Nothing for thirteen minutes and fifty-one seconds. What comes next is only for us, the ones who care enough to endure the silence. First the drumbeat, thrumming into the too-quiet like jungle cannibals. Then the lion roars: Kurt's voice, pure and gleaming; Kurt's voice like a knife scything the sky. It's the raging of a man not going gentle into that good night. The silence is part of it, those thirteen minutes of agony, and Kurt's in it with you, muzzled and frenzied as the seconds tick by and the pressure mounts and finally, when he can't bear it any more than you can, he tears off the muzzle and goes fucking nuts. Thirteen minutes, fifty-one seconds. It doesn't seem like it would be that long. But time stretches.

Remember what we read about black holes, Dex? How from the outside, from a safe distance away, when you watch someone fall into a black hole, they fall slower and slower, until they seem to freeze at the event horizon? How they'll stay there forever, suspended over the dark, the future always just out of reach?

It's a trick. If you're the one falling, time keeps right on going. You sail past the event horizon; you get sucked into the black. And no one on the outside will ever know.

That's how it was, in the dark place. No boundary between yourself and the dark, past and future, something and nothing. You could scream all you wanted, and the dark would swallow it whole. In the dark place, silence was the same as noise.

IN PRISON THEY CALL IT the hole, at least if you want to believe prison movies, and if you can't believe the movies, then half of what I know about the world is bullshit. But in prison movies, the hole is just some cell like all the others. At Horizons, it's a fucking hole in the ground.

In the dark place, you tell yourself, This time I will hold on. This time you'll keep it together, remember that time passes and there are no monsters hiding in the dark. When the slab creaks open each day and the food drops down, you'll fling it back in their faces, along with fistfuls of your own shit. When they lower the rope and offer to lift you back into the sun, if only you'll apologize and say thank you, you'll laugh and tell them to come back later, you were in the middle of a nap. This time the dark place will be your gift, your vacation from the torments of daily life. This time will be your time.

Bullshit.

The dark place is always the same.

First it's boring. Then it's lonely. Then the fear washes in, and when that tide ebbs, there's nothing left. Silence fills with all the thoughts you spend your daylight life trying not to think. The bad things you've done. The blue of the sky. The bodies rotting away in coffins, the maggots feasting on skeletal remains. What happened to the body when you left it behind, and whether now is your time to return. Your food is damp with tears. It tastes like shit and piss, because that's all you can smell, that and your rotting sweat and shame. The air is hot and stale, thick with your own breath. When the darkness breaks and a voice cracks the silence, you tell them whatever they want to hear.

No, not you. That's cheating. I don't know what you would do, Dex. This is what I did.

"I accept Jesus into my heart."

"I renounce Satan."

"I have sinned and I will sin no more."

I always gave in-and that's something I'll never not know about myself-but at least I held out longer than most. It was because of Kurt. He was down there with me. Down there is where he lives. Singing was better than screaming. I sang with him; I remembered you. I lived for you, down in that dark place, and I survived knowing you were somewhere up in the light, living for me.

DEX.

About a Girl YOU'RE GOING," MY MOTHER SAID. "We both are."

I felt ancient, but when it came to my mother, apparently I'd never be too old for because I said so. We went. A mother-daughter pool party, awkward purgatory of small talk and cellulite that only a Drummond could dream up.

"It was lovely of them to think of us." My mother navigated our beat-up Olds into a narrow slot between a Mazda and an Audi, tapping the bumpers of each of them once, as if for luck. Nikki's house couldn't have been more than a five-minute drive from mine, but it felt like we'd passed through a portal-or maybe through a TV screen, because the sidewalk maples, the colonnade-lined porches, the impeccably pruned rectangles of green all seemed too perfect to be anything but a set. Tragedy or farce, that was the only question. "And it'll be lovely for you to spend some time with your friends."

Okay, farce.

"How many times do I have to tell you-"

"All right. Girls who could be your friends. If you would only give them the opportunity."

How was it, I wondered, that the mere act of growing older precipitated radical memory loss? Here was my mother, naively expecting not only that a coven of PTA moms who'd snubbed her for a decade would spontaneously open their arms to her unmanicured charm, but also that their daughters would follow suit.

"You really want me to go to a party? After what happened the last time." It was a mark of my desperation that I was willing to come so close to explicitly referencing it. "Aren't you afraid of what I'll do?"

For someone with no sense of humor, my mother had an expert wry smile. "Why do you think I came as your chaperone?"

It should have been worth something she was willing to be seen in public with me-but then she was my mother, so that was worth about as much as her telling me I was pretty.

"You can't control what people think of you," she said. "You can only do your best to prove them wrong."

"Guilty until proven innocent? I don't think that's how it's supposed to work."

"Life isn't LA Law, dear." She turned off the car. We were actually doing this.

"Lacey's gone," I said, the last-ditch effort worth the pain of saying the words out loud. "No more bad influence. No need to sucker me into making new friends."

She put her hand over mine-then pulled away before I could. "You know, Hannah, my issue with Lacey was never Lacey. Not entirely."

"Is that one of those Zen things that make no sense?"

"I know how it feels," she said. "To invest everything you have in another person. But no one's dreams are big enough to be worth giving up yours, Hannah. If you don't figure that out before it's too late, you can wake up inside a life you'd never have chosen for yourself."

"I don't know what any of that has to do with me."

My mother did not talk like this, and she certainly didn't talk like this with me. We weren't equipped for it, either of us.

"You can't dream someone else's dreams forever, Hannah. And when you finally stop, it's no good for anyone." She clapped her hands together, plastic again with a Teflon smile, as if I'd simply imagined that, for a moment, she'd somehow melted into a real person. "Let's get going. We wouldn't want them thinking we're rude."

"Who cares what they think? They treat you like crap." I didn't say it to hurt her; it didn't occur to me, then, that I could hurt her.

Framed in fake gilt on my mother's bureau was a photo of the girl she'd once been, posing at a ballet recital with her younger sister, who, unlike my mother, was actually built to be a ballerina. The two of them were frozen midpirouette, my aunt's form perfect and her smile beaming, my mother sullen and dumpy with a familiar thicket of frizz-her hair had gone limp after pregnancy, something else to blame me for. If this had been a movie, we would have bonded over our mutual ugly-duckness; of course, in the Hollywood version, my mother would have blossomed into an intimidating swan rather than simply expanding into a slightly taller, substantially thicker duck, one who sometimes didn't seem to like me very much. For which I couldn't blame her: She probably didn't enjoy the daily reminder of her yesterday any more than I wanted the glimpse into my tomorrow.

She climbed out of the car and smoothed down her bathing suit cover-up, a blue terry cloth drape I was sure looked nothing like anything the other mothers were wearing. "Just because you leave high school doesn't mean high school leaves you."

I had to laugh. "That may be the most depressing thing you've ever said to me."

She laughed, too. "Then I suppose I'm doing my job."

"Mother of the year."

I could see it on her face, the moment she decided to press her luck and go for it, a mother-daughter moment. "It's nice to see you smile, Hannah."

"Tell me we can get back in the car and go home. I'll smile like I'm in a toothpaste commercial."

"Tempting," she said, pausing just long enough for me to get my hopes up.

Then we went to the party.

BEDECKED IN FULL-ON RICH GUY leisurewear-Ralph Lauren khakis and a polo shirt-Nikki Drummond's father opened the door and grunted us toward the pool deck. I crossed through the house head down, not wanting to spot some domestic artifact-an ancient finger painting on the fridge or a therapist's appointment on the calendar-that might render Nikki human. We padded across fancy tiles, the kind with barely perceptible swirls that make you feel like you're walking on water, and stopped short in the back doorway, a mother-daughter pair in matched contemplation of their dark fate.

Mothers wore artfully draped sarongs or Esprit tracksuits, nails manicured and hair dutifully bobbed into Hamill-esque mom cuts, like they'd sworn a sacred pact to go frumpy at forty; daughters frolicked in designer cutoffs, tan, coltish legs poking through artfully frayed denim. Pink or purple jellies squished on manicured feet; oversized T-shirts belted low or tied in a knot just above the belly button, except on those girls who-despite the absence of any Y chromosomes to impress-had bothered stripping down to bikinis. Nikki's usual crowd was absent, replaced by scattered clutches of second-tiers dangling their feet in the pool or poking suspiciously at plastic Jell-O cups of shrimp cocktail.

If there's a hell, it smells like suntan lotion and sweaty Benetton cotton, and tastes like warm Coke; it sounds like easy listening and urgent whispers; it feels like being X-rayed, radioactive stares penetrating baggy clothes to the naked flesh beneath. I could feel myself mutating; I was the hideous swamp monster come to crash the soiree, and the Lacey in me wanted to play the part, tear a swath of destruction, give them a reason to stare.

Instead, I drifted toward the closest thing to a safe harbor: Jenna Sterling, Conny Morazan, and Kelly Cho, who styled themselves so aggressively as the Three Musketeers that they'd dressed the part every Halloween since they'd met. They were a self-contained unit, occasionally glomming in lockstep onto creatures a little higher up the food chain but never breaking formation. Jenna, with her Barbie hair and chunky field hockey legs, had once cried when forced to partner with me on some fourth-grade math project-memorably demonstrating the concept of remainders. Able lieutenant Conny was an expert at completing Jenna's sentences when Jenna found herself unable, which was often. And then there was Kelly, who'd appeared in second grade, still learning the English for recess and blackboard and weirdo, suffering the boys who pulled their eyes into slits and spoke in nonsense syllables they called Karate Kid Chinese even after she reminded them, yet again, that she was Korean. Somewhere along the way she'd lost the accent and the baby fat, and now was the only one of the three to consistently have a boyfriend, even if it was usually some youth group kid she'd picked up at church.

They hadn't been at the foreclosure party; girls like these didn't go to parties like those. Whatever they'd heard afterward, they hadn't seen it happen.

I'd never quite mastered the art of joining a conversation in progress, so I stood there creeping on their huddle, waiting for one of them to acknowledge my existence.

"So where did she go, anyway?"

It took me a beat too long to realize the question was directed at me. "Who?"

"She probably has no clue," Jenna said. "She's like . . ."

"Clueless," Conny offered, and Jenna nodded her assent.

"So do you or don't you?" Kelly said.

"What do you think?" I said, with a tone that suggested duh, of course I did.

Result: eagerness. "So? Where?"

"Juvie, right?" Jenna had a wholesome midwestern look I'd never trusted. She was the kind of girl who brought her field hockey stick to class and experimented with Body Shop perfume combinations until she found the one that made her smell most like apple pie.

Conny snorted. "Mental institution, more like."

"New York City, that's where they all go," Kelly said.

"They who?" I asked.

"You know . . ." Less confident now. "Girls like Lacey. Who . . ."

". . . run away," Conny supplied. "Like in Pretty Woman."

"Pretty Woman is about LA." Nikki had suddenly materialized by my shoulder in her witchy way. "And I highly doubt Lacey ran away to be a prostitute." She hooked a finger around one of my belt loops and tugged me away from the Musketeers. "Hannah Dexter. You want to get out of here?"

It took me a moment to realize this was an invitation, not a command-or maybe that's just a convenient excuse for why, instead of coming up with a clever retort or giving her the finger, I said yes.

I DON'T KNOW WHY MY MOTHER insists on this crap," Nikki said, monologuing us through the woods. Complaints about finger food and her mother's friends led to the laundry list of adventures for which all Nikki's actual friends had abandoned her: tennis camp, arts camp, Jewish camp, Allie Cantor on a teen tour of the Grand Canyon, Kaitlyn Dyer shopping (and doubtless fucking) her way across the Continent, less Virginia Woolf, more Fergie. (It destabilized my world to hear Nikki Drummond reference Virginia Woolf.) She complained about the humidity and the gnat swarms, the creepy pool cleaner whose gaze always lingered one second too long, the hassle of shaving her bikini line, the tedium of reruns, the gall of her parents to refuse to pay for call-waiting on her personal line. She whined and sipped from an airplane bottle of something brown and illicit, and seemed not nearly as concerned as she should have been about what I might do to her in the woods.

The trees closed around us, dark and lush and whispering. The afternoon had taken on a fairy-tale inexorability: The witch told me where to go, and like a child lost in the woods, I followed. Until, finally, she stopped-walking and talking both, and it hadn't occurred to me that the endless stream of complaint might indicate some jangling of nerves until she abruptly fell silent.

We'd paused at the edge of a clearing, its center occupied by a sagging structure, its walls crayoned with black hearts and bubbled tags, its windows jagged black holes. A few yards away, a rusting freight car tilted on bare axles twisted with weeds, like some ancient mechanical beast had crawled into the forest to die. It was no gingerbread house, but it still felt enchanted.

I knew about the old train station, of course. Everyone did. It had been abandoned since the seventies, and whatever cozy charm the architect had been aiming for with its sculpted iron railings and gabled roof was long lost to history and the encroaching woods. Somewhere in the darkness below the platform were broken and weedy tracks, and rumor had it that there were people living down there, storybook hobos who warmed themselves over trash fires and stabbed one another with iron nails. The station loomed large in Battle Creek childhoods, a landmark for bored and daring kids, easy initiation ritual for secret clubs: Brave the haunted station, return with a talisman, a sliver of glass or torn condom wrapper. Try not to get hepatitis. It was a place of possibility, the threat of shadows or even sentience, like the slouching station might be keeping counsel of its own. It was the kind of sacred place Lacey might have tried to make ours, if not for her thing about the woods.

A trench cut through the clearing, bent and broken track unspooling along its base like a canyon river, and Nikki settled onto its bank, dangling her feet over the edge. "This is where he died, you know."

It didn't exactly make the place feel less haunted.

"That's what they say," she added. "They didn't want to make it public, that this was the place. In case freaks wanted to turn it into some kind of shrine. Or do some copycat thing. But they told me. Obviously."

I didn't know Craig at all, not really, except that I'd known him for sixteen years and knew plenty: that he could burp the alphabet, that he could fit four Legos up his nose, that he'd once cried when he fell off the seesaw and broke his arm. He was a fixture, like the condemned church on Walnut Street I walked past every day for years, never wondering what was inside, until the day it burned down. That was Craig's absence, for me: a vacant lot where one shouldn't have been.

Impossible not to imagine him sitting in the shadow of this abandoned husk, pondering the desiccation of the past, reading existential doom into the graffitied dictates: fuck ronda, suck my cock. Impossible not to imagine him bloody and still, rotting into the dirt.

It belonged to Nikki now, this place. He'd claimed it for her.

"Your boyfriend killing himself doesn't automatically make you a good person," I said, because it hurt to feel sorry for her.

She looked like she'd had that thought before. "It's funny, isn't it? Because you'd kind of think it would." She offered me the bottle, but I waved it away. I knew what to do when the witch offered you a bite of her apple.

Nikki downed the rest in a single swallow, then fired the bottle into the trench. There was something immensely satisfying in its shatter. She swung her legs back and forth. Somewhere, birds sang. A mosquito lit on my knee, and Nikki slapped it away. She left behind a slick of sweat, which surprised me. The Nikki Drummonds of the world weren't supposed to perspire.

"I don't lie to people here," she said. "So maybe you'll believe me this time. I'm not the enemy. There is no enemy."

"Why do you care so much if I believe you?"

She shrugged. "I thought it was weird, too."

The witch builds her house out of candy to charm stupid children, I reminded myself.

"I can help you fix it, you know," she said.

"Fix what?"

"Well, for one, your sullied reputation. For another . . ." She flung her hands in my general direction, as if to suggest your essential Hannah Dexterness.

"What makes you think I need to be fixed?"

"Do you really want me to answer that?"

"And why would you want to make me your project?"

"Maybe I'm bored." She was looking at her feet, pointing and flexing them together, like we used to do in gymnastics at the Y. "Maybe I'm tired."

"Of summer?"

"Of pretending not to be a bitch," she said. "You've obviously already decided I am. It's relaxing."

"You must think I'm pretty stupid," I said, and maybe I was, because at her admission I felt a strange tingle of something adjacent to pride.

She shrugged again, which I took as a yes. "I don't beg. Come to the mall with me tomorrow. Let the idiots see you not caring what they think. Let them see you with me. It'll help."

"Come to the mall with you? Are you high?"

"Marissa is cheating on Austin with Gary Peck. She lets him finger her in the chem lab after school."