“Shut the door.” I jammed my foot on the accelerator, and she jerked backward in her seat. Now we were going too fast—she couldn’t jump. “Shut the door.”

“Pull over.”

Faster, faster, even though I could hardly see; even though the rain was heavy as a curtain, loud as applause cresting at the end of a play. “No. Not until we finish talking.”

“We are finished talking. For good.”

“Dara, please. You don’t understand.”

“I said, pull over.” She reached over and jerked the wheel toward the shoulder. The back of the car spun out into the opposite lane. I slammed on the brakes, spun the wheel to the left, tried to correct.

It was too late.

We were spinning across the lanes. We’re going to die, I thought, and then we hit the guardrail, burst through it in an explosion of glass and metal. Smoke was pouring from the engine, and for one split second we were suspended, airborne, safe, and somehow my hand found Dara’s in the dark.

I remember it was very cold.

I remember that she didn’t scream, or say anything, or make a sound.

And then I don’t remember anything at all.

AFTER

Nick

3:15 a.m.

I haven’t been paying attention to where I’m heading or how far I’ve run until I see Pirate Pete looming above the tree line, one arm raised in a salutation, eyes gleaming bright white. FanLand. His gaze seems to follow me as I jog across the parking lot, transformed by the storm into an atoll: a series of dry concrete islands surrounded by deep ruts of water, swirling with old trash.

The sirens are going again, so loud they feel like a physical force, like a hand reaching deep inside me to shove aside the curtain, revealing quick flashes of memory, words, images.

Dara’s hand on the window, and the impression left by her fingers.

RIP, Dara.

We’re done talking.

I need to get away—away from the noise, away from those hard bursts of light.

I need to find Dara, to prove it isn’t true.

It isn’t true.

It can’t be.

My fingers are clumsy, swollen with cold. I fumble at the keypad, mistyping the code twice before the latch buzzes open, just as the first of three cars jerks into the parking lot, sirens cutting the darkness into planes of color. For one second, I’m frozen in the headlights, pinned in place like an insect to glass.

“Nick!” Again those cries, that word, both familiar and alien-sounding, like the cry of a bird calling from the woods.

I slip inside the gates and run, blinking away rain, swallowing down the taste of salt, and cut right, sloshing through puddles that have materialized on the sloping pathways. A minute later the gate clangs again; the voices pursue me, overlapping now, drumming down on the sound of the rain.

“Nick, please. Nick, wait.”

There: in the distance, through the trees, a flickering light. A flashlight? My chest is tight with a feeling I can’t name, a terror of something to come, like that moment Dara and I hung suspended, gripping hands, while our headlights called up an image of a sharp rock face.

RIP, Dara.

Impossible.

“Dara!” My voice gets swallowed up by the rain. “Dara! Is that you?”

“Nick!”

Closer now—I need to get away, need to show them, need to find Dara. I push into the trees, taking the shortcut, following that phantom light, which seems to pause and then be extinguished at the foot of the Gateway to Heaven, like a candle flame suddenly snuffed out. Leaves lap like thick tongues against my bare arms and face. Mud sucks at my sandals, splatters the back of my calves. A bad storm. A once-in-a-summer storm.

“Nick. Nick. Nick.” Now the word is just a meaningless chant, like the chatter of the rain through the leaves.

“Dara!” I cry. Once again, my voice is absorbed by the air. I push out of the trees onto the walkway that leads to the foot of the Gateway, where the passenger car is still grounded, concealed by a heavy blue tarp. People are shouting, calling to one another.

I turn around. Behind me, a rapid pattern of lights flashes through the trees, and I think then of a lighthouse beam sweeping through the dark sea, of Morse code, of warning signals. But I can’t understand the message.

I turn back to the Gateway. It was here I saw a distant light, I’m sure of it; it was here that Dara came.

“Dara!” I scream as loud as I can, my throat raw from the effort. “Dara!” My chest feels as if it has been filled with stones: hollow and heavy at the same time, and that truth is still knocking there, threatening to drown me, threatening to take me down with it.

Rest in peace, Dara.

“Nick!”

Then I see it: a twitch, a movement beneath the tarp, and relief breaks in my chest. All along this was a test, to see how far I would go, how long I would play.

All along, she’s been here, waiting for me.

I’m running again, breathless with relief, crying now but not because I’m sad—because she’s here and I found her and now the game is over and we can go home, together, at last. In one corner, the tarp has been loosened from its anchors—smart Dara, to have found a place to hide out from the rain—and I climb over the rusted metal siding and slide beneath the tarp into the dark between the cracked old seats. Instantly I’m hit by the smell: of bubble gum and old hamburgers, bad breath and dirty hair.

And then I see her. She scurries backward, as if worried that I’ll hit her. Her flashlight clatters to the ground, and the metal carriage vibrates in response. I freeze, afraid to move, afraid she’ll startle away.

Not Dara. Too small to be Dara. Too young to be Dara.