Mischa groaned. “Whatever! I keep seeing threes. Everywhere I look! And I’m not being paranoid, okay? Last night, the alarm on my phone went off at three thirty-three a.m. And at lunchtime today? I bought an iced tea and carrot sticks in the cafeteria? Three dollars and thirty-three cents. And that’s just today. For the last few weeks? Every morning when we leave for school, Amanda has to start the car three times. Three. It always works on the third try.”

I listened without interrupting, mostly because I didn’t know what to tell her to convince her to continue resisting. She was in a sickeningly awful predicament. It was one thing to fear for your safety. It was quite another to intentionally kill another person.

“Look,” I said when it seemed like her rant was over. “I know you’re not being paranoid. If anyone on Earth is going to believe that these things aren’t just coincidences, it’s me.”

“So what am I supposed to do? I don’t think I can keep ignoring this!”

I had never told Mischa what Violet had relayed to me about her early experiences with the curse after she had inherited it from her grandmother. Telling Mischa that the spirits had electrocuted Violet’s mom and nearly killed her when Violet was refusing them seemed like a surefire way to make Mischa whip out a deck of tarot cards and give some unsuspecting kid a death prediction as soon as possible. It made me feel terrible keeping that from her since I had every reason to believe—even though I didn’t want to think about it—that eventually the spirits would pursue Mischa’s family if they didn’t get what they wanted.

“I’m working on this thing every day. I’m so close to finding a way to get it off you. I swear,” I assured her. This was wholly untrue because I’d been focused on keeping a low profile in Florida and had been naïvely hoping that things in Wisconsin were under control. But I did feel slightly better about lying to her regarding the status of my progress, because meeting Mrs. Robinson was something.

“Well, work faster! I’m honestly, like, scared. And this is super messed up because I qualified last weekend at the state championships to advance to the Region Four meet in three weeks—which is amazing considering that I missed two invitational meets and who knows how much practice in January. But instead of throwing myself one hundred percent into training, I’m freaking out about stupid evil spirits! I mean, do you understand how ridiculous this is? I have a real shot at qualifying for the Olympic team, and I’m worried about potentially having to kill people!”

“Just…” I struggled to find convincing enough words to encourage her to keep resisting. I had no reason to believe that Mrs. Robinson’s knowledge of voodoo would be of any assistance at all in Mischa’s situation. We hadn’t even talked about Mischa. “Don’t predict any deaths, okay? We both know how that ends.”