WHAT AM I DOING here? That’s all I could think, frozen in that stupid library doorway. That’s all any normal human being would think, trapped in all that darkness and dust when there was a perfectly good Friday afternoon just outside.

I should have known I’d find Velma Dinkley, of all people, lurking in there. Voluntarily.

Not just because Velma was exactly the kind of person who volunteered to spend her free time with some random old nerd, doing paperwork in a mildewed storage room. But because it was clear that the universe was out to get me.

And it was doing a pretty good job.

Rewind to Monday morning. Maybe the first morning in my life I’d ever woken up before the alarm and flung myself out the door toward school. Eight guaranteed hours away from the house, which no longer felt like mine. Not now that it had been colonized by my mother and the family she liked better than the one she’d started out with.

Bonus: School meant Marcy. An explanation about what was going on. Confirmation that we were still friends, that I was just being insanely paranoid about all the unreturned texts. That everything was the way it had always been and the way it should be.

Except Marcy didn’t show up, and then she didn’t show up again the next day.

Where are you? I’d texted her on Monday.

Sick, she wrote back.

I’m coming over, I texted. Getting to live alone in your own apartment at age sixteen was, under most circumstances, wildly cool. Under circumstances of flu, however, it was miserable. No one to bring her orange juice. No one to give her fresh sheets. No one to care. Except for me. I always came by when she was sick. I brought along soup, cough drops, cheesy magazines—evidence someone was paying attention.

Contagious, she wrote. Stay away.

So she wasn’t really sick. I knew that much, at least.

Marcy would never pass up a little TLC just for the sake of sparing me germs.

When she didn’t show up at school on Wednesday, I decided I’d show up instead. I went straight to her doorstep after school. I tried to bring her boyfriend with me, thinking he’d be just as worried. But worry was a human emotion. I’d forgotten that Trey Moloney didn’t have many of those.

“Dude, I’m not her boyfriend anymore,” he told me. Trey didn’t go to class much more than Marcy did. I’d found him in the parking lot, polishing his truck. I was pretty sure he treated that truck better than he’d ever treated Marcy. “You two are basically psychic for each other. You must know that already.”

There was almost no way Marcy would have dumped Trey without telling me.

But there was even less of a way I wanted to admit to Trey that he knew something I didn’t.

“Pretend I don’t.”

“Dude, she dumped me right after she saw the ‘ghost.’ Maybe the ghost made her do it.” He waggled his fingers in my face. “Boo!”

“So she dumped you out of the blue, and then called a tabloid and claimed that she’d had a supernatural experience,” I said. “And now she’s cut school for three days in a row. That doesn’t seem kind of extreme, even for Marcy? You’re not worried?”

Trey looked kind of like a Ken doll, and he had the brains to match. But surely even he could put those pieces together.

“Something’s got to be wrong,” I told him.

“The chick was cheating on me. That’s wrong. But now she’s not my problem anymore. That’s right.” He edged past me to polish an imaginary spot on his precious truck.

Which is how I ended up on Marcy’s doorstep, outside Marcy’s empty apartment, all by myself. Waiting.

Call it a stakeout.

An hour passed: no Marcy. Two hours, then three. I was supposed to be home by then. My mother had invited her college best friend for dinner—my godmother, who I liked more than my actual mother. She had made it clear I was supposed to show. Preferably on time and in a polite mood. Which was all the more reason to stay on that doorstep.

Not that I had anything against “Aunt” Emma—she was always nice to me. That didn’t mean I was going to just do as I was told, like a good daughter. I was a good daughter—but only to my good parent. Which, in case it hasn’t been made painfully clear, is not my mother.

Marcy clomped up the stairs just before sunset.

“You don’t look sick,” I said.

“What are you doing here?”

“What do you think I’m doing here, Heller? I’m your best friend.” I tried not to put a question mark at the end of the sentence, but she must have heard it anyway. She sighed and grabbed my hands, pulling me to my feet. Then she unlocked the door.

“Okay, Blake. You might as well come in.”

The apartment was a studio, and—since Marcy subsisted on yogurt, granola, and cold pizza—she basically used the kitchen as a giant walk-in closet and had made the rest of the apartment one big bedroom. Marcy dropped with a thump onto her patchwork comforter. I sank back into her beanbag chair. We’d sat exactly like this hundreds and hundreds of times, but this time felt different. Maybe because it was so clear she didn’t want me there.

We stared each other down. She’s your best friend, I told myself. That doesn’t change just because she’s mad or upset or keeping some terrible secret or thinks she saw a ghost or whatever’s going on. That doesn’t change just because she pretends you mean nothing to her. It’s a front, I told myself. A way to cover weakness. Marcy didn’t do weak. Ever.

Except that this time, after a minute or two of silent glaring that felt like it lasted about a hundred years, she broke first. “Okay. What.”

Marcy never broke first. In Marcy-speak, that was a cry for help.

“Start anywhere,” I said. “Where have you been all week? Where were you just now? I won’t ask why you dumped Trey”—that was the one thing she’d done that actually made sense—“but why didn’t you tell me first? Or, speaking of telling people things, why are you telling people you saw a ghost?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Come on, you’re not serious.”

“How do you know?”

“Heller, are you not the person who once said the only thing dumber than voluntarily living in this town is coming here on vacation, just because it’s supposedly haunted?”

“Sounds like me,” Marcy said. “And now that I know how scary real ghosts are, I believe it even more.”

Time for a different angle. “What were you even doing there, in the middle of the night?”

She shrugged. “I was walking by, the gate was open. It was there—do I need a better reason?”

“You know they’re saying Velma Dinkley’s mother might get fired because of you.”

She narrowed her eyes. “If anyone gets fired, it’ll be because of her negligence. Not ‘because’ of me. But I’m glad to hear you’re more concerned about your ex–best friend than your current one.”

It was mean, which was reassuring; mean was Marcy. Especially on the subject of Velma Dinkley. We never talked about it, but we both knew that if I’d stayed friends with Velma, I never would have ended up friends with Marcy. Deep down, I suspected she was jealous.

Even deeper down, I hoped so. Don’t forget, I’m a monster.

Marcy stood up. “If that’s all you came for—”

“It’s not just the so-called ghost; it’s not even just this week. You’ve been acting … different. For a while. I need to know what’s going on with you. I can help.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“It’s just interesting phrasing,” Marcy said. “You need to know.”

“Yeah,” I said. “So?” Turns out mean is a little less comforting when it’s aimed in your direction.

“You need a lot of things, Blake. A person might even call you needy. Which is kind of funny, when you think about how much you already have.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Never ask a question you don’t want to know the answer to.

“It means how much whining have you done about your mother uprooting her entire life to come stay with you? How many times have you said you wish she was more like mine? You know, not giving a crap.”

Everyone in school thought it was amazing that Marcy’s parents had let her live on their own when they took off on their cross-country adventure. Most of the time, Marcy acted like she thought it was amazing, too. But I was the one who was supposed to know better.

“I’m sorry, I—it just didn’t occur to me—”

“It doesn’t need to occur to you now, either,” she said. “I’m just saying, you have a lot. So whatever it is you think you need, maybe you don’t need me.”

They’ve been telling us since preschool: Words hurt. But I never knew it was actually possible. For words to feel like a slap. To sting with real pain. “You don’t mean that.”

You can’t mean that, I meant. Please.

“Okay then, maybe what I mean is that I don’t need you.”

Somehow, that was almost worse.

And she wasn’t done. “Maybe I’ve got enough going on right now without having to tend to the needs of a spoiled brat who throws a fit every time she doesn’t get what she wants.”

“Stop it, Marcy, you’re just trying to get me mad at you.” I knew, of course, what people thought of me. Some people.

Okay, most people.

But she was the one who was supposed to know better. “You’re just trying to get me to leave—”

“Yes, you’re finally getting it!” she shouted. “At least now we know you’re not stupid and spoiled. Just spoiled.”

“Please stop.” I hated how my voice sounded. Weak.

Afraid.

As if I didn’t have the nerve to hear what would come next.

Like I said. Words hurt.

“I am trying to get you to leave,” she said. Calm now. Not shouting anymore. Not emotional. This was worst of all. “You’re right. I do have crap to deal with. And I don’t want to tell you about it, okay? I don’t want you poking your nose into my problems anymore. And I don’t want to have to bother pretending I care about yours. So can you just, please, leave me alone?”

She was the one who knew all my secrets. The one who knew the ugliest things about me—and loved me anyway. That was the deal with best friends, right? You took off the masks. You showed each other your real faces. You knew that no matter what—no matter how many mistakes you made or how many times you broke the promise to yourself, that you would be nicer, kinder, better—you weren’t a monster. You weren’t alone. You were someone who could be loved.

But what if the person who knew me best didn’t love me after all?

What if she thought I was just as ugly, just as spoiled, just as monstrous, as I’d always secretly feared?

What if she was right?

We stared each other down again, but this time I knew I’d break first. And I had to get out of there before I broke messy, all tears and snot and weakness.

So I did. And it’s only because after I slammed the door, I sat down on the stoop again—feeling like I couldn’t breathe, like I was going to pass out—that I heard her. Marcy. Sobbing.

I thought about it. Opening the door. Forcing her to tell me what was wrong, or maybe just letting her cry without asking any more questions. Letting her call me all the names she wanted, and proving to her that no matter what, I would still be her friend. But I didn’t want to be called any more names. I was embarrassed. I was scared going back in would make things even worse.

And, okay, I was out of my mind furious.

Anger was what I did best.

And it always, always made me do my worst.

Maybe if I’d stayed, if I’d found a way to make her feel less alone, less helpless, everything would have been different.

But I left.

*   *   *

At home, I walked straight into an ambush.

Okay, maybe it’s not an ambush if somewhere in the back of your mind you knew there was going to be company for dinner. Probably you should have expected the whole happy not-your-family assembled around the dining table staring at you in the doorway like a party crasher. The kind of crasher who ruins everything just by showing up. But the back of my mind was pretty far from the front that night.

“You’re two hours late,” my mother said. “We were worried sick.”

She didn’t look worried. She looked furious.

Anger was what my mother did best, too. Add it to the list of crappy things we had in common.

“Daphne, you’ve grown up so much,” Aunt Emma said. Even though I still thought of her that way, Aunt Emma, we weren’t related. That’s just what my mother always called her when I was a little kid. She let me keep calling her that, even after my mother left town.

After my parents split up, Aunt Emma took me out for ice cream and promised she wasn’t going to disappear. That we were family. And she must have meant it; every month, she checked in on me, took me out for ice cream, reminded me that she was there if I ever needed her. Some years I saw more of her than I saw of my mother. We never talked about anything important. Sometimes we didn’t talk about much at all except what flavor of ice cream to order—but it felt kind of good, imagining my family was a little bigger than just me and my dad. It felt like maybe I wasn’t so easy to leave behind as my mother made it seem.

I guess I’d started thinking of Aunt Emma as if she belonged to me. But seeing her with my mother reminded me that they’d belonged to each other first. That maybe she only ever acted like she cared about me because she actually cared about my mother. That night, of all nights, the last thing I needed shoved in my face was a reunion between two lifelong best friends.

It was weird to think of Emma and my mother being friends at all, much less best friends—Aunt Emma was round everywhere my mother was sharp, soft everywhere my mother was hard. My mother was a power-suited shark, even here; Emma wore a brown caftan the same color as her frizzy hair. She looked like the kind of woman who baked very good chocolate-chip cookies. Which, I dimly remembered, she did. “It’s lovely to see you again,” Emma said.

“Yeah. Sure.”

Nothing against Aunt Emma. But I couldn’t think about anything except Marcy. Those words, spoiled brat, were pounding in my head.

“You won’t talk to our company that way,” my mother said. My stepfather put his hand on hers, like he owned her. That was more than I could take.

“I won’t?” I said, not quite yelling, but not quite not. “You’re going to tell me what I will and won’t do? In my own house? Are you a fortune-teller now? If you can see the future, maybe you can tell me when you’re going to vaporize again so I’m not so surprised this time.”

“Daphne!” My mother sounded a little like invisible hands were strangling her.

“You’re all company, you know,” I said. Spoiled brat. Spoiled brat. Spoiled brat. “Uninvited guests. So I don’t think I have to be very polite after all.”

“If you’re going to speak that way to us—”

“Oh wait,” I said, “maybe I’m psychic now, because I can see exactly what you’re going to say, and I agree.”

I sent myself to my room. Again. Slammed yet another door. Flung myself on my bed. My queen-sized bed in my own bedroom in my huge house. Spoiled brat. Cried my spoiled little eyes out. Spoiled brat. With my mother downstairs basically begging me to let her mother me. Spoiled brat.

It wasn’t true, I thought.

I wasn’t.

I didn’t want to be.

I tried crying myself to sleep, but I was way too hungry for that. So eventually, once it was late and I’d heard the bedroom doors closing, I snuck downstairs, hoping to steal a snack.

Turns out I should have waited a little longer. Aunt Emma and my mother were huddled on the couch together. Something about the way they were sitting made them look younger, like teenagers. Then I realized why—they were sitting the way Marcy and I did, when she was over here. Like best friends. I froze on the stairs, held my breath, listened.

“I’m worried it’s my fault,” my mother said. “She’s had so much, but …”

Did she think I was a spoiled brat, too?

She’s not allowed to think anything, I reminded myself. She barely knew me.

“She’s got a lot of … energy,” Emma said.

“I just wish she had somewhere to channel it. Something to teach her a little responsibility, teach her the world is bigger than she realizes.”

Aunt Emma wrapped her in the kind of warm, comforting embrace I’d never gotten from my mother, and I’d never seen her accept from anyone else. “I have an idea,” she said.

And that was how I ended up trapped in the town library on a Friday afternoon, pretending that I cared what Aunt Emma’s husband, Dr. Thomas Hunter, had in his dusty folders. Old letters, old maps, old newspapers. He kept calling it treasure. Seemed more like dead people’s recycling.

My mother had waited till that morning to inform me of my new “job” (no money, of course, so what kind of job was that?). I’d asked whether it was a punishment.

“It’s an opportunity,” she’d said.

But an opportunity is something you can choose to take or leave. My mother chose for me. As usual.

After an hour, Dr. Hunter left Velma and me alone with our drop-dead-boring work.

“So, what?” I asked Velma. “You actually do this for fun?”

This was stapling. Seriously. Dr. Hunter had set down two gigantic stacks of photocopies between us. I was supposed to take one page from each, hand them to Velma so she could staple them together, and then do it again. And again. And again. Apparently no one had told Dr. Hunter that copy machines could collate and staple themselves. Or maybe torturing his volunteers was just his version of fun.

“Don’t talk to me,” Velma said. I was impressed she could form words through her gritted teeth.

“Fine.”

We worked in silence until my phone buzzed with a call. I would have ignored it, but—

“It’s a library,” Velma hissed. “You’re supposed to turn off your phone.”

So, obviously, I had no choice. I answered. Loudly. “Hello?”

“Daffy! What’s up, girl?”

It was Nisha Shah, one of those girls I was sort of friends with by default. That’s how high school was—if you wore the same kind of clothes and the same kind of makeup and dated the same kind of boys, people just sort of assumed you were friends. It was easiest to let them be right.

Or maybe that’s just how I felt.

The older I got, the less sure I was.

“I can’t really talk, Nisha.” Nisha’s dad was in India for two months visiting family, a trip he took every year. For a while now, I’d been wanting to ask Nisha whether it got easier, having him so far away. Whether, when she was a kid and didn’t know any better, she’d ever secretly worried he wouldn’t come back. Maybe, if we were real friends, she’d be the one person who would actually understand how I felt, having my father on the other side of the planet.

But we weren’t real friends. Without Marcy around, I wasn’t sure I had any real friends left.

“Just checking if you want a ride to the party tonight,” Nisha said.

“What party?”

“Duh. At Shaggy’s. It’s going to be epic.”

Shaggy’s parties were, to be fair, always epic. But the last thing I wanted to do was go to a party. Especially one I’d been planning to hit with Marcy, like usual, before I forgot all about it.

“Come on, Daffy, you have to go—I hear there’s gonna be a séance. Marcy’s gonna try to introduce us to her ghost!”

“Wait … Marcy’s going to the party?”

Velma’s eyes were boring into me. I turned my back on her, lowered my voice.

“How do you know?” I whispered.

“How do you not know? Aren’t you two, like, the same person?”

“Pretend we’re not—you sure she’s going?”

“Shaggy said no doubt. I just talked to him.”

I told myself not to be pathetic. You couldn’t force someone to be your friend. Especially someone who thought you were a spoiled brat.

On the other hand, there was the crying. Marcy wasn’t a crier. Was it really so bad to be worried about your best friend in trouble, even after she’d made it pretty clear she wasn’t interested in that label anymore? Did that make me some kind of stalker? Or did it just make me a good person?

I didn’t know. But I couldn’t just let things end. Not like this.

I turned back to face Velma. Still glaring at me. I knew what it was like to walk away from a friendship, cold turkey. Or to let a friend walk away from you.

Not again, I thought. Not this time.

“So? Ride? No ride?” Nisha chirped. “Party? No party? Speak, lady.”

“I don’t need a ride, but … party. Yes. I’m in.”