Even though I already knew that I couldn't trust most people with the secret of the talisman, it still was unsettling that the information was out there thanks to Dr. Reed, and I couldn't do much about it.

To my surprise, it wasn't Sierra or Dominic who were the first people to see the talisman as a gift rather than the curse it still seemed to be. It wasn't like I had much of a choice to trust them in the beginning, but they still hadn't made me regret it.

After our chat with Dr. Reed about the questionable behavior from Dr. Rainier and his lack of answers, I headed back to my dorm alone. It was quiet and peaceful and Dominic-free there, and hopefully, I'd be able to hide my new ring before Sierra could get her hands on it. I certainly couldn't resist it.

At least now I had a reason to go to ASL, even if it was just to bother Dr. Rainier until he told me what I wanted to know about the talisman. Although I still didn't understand how it worked or how it determined which thoughts it deemed worthy to act upon, maybe I could figure out a way to have it help me get answers.

"Alright, talisman, I know we've had our ups and downs, but I'd really appreciate it if you helped me out here and guided me to an answer to where you're from, who made you, or how you ended up in my hands. Please and thank you," I said out loud. No one was around to hear the excessive politeness, anyway.

I had definitely asked before and got nothing in return, but maybe it would be different after the whole sky and other things incident.

Ugh. Why did I have to think about that again? It was like I had just forgotten about the first incident in the back of Butterfly's magic shop, and then it happened again. How was I supposed to let it go?

Maybe there was a reason I couldn't forget about it. After all, I had spent my entire life ignoring the problems I didn't want to face.

Damn talisman.

***

Jack had another rehearsal scheduled for the evening, and although Trailfest was quite some time behind us, I couldn't help but feel like that was part of the reason the only gig they had played since then was at a bar. That wasn't my fault, of course, but I had a little something to do with it. But only a little.

I didn't understand why Sierra insisted that she also come to watch the practice session, considering she just took all the warmth from the space heater from me the last time, but Jack didn't seem to mind.

There was a steady downpour outside Harvey's garage, but no one in the band, not even Jack, seemed concerned about their instruments and sound equipment getting wet. Instead, Harvey plugged his microphone into an amp, and he looked up at me.

"How's it going, Lindsay?" he asked.

Was he talking to me? I thought he knew I thought he didn't deserve to be the leader of the band. "It's fine. Find anywhere to play a show in the near future? You're running out of time here."

He was graduating in the spring, and then what would happen to the band that introduced me to Jack? It would be dead.

"Still got plenty of time," Harvey replied. For someone who was supposed to be the charismatic leader of the band, he certainly didn't have much to say.

But that was fine with me. I didn't have much to say to him, especially after the embarrassment known as the ASL partner chat. I told him more than he needed to know about me, and exactly none of it was in sign language.

After a second of silence besides the noise from the drum set being fussed with, Jack spoke up. "Didn't you say that you like Queen, Sierra?"

She nodded. "Doesn't everyone?"

"Rich people at a gathering celebrating the Oregon Trail apparently do not," Jack said, and Sierra laughed.

If my mother had been from Tillamook, she probably would have found a way to make it on the guestlist despite being only well-off instead of rich, and she wouldn't have cared to hear Fat Bottomed Girls, so the story added up.

A car pulled up in front of the house on the street, and unfortunately, I knew exactly who it belonged to.

This certainly wasn't the first time Dominic showed up uninvited to Harvey's garage. The only time he left me alone was when I briefly had the positive energy talisman that was now in Sierra's possession, but she probably didn't carry hers everywhere like I did.

"Great," I mumbled and turned to Sierra. "We're not sharing the space heater with him."

"Emotionally cold people get to stay cold," she replied with a small laugh.

She had no idea just how cold he could be, and I certainly wasn't a bright ray of sunshine myself most of the time.

"Is this the guy you were telling me about during your ASL partner chat?" Harvey asked. "I gave you full credit, by the way."

"Shut up about it," I said.

"What the hell is this? Middle school? Just have sex and get it over with." Harvey raised his voice to an obnoxiously high octave. "I just want Dominic to like me." He giggled and twirled an imaginary strand of hair around his finger.

Sierra straightened her posture up and turned to Jack. "We called it!"

Jack gave her a smile in return, but they wouldn't listen even if I told them that they didn't call anything. He was just a necessary evil that I had to deal with in order to keep the talisman in my possession. Even though it wasn't the treasure I had in mind when I first bought the metal detector, the talisman could have ended up in much worse hands. My intentions were sometimes okay, but there were plenty of people who didn't even reach that bare minimum.

As Dominic approached the garage all dressed in his dark fitted clothes that were already drenched, he gave me a tight-lipped smile that meant that he was far from happy. Of course, it wasn't my fault that the talisman made him stalk me, so I waved back with a genuine smile just because.

"You've got to stop inviting all your friends to our rehearsals. It's distracting," Harvey said to Jack.

"I didn't—" Jack hesitated. "You know what? That's my bad. I won't do it again."

I wasn't sure how he thought he was going to live up to his word on that issue since none of us could control what Dominic did, but I didn't say anything. It wasn't helpful, and it would only look suspicious.

I smiled to myself as Dominic took a spot between Sierra and me by the heater. Good job, Lindsay, doing better at this secret keeping than ever before.

"Hey, no," Sierra said and nudged him away from herself and closer to me. "Lindsay, you said we weren't gonna share with him."

"So you want me to get hypothermia and die?" Dominic asked.

"I didn't say that. I just said that I don't want to share, and if you got hypothermia because of it, I would only cry a little bit," Sierra said.

Dominic hesitated for a moment, then turned to me instead of responding to Sierra. I wouldn't have known how to reply to her either, though, so I couldn't blame him, and I couldn't blame Sierra either. I probably would only cry a little bit too.

"Any reason I'm here now?" he asked as the drummer started to play.

I shook my head. "I wasn't even thinking about you before your car showed up here uninvited, if that's what you're asking."

"Just checking," he said much more loudly than necessary to be heard over the noise that Harvey considered singing.

What was there to check on? Everyone involved knew that the talisman thought its job was to do the opposite of what I actually wanted. Well, everyone except for me. Every once in a while, it seemed that there was something to its madness, even if I didn't actually understand it.

I didn't have any way to reply to that, so I turned back to the band to watch Jack play his guitar. I wasn't sure what song they were attempting to play, but it didn't even sound like a song at all. It just sounded like four people doing whatever they wanted and hoping for the best.

"You don't think that I would have anything to do with the whole stalking thing, right? I know we were blaming you for a while, then we shifted all the blame onto the talisman, but it doesn't have anything to do with me, even if Dr. Reed wants to think so based on her little whiteboard of half-stories and loosely connected events," I said.

"When were we ever blaming me? I'm the real victim here," Dominic said.

I held in a laugh, mostly because I was sure he honestly believed what he just said.

"Look, Lindsay, I hate this more than you do—"

I interrupted him. "Do you now?"

He nodded. "Well, yeah. It's not like I enjoy dropping everything because of shit that's out of my control, and I really don't think you're thrilled with me right now."

I didn't respond to that right away. That may have been the first time in history that he considered my feelings, even if they were ones that I wasn't interested in getting to know.

"I'm not eavesdropping or anything, but I just wanted to say that I think you two should just sit down and talk about everything. Like, really talk. No lying, no judging, no anything," Sierra said.

"Sierra, you're definitely eavesdropping, and I don't think you understand what's really happening right now, so you should probably mind your own business for once," I said as nicely as I could. I put on a fake smile. That seemed friendly.

"I understand just fine, thank you." Sierra paused to shake her head at me. "It's like Harvey said. Just—"

Hopefully, Dominic didn't hear that over the rain on the roof and the so-called music. "No."

Sierra took in a breath. "Fine. I'm done not eavesdropping."

No one said anything for a second. And even though there was plenty of noise to cover up the silence, there was a feeling in the air that was louder than anything else in the garage.

"So what did Harvey say?" Dominic finally asked.

"Oh my god," I muttered before raising my voice so he could definitely hear me over the noise. "He didn't say anything. No one ever says anything that means anything."

"You don't have to yell," he said. "It's always zero to a hundred so fast with you."

"With me? Weren't you the one who was just whining about how you're gonna get hypothermia and die?"

"Because that's a thing that people sometimes die of, and that's not how I see myself getting killed."

"How do you see yourself getting killed? I feel like there's a lot to unpack in that statement," Sierra said, but both Dominic and I ignored her.

"So he actually did say something and you're just upset about it? Is that right?" Dominic asked.

Before I could tell him that nothing Harvey said mattered, the sound equipment stopped amplifying the noise of the instruments and microphone so all that was audible was the drums, which were loud enough on their own.

I smiled. Good.

But that silence didn't last. The microphone shrieked and was amplified by at least a thousand times, and the sound pierced my ears and rattled in my teeth. I covered my ears, and when that didn't help, I shut my eyes as tightly as I could and dropped to my knees.

Not again. How many times was stupid shit like this going to happen?

"What the hell?" someone shouted, but my hands blocked enough of that sound out that I couldn't tell who it was by the voice.

As quickly as it came, the shrill screeching stopped, and I opened my eyes to find everyone else in the exact same position as me, on the ground without any clue of how that happened. On the other hand, I had a terrible feeling I knew why it happened.

"I guess the rain must have gotten the sound equipment wet," Jack said.

He knew better than that. He was just trying to help me.

"So it's true. Everything he said is true," Harvey said.

"True? What's true?" I sputtered. My ears were still ringing, and my teeth felt like they were about to vibrate right out of my skull, but I needed to know what the hell could Harvey know about the situation.

Jack was the only person who we both knew, except for—

If the "he" Harvey was referring to was who I thought it was, Dr. Reed and her band of intellectuals were going to have some explaining to do.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hello everyone, and thank you so much for reading! I have a couple things that I want to say, so buckle up for this author's note.

Once again, I'd like to thank you for your patience. Part of the reason that these updates are taking longer than usual is because I think I have a path to the end of the book, but some of the stuff I've already written doesn't fit with it, and I already want to rewrite the crap out of this to make it clearer, more logical and efficient, and just better overall. But at the same time, that's not something I want to do to y'all at this point, so I think I'm going to suck it up, keep writing, and then fix everything sometime in the future like I did with The Exchange. So if you have any feedback about what's working, what's confusing, or anything else, I'd love to hear it. It would be a huge help to me.

Next, I'm getting kind of close to 1M reads on Fluke, so I want to do something to celebrate when it finally happens. When people read my works while they're in progress, I feel like we build a decent relationship over that time, so I consider y'all to be in a super secret club with me or something. That being said, what kind of celebration do you think people would want for one million reads? Another bonus chapter? A giveaway of some kind? I really don't know what I should do, but I sure as hell would never be in this situation without my readers, so I feel like I owe it to everyone.