"Heaven is my favorite." Joanna spritzed a bit of the scent onto her wrist and raised it to her nose. "Oh my God . . . smell it. It literally is Heaven."

Helen turned away. "How can you think about perfume right now?"

Joanna huffed, plopped the metal sample bottle onto the display table. "I don't want to be insensitive, but why can't I try to be normal?"

"Because nothing's normal right now!"

"Shhh!" Joanna darted looks at the shoppers filling GAP. "Calm down!"

"Oh, where the heck is Danielle? Didn't she say she'd meet us here at six?"

"I offered to pick her up, but she said her stepdad would drive her."

"I don't like him. He creeps me out."

"She doesn't like him either." Joanna took hold of Helen's arm. "Come on. Let's go wait out on that bench there, by the fountain. I don't want to miss her if she walks by."

"You said The Pasta House entrance, right?"

"Yes."

The two crossed the flow of Saturday evening mall traffic and sat down. They were close enough to the Auntie Anne's to smell that buttery garlic pretzel dough, and it made their mouths water. Helen found herself hoping Joanna would offer to buy her one; her own mother never gave her spending money. But Joanna didn't say anything, and Helen was afraid if she spoke up she'd be reminded how little she needed junk food in comparison to her slender friend.

"What's up bitches?"

Both girls turned to see Danielle approaching from behind. She had her long brown hair up in a knot at her head and wore wide leg jeans with a fitted red top. Danielle wasn't pretty, exactly (her nose and chin were too severe for that) but she had developed a real figure and knew how to move in it. The others didn't need to know she used her mother's cast-off padded bras. If there was one thing Danielle understood it was how to get people to think what she wanted them to think. She knew people her age were malleable, and she had no problem using that to her advantage.

Danielle wrapped her arms around Helen's and Joanna's shoulders. "You blow any boys in the dressing rooms yet?" She pulled Helen closer in the crook of her elbow. "Oh, Helen! I think I see a pube stuck between your teeth! Better get the floss!"

Helen pushed out of the headlock. "Can't you be a little more serious?"

Danielle rolled her eyes. "Helen the buzz-kill, as always."

"Our friend just died!"

Joanna sighed. "Come on you guys. Stop. Can we find somewhere else to talk?"

Helen and Danielle acquiesced (the latter with merely a shrug and a smack of her gum), followed Joanna down the nearest escalator into the food court and noisy arcade. There was a movie theater down there as well, so the smell of buttered popcorn mingled with a variety of fast foods, producing a rather indescribable scent. They selected a table nearest the Baskin Robbins, close enough to the arcade to keep an eye on the boys inside but far enough to hear one another if they chose to lower their voices.

"What time is Anjulie getting here?" asked Joanna, hanging her furry pink purse on her chair before primly sitting down. "You did ask her, didn't you?"

"Yes, duh," Danielle lied. "That's the whole point, isn't it?"

Helen sniffed and looked down at her hands, which she'd placed on her lap. "I can't believe it's been two weeks, already."

"And it hasn't stopped, has it?" Danielle asked the other two.

"No," replied Joanna while Helen just shook her head. "It's gotten worse. I—I wish my parents saw and heard it, but it's like, it's only me."

"Only us," Joanna somberly corrected.

Helen snuffled again. "I'm getting really scared, you guys. I feel like I can't even go to sleep because then I start hearing things, and I can't even look in the mirror at all anymore."

"Why?" asked Danielle. "What's up with your mirror?"

Forgetting she'd told only Joanna what she'd seen, Helen grew suddenly self-conscious, didn't want to talk about it. "Oh, just things moving, like you."

Things moving, making sounds . . . strange lights and occurrences . . . none of them had been harmed as of yet, but each had been relieved to know the others were experiencing similar events—relieved and terrified. It hadn't taken long for them to realize they and their families were no longer alone in their homes.

The day after Emily's body had been discovered, school had reopened. There'd been a Mass and grief counseling and lessons about loss and tragedy. There'd been a prayer circle and a silent lunch in honor of Emily's family. When lessons resumed on Thursday, most of the schoolchildren had forgotten all about the girl's death; after all, they hadn't known her. But the eighth grade class had struggled to pull itself back together, and their teachers had taken that into account in planning their activities. The subdued atmosphere and the other teens' sense to leave the girls alone had offered them much time to murmur in corners in their small group, from which Anjulie had immediately been excluded. The three had bickered, but for the most part, they'd ended up on the same page—or, really, they'd ended up on Danielle's page. And here's what that page read: deal with it, tell no one, blame Anjulie.

Anjulie had brought this thing into their lives; all of it was her fault.

The evening they'd found Emily, after she'd called the others and bullied them into keeping quiet, Danielle hadn't known what to do with herself. Her parents had gotten drunk and high and locked their bedroom door, but the house wasn't small enough to avoid their noises. So she'd gone to her bed and stripped down to her underwear, climbed under her covers and tried to distract herself for a while, though she'd been unable to get Emily's pale, naked body out of her head—the ghostly vision of her, frozen in place, her small body even more emaciated because what'd filled it had been sucked out, her ribs like slight rolling ridges beneath her baby-soft flesh, her smooth stomach with its ever-so-slightly protruding bellybutton and the continuation of flat smoothness all the way up her chest, the rest of her hairless beyond what was on her head. Emily had looked like that in the house, like a boy, except obviously not. And Danielle hadn't known what to feel about that.

She'd wanted Emily to fall asleep first, planned it. Incautious of the dose, she'd put some of her mom's sleeping meds in Emily's hot chocolate, and that'd really done the trick. Emily had been essentially dead to the world when they'd gleefully begun their work. It'd been only the typical stuff, innocuous doodles, but at some point, things had taken a turn. Danielle had pulled off Emily's pajamas, and though the others had at first protested, they'd quickly stopped; they always did. Their artwork had grown more vicious, more pointed, and something had changed. Danielle had grown unsure what exactly she was doing and why she was doing it. Why she'd said what she'd said and behaved the way she had. But they'd all done it—Helen and Joanna. It hadn't just been her. Anjulie had been more reserved, which had annoyed Danielle, as if Anjulie's reticence was in itself a chastisement.

But none of that mattered, now. Emily was dead.

And after hearing about Emily's body the night it'd been found, while her parents fucked noisily a few rooms away and she moved beneath her covers in confusion and agitation, struggling to understand why she was more numb than sad, Danielle had turned into her pillow and over and over held her breath until it hurt.

The little things had started after that. The remote control or a fork sliding across the table when she reached for it; lights turning off or on when she entered a room; strange sounds waking her at night, sounds that her mother and Steve never heard and had told her to shut up about after she'd woken them more than once. It was happening to all of them—except for maybe Anjulie. They hadn't spoken to her since returning to school, and she hadn't seemed inclined to socialize with them, either.

Now, sitting at that table, the sounds of the arcade and Helen and Joanna's arguing re-crystallizing, Danielle pulled herself back to reality. "You know how sometimes you see your breath on a window?"

The other two abruptly stopped talking, turned to the unexpected speaker.

"Or when you take a shower, and the heat steams up the glass?"

Helen and Joanna waited for the rest.

Danielle exhaled through the "o" her lips had formed. "It said—it said time to play on the car window. The inside. When Steve drove me here."

The other two exchanged glances. "It talked to you?" asked Joanna.

"It wasn't exactly talking . . . I tried to tell Steve, but he just bitched at me for getting my prints on the window."

Joanna chewed her lip, then met each girl's gaze. "Do you think . . . she's mad at us?"

Helen lowered her thick eyebrows. "Anjulie?"

"No, dummy," Joanna huffed. "Emily."

"She's dead."

"Yeah, no shit, Helen." Danielle rolled her eyes.

Frowning, Helen morosely added, "And we weren't even invited to the funeral."

The Daniels family had opted for a private service, direct relations only.

"That demon killed her," Helen averred. "There's no doubt about it. We were all there. Even if Anjulie meant it as a joke, we brought out something from Hell, and now it's out there and it got Emily and it wants the rest of us."

Danielle looked at Helen's watering eyes and scowled.

Joanna cried, "But Emily talked to me through my television! How do you explain that?"

"It wasn't her! It was the thing!" Helen struggled to say the word but hissed it out: "Kitty. Whatever it's called. I think Anjulie made that part up, but whatever it is, it's like that movie The Exorcist, where that boy—it wasn't a boy in the movie, but it was in real life—and he played with a Ouija board and that's how the evil spirit got to him. And we did it, now! We have to tell someone. We have to get help. It's going to kill us, too."

"Who would believe us?" Joanna bemoaned.

"No," Danielle agreed. "If we said anything, we'd have to talk about why it's here, and then we'd have to get into what we did that night."

Helen was beginning to look desperate. She shifted in her chair. "Nobody needs to know what we did to Emily. We just tell them about the thing Anjulie did—"

"No!" Danielle's authority cowed the others, who tucked their chins toward their chests. "We already went over this. Just . . . we keep talking to each other. Every time something happens, tell me. Right away. Just call. It won't hurt us."

"How do you know?"

"Because, Helen, we gave her to it!" Danielle snapped far too loudly. "We didn't mean to, but we did it. We didn't kill her, but we picked her, and it took her. Don't you get that? It wasn't on purpose, but that's what happened. So if we just leave it alone, maybe it'll go away and bother someone else."

Helen began to cry, not big heaving sobs but little whimpers. "What if you're wrong? Poor Emily! Oh, poor, poor Emily. Her eyes were gone! The fish—oh, where's Anjulie?"

"Probably got lost in the Hot Topic," Joanna sneered.

"But we need her! We can't get rid of it without her! I can't live like this, all right? I keep praying every night, but this is too much, and I—"

Danielle half-stood and leaned across the table to slap Helen. The sound of it garnered a few stares, but everyone around them went about their business after a moment of curiosity.

"Listen to me," Danielle insisted. "Anjulie's not coming. She didn't want to help us. I tried, but she refused. She said it wasn't her fault. So just put up with all the freaky shit—just do it—and let me know about it. And if you get too scared, just tell it to go get Anjulie."

Helen gaped. "What? No! What if it killed her, too?"

"Well, she didn't want to help, and she's the one who brought it here. So either shut up about it all, or I'm going to send this Kitty thing after her." Joanna pursed her lips. Helen sunk into herself. Danielle offered a self-satisfied nod, stating, "Good. Now let's go smell the bath beads at The Body Shop."