It probably should not have surprised any of us when we pulled into the parking lot at the UW University of Wisconsin Hospital in Ortonville that a white Audi was parked in one of the closest spots to the visitors' entrance. Violet's mother drove a brand new white Audi, and when Violet drove herself to school functions, it was always that car—instead of her father's extremely expensive jade green Jaguar—that she borrowed.

"You have got to be kidding me," Mischa, who was the first to see the Audi, muttered.

"What?" Henry asked, oblivious to what the rest of us already knew: that our enemy was most likely already in the hospital. 

"Violet's mother drives a white Audi," Trey said.

It was easy to forget that Henry barely knew Violet. To the best of my knowledge, they'd only met formally once before Olivia's death on the night of Olivia's Sweet Sixteen slumber party. Henry had been back in town that weekend to have his broken toe X-rayed after having been away at Northwestern for his first few weeks of college.  

"Oh. That's not good," Henry said, turning around a row of cars to park. "Are you sure it's her car? Do you know the license plate number?"

"We're not in the CIA," Trey snapped.

"Trey," I said gently. "I guess if she's up there, Trey and I will have to wait in the car. We can't risk getting in trouble again."

"That's ridiculous," Mischa snapped. "We're not even in Willow! We're technically within Ortonville town limits. What if you were visiting a relative? The Simmons family does not own the entire state of Wisconsin!"

Henry led the way into the hospital's visitor center, carrying the enormous arrangement of roses and carnations he had been wise enough to pick up at the florist conveniently located in the shopping center down the block.

"Good morning, Doris," Henry greeted the heavy-set head nurse at the front desk, apparently on a first-name basis with her. She turned almost as pink as her deep rose tunic when she looked up and noticed Henry smiling there. He was probably the most charismatic and handsome man to enter the hospital visitor center on a regular basis, so of course the nurses recognized him.

"Here to see Miss Hartford?" the nurse asked him.

"Of course," Henry replied with his million mega-watt grin.

"Sure thing. I'll just need identification from everyone who'd like to go up to see her," the nurse said. The visitor's center was nothing at all like an emergency room. The front lobby was sunny and clean. Cut-out Santa Claus images and tin foil from the recently passed holiday still decorated the area. A fake pine tree had been erected in one corner of the lobby, under which similarly fake wrapped gifts had been placed. There was a sign near the tree announcing that the ornaments on its branches contained the Christmas wishes of terminally ill children at the hospital. It made me a little sad that it was two days after Christmas Day, and there were still ornaments on the tree.

As we all withdrew our driver's licenses from our wallets and handed them over to Doris the nurse, Mischa asked, "Is Tracy still contagious?"

"Oh, no, dear," the nurse assured us. "She's still very sick, but she's been on antibiotics now for almost two weeks. It's safe for you to visit."

I looked around, fighting the urge to sniffle. I didn't want to give the nurse any indication that I was ill and be banished from the visitors' center. There were two nervous-looking young guys walking around the visitors' center talking on their mobile phones, quite possibly brand new dads calling relatives to share good news. There was a middle-aged woman sitting on a sofa leafing through a paperback novel with a sleeping daughter in her lap, and two middle-aged men drinking coffees on the chairs near the window. It was what appeared to be a quiet morning. I realized that I was in the very same hospital I'd been taken to after our house burned down. This was the building where I'd been given soup and pudding while my parents' burns were treated. Nothing about the sunny visitors' center looked the least bit familiar, but then again, I'd been a patient when I was eight years old, not a visitor. I couldn't recall ever having been in the hospital since then. Even when Mischa and I had driven out to visit Candace when she'd been undergoing in-patient psychiatric evaluation, we had been deterred from entering the building by Candace's mom in the parking lot.

"Here you are, Miss Brady," the nurse said happily, handing me back my I.D. I accepted it, and wondered if she had any idea who I was. It had been quite a while since I had been so warmly welcomed anywhere.

We followed Henry down the hallway toward the elevator bank. Posters made by school children about the importance of exercise were professionally hung in the hallway, making it even more strangely cheerful and bright despite the overwhelming antiseptic smell and cacophony of doctors being paged on the overhead audio system. My eye was caught by the signs detailing which visitors were assigned to which floors. Maternity was the second floor. Infectious Disease was the seventh floor, all the way at the top, presumably as far away from the newborn babies as possible.

"Tracy's on three," Henry told me, noticing that I was trying to figure out on which floor we'd find her. "She was moved down from seven once her doctors decided she wasn't contagious anymore."

Three was the children's floor, which made me feel a little better than stepping off the elevator onto a floor riddled with dangerous, infectious germs. As soon as I felt relieved about my own safety against germs, I felt guilty about potentially infecting the children's ward with whatever unpleasant cold I had managed to contract in the last twenty-four hours. There were probably children undergoing chemotherapy and kidney dialysis on that floor; the last thing any of them needed was to catch what I had. I wondered if the third floor was where I had been treated for smoke inhalation, and where my parents had come to calmly inform me that my twin had died in the fire. My memory was maddeningly scant on details of the days I'd spent in that very same building.

I turned to Trey and said, "Maybe I should stay down here while you guys go up. I don't want to—"

The elevator doors suddenly opened and the four of us were face to face with Violet. I hadn't seen her since the day she had shown up in court back in November to tell the judge her version of what had happened, dressed like an ice princess. Her story had been a pitiful one, a sorrowful saga of how Trey and I had singled her out for bullying at random. As all of our eyes narrowed at the sight of her, she took a step back in the elevator, looking surprised, before regaining her composure and stepping off, probably thinking better of leaving open the possibility of the four of us boarding the elevator and closing in on her.

"You can't be here."

Her voice was unnervingly steady and confident, and her comment was targeted unmistakably at me.

The month she'd enjoyed away from my insinuations had suited her. Her cheeks had some color to them, and her makeup had been painstakingly applied even at the early hour. She wore an enviably cool purple cashmere coat with a funnel neck that made her eyes look even more vibrant than usual. The coat had no doubt come from Saks Fifth Avenue or Barney's or any other luxury store in downtown Chicago or New York, certainly not from any store near Willow, Wisconsin. It was both surprising and disturbing to actually see Violet standing just a few feet in front of me, the girl I had so fervently spent the last six weeks hating with all my heart.

"It's a free country," I fired back. "I can be wherever I want."

"No, you can't," she corrected me. "Judge Roberts ordered you to stay away from me. Both of you." She pointed a long white finger at Trey. I noticed her left eye twitch. Maybe she wasn't as confident as she was trying to appear.

"Technically, he said it was pointless to try to enact an order of protection in such a small town among people our age," Trey said calmly.

Desperate, Violet looked at Mischa, who glared back at her. "Judge Roberts doesn't even know who I am," Mischa announced. "I can go wherever I want, and talk to whoever I please. So if I were you, I'd get a move on."

Violet raised an eyebrow. "Is that a threat?"

"Oh, no. It's advice. From a friend. That's what we are. Right, Violet?" Mischa asked in a mocking voice. "Friends?"

Violet's hand gripped the shoulder strap on her leather handbag more tightly and she dug her other hand into her coat pocket. "You're not allowed to be here. I know why you're here. You're going to bother Tracy, and you can't upset her right now."

Henry stepped onto the elevator and Mischa followed him. "We're going to visit Tracy," I said. "As friends who care about her life and want to make sure she understands what a grave situation she's in."

Just as Trey and I stepped onto the elevator, a guard in a uniform rounded the corner from the lobby carrying a styrofoam cup of coffee. Violet's eyes flew wide open and she seized the moment. "Guard! Guard! Those people are trying to go upstairs to visit Tracy Hartford and they're here to bother her!"

Henry jammed on the DOOR CLOSE button on the inside panel of the elevator. The heavy metallic doors slowly closed as the guard was about to object to us traveling up in the elevators.

"Hold it, kids," we heard him say as the elevator lurched upward and began slowly, smoothly lifting us up to the third floor.

"Great," Trey said. "In trouble at the hospital. This is just perfect."

"It'll be fine," Henry announced. "Tracy's not going to throw us out. Just trust me."

My heart was already beating rapidly. I imagined that when the elevator doors opened on the third floor, an entire battalion of hospital private security guards would be waiting for us in riot gear, slapping night sticks into their palms. I was perspiring so much from both the fever and anxiety that the hair closest to my scalp was damp.

On the third floor, the elevator doors opened anti-climactically. The nurses behind the front desk smiled at us without interest. "This way," Henry told us, leading us past the nurses' desk, where colorful "get well" balloons were bobbing up and down while waiting to be delivered, and down a long hallway. The children's ward buzzed with weekday morning activity. I peered into rooms with opened doors on our way to Tracy's room, and noticed listless children laying in beds watching cartoons on televisions mounted to ceilings. A mother holding up a toddler by his hands as he took clumsy footsteps smiled at us as we passed her in the hallway. Nothing on the floor seemed the least bit familiar to me, although I remembered my own hospital room quite well. The stiffness of the mattress, the blandness of the tapioca pudding I was served, the baffling remote control for the television set in my room. Next to me, Trey took my hand in his and squeezed it, perhaps remembering that it really hadn't been too long ago when I'd been a patient at this hospital.

Finally, we arrived at room 318, and stepped through the open doorway.

"Well, dear, we've been through this. I don't think Principal Nylander will appreciate my calling him at home two days after Christmas," Mrs. Hartford was saying as we entered. She looked up from where she sat near Tracy's bed and smiled warmly at Henry, who raised his free hand in a casual wave. As usual, Mrs. Hartford looked like the ultimate Midwestern mom, wearing a red holiday sweatshirt with a reindeer appliqued onto it and a festive gold headband.

"Henry! How sweet of you to come this morning," she gushed.

Although Tracy's room was a double, the bed next to hers was empty and the cornflower blue curtain that would have separated her from a roommate, if she'd had one, was pushed back against the wall to allow sun to drench the entire room. Her windows faced east, and early morning sun cast a golden glow on all of us. I was so preoccupied with inspecting Tracy's room and the amazingly tacky painting of a seashell hanging over her hospital bed that when I finally looked at her, I gasped.

Tracy had lost so much weight that her arms, stretched out of over her blankets, were nothing more than bones with skin wrapped around them. Her overall pallor was a sickening shade of greenish yellow, like a bruise that had faded. Tubes ran from bags of saline hanging on a rack next to her bed into entry points on the insides of her elbows and the tops of her hands. Skin pulled tautly over her cheekbones and her eyes were deeply sunken into her face. Her lips were colorless, and her dark blond hair was greasy and limp. While Tracy had never been an especially gorgeous girl, she'd also never been ugly, either, and now she just looked ghoulish.

"Why are all these people here?" she asked in a weak but angry voice. "They're not supposed to be here. These are the kids that attacked Violet, Mom," she said, tilting her head in the direction of me, Trey, and Mischa.

Mrs. Hartford rose to her feet and set her electronic reading device down on the table next to the chair in which she had been sitting. "I don't think it's a good idea for you kids to be here. Tracy's still in a very fragile condition."

"Please, Mrs. Hartford," Henry begged. "We'd just like to ask Tracy a few questions about a party she went to in October."

"It would be best if you could come back next week, after New Year's," Mrs. Hartford told us, inching past the bottom of Tracy's bed in an attempt to corral us back toward the door. "Tracy's trying to conserve all of her energy for the class ski trip. Surely you understand. It's not good for her to be distracted."

I looked over my shoulder at Tracy, so weak and tiny in her bed. Her bedside table was covered in cards propped up, and her windowsill boasted no fewer than six enormous flower arrangements.  Get well, Tracy! Love, Grandma and Papa, read a gift card in a huge arrangement of pink roses that was starting to wilt. An enormous plush polar bear with a pink ribbon around its neck sat in the chair closest to Tracy's bed of the pair of chairs flanking the table at which Mrs. Hartford had been sitting when we'd entered. I didn't know who Mrs. Hartford thought she was kidding; it seemed like Tracy had been living in the hospital room for weeks. She didn't look like she'd have the strength to go skiing for another couple of months.

"Of course, of course," Henry said reassuringly.

"Mom, I really don't want them here. Henry can stay. But I want everyone else to leave," Tracy insisted.

"I'm sorry," Mrs. Hartford told us. "I'm really going to have to ask you to go."

Ignoring her, Mischa walked around the side of Tracy's bed. "When you were all at Violet's house on Halloween, did Violet get you to play a game with her? Did she tell you how you're going to die?"

Mrs. Hartford was immediately spooked by Mischa's question and began wringing her hands. "That's enough, kids. Henry, your mother's going to hear about this."

"Go ahead and call her," Henry replied. "She knows I'm here."

"I know all of your mothers. Mischa, we bought our house from your mother. I don't think she'd like the idea of you harassing a girl as sick as Tracy is one bit," Mrs. Hartford said.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Hartford, but we're only here because we care," Mischa solemnly insisted.

Frustrated, Mrs. Hartford stormed out of Tracy's hospital room, presumably to fetch a doctor or a guard to evict us. Trey swiftly locked the door behind her, slowing down our likely forcible removal until someone arrived with a key. My head ached and I knew trouble was unavoidable at that point; it was very unlikely I'd make it back to my house that day without my mother getting a call from some form of law enforcement.

"Mom!" Tracy called, the veins in her neck popping out as she strained to be heard. "Mom, don't leave me in here with them!"

"Relax, Tracy. We're not here to hurt you," Mischa said in an uncommonly comforting voice. "We're here because we think you might be in more danger than you realize."

Tracy blinked solemnly, not challenging Mischa, but probably too tired in her state of illness to put up much of a fight.

"We really need to know if Violet asked you and the other girls at her party on Halloween to play any weird games with her, like Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board," I said, cringing as I swallowed. My throat ached.

"Why? Why do you guys care what we did? I mean, obviously you're jealous, since Violet's the most popular girl at school and none of you were invited to the Halloween party. That's got to hurt, right? Going from being the coolest girls at school to suddenly a bunch of people everyone avoids after Olivia died," Tracy said. She was making it easy to remember why I disliked her so much. It was tempting just to leave her there and let her suffer the fate that Violet had assigned her on her own, without our help. "Sorry, Henry. But it's true. Olivia was my friend, too, but everything changed after she died."

"You would be wise to listen to what Mischa has to say," Trey told Tracy in an authoritative voice.

"Me and McKenna played a game with Violet in September at Olivia's party, and Violet told stories about how Olivia and Candace were going to die. And then they came true. I know it sounds crazy, Tracy, but if you played any kind of game with Violet that sounds like that, all I'm asking is that you tell us," Mischa begged Tracy. "I'm asking as a personal favor, because I played the game after Candace. I'm next to die, and I'm scared, and you're the only person who can tell us what happened at that party in October."

Mischa was smart to appeal to Tracy's sense of pity. The ill girl twisted her mouth into a frustrated frown, considering her position of power for a moment. If there was anything Tracy Hartford loved, it was scandalous gossip, but only because her exclusive knowledge of gossip gave her power. Similarly, her friendship with Violet now that Violet had been named Homecoming Queen gave her power. And Mischa had let Tracy know that she, alone, had the power to help us.

"Yes. We played a game like that," Tracy finally admitted. "I thought it was stupid. The last time I played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board was at Nicole Blumenthal's birthday party when she turned twelve and we accidentally dropped Hailey West and she broke her collarbone. But Violet made it sound like it would be fun. So we played. Everyone thought it was funny."

Mischa looked at me with a sorrowful expression. "And you were the first to have your death predicted?"

Tracy shrugged. "Yes. But don't worry. Violet didn't say I would die from bacterial meningitis. I'm almost better; my doctor thinks I might even be able to go home next week."

"How did she say you were going to die?" I asked, not caring what Tracy's doctors had told her. Tracy's doctors had no idea what they were up against.

"Cardiac arrest. That's a heart attack. So I think I'm safe until I'm old. I mean, at least like, forty, right? That's a pretty typical way to die," Tracy reasoned. "Besides, it's just a game. Some of the predictions that Violet gave people were absolutely ridiculous. Like, she said Stephani deMilo was going to fall off the side of a cliff. She obviously made that up. There aren't any cliffs in Willow!"

I looked up at Trey, and he nodded at me. We were both thinking the same thing: falling off a cliff seemed less ridiculous on a ski trip than in someone's living room at a slumber party.

We heard the door rattling. Someone was trying to enter the room from the hallway, and a moment later we heard Mrs. Hartford's muffled voice say, "I know they're still in there. Send someone to fetch keys. Kids? Kids! I'm here with the hospital's security guard. Open this door, right now!"

"When is the ski trip?" I asked Tracy.

"We should let Mrs. Hartford in," Henry said, uncomfortable. "We're going to really get in trouble." He walked over to the door to unlock it just as Tracy's eyes rolled back up into her head. Her jaw began trembling and then her arms began shaking. She gurgled up frothy saliva, which spilled from her lips and down her chin. Her bed frame began shaking and making a horrible clanking noise as it moved.

"Oh, my god, what's happening?" Mischa shrieked.

Henry unlocked the door and pulled it open for Mrs. Harford, who entered not with a security guard, but with a doctor wearing a white lab coat and a nurse carrying a clipboard.

"You kids are in so much trouble," Mrs. Hartford began to say, and then noticed Tracy thrashing around on her bed.

"Something's happening to Tracy!" Mischa exclaimed to summon Mrs. Hartford's attention.

"It's just a seizure," Mrs. Hartford informed us with surprising calmness. "This has been happening ever since her fever." She and the doctor pushed past us to lean over Tracy's bed and stabilize her. Mrs. Hartford held down her arms as the doctor began making adjustments to the dials along the tubes running from the bags of liquid into Tracy's arms. "I would really appreciate if you guys would leave now. I don't think Tracy would be happy that you're seeing her like this."

In the hallway outside Tracy's room, we lingered for a moment in a subdued state of shock. I certainly hadn't expected to feel bad for Tracy Hartford that day, but I was feeling undeniably guilty and sad about her predicament. In a small town such as Willow, sometimes even people who you didn't especially like were dear to you simply because you'd known them for so long. Even though years had passed since the last time I'd been to the Hartfords' house, I had been invited to Tracy's birthday parties all the way through middle school, as had all of the girls in our junior class. Seeing her so gravely ill made me so profoundly upset that it seemed like the prospect of reversing Violet's curse was hopeless.

"That was awful," Mischa finally said, her voice cracking.

"Well, you were right. That girl Violet is still convincing girls to play the game with her," Henry said matter-of-factly. "So, what does that mean?"

"It means Tracy's going to die, and then Stephani deMilo, and whoever else played that game, if we can't figure out what this deal is between Violet and the spirits giving her these predictions," Trey said. Thankfully, he chose not to mention that it was logical to assume Mischa's death would precede Tracy's.

"Geez," Henry said. He looked over his shoulder back at the open door to Tracy's hospital room. "What do you think the chances are of someone going into cardiac arrest during a seizure?"

 Two uniformed security guards, one of whom had been the guard whose attention Violet had caught in the first floor elevator bank, walked briskly toward us.  "Alright, kids. Party's over," he said, grabbing Henry by the upper arm. "The hospital is no place to bully people."

"It's alright, we're leaving," Henry told the guard, shaking free of his grip. He motioned for us to once again follow him. "Come on, guys."

The guards followed us back across the children's floor to the elevator bank, and lingered a few feet away from us until they saw us board the elevator. There elevator onto which we stepped was a little crowded with doctors and other visitors.

"When is the ski trip?" Trey asked Mischa quietly.

"Everyone's leaving on January ninth, the first Thursday of the first full week of school after the break," Mischa informed us. "Matt can't wait, even though I told him I didn't want him to go."

The elevator stopped on the ground floor, and for a brief second my heart fluttered wildly with wonderment of whether or not we'd run into Violet again. Then I realized that there was no way she'd stuck around after ratting us out to the guards; Violet hated confrontation. She was a real coward, at least in my limited experience trying to address her directly about what she'd done to Olivia and Candace.

"Which mountain are they going to?" I asked. I couldn't think past January first, when I'd be driven back to school. For me, life ended on that date. There was no future worth consideration past that day on the calendar.

"I don't know," Mischa said dismissively, and then added, "Someplace weird. I'd never heard of it. Mount Farthington, I think? It's in Michigan."

Michigan.

If Mischa was right, I knew exactly where Mount Farthington was. It was located off the same highway that led directly to the Dearborn School for Girls, just much, much further north. The long drive I took with my mother looped us around the bottom of Lake Michigan, but if we'd been able to drive directly over the water from Green Bay to the state of Michigan, we'd have driven right past that mountain range, which was riddled with luxurious ski lodges.

 "What next?" Henry asked the three of us as we walked past the nurse's station in the visitor center on our way toward the revolving doors that would deliver us back out into the freezing cold morning.

"The Gold Coast Residence," Mischa announced. "Mrs. Caroline Stowe is expecting us, or rather, her lovely granddaughter, Violet."

I kept my mouth shut as we all walked carefully over the icy blacktop parking lot toward the Richmonds' Mercedes. It was December twenty-seventh, a Thursday. If the ski trip was on January ninth, and we were right in assuming that Stephani deMilo would, indeed, find herself falling off a cliff on that trip, Mischa could expect to die within the next two weeks.