I watch her leave. Jason will hate me for sure, but at least he won’t get blood poisoning. Someday he just might realize I saved his life, but I’m not counting on it.

Detective Klein gives me another one of his long, mind-searching looks. “You’re a smart girl, and so is Skylar, but neither one of you has any sense. Do me a favor and work on acquiring some.”

He starts to leave and stops in the doorway. “We picked up your bike. It’s at Skylar’s house. Oh, and here’s your phone.”

I press it to my chest like it’s a sacred object. My phone, my phone, my dear phone. I’ll never let it out of my sight again.

“By the way,” he says, “we weren’t able to recover your image library. Luckily, we didn’t need the pictures.”

I look at my phone. Maybe by losing all my pictures, I’m getting off lightly.

Detective Klein goes to the kitchen to have a few more words with Mom and Greg. I hope he won’t tell her about Paul and the trailer. I could be wrong, but he seems like the kind of person who keeps his word.

While they’re talking, I look out the front window and see Jason limping toward the police car with Officer Delaney. She has one hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t look at my house or Skylar’s house. With his head down, he climbs into the back seat of the police car. Detective Klein says goodbye to me, goes outside, and gets into the car beside Officer Delaney. Jason doesn’t even glance out the window as they leave.

I take a deep breath. Mom did not see Jason get into the police car. If she had, she’d ask me who he was and what he was doing in our shed and I would have had to spin some crazy explanation that she wouldn’t have believed and before I could stop myself, I’d be telling her about the nightmare in the woods. She’d probably send me to a convent school in Switzerland.

It’s almost nine o’clock, not quite dark. The night cicadas are singing in the trees and I am so tired I can hardly stand up.

I ask Mom and Greg if I can go to bed. I haven’t heard the end of this, not by a long shot, but at least they let me leave the kitchen without another lecture.

In the bathroom, I slather my legs with calamine lotion. The itch almost goes away, but I know it will be back. If I hadn’t been running for my life, I would have noticed the poison ivy, but when you’re terrified of one huge thing, you don’t think about little ordinary things.