“Here I was thinking his reign had ended in this school,” she says. “I still hear him constantly. Come out, come out, wherever you are. Can barely tell if it’s real or I’m imagining it. Same with everything else in this world.” River turns back to her phone. In every spare moment, she seems obsessed with picking it up, but she has no hands. “They say when you’re a ghost you’re supposed to be able to reach the living. But I can’t even reach my mom.”

DMM! A locker slams.

“You lost your hands,” I say.

“They didn’t cross over with me, for some reason.”

I pull my knees to my chest and look around at the holes in the floor, which sear orange at the edges, like the tops of volcanoes. “What happened in here with Sawyer? If you don’t mind my asking.”

It takes her a minute. Her lips dance on words, and when she speaks, it’s a whisper. “He just went berserk. I didn’t know he was violent until . . . I mean, you can’t ever really expect it, can you? I used to watch him pick his nails off and eat them. Pull his hair out, leave it on the desk. I always thought that kid is so fucking aggravated, that kid will snap, better be nice to him. So I tried to be. I was coming from the bathroom when I heard the gunshots; everybody was running out of the room, but I thought it’d be smarter to hide. Hid in here thinking . . . I said hi to Sawyer even when other kids ignored him, so I thought he wouldn’t shoot me . . . but then he did. Knocked my phone out of my hand so I couldn’t send any messages first.”

River looks like she’s spent ages trying to find an answer to an answerless question.

“He’s getting his power from his victims,” I realize aloud.

“Is that what it is?”

“Maybe this is what he’s challenging me to discover. And this is why he’s following me everywhere. It’s a game to see if I can save his next victims before he kills them. They must be kids he wanted to kill but didn’t on his first killing spree.”

River’s eyebrows crease. “I always thought I’d live a short life, for some reason. But I didn’t want any of my friends to.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. It hurts to know the words won’t matter as much as I want them to.

“You had nothing to do with it.” River’s eyes pass gradually over my chest and hands. “But I do wonder . . . if I was a medium, and not just a regular person, would things have gone differently?”