The last bell rings, and I make my way through the hallway. Two girls ahead of me whisper behind their hands and look in my direction. The weird thing is, they don’t laugh. They frown.

I unload my books into my locker. Please let Elijah have made some headway. His not coming back to school is a good sign. I click my locker shut and turn around. Mary, Alice, and Susannah are standing right behind me.

“Whoa,” I say. “Way to creepily sneak up on someone.”

“I’m so glad you think so,” Alice says. “I worked long and hard on that technique.”

Mary bounces slightly and grins at me. “Give it to her, Suze.”

Susannah pulls a small black velvet box from her Victorian jacket. She holds it out to me in her palm. “From us.”

I look at each of them. “What’s this for?”

“Just open it,” Mary says, clasping her hands together with all the enthusiasm of a kid at a birthday party.

I flip the lid. Inside is a delicate silver broom necklace. It looks handmade.

Alice pulls her own broom necklace out of her blouse.

“It’s our personal symbol for our circle. It binds us. Alice chose it when we were kids. We all wear one,” Susannah says.

“It’s silly,” Alice says. “But at eight, I thought it was super cool.”

I open my mouth to say thanks, but my voice catches. Elijah was right. I do belong in Salem. And all of a sudden, I want to cry.

“Well, it’s not that bad,” Alice says, but she’s smiling.

“It’s not bad at all,” I manage, smiling too.

“Consider yourself official,” Susannah says, and links her arm through mine as we head down the hallway toward Wardwell’s.

I slip the necklace over my head just as we pass a couple holding hands. They look from the Descendants to me and frown.

“I think we can definitively conclude that whatever gossip Niki and Blair spread today was related to me,” I say.

“Agreed,” Susannah says. “Normally, I would be annoyed. But I’m actually relieved.”

I nod. “The only strange part is that whatever they said isn’t getting me judgy looks but sad ones. Have you guys heard anything about it?”

“No,” Alice says. “But people wouldn’t tell us rumors about you. They know better.”

“Let’s be honest, Alice,” Mary says. “People don’t usually talk to us at all about anything. Not if they have to meet that death stare of yours. And I don’t know what you saw today, but we got just as many looks as Sam.”

They got looks, too? I stop in front of my history classroom. “I’ll be fast.”

“We’ll wait here,” Susannah says.

I push open the door, and Wardwell looks up from a stack of papers. “Please sit.”

I plop down in a chair next to his desk.

He clears his throat. “I’d like you to complete the remainder of the work you missed by writing a five-page paper.”

“Sounds good. I can do that,” I say quickly.

“I want you to use the research you’ve done these past weeks on the Titanic to create a fictional narrative,” he continues.

The last thing I want to write is a paper on the Titanic, but I know him well enough to not even attempt to ask for a different subject.

“For fun I will give you an object that is similar to objects recovered in the wreckage. You will examine it, determining what kind of a passenger might have carried it and what their story was from the moment they boarded until the moment they arrived home—or didn’t arrive home, as the case may be.”

Object. I glance at the door and catch a glimpse of Alice’s face in the small window.

Wardwell opens his desk drawer. “Be careful with it and do not lose it.” He places a silver book the size of a playing card on the desk in front of me. It twinkles in the bright classroom lighting.

I stand up so fast that my chair almost topples over. The silver book from my dream.

“Is there a problem?” he asks me, examining my face like he’s looking for something specific.

“What? No. Charley horse,” I say, and rub the back of my calf. Damn it. I can’t believe I reacted like that. This lack of sleep has me all jumpy.

Alice comes through the door, with Mary and Susannah behind her. “Want a ride home, Sam?” She feigns surprise. “Oh, sorry, Mr. Wardwell. I didn’t realize you guys were having a meeting.”

“I’d ask you ladies to wait outside, but we are technically finished here.” Mr. Wardwell points at the silver book. “Make sure you take that with you, Sam.”

I don’t move. There is no way I’m touching that thing.

Think. I scan his desk. “Is it old?”

“Fairly.”

“Oh, well, I don’t want to just shove it in my bag, then,” I say. I grab two tissues from his tissue box.

“It’s not that delicate,” he says, but I’ve already got it wrapped up.

I make my way out of the classroom with the girls. We put a good hundred feet between us and his door before we start talking.

“You know this is the silver book from my dream, right?” I say, pointing at my shoulder bag.

“Why do you think we came in, Sherlock?” says Alice, and pushes open the door leading to the back field. “You seriously need to work on hiding your emotions. You looked ten kinds of flustered in there. If Wardwell is in on this Titanic spell, you just set off warning bells.”

“Did he say anything we should know about?” Susannah asks.

“Possibly. He did use the word ‘object’ to describe it,” I say. “If he knew anything about our conversations, he could have chosen that word to mess with me.”

“He also looked really adamant about you taking it,” Mary says as we walk across the grass. “He didn’t take his eyes off you.”

The guys’ lacrosse team jogs past us.

“Sam,” Dillon says, and stops. His usual happy tone is missing. “Hey, can I talk to you for a minute?” He glances at the girls. “Alone, if that’s cool?”

“Uh, sure. What’s up?” I say. Did something happen with Jaxon?

He leads me away from the girls. “You’re not getting in a car with them, are you?”

“Huh?”

His breathing is slightly labored from his run. “The Descendants. Don’t you think you should steer clear of them, at least until you know if it’s true?”

“Hold on, what are you talking about?”

He looks at me like I’m the one saying shocking things. “Everyone is saying that it was your stepmother who tried to hang you in the woods. And the reason the Descendants haven’t told anyone is because they’re planning their revenge or something. Everyone’s saying they’ve bewitched you. I mean, it is super weird that you guys haven’t hung out for six months and now all of a sudden you’re inseparable.”

My stepmother. My stomach clenches so hard I grab it. “What?” I walk two feet away from him and then back. What is he saying? People know it was Vivian? But how would they even…Jaxon. The conversation we had in his truck. Holy shit. I press the heel of my hand into my forehead. Jaxon must have told Niki. It’s as if someone sucker-punched me. I know Jaxon’s under a spell and that it’s not his fault, but the betrayal is so big that I can’t swallow my upset. Tears prick my eyes.

I jog back to the girls.

“Sam, wait!” Dillon calls after me, but I don’t stop.

I speed-walk right past them.

“What the hell happened back there?” Alice asks, keeping pace with me.

I get in the Jeep and they follow. “They know about Vivian. Niki knows. Which means Jaxon told her.” My voice catches on his name.

“Shit!” Alice says, and hits the wheel with the palm of her hand.

“How could he do that?” Mary says. “That’s horrible. Even under a spell, that’s horrible.”

“And people are saying that the reason you guys didn’t tell anyone is that you’re planning your revenge. People think we’re suddenly hanging out because you bewitched me.”

“This is Niki’s lie, but it’s not typical. Someone is setting us up,” Susannah says.

“The only thing to do is try to ride it out,” Mary says. “Not acknowledge it. There’s no evidence it was your stepmother. The police would have questioned you about it way earlier. It’s actually good you heard it from Dillon now instead of being surprised in class. Everyone would take your reaction as a confirmation that it’s true.”

“Riding it out isn’t the issue. What if something does happen to me?” I say.

“That was my thought, too,” Alice says. “Now, there’s a story. A reason for us to have conflict.”

“Redd’s warning,” Susannah says. “Maybe you are the target, Sam. And maybe we’re the ones supposed to take the fall for it.”

“It’s the thirteenth,” Mary says.

No one responds.

“The book,” I say. I cover my hand with my sleeve and pull the tissue-wrapped package out onto the seat between me and Susannah.

“Here,” Susannah says, and hands me two pens.

I pull back the tissues with them. The small silver book is engraved with a lacy pattern, and there’s a ship in the center. “You guys? Am I wrong, or is this the same ship drawing that was on those raffle tickets that put the seasickness spell on Susannah? The tickets Blair gave us.”

“You’re not wrong,” Susannah says before anyone else can respond.

We all look at each other.

I push open the front cover with the pens. The off-white first page reads:

“That’s not a silver book, that’s a silver dance card,” Mary says with surprise. “My aunt has some in her antique shop. Women used to carry them at balls and things and write their dance partners down in them.” She leans over the center console to get a better look. “That one looks legitimately old.”

I flip to the next page, but it’s the same as the first, and so are all the ones after it. “A blank dance card, though? What does it mean? It’s the third object in my dream. It has to be significant.”

“Maybe there was an actual dance card on the Titanic that has a real story?” Susannah suggests.

I pull out my phone and search. “Nothing pops up. And all the Titanic artifacts are cataloged in museums. If this was a real one, or a replica of a real one, it would be easy to find.”

My phone vibrates in my hand.

Dad: Where are you?

Me: With the girls.

Dad: I need you to come home now.

I stare at my phone. Something must have happened. He never talks like that.