“Sera stopped doing anything anyone wanted her to do. My parents have always pushed her hard in gymnastics, so she quit—refused to even do a cartwheel for her coach. Failed classes she didn’t used to have to even try in. Dropped her old friends and found new ones. Bad ones. Way older than her. She had money and they were happy to use her for it. They got her on weed, then coke, and one night they all got high and tried heroin.” He shrugged. “She was tripping hardcore when the only other girl her age OD’d.” Khail sighed and leaned back against the truck. “If anyone had been lucid enough to call 911, they probably could have saved her.”

“Holy shit.” I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“My parents finally realized their stupid problems were having an effect on their kids. Sera went to court-mandated rehab for two months, Mom and Dad started seeing a counselor, worked some stuff out, didn’t get divorced after all, but it was a little late by then—we were already screwed up,” he said in a quiet voice that simmered with anger.

I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t say anything. Sera had told me she’d been a mess, but I figured she meant something . . . I don’t know . . . tamer. She seemed too good and pure to be involved in anything even remotely like this.

“She’s worked really hard to get over this. And, trust me, it hasn’t been easy. Some things she’s never going to get back. Her clean conscience, for one. I know that night still haunts her. On top of that she lost her shot at competing nationally in gymnastics. She’ll brush it off if you ever mention it, but it’s a major sore spot for her. She has a lot of regrets, but she’s dealt with them and moved on.” He hopped up onto the tailgate and fixed me with a hard glare. “That’s why I started watching you so closely when Sera told me she liked you. Why do you think someone as pretty as her hasn’t had a boyfriend in almost two years? She doesn’t trust herself to choose someone good. Someone who’ll understand that she’s made mistakes and let her keep moving forward. And if you can’t, then you should—”

I held up my hand defensively. “No, you don’t get it. I don’t hold it against her at all.” I hoped I was telling the truth, but I had a little ache in the pit of my stomach. Coke? Heroin? I had never even seen that kind of stuff, much less tried it. “But . . . what if Hennigan tried to use that against her? To put pressure on her?” I hedged.

But Khail was already shaking his head. “She owns her past—owns her mistakes. And she would never let someone else suffer for what she did. Besides,” he added as he jumped back onto the tailgate and lifted another box, “most people at Whitestone either know or have heard rumors. Who would Hennigan threaten to tell? You?”

He had a point. It really didn’t make a lot of sense. But . . .

“She would hate that we were helping Kimberlee,” Khail said. “But I guarantee she’d never rat me out.” He let the box fall hard into the bed of the truck. “And I don’t think she’d rat you out either.”

I nodded and tried to squelch the feeling that something still wasn’t right, but doubt haunted me . . . rather like a drowned girl’s ghost.

Twenty-Six

“DO YOU WANT TO DO something else?” Kimberlee asked peevishly after I failed yet another attempt to conceal a yawn.

“No, I’m good,” I said, trying to sit up and look interested.

“Right,” Kimberlee muttered.

Since Sera was busy, I’d been watching TV with my only other nonsecret friend—loser much?—and she was on this nostalgia-for-childhood kick so we were on about our tenth episode of My Little Pony. I argued that she wasn’t even alive when My Little Pony originally aired, but she retorted that she wasn’t alive now, either, and there’s just no good comeback to that.

After a few more minutes of pink sparkle ponies, she turned to me. “It’s all going to be gone on Monday, right?”

I had to jerk to attention a bit. I may have been snoozing. And possibly drooling. “Wha—? The stuff? Like in the cave? Yeah. We’ll finish it all up on Monday.”

“Then what?”

“Huh?”

Kimberlee turned her whole body to me now. “Then. What?” she repeated, as though the problem was with my ears.

“I heard you,” I said, rolling my eyes, “but I don’t understand what you’re asking. We return the stuff, you go poof, I get my life back, the end.” I rolled over and closed my eyes again.

She was silent for a few seconds, then asked, “Yeah, but what happens to me?”

I figured that if she actually asked me a question three times maybe she was ready to hear a serious answer. But it wasn’t really an answer I knew myself. “Honestly?” I said hesitantly. “I think you’ll just fade out. Become at peace and then cease to be.”

She sat straight up. “What the hell do you mean, ‘cease to be’?”

Perhaps that was a bit too serious. “Okay,” I said, rolling over to face her, resting my chin on my crossed arms. “I always figured when someone died, they were probably just done. But now there’s you. I mean, are you an angel or a spirit or what?” None of those words sounded anything remotely like Kimberlee. “My theory is you’re kind of like an echo of a person. And you’re still here because you can’t find peace. So once you do, maybe you’ll slowly slip away, like drifting off to sleep.”