Obviously, I was wrong.

“Shay?”

But all I heard was a gurgling noise coming from him.

While I waited for my mom to pick me up at the police station, I thought about this time during the summer before freshman year. Cole and I were with her father, driving fast in his Porsche along the mountain road from Boulder up to Estes Park. We were going to stay at this famous haunted place—the Stanley Hotel. It was in this really supercreepy Stephen King movie that Cole totally forced me against my will to watch like thirteen times so we’d be completely freaked out. We almost didn’t go, not because we were scared, which we were, but because Mr. Blakely tried to back out. He hadn’t wanted to take us in the first place and had too much going on with work, but Regina Blakely put her Jimmy Choo down. He was going to spend time with his daughter.

We’d stopped at a convenience store near Lyons; Mr. Blakely was taking a call. He’d been taking a lot of calls. He was irritated. With the caller and with us. Cole and I were fourteen. We didn’t understand about those kinds of things. Didn’t understand that our giggles and gossip and obsessive quoting of The Shining—” All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” was particularly entertaining for us—were making it hard for him to talk on the phone. And even if we did, we didn’t care. He’d been jerky about the whole thing, why should we be nice?

Before he burst a vein in his forehead, he’d whipped his beloved 911 into a parking lot. With a slammed door, he was out of the car.

For some reason, Cole and I thought this was hysterical.

Maybe we thought we had won the battle that had been raging inside those sleek metal walls. I don’t know. But we weren’t satisfied. We wanted more.

Cole slid her long tan legs over the center console and sat behind the wheel of her father’s “baby.” In the rearview mirror, I could see her eyes were filled with tears. I can’t say for certain if they were from our laughter or from something I didn’t even realize was taking place. All I remember was her throwing the car into reverse. Everything was spinning like an amusement park ride, gravel splattering in a hailstorm around us, the blaring of a horn coming from somewhere I couldn’t quite place. Before I could even register that the blur of color whipping past my window was the source of the long wailing honk, there was a sudden smack of a stop that seemed to yank the entire planet to a halt.

The quiet gave way to pain. And then came Cole’s whispered, “He’s going to kill me.”