She picked up her iPad from her bed and paged through her pictures from the writer’s workshop that summer—herself and Kyle and Gray—and realized that Gray was touching and changing her life even now. More now than when she had been alive. She owed her friend something for that.

She and Kyle had made a plan to go to see Gray’s mom, to give her their condolences. They didn’t want to wait until there was a funeral or a memorial, when it would be easy to just be one of a bunch of people saying what they were supposed to say. They wanted to do it together, on their own, when it took an effort, and they couldn’t just blend in with the crowd. They had decided they owed it to Gray to go tell her mom that they had considered her daughter their friend and that they were sorry she was gone.

They wanted to do it tonight—before they could talk themselves out of it. They had agreed to go after supper. Brittany wanted to go and come back before her mother returned from her pottery class. Kyle would come here and they would walk together the few blocks to Gray’s house.

Her phone announced another text message with a bright ping! Brittany glanced at it, braced to see Christina’s name on the screen, but it was Kyle.

how r u? r u ok?

That was how he always started his texts to her—with concern for her. As many times as she’d been a bitch to him, as many times as she’d told him to leave her alone, his first concern had always been her well-being.

Wish u were here, she typed, then hesitated, thinking she wasn’t brave enough to send it. She looked at the picture of Gray on her iPad and drew on the memory of her friend’s strength. Gray would have sent the text. Gray would have told her to send the text. Gray would have said, Fuck yeah! Send it!

She hit the Send button, and butterflies took wing in her stomach as the message went out into space.

The answer came back right away. Me 2

She felt giddy and guilty at the same time. She’d been so mean to him, and he was so nice.

Can’t go with u to c Gray’s mom cuz of my mom/investigation. Really sorry

Her disappointment was instant. She wanted to see him, to spend time with him without all the tension and BS of school and the people in it. More than that, she realized, she wanted to hide behind his strength when they met with Gray’s mom.

Her first excuse was that she was shy by nature. She had met Gray’s mom only a couple of times, and her perception of Julia Gray had been colored by the things her daughter had said about her—that she was cold, that she was selfish, that she was a bitch. But that had been Gray’s reality with her mother and didn’t have anything to do with the here and now, or with what Brittany needed to do to fulfill her obligation to her friend.

The truth was that she didn’t want to be strong on her own. She wanted to let Kyle be strong for her.

No.

No worries, she typed. will txt u when I get back.

UL go alone? U shouldn’t.

It’s just a few blocks.

Still wish u wouldn’t.

I’ll b fine.

B careful.

I will. Thnx.

She sent the message and tucked her phone into the front pocket of her baby-pink cashmere hoodie, feeling like she had him close to her that way. Grabbing the handle of Gray’s duffel bag, she went downstairs to pull on her coat and the new Ugg boots she had gotten for Christmas. It would take ten minutes to walk to Gray’s house near the lake.

It seemed strange to be carrying the belongings of someone who would never use them again, she thought as she started down the street. Makeup, underwear, sweaters, and socks. A toothbrush, a hairbrush, her laptop computer.

The weirdest thought was that Gray lived on inside her computer. She kept everything on it. Her journal, her poetry. iPhoto contained hundreds of pictures of herself and her friends, and all the places she had been and people she had found interesting. She had always been snapping photos with her phone, making videos on her phone. She recorded everything and everyone—friends, strangers, homeless people, dogs. She was always recording her thoughts and ideas.

In her recordings and in her poetry, Gray would always be alive, telling her story.

Brittany wondered if Gray’s mom would let her copy some of what was on the computer. She could keep it like a digital scrapbook. She would end up spending more time with Gray after she was dead than when she had been alive.

Her nerves were vibrating as she walked. The night was pitch-dark. There seemed to be no stars in the sky. She could see people in their homes looking warm and snug on the other side of their picture windows. They didn’t notice her. She was alone out in the cold.

She hurried from one pool of white streetlight to the next, suddenly too aware of being the only person on the street. The police thought a serial killer might have gotten Gray. She thought of someone like that haunting dark alleys in bad parts of the city or on isolated roads in industrial parks or out in the country—like they showed in the movies—not in her nice upper-middle-class neighborhood. That was what she thought when she was in the safety of her own home. Now she was on the street, alone, walking to the home of a girl who had been murdered.

Inside her hoodie pocket her phone pinged with another message. Brittany stuck her hand inside her coat and fished it out. Another message from Christina.

I can pick u up. We should talk.

What was there to talk about? The fact that Christina thought she was too stupid to look on Twitter to see the things her friends were saying?

Annoyed, she turned the sound to Vibrate and tucked the phone back in the pocket of her sweater. A bolt of panic went through her as she thought Christina might already be in the neighborhood, expecting Brittany to cave in and agree to meet her somewhere or let Christina pick her up. What if Christina was at Mrs. Gray’s house, along with her father?

Dr. Warner was engaged to Gray’s mom now, something Gray had been strongly against. She disliked Michael Warner. He had been her therapist for a while. She had probably told him all kinds of things she wouldn’t have told her mother. Having him dating her mother was like some kind of breach of patient/doctor trust. Gray and her mother had fought about it, and her mom had kicked her out of the house because of that fight. Maybe Gray had said the same vile thing about Dr. Warner to her mother that she had said to Christina that night at the Rock & Bowl.

Brittany had met Dr. Warner on several occasions, and she had to admit she didn’t like him either. There was something vaguely creepy and phony about him. She didn’t like the way he was always touching Christina when they were together—putting his hand on her shoulder, on her back, touching her hair. Christina wasn’t bothered by it, but it made Brittany uncomfortable. She decided if there were cars in the Gray driveway, she was going to turn around and go home.

She turned onto the block where Gray had lived and squinted against the glare of headlights coming her way. Her heart picked up a beat. The dark car seemed to crawl toward her like a panther stalking, sliding closer and closer to the curb. She thought of Christina and Aaron. Aaron’s dark car. She thought of the look on his face that morning as he ordered her to get in his car. She thought of him rushing at Kyle, fists swinging, and the way he had struck Gray that night at the Rock & Bowl . . .

She thought about serial killers . . . and girls turned into zombies . . .

She was all alone.

The car came alongside her, and the passenger’s window slid down.

Brittany’s heart was in her throat. She should have listened to Kyle and stayed home.

“Excuse me, miss,” a middle-aged woman said. “Can you tell us how to get to the freeway?”