“JINKIES!” I WHISPER-SHOUTED INTO the early morning darkness. There was only silence.

“Jinkies!” A little louder this time. Still, silence. Until … the soft crack of a twig. Padding footsteps. Then two yellow eyes, blinking out of the dark.

“Come here, you little monster.” I scooped up Jinkies, cuddled the fuzzy kitten tight, then deposited her inside with fresh bowls of food and water. The moment she smelled the food, she forgot my existence. Typical cat.

I know it violates every law of teenage life, but I have to admit: I like waking up early, the sky all pink and smeary with dawn, the whole world asleep. No one to see you, no one to judge you, no one to ask you why you are the way you are and not the way they want you to be. No one to look straight through you without bothering to ask anything at all. Just Jinkies and me, up with the sun.

Our apartment was dead quiet. I tried to be quiet, too, though there wasn’t much need. My mother worked the overnight shift and wouldn’t be home for another couple hours. My father, who could sleep through a jackhammer, usually didn’t get up till noon—which, okay, was reasonable on a Sunday. If I tell you he slept that late every day, though, and even once he got up usually stayed in his pj’s for another couple hours, staring out the window or listening to depressing music and waiting for the time to pass, you might have some questions.

I had some questions. But I knew better than to ask them. The Dinkley house wasn’t exactly a model of open and honest communication. We loved each other. But that didn’t mean we knew how to talk to each other. Not about anything real.

When my grandmother was still alive, mornings were our time together. She would wake up even earlier than I did, and the smell of cinnamon toast or, if I was really lucky, chilaquiles, would drag me out of bed and into the kitchen. It was our secret Sunday ritual, just the two of us, talking at the table, about anything and everything—with her, there was no question I wasn’t allowed to ask.

But that was a long time ago. Back when we lived in a house with plenty of bedrooms and a big backyard, instead of this tiny apartment where everything was always broken and I slept on a futon shoved into an oversized closet and pretended it was a bedroom. Back when my parents both had jobs they loved and I had a best friend I loved and life was basically okay—back when I was too young to realize things could be any other way.

Jinkies’s little hide-and-seek act had almost made me late for work, but I pedaled faster than the rickety old bike had ever managed to go, and showed up right on time (if a little bit sweaty). The Crystal Cove Haunted Village wasn’t exactly a village, but then, it wasn’t haunted, either, at least as far as I knew. Truth in advertising wasn’t really what they were going for.

What they were going for: A tacky, tourist-revenue-generating combination of educational historical exhibits and hair-raising amusement park rides fueled by a steady stream of greasy food, sugary drinks, and all the overpriced crap your kid could beg you to buy. It was another reason to like the early mornings—on days when my shift started before the park opened, I could count on at least a couple hours free from little kids screaming and puking, rude customers expecting me to pretend they were right, and jerky jocks and their plastic girlfriends who ignored me in school but still expected me to slip them free pizza and ride tickets and thought it was hilarious to smear cotton candy in my hair or steal my glasses when I refused.

It’s not exactly the part-time job you’d expect I would have. If you saw me on the street, checked out the turquoise streak in my hair, the chunky glasses, the combat boots, you’d figure me for a record-store geek or some hipster clocking hours in an anarchist bookstore that smelled like incense. Not that there were any anarchist bookstores in Crystal Cove, or any record stores left, anywhere, but you get the picture. Working at the Haunted Village was sometimes dull, sometimes dirty, sometimes humiliating, almost always lame, but it was the best job I could get, and we needed the money. It also felt a little like home. Maybe because it used to be.

Long story.

Anyway, the Haunted Village was filled with fake 1850s-style stores (alongside all the real ones where you could buy your made-in-China souvenirs). It was my glamorous job to unlock them, turn on the lights, and make sure no animals had done any damage—or left any disgusting little treats behind—in the night. The giant gates at the entrance did a pretty good job keeping out any troublemaking humans, but the raccoons and coyotes still somehow found a way inside.

It was usually a pretty uneventful part of the job, and that Sunday started off no differently. The candle-making store was fine, the apothecary fine, the mining outfitter fine … and then came the sheriff’s department. I stopped short just before opening the door. Something inside was yowling. It sounded like a wounded cat or a rabid raccoon or, well, I’m not really a nature girl so I had no idea what it sounded like, except like something I was in no hurry to meet.

I could have gone to get the night manager. But the night manager happened to be my mother, and I wasn’t especially eager to get my mommy to do my job for me. I could also have gotten the day manager, but Jerry Printz was my mother’s boss, and also an annoying twerp always looking for infractions to cite and pay to dock. It had taken me months to convince him I was responsible enough for this shift—I wasn’t about to make it seem like I couldn’t handle myself with an angry raccoon.

I unlocked the door, opened it, and—

Okay, I admit it.

I screamed.

Just for a second.

And only because the moment I opened the door, I realized that was no angry raccoon. It was a person. Screaming her head off. It startled me enough that I screamed back. Then I took a breath, and a closer look.

“Marcy?” I said. “What are you doing in there?”

It was definitely Marcy Heller, second-prettiest girl in the junior class—though she took first prize when it came to meanest, if you ask me—locked inside the fake jail cell. (Fake cell, real lock—the better to spook little kids with.) She was rattling the bars, shrieking at me to let her out.

I’d known Marcy my whole life—technically, we were second or third cousins, although in a town this small that’s not much of an achievement—and I’d almost never seen her with a hair out of place. But that day, her hair was a rat’s nest, her eyes were wild, her cheeks mascara streaked, her skin pale as a sheet of paper. She looked like … well, she looked like someone who’d spent the night alone trapped in a haunted jail. She looked scared out of her mind.

I fumbled for the keys, opened the doors of her cage. “Are you okay? What are you doing here?”

She didn’t say anything.

“What happened, Marcy?” I put a hand on her shoulder, but she shrugged me off, hard.

“Like I’d tell you,” she snapped. “Take me to see someone in charge.”

That sounded a lot more like the Marcy I knew, the one who didn’t think I counted.

“Fine,” I said, and I made sure there wasn’t a shred of concern in my voice. “Let’s go.”

I brought her to the managers’ office, which technically belonged to Jerry Printz, but my mother got to squat in it during her overnight shift. Lucky her. She was still there, handing off the details of the night to Jerry. I introduced Marcy, who was suddenly looking a lot more upset again—the moment we walked into the office, she started crying so hard she couldn’t speak. Which left me.

“I found her locked inside the jail,” I said. “I think she’s been in there most of the night.”

Marcy nodded.

“How would that possibly have happened?” Jerry turned to my mother. “You didn’t check before you closed down last night?”

“Of course I checked,” she said. “She wasn’t there when the park closed.”

Marcy sniffed and mumbled something that sounded like “after that.”

“How would you have gotten in here after hours, young lady?”

This time, Marcy’s answer was a lot clearer. “The gate was unlocked.”

Jerry’s glare swiveled back to my mother; it was the most basic part of her job to make sure all the park gates were locked at night. And she insisted she’d done so.

Which meant someone was mistaken, or someone was lying. Either way, I was absolutely sure that someone wasn’t my mother. Jerry Printz, on the other hand, didn’t look so sure.

“Velma, why don’t you leave us alone so we can get to the bottom of this.”

“Why should I leave when—”

“Velma.”

When my mother says my name in that tone of voice, I know better than to argue. I left her there to fend for herself, which I knew was how she wanted it.

But I still felt like a total traitor.

*   *   *

Once the park opened, my job was to staff the register at the Pizza Panic booth. It was a good shift for a Sunday morning, because no one in their right mind wanted pizza for breakfast. Well, no one, except—

“Can I get, like, six slices, with extra olives, extra jalapeños, extra pineapple, extra anchovies, and, like, extra everything else you got?” That was Shaggy Rogers, for whom every time was pizza time. “And, like, some crusts for Scoob?” Shaggy grinned, and the Great Dane he brought with him everywhere barked hungrily.

“Hey, Scooby,” I said, like he was an old friend, which I guess technically he was. I’ve known Shaggy since we were six years old and Scooby-Doo was just a wriggly little puppy. Dogs weren’t allowed in the park, but somehow Shaggy had managed to wrangle himself an exception. My father would have said, Like father, like son—just like a Rogers to think the rules didn’t apply to him. But I thought it was just that everyone in town loved Scooby-Doo, or at least understood how much Shaggy loved him, and acted accordingly.

And of course, my father didn’t have much to say about anything these days.

“Don’t you think it’s a little early for pizza, Shaggy?”

“Like, it’s never too early for pizza.”

It wasn’t that unusual for Shaggy to wander into the park this early looking for greasy food. He liked to go surfing at sunrise, and the Haunted Village was on his way home. But that day, something about him seemed off.

“You okay, Shaggy?”

He looked like he hadn’t slept. Don’t get me wrong—Shaggy always looks like he hasn’t slept—there’s a reason everyone calls him Shaggy. But he was looking particularly ragged. Almost like he was worried about something. Which was weird, because Shaggy’s whole life philosophy was to never worry about anything, except where the next snack was coming from.

“It’s all good,” he said.

That was part two of his life philosophy. Everything was always all good. I’d known Shaggy forever, but never that well. I’m not sure anyone knew him that well. He seemed easygoing, which made sense, because from the outside, he had a ridiculously easy life. He lived in a huge—if slightly spooky—mansion, and his father had a piece of every business in town. His mom was a cop, though rumor had it her husband wanted her to quit her job. Maybe because he was into the whole stay-at-home parenting thing. Or maybe because (again, as my father liked to say, back when my father said things), it’s tricky to bend the law when you’re married to it. That didn’t stop Shaggy from throwing huge parties whenever his parents left town, which they did almost every month. At Crystal Cove High, that was pretty much all you needed to be popular.

Shaggy could have had all the friends he wanted; he probably could have been homecoming king. (If you could get past the scraggly beard and the faded T-shirts two sizes too big, he was almost handsome, though I never would have told him so.) But Shaggy had never had close friends; he’d certainly never had a girlfriend. And he didn’t seem to care. He didn’t care about much of anything, as far as I could tell, except his stomach and his dog. I liked that about him. He was simple. Sometimes it seemed to me like everyone I knew was wearing a mask, trying to hide who they really were. Shaggy was always just Shaggy.

“You’re looking a little rattled yourself, V. You doing okay?”

I was a little rattled. I couldn’t stop thinking about Marcy, how she’d ended up there—and what she was going to do about it. So I told Shaggy the whole story, figuring he’d laugh it off, the way he laughed everything off, and maybe I could steal a little piece of his chill.

Except that when he heard the story, Shaggy’s chill vaporized.

“Like, whoa. Was she hurt? Did she say what happened?”

“She seemed fine?”

He looked unconvinced.

“I mean, shaken up, yeah. But okay? I—”

“I gotta go,” he said, cutting me off. “Come on, Scoob.”

“But—”

“Party this weekend, V. You should come.” He tossed this over his shoulder as he was walking away, even though we both knew there was no chance in hell I’d ever show my face at one of his parties. But that wasn’t the strange part. It was a running joke between me and Shaggy, that one day I would wake up and decide to become one of the party people.

The strange part was that usually he stuck around to actually enjoy the joke, plaguing me with all the “temptations” I was missing out on, promising me how much I would love hearing Luna Moss rock it as a DJ or watching Fred Jones show off his yoga poses, before inevitably toppling, fully clothed, into the pool. I would tell him it wasn’t my scene, he would tell me I didn’t know until I tried, and I would give him a free slice of pizza to get him to go away.

Everybody’s got a thing. That was ours. So it was weird that he ran off so quickly—and even weirder, I suddenly realized as I heard Scooby mournfully barking in the distance, that he’d left without his pizza.

It was a morning full of bad omens. Maybe I should have expected what came next.

But first, a long, dull stretch without any customers. A lot of time to stare at the sky and count how many minutes stood between me and the rest of my life, beyond Crystal Cove and all its history.

Next, my mother, carrying a big cardboard box, looking miserable.

“I just came to say goodbye, and …” She trailed off, as if she didn’t know what to say. Which was not like my mother at all.

“What’s wrong?”

She sighed. “I’ve been suspended, mi amor. Because that girl claims I left the gate open. There’s going to be an investigation of whatever happened in here last night, but given how things are going … I’d say it’s probably best I start looking for a new line of work.”

“They can’t fire you!”

She laughed, and inside that laughter was the whole sad story of the last six years. And all the years before that, the happy ones, when all this belonged to us. Or at least, that’s what I’d thought.

Before this was a giant, expensive, neon tourist trap with a virtual reality arcade and a waterslide, it was a little museum of local history. No flash, no pizzazz, no plastic souvenirs, only a few dusty display cases and my parents leading tours of schoolchildren through Crystal Cove’s cursed past. Only a house next door, big enough for all of us to spread out—though it’s funny, because back then, in that big house, everything always felt cozy and together. It’s only now, in the tiny apartment we had to move to, that home feels like nothing but empty space.

My mother smiled sourly. “I’ve learned by now ‘they’ can do whatever they want.” She didn’t just sound miserable, she sounded defeated, and Angie Dinkley never sounded defeated.

Marcy did this, I thought, furious. She was up to something, and no way was I letting her take my family down in the process.

“Where is she?” I said, fuming.

“Who?”

“Marcy.”

“Don’t say it like that,” she said. “And please don’t get involved. Marcy’s still in there giving Jerry more details about what happened. Poor girl, she seems totally traumatized. And before you ask, no, I can’t give you any more information—it’s all confidential and I’m in enough trouble already.”

“Because you supposedly forgot to lock up? As if you’d ever do that?”

She shrugged. “Anything is possible. I’m the night manager, Velma. It’s right that whatever happens falls on my shoulders.”

“Mom—”

She shook her head. Dinkley-speak for no more talking about this. I’d just add it to the long list of everything else we never talked about. “I’ll see you at home.”

Here’s what I knew just as well as my mother: She was the most responsible person in Crystal Cove. And on top of that, she loved this place like it was still her own, and would never, ever have forgotten to lock up.

Here’s what I knew that my mother didn’t, because my mother was a pure-hearted idealist who wanted to see the best in people, and I was a realist who only wanted to see the truth: Marcy was a liar and a troublemaker. And I was going to stop this trouble in its tracks.

I abandoned my post at Pizza Panic and headed to the managers’ office to give Marcy, Jerry, or whoever else I could find a piece of my mind. Perfect timing: I found Marcy on her way out, looking a whole lot more like herself. By which I mean smug. And satisfied. She brushed straight past me as if I wasn’t even there.

“I need to talk to you!” I hurried after her.

She walked faster, heading for the exit.

“Marcy! Stop acting like I’m invisible!”

Marcy pushed through the front gate. A sleek silver Mercedes was idling at the curb.

“Leave me alone, Dinkley,” Marcy said, finally acknowledging my existence. “I’ve got important places to be. Like my bed.” She opened the passenger door of the Mercedes and climbed in.

“Your lies are going to get my mother fired!” I shouted.

Marcy snorted. “If you knew anything about anything, you’d be thanking me. She’s getting off easy.” Then she slammed the door.

I was about to respond, loudly, using several unmentionable words to colorfully express exactly how unthankful I felt, when the tinted driver’s-side window rolled down and a perfectly symmetrical face topped with perfectly wavy, perfectly auburn hair peeked out and fixed me with a perfectly poisonous gaze.

“Your face is turning purple, Velma,” Daphne Blake said.

It was the seventh sentence she’d said to me that year. Not that I was counting.

“That can’t be healthy,” she added, perfectly sweet. Everything about Daphne Blake was perfect, including the perfect sheen of ice in her eyes as she stared right through me. “Ever considered meditation?”

I opened my mouth.

I shut it again.

“Yoga?” she said. Then, worst of all, she laughed. That was stupidly perfect, too. Like a melody.

I hated her. I hated her with the molten heat of the Yellowstone supervolcano, the one so big that when it finally blows it’ll cover the entire continent with a layer of burning ash, which will destroy the atmosphere and block out the sun and basically bring about the end of the world.

Actually, maybe I hated her more than that.

A brief interlude, to explain why the sight of a sweetly smiling Daphne Blake was enough to make my tongue curl up in my mouth, my blood turn into pudding, and my heart burst into a fiery ball of rage.

Once upon a time, we were inseparable. Since day one of day care, according to my mom, who has told this same nauseating story approximately one billion times. Some obnoxious toddler pushed Daphne into a mud puddle, and I threw a toy truck at his head and then gave Daphne the rest of my juice box to make her feel better.

That’s what they tell me, at least. I have no memory of this, and if I could go back in time, I’d shake that toddler’s hand, because he was obviously a lot smarter than I gave him credit for.

They say opposites attract and all, and maybe it’s true, because from the outside, Daph and I seemed a lot like opposites. She was the pretty one, I was the smart one—or at least, that’s how people treated us. But I knew Daph was super smart, and she always told me I was beautiful. The way she said it, I actually believed her.

We were best friends, and we had the BFF necklaces to prove it. We pushed our desks together in school and we had sleepovers every weekend, but the best part of the year was always summer, when we could spend all day, every day, together, finding adventures.

The best summer—which also turned out to be the last summer—was the summer we both turned ten years old, when we decided to be detectives. We lived in a haunted town, right? So why not chase down some ghosts? Not that I ever believed in ghosts—that was Daph’s thing. I didn’t really care what we investigated, I just wanted a mystery. A whole mystery-solving agency, actually, and so we recruited the boys who lived down the street from her, Fred Jones and Shaggy Rogers. And, of course, Scooby-Doo.

This wasn’t unprecedented. The boys never had anything to do on summer vacation, so they usually ended up doing whatever we told them to do. (When we were eight, Daph and I ran a circus—the boys were our clowns. When we were nine, Daph and I were magicians. We made Fred disappear and spent all summer trying to saw Shaggy in half.) We used my parents’ van for our office, and I’m proud to say that for that summer we were the most successful detectives in town.

Okay, we were the only detectives in town, and one of us was a dog. And yes, Shaggy was mostly in it for the free snacks and Fred was never into much of anything, but Daph and I were committed. We found some kid’s missing pet frog. We helped a third-grader investigate whether there was really a tooth fairy (spoiler alert: There was not). And we spent a lot of afternoons sitting in the van, eating cookies, telling ourselves stories of bigger, better mysteries—monsters lurking in shadowy basements, enchanted suits of armor, ghosts and goblins, all of them taken down by us, Mystery Inc.

Maybe it was a little silly. Kid stuff. Maybe we would have ditched it in the fall, just like we did with all our other summer games. Maybe we even would have ditched each other, eventually, the way childhood best friends sometimes do—grown apart, naturally, and without the pain that felt like yanking out a tooth. Or sawing off a limb.

But we never got that chance, because that was the summer everything blew up. I don’t know how long my parents suspected that the town was going to sell the museum (along with the land, along with our house), but in July some obnoxiously handsome lawyer started poking around on behalf of his anonymous clients. That’s when Daph and I finally clued in to what was going on, and we decided it should be our next case. Forget ghosts, we were going to save the museum.

We just didn’t quite agree on how to do it. Daph thought the lawyer was the key: It was fishy, right, that he had these secret clients? If we could figure out exactly who wanted to buy the land, then maybe we could stop them. I thought we should focus on finding the original deed to the land, which had been lost a hundred years before. According to my father, his grandfather always claimed that this land once belonged to the Dinkleys. If that was true, and we could find some way to prove it, we could save the day.

But I had no idea where to start looking for a deed, and the lawyer was right there in front of us, so Daph won. We spied on him whenever he came to snoop around the museum. We followed him around town. As far as I could tell, he was the most boring man alive. But then, at that age, all adults seemed breathtakingly boring.

I wanted to give up; Daph insisted on one last stakeout, and I loved her for it, because she wanted to save my parents’ business as much as I did.

The only problem was that midway through our stakeout, Daph had to leave for a dentist appointment. So I spent the afternoon following Mr. Handsome and Boring all by myself—to the coffee shop, to the magazine stand, to a secluded corner of the park. He stood under a tree, checking his watch.

My heart beat faster—maybe this was it, what we’d been waiting for, his secret rendezvous with his mystery client.

It was a secret rendezvous, all right.

With Daphne’s mother.

Specifically, with Daphne’s mother’s lips.

You know how they say don’t kill the messenger? Well, no one told Daphne. That night, I called Daph and admitted what I’d seen. She didn’t want to believe it. She yelled at me, and then hung up on me.

That was the last night we were ever best friends. The next day in school, she told me her parents were getting a divorce, and she said it like it was my fault, and then she wouldn’t say anything else to me. She dropped me. Ice-cold. Even when the sale of the museum went through, even when my parents lost their business and our house and my dad basically lost the will to get out of bed, she acted like I was invisible. My mother told me I should be the bigger person, so one day at recess, I tried to talk to her.

Big person, big mistake.

To punish me for daring to speak to her like we were still friends, Daphne started calling me Detective Dinkley, and told everyone in school that I was a huge baby who wanted to be a ghost hunter. Marcy, her new BFF, started sneaking up behind me and shouting boo! all the time, and the other kids thought it was so hilarious that they did it, too. For the whole year. That’s when I realized maybe being invisible was the best I should hope for.

In high school, it was easier for Daphne and me to avoid each other. But every time we came face-to-face, I felt like that humiliated ten-year-old girl, the one whose best friend turned on her. The one who learned that maybe it was safest to have no friends at all.

“What?” Daphne said now, all innocent like she couldn’t possibly understand why I might be frozen in horror and disgust at the sight of her. “You’re staring at me.”

That was the worst part of it. Daphne acting like she barely remembered I existed. It was humiliating all over again: Losing her was the worst thing that ever happened to me. But for her, I suspected, it was just little kid stuff. She’d moved on.

“Nothing,” I said.

That was how she made me feel. Like a big, invisible, useless nothing.

Daphne smirked, like I’d said exactly what she expected. Then she rolled up the window and drove away.

I went back to Pizza Panic. I served out the rest of my shift. Then I went home, feeling like crap, but putting on a happy face because I figured my mother would need some cheering up. Except my mother wasn’t there. According to her note, she was at yet another meeting of her local activist group.

Even now, my mother was a die-hard supporter of Crystal Cove history. She and her friends were trying to make sure the town preserved its character, even as it kept selling off parcels of land to the highest bidder. Right now, every sale came with strings attached. The buyers had to “respect” the town’s history and use the land in some way that celebrated Crystal Cove. Which was why the Haunted Village was a Haunted Village and not, say, a golf course. My mom was the queen of the picket sign. If she had her way, the town would stay exactly the way it was, forever. And she wanted to make sure everyone knew it. Which meant I spent a lot of nights alone eating mac and cheese in front of the TV. I made some for my dad, too. He was back in bed.

It was weird, how you could live in the same home as people but still miss them. I missed my mom and dad the way they used to be. I missed our family. Something happened to them when the town took away their museum. It was like that job, that place, anchored them to the ground, and once it was gone, they both just floated away. If it wasn’t for Jinkies, mewing for her dinner, it would be easy to believe I really was invisible.

I still didn’t believe in things like monsters and curses, but I have to admit: Sometimes I felt like a ghost in my own life.