On the morning of Christmas Eve, I sat on the cold cement steps in front of my house with my head turned toward the rural highway at the end of Martha Road, watching cars infrequently speed past my corner. I'd heard our neighbor Mr. Emory starting the engine of his black Hyundai Sonata before the sun had even risen, and my heart was racing with anticipation. I had done the math repeatedly in my head since the Emorys had backed out of their driveway; it was a two-and-a-half hour drive up to Florence, where Trey's school was located on the Canadian border, and another two-and-a-half hours back. It was nearly noon, and only a matter of minutes before Trey would be home from his military school up north.

Of course, enough time had passed that I'd started to wonder if maybe the Emorys had gone straight to Trey's grandparents' house for the holiday or something. I had factored time for a quick lunch at McDonald's into my estimate, but I was beginning to worry. I didn't even know if Trey had living grandparents, and if so, where their home was located. All I knew for certain was that I wanted him to see me waiting for his arrival when his parents passed by our house so that I could wave to him and make sure he realized I urgently needed to see him.

It was fair to expect that our parents were going to do everything in their limited power to keep us away from each other. This wasn't going to be any easy task for them, since our houses were less than one hundred feet apart. But considering the amount of trouble we'd managed to get into together less than two months earlier, they were probably wise to keep us separated. I'd been charged with failure to observe a traffic signal, exceeding speed zones, resisting arrest, and disorderly conduct. Quite an impressive record for a girl who'd previously never even served a detention in her whole sixteen years of life. I'd been very lucky that Mrs. Emory hadn't added theft of an auto vehicle to the list, since technically she had loaned her Honda Civic to her son, Trey, and not to me on that fateful day when he and I had led most of our town's small police force on a wild chase across our county to White Ridge Lake.

That day seemed like a million years ago, like a nightmare so scary that even the thought of it now made my body feel uncomfortably warm and nauseated. Throughout most of my dealings with the police and court system in the aftermath of the insanity, I had been suffering the dizzying effects of a concussion which I'd obtained during a nasty fall down the stairs in my high school while chasing my former friend, Violet, into the girls' locker room. My memory of the details of the court room was fuzzy at best, and I hadn't been allowed to attend any of the hearings related to Trey's punishment. I didn't know the full list of things Trey had ultimately been charged with; I knew he'd been punished more severely than me because he'd already had a history of mouthing off to teachers and cutting classes.

While the memory of the day on which we'd gotten ourselves into so much trouble seemed like a vivid nightmare, the actual nightmares from which I suffered at the Dearborn School for Girls, the boarding school where I'd been sent for behavior modification, were completely unrelated to the punishment I had been administered for my crimes. At night when I closed my eyes, my consciousness was lit ablaze with flames from my memories and the voices of my recently deceased friends, Olivia and Candace. I couldn't understand why they were still pleading with me to rectify the circumstances that had led to their tragic deaths. I thought Trey and I had done exactly what they'd instructed us to do. Following cryptic signs provided to us, doing what we thought their spirits had asked of us to bring an end to the trick Violet had played, was precisely what had landed us in such hot water.

The wind blew softly, rustling the dry leaves up and down Martha Road as a car turned at the corner and came toward me. I grew anxious immediately until I realized that the car was a white Cadillac, presumably the one belonging to Dr. Waldbaum, who lived much further down the block. I heard the screen door of my house open behind me, and turned to see my mom stepping outside, holding a coffee mug.

"Why don't you come inside? I've got Christmas carols on, and I'm making hot cocoa," she said. My mom had been in a turbo-charged parenting mood since picking me up in Dearborn the night before. The last few weeks that I'd been away in boarding school were not the longest amount of time we'd ever been apart; I usually spent long stretches of the summer with my dad and his girlfriend, Rhonda, in Florida. But these last few weeks had been particularly hard on both Mom and me because our separation had been so abrupt, so unexpected. She had decorated the whole house for the holiday, which was totally unlike her, and I suspected it was mostly for my enjoyment. She'd saved trimming the tree for my arrival, and I knew it was important to her for me to show enthusiasm even though Christmas was the last thing on my mind.

I had realized the previous night, after the long drive home from Michigan, that Trey and I had not been successful in bringing an end to whatever paranormal curse Violet had put on me and my other friends earlier in the school year. She'd let us think we'd been victorious so that we would be sent away to serve out our punishments while she carried on with her life as the most popular girl at Weeping Willow High School, captain of the varsity cheerleading squad and Junior Class President. I deeply regretted having been so gullible as to have been proud of myself these last six weeks that I'd been away from home. I'd convinced myself that my miserable time spent wearing an itchy uniform and following strict routines at Dearborn was tolerable because at least I'd avenged Olivia and Candace's wrongful deaths, and saved Mischa's life.

But I'd been wrong. I was essentially serving time because I'd been unbelievably stupid.

"I'll come in soon, Mom," I assured my mother.

"Hon, I don't want you to be disappointed when the Emorys get home," my mom said, cutting right to the chase of why she'd been keeping an eye on me all morning. My mom was no dummy. She was still, underneath all of her Christmas spirit, very cross with me for not telling her exactly the reason Trey and I had gotten into so much trouble in November. To anyone who didn't know, it seemed like we had just arbitrarily decided to viciously pick on Violet, the new girl in town who had joined the junior class after moving to our town from the suburbs outside Chicago. It seemed as if for no good reason at all, I had ruthlessly attacked her in the school hallway during the basketball game against Angelica High School, chased her all over school property, assaulted her, stole the beloved heirloom locket she'd inherited from her grandmother, and thrown it off the bridge across White Ridge Lake. How could I possibly explain to my mom that I'd been stupid enough to play a paranormal game with Violet at Olivia's Sweet Sixteen birthday party... a game in which Violet had predicted all of my friends' recent deaths in horrifically accurate detail? No grown-up was going to believe me, or my friend Mischa, that Violet had the power to manifest Olivia and Candace's deaths. Grown-ups, especially my mom, were just going to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself for playing such a childish game in the first place, and for trying to blame my own bad behavior on cherubic-faced Violet. I'd even asked my dad, a psychiatrist, for his opinion on whether or not the game we'd played at the party had the potential to be dangerous, and he'd debunked the theory that the game involved the supernatural immediately, dismissing the game simply as a phenomenon of hypnosis.

"Mary Jane and I have been speaking while you and Trey have been away, and we think it's for the best that you two not spend so much time together while you're home for the break. Maybe this summer, we'll feel differently. But for now... it's only been a month since your sentencing. I don't think it's too wise to put yourself in a position to attract Judge Roberts' attention so soon."

Everything my mom was saying was fair and valid. But I hadn't put myself in a position of potentially attracting Judge Robert's attention again already; whoever was haunting my bedroom had done so the night before by starting my music boxes as soon as I sat down on my bed to relax. I still hadn't figured out what the cause of the haunting was; was it the ghost of beautiful Olivia, the first of my friends to die? Of her tall, boisterous best friend Candace, who had drowned in Hawaii a few weeks after Olivia's car accident? Or was it my own twin sister, Jennie, who had died down the block eight years earlier when our original house burned to the ground, who was trying to keep me out of harm's way? Whoever it was, not only had they made their persistent presence known, but they'd also let me know in no uncertain terms that Violet's connection to the evil spirit that was giving her the power to predict deaths hadn't been the locket I'd hurled into White Ridge Lake.  It was suggesting that the connection was the majestic, sprawling mansion that Violet inhabited with her parents on the outskirts of town.

That was what I needed so urgently to tell Trey.

As long as that house was standing, there was a strong likelihood that the death Violet had predicted for my friend Mischa back in September was going to come true at any second. Realizing now that it had been the house all along, it was kind of amazing that Mischa's prediction hadn't come true in the weeks Trey and I had been away from Willow.

"I know, Mom," I told her gently. "I'm not looking to get into trouble at all. I just want to wave. That's all. Wave."

My mother's mouth remained in a firm, disapproving line and she opened the screen door again. Her little dog, Maude, who she had adopted in October after the death of the dog we'd had since I was a little girl, scratched at the inside of the door, wanting to join us on the stoop. "Well, don't wait too much longer out here. It's cold. You're going to freeze to death."

I can't freeze to death. I'm already dead, according to Violet, I thought grimly.

I looked back down the block toward the corner as soon as she had returned to the house. On the right side of the corner, just beyond the yellow house in which the Ferguson family lived, was the empty lot where our old house, the one that burned down, used to stand. Now, the property where our house used to be was overgrown with weeds, but the township would never dare to build over it. No family would ever want to erect a new house on the site where a little girl had perished in flames, and the rest of the township emphatically refused repeated proposals from various groups to build parks or community centers there. Even though I hated walking past that empty lot every day, I was abundantly grateful that it was there, untouched. It was like a messy, disastrous monument to my twin's lost life, as wild as my mother's grief had been in the years that had immediately followed the fire.

Then, finally, a black sedan slowly rounded the corner.

I couldn't help but rise to my feet when I saw that it was, indeed, Mr. Emory's black Hyundai. As badly as I wanted to tell Trey about our having been wrong about Violet's locket, I was also desperate to see him. Even though we had been next door neighbors since I was eight years old and had barely spoken during my first two years of high school, we'd fallen a little unexpectedly in love earlier that fall as Violet's curse had unfolded. Trey had been the unfortunate driver in the accident in which Olivia had been brutally killed. I'd (unfairly, perhaps) involved him in my quest to figure out exactly who Violet was and why she'd suggested that we all play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board at Olivia's birthday party when it very much seemed like she'd known all along what would happen to the girls whose predictions she'd provided.

Except mine. She hadn't been able to predict my death, and had cryptically told me that the reason why was that I was already dead.  She'd never given me an explanation for why she'd said that before I'd been sent away.  The only time I could recall seeing her in the court room before my sentencing was when she'd given her sorrowful testimony on the stand about how mean I'd been to her since the start of the school year, and how all she wanted was to fit in among her new classmates at  Weeping Willow High School. It had been a spectacular show of theatrical ability, her performance, and even though the lawyer Mom had hired for me pressed me to tell him why I had singled Violet out for such abuse, I couldn't. I couldn't tell him for the same reason I couldn't tell my mom. When my friend Candace had gone around telling everyone at school that Violet was evil and had killed Olivia shortly after Olivia's death, she'd been thrown in a mental hospital and had been treated for schizophrenia. I couldn't let that happen to me; especially not now that Mischa's life was still in imminent danger.

So I stood, my legs disobeying my brain as the car rolled past my house. Through the tinted windows of the car's back seat, I saw Trey raise his head and meet my gaze with his magnificent blue eyes. He'd seen me. I sank to the cement steps again, and wondered if we'd have a chance to even kiss while he was home visiting his parents for the holiday if our activities were going to be as closely watched as my mom suggested. In the weeks we'd been apart, we'd only been permitted to talk on the phone for a few minutes on Sunday nights, and we both assumed that our calls were monitored. Absolutely no physical interaction or even a chance to share a few private words was hardly the way to keep a teen romance going.

The Emorys pulled into their driveway and into their attached garage. The garage door automatically rolled closed, and my breath grew short. There was a chance they were going to immediately banish him to his room. But few moments later, he stepped out of the house through the front door and walked across his front lawn, the frozen grass crunching beneath his feet, over to mine. My mouth went dry and my palms began sweating. If it was possible for me to have forgotten just how hot he was in the weeks I'd been away, I'd done exactly that. His hair, which used to be long enough to tuck behind his ears, had been shaved off, which only served to make his aquamarine eyes look even larger and bluer. His face looked leaner and his jaw looked stronger, as if he'd matured into more of a man in the six short weeks he'd been away.

"Hi," he said shyly from a few feet away, his hands pressed into the black jacket he wore.

"Hi," I said. It was a little weird knowing what to do, under the circumstances. I wanted to run into his arms and make out under the cloudy skies for all of our neighbors to see. But I wasn't sure if he still felt the same way about me that he had in November when we'd driven his mom's car to White Ridge Lake. A lot could change in six weeks. Especially in six weeks during which we'd barely been able to communicate.

"Uh, your mom's standing in the window, watching," he said, blushing a little and looking at his feet.

"Oh," I said, with a laugh, better understanding now why he hadn't immediately kissed me.

"If I sit down, is she going to come out here?" he asked.

"I don't think so."

Trey sat down next to me on the cement steps and kissed me on the cheek, which was a little more chaste than I was hoping for, but he let his lips linger there against my skin for almost a minute.

"I missed you," he whispered directly into my ear. "It's so good to see you. It's like, amazing. I can't believe we're both here, together again."

It was so overwhelming to have him right next to me that I almost forgot why I had so badly needed to speak with him before he got pulled into his family's Christmas celebration for the next twenty-four hours.

"Trey," I said sternly. "I missed you, too, but listen. We were wrong. We were way wrong. It wasn't locket. It's the house."

Trey sat up straight instantly and looked angry, and then confused. "But, how could we be wrong? Your dog scratched that heart in the yard, and Violet wore that locket every day. It doesn't make sense. It had to be the locket."

I shook my head. "I think it was a decoy intended to throw us off all along. When I got home last night, the ghost was back, messing with my music boxes. And something drew a crude picture of a house in the condensation from the heater on my bedroom window. I'm positive. We haven't ended it yet."

Trey was silent for a minute, and I heard the front door of his house open. His mother, who was probably almost ten years younger than my mother, stepped out onto the Emorys' stoop and wrapped her sweater around herself a little more tightly. Trey's mother was petite, pretty, and blond. It was hard to believe that a boy as tall and brooding as Trey could have been raised by someone as happy and cutesy as his mom.  "Trey, are you coming inside? I could use some help with cookie dough."

"Just a minute, Mom," Trey called across our respective front yards.

"Hi, McKenna," she waved cheerfully to me, as if she hadn't had a serious conversation with my mom probably within the last two days about me and Trey not seeing each other.

"Hi, Mrs. Emory!" I called in return, trying to sound friendly.

"Merry Christmas!" she said, and then returned inside the house.

"Cookie dough?" I teased.

"Come on, man," Trey said. "My mom is, like, giddy that I'm home for a few days. Gotta play the part of the good son."

"Yeah, I kind of know what you mean," I said, referring to my own mom.

"So, what are we going to do?" Trey wondered aloud.

"I have no idea," I admitted. My brain was just completely, maddeningly empty. I didn't know in which direction to turn, or what to even think.  I felt inclined to call Mischa to warn her, but even that seemed cruel if didn't have a plan in place. "If we burn down the house, we get in even more trouble. I've thought about it, and I don't see how we could possibly burn it down without getting caught. And then what if that's a decoy, too? What if the real thing connecting Violet to her grandmother is something we'd never, ever in a million years guess? And what if it's not even her grandmother's ghost behind all this? What if we've just been wrong about everything?"

Trey deeply sighed and let his breath ease out of his lungs slowly, making a drawn-out woosh sound. It streamed from his mouth in a puff of steam, foreign heat in the freezing cold air.  "If only we had a contact on the other side who knew as much as Violet. I feel like we're never going to figure this out on our own."

"We sort of have a contact," I said, implying the ghost, whoever's ghost it was, that kept causing trouble in my house. It had expanded its reach from fooling around with my possessions in my bedroom to messing with the burners in the kitchen when I began avoiding my bedroom, presumably in an attempt to get my attention. I wondered grimly if the strange activity had stopped while I'd been away, or if my mom had been tormented. There would no subtle way to ask her if she had experienced any haunting while I'd been away from home. "It just seems to do all of the contacting."

"Yeah, we need something we can just ask questions directly," Trey mused aloud. "No more of this dumb Ouija board stuff. We need answers, not riddles. We need a spirit we can just ask who is doing this, why are they doing this, and is there any way to—"

"Trey!"

The stern voice of Mr. Emory startled both of us. He had stepped outside of the Emorys' house and had his hands on his hips, with his wire-rimmed glasses dangling from one hand.  "Your mother needs help in the kitchen. Come on home, right now."

Trey rolled his eyes and stood to leave. "That guy," he muttered.

"I know where we can find a ghost," I blurted out suddenly. "I mean, not for certain. But maybe."

"Trey! I didn't mean in five minutes, I meant, now!"

"I'm coming," Trey assured his father.  "Your window. Tonight," Trey quietly told me before he trotted across the lawn again back toward his house.

I stood and reached for the screen door to step inside my house for the afternoon of Christmas festivity she had planned for us. We were going to have that cocoa she wanted to make for us, and put together the fake Christmas tree that she stored in the attic the rest of the year. She might even make me watch It's a Wonderful Life, and I'd surely indulge her, since I was so grateful to be home again. But I couldn't allow myself to enjoy the holiday. I was going to have to call Mischa and ask her to drive me and Trey upstate later that night. Even though it was Christmas Eve, we really didn't have a moment to spare.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox

Later that evening, after eating an enormous Christmas Eve dinner with Mom and opening one of my gifts, as was our tradition, I retreated to my room to take care of a few matters. I left my door open so that my mom wouldn't think I was intentionally avoiding her, even though that was exactly what I was doing. With my light on in my bedroom, I hoped Trey could see me, since our windows faced each other. I was really going to have to talk to him before it got too late, but I had no idea how to get in touch with him. I was pretty sure his mobile phone had been taken away by his parents, and I could hardly walk next door and knock on the Emorys' front door requesting that Trey come out and play.

"Oh my god, are you home from school?" Mischa squealed when she answered her phone. "I can't believe it! Will your mom let you outside to hang while you're home? I haven't seen you in ages!"

"Mischa," I said, trying to interrupt the bubbling fountain of words that were coming out of her mouth. She had been solemn and stone-faced all autumn, convinced (for good reason) that she was going to choke on something and die, as per Violet's prediction. Since she'd been convinced that Trey and I had brought an end to Violet's game in November, she'd returned to her exuberant self. I could hear music playing in the background and I imagined that she was chilling alone in her intensely purple bedroom. Mischa's parents spoiled her and her sister Amanda a little bit, and Mischa had her own computer and online accounts to download any kind of music, movies, and games she wanted. "I have to tell you something kind of bad."

But she wasn't listening. "I cannot wait to tell you all about St. Patrick's. Those nuns are crazy. So crazy mean, you wouldn't believe it. And the girls are so stuck up!"

"Mischa," I interrupted.

"And that guy? Mark Regan? The one Violet said asked her to go to Homecoming with him? Her story checks out, but he told me she stone-cold dropped him after she started seeing Pete. Didn't even text him to tell him she met someone else. Nothing. That's brutal, don't you think?"

"Mischa," I said firmly. "You have to listen to me. Trey and I were wrong. It wasn't the locket."

There was dead silence on the other end of the phone for a long moment.

"You're lying," Mischa said finally. "That can't be true. It had to be the locket, McKenna."

I sank into my bed, wishing that it all wasn't true. Wishing more than anything that I could reverse time and go back to the night of Olivia's party and suggest that we do something—anything—other than agreeing to play the game Violet had suggested. "I'm really sorry, Mischa, but I wanted you to know. It's not over."

I felt horrible telling my sweet friend that we hadn't released her from the curse, as we had previously assured her back in November. Tiny Mischa, a competitive gymnast, had wasted away during the fall, refusing to eat for fear that she'd choke on food as Violet had predicted. By the time Trey and I had focused on the locket and concocted a plan to seize it away from Violet, Mischa had grown hysterical about the likelihood of her death and was inconsolable. I knew that it was inevitable that she'd return to that state now that I was telling her that she wasn't out of the woods yet.

"No," Mischa refused. "No! It can't be true! McKenna, are you sure?"

"I'm pretty sure."

"Oh my god. What do we do? What can we do? You have to help me, McKenna. I thought I was safe!"

I bit my lower lip, knowing that as soon as the words left my mouth, I was kicking open the gates for trouble to flow through again. There was little chance that Trey and I would be able to involve ourselves in this disaster Violet had created without getting ourselves into deep, serious trouble this time.

"I have an idea, but I'm going to need you to pick us up tonight. Late. After ten."

Mischa hesitated. "I don't know if my parents will let me have the car. They're freaks about me driving alone after dark."

The sun had set an hour earlier, as my mom and I had been sitting down to eat dinner. "Then you're going to have to just take it," I told her sternly. "This is the only way, Mischa. The longer we put this off, the worse it gets. You have to pick us up at the corner of Martha Road. Don't drive down our block. Our parents are on, like, code red, DEFCON-one alert."

"God, McKenna. My parents are calling me for dinner. What am I going to do? I can't eat! I thought it was over."

Just then, I heard a very light knocking on my window and turned to see Trey outside, looking nervously over his shoulder at his own house. The lights were on in the Emorys' living room, and I could see Trey's dad where he usually was, on the Emorys' couch.  I said a quick goodbye to Mischa after making her promise again that she'd find a way to get the car and meet us on our corner in three hours before I gently closed my bedroom door.

"Hey," I said very quietly after I raised my window as slowly as possible to prevent it from squeaking and catching my mom's attention.

"Hey," Trey said. "I'm not coming in. I just wanted to see what the plan is. My parents are probably going to bed around ten."

"Good," I told him. "Meet me back here and bring two hoodies and any kind of baseball caps or ski hats you have."

"Okay," Trey agreed, trusting me enough not to question my strange request.

"Mischa's going to meet us at the corner with the car."

"Word," Trey said, turning to walk back to his house. He was wearing a thin t-shirt in the freezing night air.

"And Trey?" I added. "I'm sorry that this is happening on Christmas Eve. We just don't have any time to spare."

"I know," he told me.

"We've only got nine days," I muttered, bitterly conscious of the fact that my mom was driving me back to the Dearborn School for Girls on the evening of January first. Other than running away and living in the woods, I saw no way to avoid getting in the car with her that night and starting the drive. Even if my mom were understanding of the situation we were facing and permitted me to stay home a few more days, there was Judge Roberts in Ortonville would make sure she'd regret that decision.

"Actually," Trey said slowly, "Six. I go back on the twenty-ninth."