Lelia smirks. “If we want to bond with you, there are better ways.”

Danny’s eyes flick wide.

“It’s official,” Lelia says. “I like messing with her.”

“Okay, so this knife is special,” June says, tugging Danny back to the point, literally and figuratively. “It’s not meant to cut anything except air. I have a smaller knife for spell bits. String, candlewicks, that kind of stuff. This is for rituals.”

“And there’s a ritual to find what my magic is?” Danny looks like she wants to believe them.

She looks like she doesn’t believe them at all.

“It’s not really like that,” Hawthorn says, slipping off her beaded sandals, connecting the soles of her feet to the sun-freckled ground. The other Grays follow, until everyone is shoeless but Danny. She stubs toe to heel, pushes off her dark-blue Keds. Hawthorn pushes her glasses up into her hair, lodging them in her curls, because the kind of sight they help her with is not the kind she needs right now. “You can probably do a lot of things — cast spells, read the world differently from other people. But you’re here for a reason. There’s something you can do that . . .”

“We can’t,” Rush finishes.

June nods, because Rush said the thing that they were all thinking. The unbearable thing. It means they can’t bring Imogen back without trusting someone who doesn’t know her the way they do.

June inches closer to Danny, who doesn’t back away but clenches along invisible lines all down her body. “I’m going to make a few signs over you, to see if I can open up your intuition,” June says. “I don’t want to tell you what your magic is. I want to show it to you and then have you tell us.”

“So . . . you’re going to slice into my psyche?” Danny asks with what the Grays are starting to think of as her trademark smile. It’s a nervous, flimsy thing, bright and fluttering, a kite somebody lost their hold on.

June swings the knife back and forth slowly, inches from Danny’s face.

Danny’s smile dulls.

And then it’s gone.

Danny: The Past Two Years

In the supposedly haunted bathroom stall during the winter dance, hooking up with Hallie Carpenter, whispers of a ghost keeping everyone away while we gasped each other’s breath, worked our hands into the impossible spaces between tight dresses and skin.

Jenna DeWalt running her pen up and down my leg for an excruciating, perfect forty minutes while we watched a movie about the French Revolution in World History. I waited for her after school, wordless. We went back to Jenna’s house and put on another movie, a romantic comedy, no beheadings. The lights on, then off. Jenna hovering over me, then pressed under me. The sound of bored straight people falling in love breaking around us like waves.