeated, “Sortez, sortez, méchants.”

Then Mischa’s body contorted. She doubled over, writhing, and clapped her hands over her nose and mouth. Her hands flattened against the skin as if she was trying to keep something from escaping either out through her nostrils or her lips, and her eyes darted wildly.

“Mischa!” her coach exclaimed.

“This is it, you guys,” I warned Henry and Violet, who in turn increased the speed at which they were banging on the tops of their cans.

And then—the moment I’d been hoping for—Mischa’s petite body lurched forward, and she vomited watery foam onto the sidewalk. It hit the ground with a splat that sounded deafeningly loud in the otherwise eerie silence, which was otherwise only punctuated by Henry and Violet’s drumming on their coffee cans. Hoping with all my might that Mrs. Robinson had been correct about this part of the ceremony, I held the empty mason jar up in front of Cheryl’s stupefied face as if I was expecting to catch something inside of it, then clapped the lid over it and twisted it shut.

It was impossible for a few seconds to know whether or not I’d caught the evil spirits in the jar. Mrs. Robinson had warned me that they were invisible. But she had told me that spirits create condensation when they’re captured during those first few moments of distress, when they realize that they’re trapped. Henry and Violet both stopped tapping on their cans in amazement and focused their attention on me.

I held up the jar so that Henry could also peer inside of it.