I'm sorry, she wrote feverishly. I'm sorry for whatever I did, but I never meant to do it. I have no idea how it worked, and now everyone blames me, but I don't understand it because everything was fake. And I'm writing this down in case something happens to me like it did to her, and then maybe someone will know I didn't mean it.

"Drown, drown, drown myself! Drown, drown, drown myself! Dro—aaah!"

Marie tugged the headphones out of her younger sister's ears.

Anjulie glared at her. "What the hell, Marie? You scared me to death!"

"If you'd take those off sometimes and stop your horrible singing, maybe you could hear people when they talk to you."

Anjulie pulled her legs up closer against her chest, hid her notebook between her folded body, pulled a long bit of hair and began twirling it around her fingers.

Watching her younger sister, Marie narrowed her eyes. She'd noticed the nervous tics Anjulie had picked up over the past weeks, the messing with her hair, the constant foot-tapping, the ever-present headphones. "You know," she said, sitting in a chair across from her sister, "pretty soon you'll be at the high school. You'll get out of that awful Holy Child—"

"Infant. Holy Infant."

"Whatever. That black hole."

The two were outside, on the front porch of their home. The hard frosts of February and early March had melted into a tentative spring. Green things were slowly beginning to appear, and the harbingers of warmer weather, the crocuses and tulips, had begun to surface. Birds twittered in the budding trees; the cardinals and sparrows chattered at their mother's freestanding feeders. Across the street, a child played in some puddles along the curb. The entire atmosphere was mild and late-afternoon sunny, somewhere in the realm of sixty-five degrees, and Anjulie had taken to spending more time outside as the weather permitted. She sat in her baggy gray jeans and oversized black sweater (the one with ladybugs embroidered on it), barefoot, I-pod and notebook to occupy her mind.

"What are you listening to?"

"Jack Off Jill."

Marie rolled in her lower lip. At eighteen, she was all the mature that Anjulie wasn't. "They're so . . . loud."

"That's the point."

"Listen. You need to come out with me. I'm going to a friend's."

Anjulie slipped a finger between her teeth and began to chew a hangnail.

"I wouldn't normally ask you, Anj, but you need to get out of this house. Even mom agreed. Carly—it's at her house—she has a younger brother. I think he's in tenth or ninth grade, and he's having a few friends over, too, so it'll be good for you, to meet some new people."

"I don't want to meet anyone."

"Too bad. You're coming. Go upstairs and get ready."

For a moment, Anjulie didn't move, but when she saw the thin lines of red begin to thread from the corners of Marie's eyes, when she heard the ever so faint static that had become a constant whine beneath all the other sounds of the world, she gave in. "Let me get some shoes."

Within twenty minutes, the two were driving across a covered wooden bridge over a creek connecting an expansive piece of property to the public street. A huge house whose presumptuous white columns rose the entire three floors of the building sat a ways back amongst some mindful landscaping, the decaying sunlight frosting its bushes and evergreens with a burnished orange. Only when Marie had pulled into the circle drive did Anjulie see the multitude of other cars. She'd expected something more of a small gathering, maybe watching a movie and falling asleep on a couch. She wasn't quite sure she was up for a large crowd, and yet . . . the potential for distraction was much higher . . .

Well, either way, it was too late to complain, now.

The sisters parked and ascended the porch, rang the bell and were let in by a surprising blonde—surprising because she had more piercings across her face than the atmosphere suggested. The interior of the building was pristine, with rooms that appeared unlived-in and no people until Carly (the blonde) led them to the back, where a darkened four-seasons room opened onto a patio. Dusk obscured much of what lay on and beyond that patio, but Anjulie saw a controlled bonfire with multiple silhouettes surrounding it. She thought, too, she could make out cushioned seating and reclining figures. The sight of people interested her, but Marie put a hand to her shoulder to stop her from heading out.

"Hey, Logan!" the blonde girl called toward the open glass door. "Come here!" A moment passed before a shadowy form entered the house. His features showed a tall boy, blonde hair parted in the middle and falling straight down on either side of his thin face. "This is my brother," Carly stated. "He'll take care of you."

Anjulie was allowed no time for questions. The older girls stepped out of the four seasons room and merged into the darkness outside so quickly they seemed eager to ditch her, and Anjulie was quite suddenly alone with a stranger.

"Hey. Logan," the boy offered.

"Anjulie."

"How old are you?"

The girl shifted her weight, wondering whether she should lie. "Fourteen," she said after a moment, sticking to truth.

"Cool."

"You?"

"Sixteen."

An obnoxious crackling seeped into the space between Anjulie's ears, simmering beneath the voices outside and whatever Logan was telling her, and she watched as one of his eyes went white and rolled inward, leaving an empty socket. There was no sense in mentioning these things to him; she knew after weeks of suffering random sounds and sights that no one else seemed to hear or see them. She hoped this might be a respite from it all.

"You got anything to drink?"

The boy abruptly stopped in the middle of whatever he'd been saying. "Uh, yeah. Hell yeah. Come on."

Anjulie followed him outside, into the dark, hovering behind him as he moved about. When at length she was offered a cup with something in it, she briefly hesitated before glancing up at the back of the house, where lights flickered in its various windows, before tipping that cup back and gulping down most of whatever was in it. Logan made some sort of impressed noise—or was it a snort?—hard to tell, but Anjulie didn't really care what he thought of her. She'd always been the weird kid. Her brief episode of being interesting, of being the "cool" new girl at Holy Infant, had been a mistake. She recognized that now. She'd been relegated to the no-friends zone again, all the other students no doubt poisoned against her by Danielle's tongue or threats. And had Anjulie been unused to such treatment, or had she not been so guilt-ridden over what'd happened to Emily, she might have been more upset over all of it. But alleviating the sudden onset of strange phenomena, the sense that she was losing her mind, was the only thing that mattered to her, now.

"What else have you got?" she asked the boy, whose features showed surprise in spite of the absent eye.

He laughed for real, this time. "You serious?"

Anjulie thought about what she went through alone most nights, unable to sleep in the late hours while her sister and parents slumbered peacefully. She thought of the way inanimate objects moved about, the strange lights, and the persistent sensation of an otherworldly presence. She watched as Logan's disappeared eye reappeared only to fill with dark liquid while he smiled at her, oblivious to what was going on.

"Yes, I'm serious," she insisted.

"Are you talking . . . what, smokes?"

"Whatever you have. The stronger, the better."

Logan linked an arm in hers. "All right, all right. I like you, wild thing. Come on downstairs."

He led Anjulie through some doors and halls to which she paid little attention before pulling her down a dark stairwell into a poorly lit space, where three other young people sat in a cloud on some couches, music pulsing in the background. Anjulie thought they were two boys and a girl, though she couldn't really tell, and it didn't even matter to her. Logan disappeared for a moment, left her standing while the others perhaps studied her, but then he was back with a tiny paper cup.

"Open your mouth," he ordered.

Anjulie drew back as he lifted his fingers to her face.

"What, change your mind?"

"What is it?"

"Does it matter?"

It should. Anjulie knew it should. The only drug she'd ever taken was that innocent bit of marijuana she'd smoked at her sister's party last fall, and she had no notion of who this boy even was. But something moved there, in that basement, some threat amongst the flickering lights no one else seemed to notice. She wasn't insane—she knew it. Helen and Joanna, they were dealing with things, too. They'd indicated as much to her before Danielle had told her to keep away from them, to "take your witchcraft and fuck off!"

They'd forced her to figure this out alone, and at fourteen, Anjulie's improvidence was tragically natural.

She stuck out her tongue and allowed Logan to put a pill on it.

"Drink," he said, and she took the paper cup and obeyed. "Now you better sit down."

Within ten or fifteen minutes, Anjulie's world rapidly altered. Between whatever she'd taken and whatever they were smoking, her mind began to travel somewhere her body couldn't quite seem to follow. She thought she might've been dancing for a moment or many moments, but most of the while she was sure the couch was beneath her. A beautiful ease, the sensation of infinite possibility, eternal contentment permeated every inch of her.

"What's your name, beautiful?" someone asked her once or twice, early on or hours later.

"Kitty," she'd replied, whether to that question or to another, she couldn't tell nor did it matter. "I'm a puppet on a string!" she revealed. "Scrape me out and fill me up."

"All right, Kitty. Come sit on me."

"It's Angela, asshole," someone else said, and laughter radiated through the cosmos expanding inside her skull.

There were arms around her, maybe, and she had a very distinct understanding that her Mary Janes were no longer on her feet, though her comprehension of nearly everything else was vague at best. Something moved between her lips, a cigarette? A finger? She was coughing and swirling and laughing and falling through a deep, watery place, but there was no static or horror clips, no flashing lights—no reminders.

"Damn, girl," came words in a warm breath at her ear. "You're a little white queen."

Jamal. The mouth's owner was named Jamal. She wasn't sure how she knew; everything was twisting together, undulating. He held her on his knees.

"When I am queen," Anjulie sighed, "I'm going to drown them all." A moment of clarity forming a brief bubble around her, she turned to the older boy, thought he was beautiful, and couldn't quite understand how she'd come to be where she was. A bottle filled her hand; she drank from it but spluttered about it tasting like urine. "Drown, drown, drown!" She laughed hysterically.

Where were they now, those bitches? Cowering in their bedrooms? Playing stupid gossipy games with eighth grade boys while she was high as a kite with high schoolers!

"Let me have a taste," Jamal said.

Anjulie was about to hand him the bottle, but he pushed the beer aside and, hand tangled in her black hair, pulled her head toward him, planting his mouth against hers, and it felt like nothing and everything all at the same time. Was it really even happening? Or was she hallucinating all of those minutes and hours? The music was not outside her but in her, moving through her shuddering limbs; she had no sense of time or place. She knew only that for the first time in weeks, she relaxed, she forgot, even.

Within six months of that night, Anjulie would develop a dependency on heroin. Within eighteen, she'd have her first stint in rehab. Within twenty-four, Jamal would become Bijou's father, and within thirty, she'd experience her second intervention. But by then, whatever she'd begun with four girls at a sleepover one night in eighth grade would have receded into her innocent past, suppressed by everything she'd sought out in order to bury it.

END OF PART IV