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revenge.”
    I braced myself against the wall, my forehead touching the smooth marble and slowly bringing my body temperature back to normal.
    “I promised you that I wouldn’t get hurt and I didn’t. But, Liam, they had people jumping out of the clock tower. They could have killed someone again. I had it on tape and it would have been all over for the Brotherhood, but then—”
    “Stop. I don’t want to hear it, Kate.” I expected Liam to walk away, but instead he grabbed my hands and pulled me toward him. “You know I worry about you, like, constantly, right? Even when you’re not trying to fight a bunch of meaty assholes who think they own our school.”
    “I know.” I tried to grab his hand, but he jerked away and headed back toward the party. For a second I thought about following him, but instead I closed my eyes, sank down to the ground, and rested my head on my knees, hating myself, hating our school, hating this night. But then somehow the memory of Grace, Maddie, and me sneaking into Obsideo in eighth grade snaked through the bars of my hatred like smoke through a grate.
    Grace had spent hours picking out our outfits. Considering the fact that we had to be dressed in head-to-toe black, you’d think that would make things easy, but according to Grace, looking fashionable was never supposed to be easy.
    She forced me into the softest black sweater dress with quarter-length sleeves in spite of my repeated protests that my forearms were going to freeze. Maddie still had all of her baby fat, leaving her at least two or three sizes larger than Grace and me, but Grace still managed to sausage her into a cute pair of skinny black jeans.
    Grace tried to talk us into stealing black stilettos from her mom’s enormous shoe collection, but I patently refused to suffer for fashion and opted for my black riding boots instead. As a result, I was the one laughing the loudest when Grace and Maddie toppled to the ground after one of the first-year boys popped out from behind a gravestone and sent us running back toward Grace’s house.
    The memory reminded me why I had come tonight. Grace. The note she’d scrawled in our favorite book. Remember Me . Isn’t that all any of us wanted? To be remembered?
    I opened my eyes and swiped my phone to life. 5:04 p.m. A sliver of sun clung to the horizon, which meant it was almost time for the ceremony. I hurried to my feet. This was stupid. I had to find Liam, I had to explain. He’d understand eventually. He had to.
    And that’s when I saw her. Standing behind the same gravestone where she’d stumbled almost a year and a half ago. Her long, dark hair hung down to the center of her back, and her plaid skirt grazed her thighs slightly higher than the rest of us dared. For a second the world went completely still. All I could hear was the blood pumping in my ears, and all I could see was my dead best friend’s ghost standing three feet away from me.
    Grace was back.

Chapter 5
    Dark patches blurred the edges of my vision. The shock of seeing Grace again seemed to have turned everything to jelly, even my eyesight.
    I felt myself falling, and it seemed to take extra time for my body to meet the ground, as though I were sinking to the bottom of a pool instead of tumbling back through air.
    When I came to, I felt someone’s arms around me and heard whispers.
    “Kate? Kate? Are you okay? Answer me! Kate!” It was Liam’s voice. He’d come to my rescue as usual. I wanted to open my eyes, to tell him I was fine. But I was too scared of what I’d see.
    “Is she okay?” a girl’s voice I didn’t recognize asked softly.
    “Everyone give me some space. I know CPR. I think she needs the breath of life.” I recognized that squeaky voice right away.
    My eyes flew open. “I’m fine! I’m fine!” I managed to croak.
    “Works every time,” Seth snorted.
    My eyes flicked from Seth’s hazel ones to Liam’s furrowed brow. And then I saw her.
    Only it wasn’t Grace. Just some