Brynn had both hands clamped like a vise around the wheel. Her knuckles were white. Beads of sweat formed like raindrops on her forehead, below the silk of her blond hair. Her mouth hung slack and open. Her blue eyes were huge. Something was wrong.

“Brynn, if this is a joke, it’s not funny,” Lucy said. “Cut it out.”

A scream bubbled up from Brynn’s chest between desperate breaths. She peeled her fingers off the wheel. Her hands shook like palm leaves. She clawed with long nails at her forearms, making scarlet streaks, and then she ripped at the skin of her face, scratching until blood smeared across her mouth and spattered her golden hair.

“Brynn!” Lucy cried.

The people in the other cars noticed what was happening. Some called out. Lucy heard car doors opening.

Brynn lurched up in the front seat of the convertible. Wind swirled her hair and tore at her purple dress. She scrambled over the windshield and rolled clumsily down the hood of the Camaro to the bridge deck. Other drivers were out of their cars now. Brynn kept screaming. She covered her face as if birds were picking at her eyes.

“Brynn, what is it?” Lucy shouted at her. “What’s wrong? Brynn, it’s me, it’s okay.”

Lucy unbuckled her seat belt. She pushed open the door, but when she tried to climb outside, she saw the blackness of the water beyond the railing. Her legs became lead. Spasms rippled through her, knocking her knees together. All she could think about was the height. The wind. The water. The fall. She couldn’t go out there.

Brynn bolted in her lavender high heels to the railing. No words dribbled from her mouth, only screams. She climbed the concrete barrier and clung with both arms to one of the ascending cables high above the bay. Her skimpy dress hugged her body. The wind threw her back and forth like a toy.

“Brynn! No!”

Lucy slid from the car, but she crumpled to the bridge deck. She couldn’t stand up. The sensation of being outside, on the bridge, vulnerable, overwhelmed her. The world spun. The concrete was ice-cold. She crawled, twitching, and stretched out a hand to Brynn, who wasn’t even ten feet away.

“Come here! Come down!”

Brynn climbed away from her in a weird, unsteady crawl, like a crab scuttling through the sand. She wrapped her legs around the cable, and her blood-slippery fingers clung to the steel. She pulled herself two feet above the railing. And then three feet. Four feet.

Lucy curled into a ball, staring at her. “Brynn, what are you doing?”