Rundell helped Derek out of his jacket carefully, but the senior screamed as the sleeves slid over his arms. “Oh, shit,” Rundell said. Derek’s arms were both obviously broken, but his right sleeve was torn and oozing blood, the white end of a bone sticking up through both flesh and stained material.

“Okay, let’s get you inside.” Coach waved Michael forward to help him get Derek to the school building, both basketball players towering over the shorter, thicker football coach as several other teachers arrived and began to disburse the onlookers.

“Hey, Coach!” another voice called from the crowd, and I turned to find a freckled sophomore member of the golf team holding up the club Rundell had dropped, a long black golf bag hanging from his opposite shoulder. “Can I have this back now?”

Rundell stopped and turned toward the kid, and Derek groaned. “What was Trace doing with it?”

The kid shrugged. “He grabbed it right out of my bag and just started swinging.”

“Well, I think it’s evidence now. Have your dad call me.” Rundell held out his hand, and the kid jogged forward to hand him the club, then the coach marched toward the building with one hand on Derek’s shoulder.

“What happened?” Emma asked from behind me, and I turned to see her rounding the car on my right.

“Trace Dennison went homicidal, and now the basketball team’s down two starters. He broke both of Derek Rogers’s arms.”

“Damn.” Emma whistled as we headed toward the building.

“Yeah. It was pretty brutal.” I was oddly relieved to realize that even after everything I’d seen in the Netherworld, human-on-human violence still truly bothered me.

We followed the crowd toward the side entrance, and gossip buzzed all around us, people rehashing Trace’s psychotic breakdown, Mona’s arrest for possession with intent, and Tanner’s locker vandalism, which had been largely outshined by the rest of the chaos. Then the shrill ring of the final bell cut through the animated chatter, and the foot traffic sped up.

Great. Another tardy. Maybe Mr. Wesner’s sub wouldn’t notice.

As we jogged toward the building, a car pulled into the parking lot, and distantly, I noticed that it was Jeff Ryan’s rebuilt ’72 Chevelle. Nash had helped him work on it a couple of times, and Jeff had let him borrow it once, as a thank-you.

I waved to Jeff as I crossed the aisle, practically dragging Em along with me. We were only feet from the school door when an engine growled behind us. Tires squealed, and I turned toward the sound to see a sleek, low-slung black car racing down the center aisle. I sucked in a breath to shout a warning, but I was too late.

The black car slammed into the passenger side of Jeff’s Chevelle with the horrible squealcrunchpop of bending metal. I flinched and grabbed Emma’s arm. And for a second or two, a thick, shocked silence reigned complete in the parking lot.

Then Jeff’s door creaked open and he crawled out of his car, the passenger side of which was nowwrapped around the crunched front of the other vehicle.

People raced toward the wreck. The other driver got out and started yelling at Jeff, but I couldn’t understand much of what he said. Jeff was wobbly and too stunned to reply, but after one good look at his ruined masterpiece, he blinked and shook his head, then jumped into the shouting match full-strength.

Teachers came running. Some gestured for onlookers to get to class while others tried to break up the fight that had erupted between Jeff and the other driver, who were still shouting between blows.

“Holy shit, what’s that all about?” Emma asked, walking backward as slowly as possible, reluctant to tear her gaze from the latest violent outburst.

“That’s Robbie Scates,” someone said from my left, and I glanced over to see a guy I didn’t know staring longingly at Emma. “He and Jeff entered some kind of hot-rod show in Dallas on Saturday, and Jeff placed higher. His picture was in the Sunday paper. Guess Robbie’s a sore loser.”

“A stupid one, too,” I mumbled. At least fifty people had seen him T-bone Jeff’s car.

“Damn…” Emma breathed. “An arrest on Friday, and now two fights and a wreck today, before school even started!”

“Technically, school’s started,” I noted, dragging her by one arm toward the entrance. “We just missed the first few minutes.”

“I don’t think we’re the ones missing anything,” Em said, turning reluctantly to follow me to algebra, where our dead teacher’s desk was now occupied by a clueless long-term sub.

IN SPITE OF THE BUSY work the sub handed out—along with our tardy slips—Emma managed to fill the rest of the class in on the parking lot chaos, through a combination of whispered sentences and passed notes, until the sub finally gave up and pretended not to notice the crowd gathered around our desks.

“It’s the pressure,” Brant Williams opined, dark brows drawn low. “Trace needed that scholarship, otherwise he’ll end up at TCJC. But he fumbled twice in the first quarter, and the recruiter never even looked at him after that.”

“Well, they’re sure not gonna recruit him now,” Leah-the pom-squad-girl added. “Unless maybe the golf team’s really hard up.”

But whether it was senior year pressure or something dumped into the school’s water supply, the truth was that half the student body seemed to have gone insane over the weekend.

During second period, the fire alarm went off right about the time we started smelling smoke, and when we filed into the parking lot, the most prevalent rumor was that Camilla Edwards’s science fair project—brought to school so the yearbook staff could get pictures of the first state finalist in nearly a decade—had been doused with something flammable and lit on fire in one of the chemistry labs. Now those pictures were all that remained of a project she’d started more than eight months earlier.