I was being such a manipulative jerk, but I had no choice. It was highly unlikely that Cheryl would refuse to meet me, and I felt kind of awful about that. I texted Mischa and informed her that I was on my way to the high school to look into Nurse Lindvall's files, just as we had discussed on Christmas Eve. Mischa lived across town in the other direction in a subdivision, so it was unfair to ask her to ask her to join us. It was only as I rounded the corner from Martha Road to the rural highway that I realized how bitterly cold it was. Powdery snow shook down upon me from tree branches overhead. The wind sliced right through my heavy winter jacket. It was so cold that my eyes hurt in their sockets. I pulled my scarf up higher over my face, feeling that my breath was dampening it where it covered my mouth.

MISCHA 10:26 AM

How are you getting there? Roads are closed. Be careful!

By the time I reached Hennessy's, there was already snow in my boots and my socks were damp. The shopping center looked other-worldly with snow blanketing the parking lot, covering up almost half of every store's front windows. Mr. Hennessy, the pharmacist, who, probably at sixty years old was still a lot younger than Dr. Waldbaum, was waiting for me inside the pharmacy as he had said he would be.  He had marched through the heavy snow in the lot just as I had, and I could see the deep trail of his footprints in the snow trailing back across the street in the direction of the Hennessys' house.

Inside the pharmacy, I stood uncomfortably, looking around in wonderment even though I had just been at that store a day earlier. Snow must have shifted from the lot into the store when Mr. Hennessy had unlocked the front door and opened it wide enough to enter, because a small mountain of it had gathered just inside the threshold. The store was unheated, which was logical but surprising anyway, and I shivered as I waited for Mr. Hennessy to prepare the prescriptions for me in the back. "Dr. Waldbaum wanted me to remind you about the water pills," I called out over the aisles of greeting cards, diapers, vitamins, and foot powder.

"I won't forget the water pills," Mr. Hennessy said, and muttered something else under his breath, probably about how he was a professional and didn't need to be reminded by an eighty-year-old retired oncologist about how to refill multiple prescriptions.

I remembered the five dollar bill in my coat pocket from my mom and walked carefully down the aisle of household goods to retrieve a 4-pack of toilet paper from the shelf. Meeting Mr. Hennessy back at the front of the store, I handed him the five dollars and he shooed it away.

"One good deed inspires another," he said.

Once back outside the pharmacy, standing hip-deep in snow, my heart began beating a little faster. I checked my phone, and Cheryl had indeed agreed to meet me at the high school.

CHERYL 10:52 AM

OK but I don't want to get in trouble.

Knowing now that the morning held the promise of more danger, I paused to slowly put the toilet paper into my backpack, wanting very much for Mr. Hennessy to lock up the store and leave before he saw where I was going next. I heard his keys jingling behind me, and watched him walk back toward his house over my shoulder before I quickened my pace toward the high school. I didn't need Mr. Hennessy to find it odd that my footprints departing from his store veered off in another direction instead of directly back toward Dr. Waldbaum's house.

The high school appeared around the corner of Tallmadge Road and filled me with a strange combination of dread, wistfulness, and rage. As an eighth grader, I had ridden my bike past the high school often, eager to leave junior high and walk the halls of the enormous brick building. I had been suppressing my anger over my expulsion for weeks, reassuring myself that it was a small price to pay for Mischa's life. But my banishment from the high school hadn't been a guarantee that Mischa would live, it was simply a punishment for having been outsmarted by Violet. Seeing the building before me, flanked by its snow covered parking lots and pristine football field, I felt the full intensity of my anger over having lost out on my high school experience because of Violet. It was my junior year. It was supposed to have been the best year of my life.

I walked through the West parking lot, which was where I had hopped into Mrs. Emory's car and floored it the day Trey and I were arrested. My mom had avoided driving me past the high school during the court proceedings, and this was the first time I'd returned to the scene of my crime. At the far end of the lot were the locked gates sticking out of the snow which led to the football field and track. Even despite the brilliant glare bouncing off the snow, I could see that the bleachers were completely covered in snow. From where I stood, they looked like an oddly-formed mountain. The days when I had sat on the lowest row of the bleachers along with the other members of the color guard during football games seemed like a century ago.

On the edge of the East parking lot, I cleared snow off of a bench with the sleeve of my jacket and sat down. I stared up at the high school at the second-floor window of Mr. Dean's history classroom, remembering how different things had been on the first day of school when Olivia and Candace were still alive. On the first day of junior year, I was still an outsider, an outcast. If I hadn't lost weight over the summer while visiting my dad and Rhonda in Florida, Olivia might never have complimented me on my handbag in early September. She might never have invited me to sit with her, Candace, and Mischa in the cafeteria. I might not have been invited to her Sweet Sixteen birthday party, and I would have been completely ignorant of Violet's involvement in Olivia and Candace's death.

I wished—just for a second—that I could go back in time and do it all again to remove myself from those events.

Fifteen minutes had passed. It wasn't like Cheryl to be late, and I wondered for a moment if she had decided not to meet me, or was so afraid of getting in trouble that she had done something unfathomably stupid, like ask her mother to come with her. Just as I began to realize with extreme annoyance that I needed to use a bathroom soon and it was too cold to continue sitting on that bench waiting for Cheryl, I saw a figure crossing the street. It was her, wearing a very uncool padded puffer jacket and a rainbow knit hat. I almost didn't recognize her without her bright red glasses frames.

"No glasses!" I exclaimed when she came within earshot.

"Contacts," she explained with a proud smile. "Finally."

"You look really different," I said. She did, in a way that made it difficult to say whether she looked better or worse. I had known Cheryl to wear glasses since second grade. Without them, her eyes seemed a little smaller and nose looked a little more crooked. Her bright glasses frames had balanced her face and she looked like a different person without them.

"So..." she said, looking around. "I'm here. You may have noticed that we're the only two people walking around our entire town right now."

"Yeah," I said. "Thank you for coming. I know it's a weird request, and I wouldn't ask unless it was a matter of life and death."

Cheryl raised one eyebrow at me as if to suggest that she hardly believed that whatever was in the high school could really make the difference between someone living and dying. "Whose life and death?"

I shrugged. Cheryl knew nothing about the game played at Olivia's birthday party, or about how we believed Violet had been responsible for killing Olivia and Candace. I'd purposefully dodged her questions in letters, not wanting to put any of the story down on paper in writing. "It's a long story, Cheryl. And I'd only sound like a crazy person if I told you."

To my great surprise, Cheryl sat down on the bench. "I'm listening."

Without her saying another word, I realized that something had changed in Cheryl over the last six weeks. Maybe the transformation had even started before I'd been shipped away to Dearborn, and I'd been too distracted to notice. But she was giving me an ultimatum. I had to provide her with my reason for wanting to go into the high school and she had to believe it, or she wasn't letting me in.

"Okay. So, back in September, when Olivia Richmond turned sixteen, she threw a small slumber party," I began. I sat down on the park bench next to Cheryl and told her everything, with one small lie. I didn't tell her that Violet had seen Jennie's death in our house fire instead of mine. I told her that Violet had predicted I would choke after Candace would drown, and that my death was next in the lineup. Mischa had never been particularly nice to any of the less popular girls in school dating back even as far as kindergarten. I couldn't afford to give Cheryl a reason to deny me help, and saving Mischa's life instead of mine would have been ample reason for her to have decided to simply walk home.

"Holy..." Cheryl said, her eyes enormous. "McKenna, that's just..."

I wanted to cry, knowing how unbelievable it all sounded coming out of my mouth. If I put myself in Cheryl's shoes, I would have assumed McKenna Brady was either the world's biggest liar or the world's most off-the-rails lunatic. I was accusing Violet of having consorted with evil spirits to commit gruesome murders, claiming that ghosts had been haunting my bedroom, and insisting that even though I'd gotten myself kicked out of school, Violet was still some kind of murderous mastermind. I sounded just like Candace in the fall after Olivia's death: obsessed.

"I know, I know," I trailed off, wishing I hadn't bothered telling Cheryl. The expression on her face was one of total horror, and not—I suspected—horror because of what Violet had done, but horror because I just sounded so utterly mentally insane. "It all sounds pretty ridiculous when I tell the story from the start. That's why Trey and I haven't told anyone, not even our parents, because it just seems so unbelievable. I know you don't believe me," I said. "You don't have to believe me. I know it's all true. And I believe in my heart that I'm going to die next."

"I believe you," Cheryl finally said after a long pause, nodding her head up and down slowly. "You haven't heard about Tracy Hartford, have you?"

Tracy Hartford, junior class gossip, was pretty much the last person I expected to hear from while I was away at Dearborn. She had rubbed me the wrong way for a long time before high school, and even more after she had buddied up to Violet after Olivia died and Violet won Olivia's student government presidency. Tracy was as superficial and as fake as girls in high school could get.

"What about her?" I asked.

"She's not in school anymore," Cheryl said. "She fell asleep in class twice in November and when her mother took her to the doctor, it turned out she had bacterial meningitis. The school was shut down for two days so that a private cleaning company could come in and scrub everything."

"Oh my god," I said. I hadn't heard. I heard nothing much from the high school other than what Cheryl and Erica told me in their letters. Mischa hadn't mentioned the school closing, but she went to St. Patrick's and probably hadn't thought much of it if her older sister Amanda had gotten to stay home from school for two days in November. "That's awful. Is she going to be okay?"

"It's an infection in the tissue around her brain," Cheryl said carefully. "I mean, I don't know her too well but she's been in the hospital for two months. That can't be good. Michael Walton is being very hush-hush about it. He sits with Violet Simmons at lunch time and Stephanie deMilo is filling in for Tracy as Class Secretary. I thought they'd cancel the ski trip in January since Tracy was the one who had done all the work to organize it, but..." Cheryl shrugged, indicating that the ski trip was still on.

I thought of the fourth and fifth girls drawn in the condensation on my window the night before. If Tracy was intended as the fourth to die, who would be the fifth?

"Has anyone ever mentioned Tracy playing any weird games with Violet?" I asked, knowing that the likelihood of that was slim.

"No, but Violet threw a slumber party at her house on Halloween. All of those bratty girls on the pom pon squad were talking about it," Cheryl said.

I stood up from the bench. "Cheryl, I don't want you to get in trouble, and I'll understand if you say no. But I really need to use your key to go inside the high school and check Nurse Lindvall's records for any information about Violet."

Cheryl reached under her long coat and withdrew her keychain from her jeans pocket. She singled out the large utility key for the school door and pulled it around the keychain to take it off, and handed it to me.

"You don't have to come inside," I told her. "If I get caught, I can say that I stole it from you."

"But if I come with you, I can say I was looking for my retainer, which I thought maybe I had left in the band room when I was locking up the color guard flags before break," Cheryl said enthusiastically. "And I can say you just happened to be with me, and it was cold out, and I didn't want you to wait outside."

As Cheryl used the key to expertly open the sticky lock on the East door, I scolded myself for ditching her as a friend earlier in the school year. Cheryl was pretty awesome. I felt lousy about deceiving her about being the next to die, and hoped at some point in my life I would be able to stop telling so many lies.

We stepped into the strangely cold, dark hallway and Cheryl closed the door firmly behind us and then punched a five-digit code into the alarm system on the wall behind the door.

"How many students have keys to the school building?" I asked absent mindedly as she tucked the key back into her jeans pocket.  "Me, Phillip Horvath, I think that's it. Band people are the only ones who ever come to school before teachers."

The high school was eerily quiet when completely empty. I had never been in the building before when the heat was turned off and lights weren't on. The locked entrance to the band room was just a few steps away from the East door to the building, and Cheryl looked down the long hallway leading to the nurse's office with trepidation. "I've never, like, explored before when the school wasn't open. This is going to be kind of weird."

We walked down the long hallway of lockers past classrooms where mostly freshman classes were held and turned right at the end. Then we walked down another long hallway which took us past the back entrances to the high school auditorium, past the trophy cases, and then ultimately to where the school administration's offices were located. The last time I had been in Principal Nylander's office was when me, Candace, Mischa and Violet had been rounded up for a stern lecture about playing occult games after Olivia's death. Directly across the hall from the administration offices was the door to Nurse Lindvall's office.

I reached out and jiggled the door knob with my purple glove. Locked.

"I don't have a key for that," Cheryl told me apologetically.

I examined the door knob to see if it was the kind of lock that could be popped with a hair pin. It wasn't. After taking off my gloves and shoving them into my coat pockets, I reached into the back pocket of my jeans to withdraw my wallet, and from that I plucked my Dearborn student ID. The card was hard plastic with my washed-out, frowning photo on the front.

"What are you doing?" Cheryl asked as I slid the card into the crack between the door and the door frame. "Are you seriously breaking into Nurse Lindvall's office?"

 "Do you have a better idea?" I asked her just as I felt the pop of the ID card disengaging the lock. I jiggled the handle again, and this time the door opened inward. I stepped into the nurse's office and flipped on the light. The office looked as it always did: clean, cozy, safe. Framed photos of Nurse Lindvall and her family were scattered along the top of the desk. Nurse Lindvall's oldest son, Jeff, had been a senior when I was a freshman, and all of the boys in his class gave him a hard time because Nurse Lindvall was, by most accounts, really hot. Suddenly, being in that office with the lights on made the mission seem more urgent. Even though there was little chance that anyone else would make their way through the snow and into the high school on the day after Christmas, we were, indeed, trespassing.

"Do you know where she keeps the key to the file cabinet?" Cheryl asked me.

I slid open the top drawer of the desk and found a small key ring in one of the components in one of its plastic organizational trays. "I think one of these will do the trick, but there's only one way to find out."

Impatiently, I tried each of the keys on the ring until the very last key I attempted fit into the lock on the tall metal filing cabinet in the corner behind the cot. I twisted the key to the right, and the top drawer budged open. "Gotcha," I muttered. The top file drawer contained student medical records for students' last names alphabetically A – F. With the draw extended fully, the center of gravity of the file cabinet shifted and the entire thing almost fell over on top of me.

"Geez!" I exclaimed, catching the cabinet and pushing it back upright. "She should reorganize this thing. That's dangerous!"  I closed the top drawer and opened the bottom drawer next, skipping ahead to last names S – Z.

"Sedgewick, Shin, Shulman," I read names aloud from the tabs on the folders. "Simmons!" I pulled the file folder titled, Simmons, V. out of the drawer and nudged the door shut with the front of my snow boat. Curious, Cheryl checked to see if the coast was clear one last time and then stepped into the office with me for a peek at the file.

Inside the manila folder, there was a photo copy of a record of immunizations from when Violet was a baby. There weren't any surprises on that: diphtheria, tetanus, Pertussis. There was another photo copied immunization record from when Violetwas five years old and presumably entering kindergarten in Lake Forest, Illinois, detailing an inoculation for measles, mumps, rubella and another for polio.  As far as I could remember my own visits to the doctor as a small child, that all seemed normal to me.

"There's nothing here," Cheryl said. "I don't know what you're looking for, but this is all pretty standard."

Under the two immunization records, however, was a much more recent piece of paper. It appeared to be an email from Dr. Samantha Boynton in Lake Forest, and listed two prescription medications that Violetneeded to take for her frequent diagnosis of bronchitis. When Violet incurred any kind of lung infection, she had always typically been prescribed a combination of Prednisone and Doryx Oral, a mild steroid and an antibiotic. Cheryl saw the intriguing part of Dr. Boynton's email further down the page before I did, and she pointed to it with her finger.

"Violet suffers from chronic lung infections as a long-term result of Bronchopulmonary dysplasia (BPD) that she suffered as an infant born five weeks premature," Cheryl read. "At the onset of any respiratory infection, Violet should visit her primary care physician for immediate treatment."

"What does that mean?" I asked, and Cheryl and I both whipped out our phones in unison, immediately going to our search engines and tapping in Violet's condition. The search results revealed that the condition was common among premature babies, causing fluid to build up in lungs not quite ready to function on their own, which could lead to scarring of the lung tissue.

"Do you think that Violetmight have been in danger of dying at any point because of this BPD?" I asked Cheryl.

She shrugged. "I don't really know anything about preemie babies," she admitted. "It sounds bad, though."

The only other item in Violet's file was Nurse Lindvall's own record of Violet requesting ibuprofen for a headache the week after Olivia's birthday party. Feeling like I'd gotten everything I'd wanted out of this little adventure on school property, I returned Violet's file to the cabinet, locked the cabinet again, and placed the keys back in Nurse Lindvall's desk drawer.

We carefully closed up the nurse's office again, and rushed back toward the East door. Cheryl re-entered the security system's code and we stepped back out into the bright overcast morning.

"Thanks," I said once were back in the parking lot.

"But, now what?" Cheryl asked, looking around.

"I don't know," I admitted. "I have to share this with Trey and Mischa. We don't really have a plan. We just know we need to try to bring an end to this before Trey and I have to go back to school."

"But McKenna... what if you can't? I mean, how are you going to stop her?" Cheryl asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

"We think the way to stop her is to force her into playing a similar game with us, but this time, sending her soul over to the other side. The problem is, we think it might be a waste of time to do that before we understand what her relationship is to those spirits, and why she'd given Olivia and Candace to them in the first place," I said. "We have a lot of theories. Maybe it's the spirit of her grandmother making good on a vow to get back property she thought was stolen from her when Violet's grandfather died. Maybe Violet had some kind of close brush with death and made a pact with the spirits to trade other lives for her own. We just don't know."

"You have to let me help you," Cheryl insisted.

I shook my head, declining her offer. "It's too risky, Cheryl. I don't want anyone else getting caught up in this."

"Well, I can't just walk away and wish you luck! There has to be something I can do."

"I'll think about it," I promised, and then hoisted my backpack over my shoulder. "For now, I really need to get back to my neighbors and drop off these prescriptions before anyone wonders where I am."

The walk back to Martha Road seemed even more dangerously cold than the walk into town. I texted Mischa and informed her of Tracy Hartford's medical condition. If what Cheryl had told me was true, it certainly seemed like Violet had continued to recruit new playmates after Olivia and Candace had died. While I had little love in my heart for Tracy Hartford, I truly hoped she wasn't dying and that her diagnosis was just a very sad coincidence. Trey and I had been burned earlier that autumn by making incorrect assumptions about clues from spirits, so I was a little uneasy about placing too much significance on the illustration drawn on my window the previous night. But it stuck in my head because there was nothing better to replace it as a lead. Five girls. Who would be the fifth?