“Did you really think she’d become a big star?” I asked, half-distracted. Whatever was in the tree was thin and white, whipping around, bashing into the trunk. I walked over, reached up to grab it, but it flew just out of reach.

“Jackie’s been gone all these years,” I said, balancing the phone between my ear and shoulder as I stretched up again. “There’s been no trouble. Why now? It doesn’t make any—”

My phone fell into the grass. I’d finally gotten a grip on the thing in the tree.

The white was lace. A dress. A doll.

“Kendra?” Bettina’s voice, tinny and high, sputtered from the phone on the lawn. “What’s wrong?”

I turned it around. And that’s when I saw the face.

I bit my cheek and felt a salty warmth in my mouth.

Blood.

Cole was in his bed, covers askew, headphones on, playing that goddamn Xbox again. Multiplayer games, open worlds. He and his friends would rather meet in some virtual pirate land and pillage a ship or set up an apocalypse and fight zombies than see each other in person. I regretted buying him a TV for his bedroom.

I threw the doll on his lap. “Too early, Cole,” I yelled, hands on hips, pissed I’d fallen for that crap.

After I’d hung up with Bettina, I’d unhooked the doll from the tree branch and brought it inside. It was a foot long, white fabric stuffed with grass and twigs and dressed in lace. Someone had painted two slits for eyes and a round O of a mouth that made it look like it was screaming.

He sat up, took off the headphones. “I’m in the middle of battle here.” He picked up the doll with two fingers, cringing. “What is that?”

“You tell me. Your friends left it in our tree. A little early in the season, don’t you think?” Every year around Halloween, the Woodard teenagers committed pranks against one another. Sometimes they were nonsensical—one year a giant, busted air-conditioning unit was hauled in the dead of night to a new kid’s front yard, decorated with Christmas lights—and other times the “gifts” were darker. But Prank It Forward, as it was dubbed, didn’t start until a week before Halloween.

“Chill. It just looks like that stupid Ghost Girl.” Cole held the doll out in my direction. His eyes went back to the TV, where a swarm of monsters with horns was attacking his avatar.

Ghost Girl. The urban legend all the teenagers talked about. I thought back to the message Alice freaked out about. This is the Halloween I take revenge.

Childish.

Ridiculous.

Of all the stories that had to stick around here, why the hell did it have to be that one?

I took the remote control and cut the screen to black. “Get rid of it.”