Famous Last Words

As the three of us sat down at the dining room table, Jonathan cleared his throat. “So, Willa, I think this is a good time for us to talk about last night — about the pool, I mean.”

I glanced up. “Excuse me?”

Mom was making such an effort to seem nonchalant that I thought she might bust a blood vessel. “Jonathan and I were thinking that you should probably stay out of the water unless someone else is around. Just to make sure we don’t have any more incidents —”

“Accidents,” Jonathan said, giving me a magnanimous look. Like his not assuming that I was a juvenile delinquent was one more generous gift. “Obviously, it was an accident.”

“Of course,” Mom said. “It’s only for your safety, honey.”

Inside me, a little volcano of rage began to spew ashes and fire. I stared at my plate for a second, studying the neat line of sushi rolls.

Get a hold of yourself, Willa.

So my mother and Jonathan clearly thought I was unreliable, maybe even unstable. Thank God I hadn’t actually told Mom the truth. What would they say if they knew what was really going on in my head?

“Okay,” I finally said, the words as cool as stone.

Jonathan nodded neatly and picked up his water glass. “You met Reed today?”

I looked at him, not wanting to talk but determined not to show them how upset I was. “Yes,” I said.

“He’s so handsome,” Mom said. “Don’t get any ideas, Willa.”

She was teasing, but I wasn’t in the mood to be teased.

“He’s too old for me,” I said, fighting not to blush.

“He’s only nineteen,” Jonathan said. Mom must have shot him a meaningful glare, because then he added, “Too old. You’re right.”

I went the rest of di

I sat on my bed, staring down at the journal. Just one line every day, Mom had said.

How hard could that be? I used to write long articles for the school newspaper. I wrote a story that won second place in the entire state of Co

But now, staring down at the clean white expanse of space, I felt like I was locked up in a cell, and anything I could possibly think to say was on the other side of a six-inch-thick steel wall.

It was so horribly hopeless that I almost laughed.

Just one line? It might as well have been a hundred pages.

I flipped the empty journal shut and put it away.

“It’s about to boil,” Wyatt said.

I glanced at the beaker suspended above our Bunsen burner. “Nah, it’s okay.”

It was the end of my first week at Langhorn. We had a lab project to do, so Wyatt Sheppard was finally forced to talk to me. And every word he spoke implied that I was a complete moron.

He let out a frustrated sigh. “If it boils, it’ll ruin the experiment,” he explained. “You may not care if we fail, but I have an academic standard to maintain.”

I tried not to roll my eyes. Wyatt was apparently just as obsessed with his GPA as he was with the Hollywood Killer. But I wasn’t in the mood for micromanagement. I’d spent a week of sleepless nights tossing and turning, and the days between the nights obsessing over the fact that I seemed to be losing my mind.

“If you stop it too early, it won’t be hot enough,” I snapped, my patience expired. “I’ll handle the beaker, you write the lab report. If it gets ruined, you can tell Mr. Hiller it was all my fault.”

A moment later, when I saw a bubble appear, I reached over and turned the burner down.

“Are you happy now?” I asked.

“Ecstatic.” He scowled down at the lab report.

We argued our way through the rest of the experiment. Then, after demonstrating our results for Mr. Hiller, we sat back down, facing away from each other.

Wyatt had been in a terrible mood all week, and I was pretty sure I knew why.

Because he couldn’t find his notebook.

My initial plan had been to give it back to him as soon as I saw him Tuesday morning outside the school. But that was before he greeted me with a glare, and Marnie pulled me away by the elbow, trying to do me a favor by keeping me out of his path.

And when I’d walked to our table in Chem that day, and spent a second studying him, to gauge if the moment was right, he looked at me and snapped, “What?”

“Nothing,” I’d said, turning away. “Never mind.” And I hadn’t tried to bring up the subject for the rest of the week.

Did I feel bad about hanging on to someone else’s personal property, when he was clearly desperate for its return? Well, yeah. Did I find the notebook disturbing and want it away from me as soon as possible? A million times yeah.

But why couldn’t Wyatt show even the smallest hint of compassion or empathy toward me — a new student who’d just had her life turned upside down and been paired with the most hostile lab partner in the history of high school chemistry?

I’d done absolutely nothing (well, nothing he was aware of) to deserve that kind of treatment. So I decided to let him freak out about his stupid notebook for a while.

First thing Monday morning, I’d turn it in to the lost and found. But until then, he could just suffer.

That night, Jonathan and Mom made plans to go out to di

What I said was, “Of course I’ll be fine. I’ll call if I need anything.” What I didn’t say was, OMG! A whole night where I don’t have to worry about doing or saying the wrong thing in front of Jonathan? Sign me up yesterday.

That just seemed impolitic.

A tiny piece of me was kind of skittish about being in the house alone, but that was nothing I was willing to share with Mom anyway.

My big plans for the night included lounging on the big comfy couch in the den, neutralizing my general sense of anxiety with trashy TV shows. First, I went upstairs to put on my pajamas. As I moved my schoolbag from the bed to the floor, Wyatt’s red notebook caught my eye.

Ignore it, I told myself. Don’t waste a single second thinking about him.

But I couldn’t suppress a mental slideshow of images of someone carrying dead girls around, posing them like dolls, taking care to get every detail correct….

Worst of all, I couldn’t shake the awful, hopeless feeling of actually being Bria

My room wasn’t cold, but I shivered as I changed into my pajamas. Then, without thinking, I reached for the ring and candle — but just as my fingers brushed the suede bag, I stopped. I’d wasted, what, ten minutes a day? For almost two years? All in a desperate attempt to reach someone who probably didn’t even want to hear what I had to say — and that’s if there even was such a thing as ghosts, or spirits, or whatever you want to call them.

Why did I even bother — because one stupid book I’d found at a used bookstore said it would work?

Forcing myself to leave the ring untouched in the drawer, I walked to the sink in the bathroom to splash water on my face. My thoughts raced. What if I’m quitting one day too soon? What if this would have been the night Dad found me?