Panic fluttered up from my rib cage to the back of my throat. Over the last few months I'd grown to distrust the dark. During my time at my dad's in Tampa I'd forgotten just how much more terrifying a situation could be when it was impossible to see anything.

"Maybe we should bang on the door and whoever just locked us in will come and let us out," I suggested, knowing that obviously our journey would probably come to an abrupt end if we were to do that. However, now our exit strategy from the boxcar was going to be tricky even if we sat in the dark for the next few hours until we rolled into Long Beach. Our fate would depend on someone wanting whatever was in the cardboard boxes around us, and being that powerless was the worst thing imaginable. Even worse than being caught and delivered directly to the local police.

Trey hesitated and I could practically hear wheels of thought turning inside his skull. The longer we waited to decide what to do, the less likely the yardman who had just locked us into the car would hear us even if we pounded on the inside of the boxcar with our fists for help. Rail yards were loud and sometimes bustling with train activity. My first inclination was to believe there wasn't any immediate danger in staying locked into the boxcar until we reached Long Beach. But I still hoped for Trey to suggest that we try to catch the yardman's attention before the train began moving again. Surely, there were worse things than spending three or four hours in a stagnant, pitch-black box, but I couldn't imagine what they might be at that moment.

"You've got that flashlight?" Trey finally asked, revealing that he preferred to tough it out on the train over risking detainment by the police.

Without being able to see what I was doing too well, I groped around in the plastic bag from the hardware store and found the flashlight I'd bought. It took several attempts of opening the battery panel and flipping over AA batteries before it produced a weak beam of yellow light that hit the wall of the boxcar almost forty feet away from me. The light cast a murky din on the rest of the boxcar, making it seem much dirtier and smaller than it had when the open door had allowed natural light in.

"Oh, that's not scary at all," Trey quipped sarcastically. "One ray of light just turned this boxcar into a crime scene."

Trapped, we made seats for ourselves on the floor with our winter coats and settled in for the ride as the train lurched back into motion toward the coast. Tense anticipation replaced the carefree spirit of the last two days we'd spent crossing the Southwest. There was no doubt in my mind now: we'd allowed ourselves to be imprisoned like gullible fools, and something very bad was coming our way. We were exactly where Violet's evil spirits want us—practically in a cage waiting for them to determine our fate. It was a sickening feeling that made it impossible to relax.

Trey leaned back against a cardboard box and crossed his outstretched legs. "I remember last year around this time, sitting in detention and telling myself I just had to endure one more year, you know? Just one more year of high school—nine more months spent staring at the clock in a classroom—and then I'd have my diploma and be able to do anything I wanted with my life. I thought senior year was going to be just a matter of keeping my head down and managing to not get expelled." He hung his head, and inhaled deeply. "I never imagined getting locked in a cargo train in Southern California while on my way to strip a high school gymnast of her evil powers."

The burden of the situation my friends and I had created back in September when we'd played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board with Violet weighed heavily on my shoulders. Trey's playful bitterness was one of the things I loved most about him, and I wished to see a sparkle in his eye but knew that was too much to expect given the strangeness that had grown between us since our time at Esther's house. "I'm sorry," I said helplessly. No amount of remorse on my part was going to get us out of the boxcar more easily.

Trey was quick to make it clear that he wasn't blaming me for our current (somewhat unfortunate) predicament. "No, you shouldn't be sorry. I just mean, this is just... I guess it's still better than detention."

I offered him a stiff laugh. The boxcar had become uncomfortably hot shortly after the door was closed. The air around us was completely immobile and I hadn't realized it before, but it was very dusty, too. I sneezed twice—hard—into my hands. "It's starting to kind of feel like we're in a convection oven," I said. "For real. I feel like we're baking."

"Yeah, no kidding," Trey agreed. He wiped perspiration from his brow.

The heat became intolerable after another half hour. If I had looked like my normal self, my cheeks would have been ruddy and my hair would have been greasy. This was a different kind of hot than being distressed for a few minutes after climbing into a car that had been parked in a sunny spot. This was the kind of hot that dehydrated you quickly and put a salty, metallic taste in your mouth. We only had half of a big bottle of water between us, and at dawn when the temperature was still cool and we were able to enjoy a breeze it had seemed like it would be plenty to get us through the remainder of our trip.

"This is unbearable," I complained, unscrewing the cap on the bottle of water and taking a swig. My shirt was damp with sweat.

Trey motioned for me to pass him the bottle, and I watched his Adam's apple bob in his throat as he swallowed. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand afterwards, and stared at the bottle for a second—quite obviously wanting more water but restraining himself—before putting the cap back on. "This is it," he said firmly. In the dim light provided by the flashlight, which we'd kept on despite the likelihood that we'd drain the batteries, I saw his eyes flicker around the space we occupied. "Maybe they weren't trying very hard to stop us from getting to California because this was their plan all along, to roast us to death in this boxcar. We might not make it to Long Beach if we stay in this thing."

The urgency to get out of the boxcar was very real, but sleepiness overpowered me. My eyelids felt too heavy to keep open. Fuzzy thoughts floated around in my head about how I might conserve energy and sweat less if I just drifted off to sleep. It was the kind of ridiculous logic that only occurs to someone who's either desperate or already in the process of dying. "Maybe we should just nap," I suggested, my tongue feeling too thick to fit inside my mouth. "Until we get there."

"No way," Trey said. "I don't know much about heat stroke but it might be like hypothermia, you know? Like when you're freezing to death you actually start feeling hot, which makes you think it's a good idea to start stripping off your clothes, and then you die from exposure. Maybe if you're dehydrating it makes you get really tired and then you fall asleep and aren't even aware that you're dying."

His words weren't making any sense to me. I closed my eyes and immediately slid into a light slumber. Trey's hypothesis about heat stroke and hypothermia being related conjured up a scene in my imagination of him wandering through a snowy forest, the tip of his nose cherry red from the cold. I was too sleepy to discern whether it was a memory of our time together in Michigan when it had been freezing outside, or if I was already dreaming.

"Hey. Hey!" His voice yanked me back to alertness. "Don't fall asleep, okay? It's too hot for us to stay in here until we get to Long Beach. If there aren't any scheduled stops between here and there, we have to find a way to get out."

"We're in a tin can," I argued. "A locked tin can. There is no way out!" I didn't have the energy to point out that we should have shouted when we were first locked in. It was plainly obvious now that we'd royally screwed up by standing there silent for a minute instead of immediately banging on the door and demanding to be freed.

Trey stood and shook his head violently to keep himself alert. He took the flashlight from me and shined it up at the four top corners of the boxcar where the metal walls met with the metal ceiling. The floor below us, however, was wood. Old, splintery boards. Without Trey even saying a word about the plan he was putting together in his mind, I said, "No way."

We didn't have any tools with us other than the bicycle chain gizmo that Trey had stolen back in Gurdon. But I was not likely to forget the cigarette lighter that Trey had also pinched during our time in Arkansas. It didn't require telepathy to know Trey had already surmised that burning the wood floor might be the only chance we had of getting out of that boxcar. He stood with his hands on his hips, lost in thought as if he hadn't heard my objection.

"Trey," I said, this time in a sterner tone. "You know how I am about fire! And besides, we'll suffocate on smoke way before the boards ever burn enough for us to break through. Forget it."

Trey stared at me with vacant eyes for a long moment, giving me reason to wonder if I could trust him not to ignite the floorboards anyway. "You're right," he finally said in a small voice. "About the smoke."

Just then, I heard the train's brakes whine ever so quietly. The train was slowing down! "Do you feel that?" I asked, now completely alert, but still miserably sweaty. "We must be approaching another rail yard!"

Trey pressed his face up against the sliver of space in between the door and the boxcar wall to try to see outside. "I just see the backs of warehouses and some mountains off in the distance," he reported over his shoulder. "We might just be slowing down if we're passing through a town."

But the train continued to slow down just as it had for all of its previous stops. We heard a bell signaling to cars that a train was passing by as we cruised through a small town at a lower speed, and then finally—mercifully—the train came to a halt.

"Where are we?" I asked. Between the dust and the stifling heat, I was having difficulty breathing. I stood to join him at the crack in the wall for a breath of fresh air, and the entire boxcar spun before my eyes once I was on my feet.

"Just a rail yard," Trey said, not having observed my dizzy spell. "I don't see any other trains."

Without even first gaining his approval, I began beating my open palms and closed fists against the steel wall of the boxcar. "Help!" I yelled at the top of my lungs. "Let us out!" Although the blows from my fists reverberated within the boxcar, it was impossible to get a sense of how loud the racket I was creating was to anyone standing outside. Trey joined me in pounding on the walls. No matter how hard I shouted, I felt like I was trapped in a dream in which I knew my life depended on my voice being heard but being unable to shout more loudly than at a normal talking volume.

We pounded on the walls of the boxcar for a solid five minutes, at which point I began to freak out about the possibility of the train resuming its westward journey without us having been rescued. I wouldn't last another hour in that inferno, I already knew. If we couldn't get someone to come and open the door while we were stopped in this rail yard, someone was going to find our baked corpses in Long Beach later that day.

"Someone's coming!" Trey said with his eye pressed up to the space in the wall again. I beat on the wall with all my might, but Trey urged me to stop. "He doesn't hear you. He's wearing headphones."

Headphones. We were going to broil to death because some railroad employee was wearing headphones while he worked.

"Look," Trey said, turning toward me and actually looking at me for the first time in hours. "If we want to catch his attention we're going to have to do something he can see."

I shook my head. Clearly, the lighter was still on his mind. It was figuratively burning a hole in his pocket, as my mother would have said. "If we light the floor on fire, smoke is going to fill this box, Trey. No one standing outside is going to see it. Do you understand? We will be killing ourselves!"

He placed his hands on my shoulders to calm me down. "We don't have a choice. If we stay in this boxcar for a few more hours, we'll die. We have to at least try, okay? I don't want to die like a caged animal, and who knows how much longer we have before the train starts moving again?"

I never actually agreed to Trey's plan. Instead, to avoid dealing with the reality of the fact that he was about to essentially turn the box in which we were locked into a smokehouse, I pressed my mouth up against the crack between the door and the wall of the boxcar to breathe fresh air and avoid watching Trey's actions. It was a hazy, sunny day. No matter how hard I tried to huff oxygen through the crack, none of it seemed to enter my gaping mouth. The sky was a rich shade of blue that I couldn't ever recall it being in Wisconsin. It was the kind of blue sky that only exists near oceans. In the distance, tree-covered mountains added bumps and curves to the horizon. As the first wisps of dry, sweet-smelling smoke tickled my nostrils, it struck me as almost humorous how I'd managed to escape dying in a fire only to succumb to the same fate eight years later over one thousand miles away from home.

Moments after smoke began to fill our boxcar, Trey pressed himself next to me, wanting to also breathe through the tiny gap. "I'm sorry," he apologized. "I really am, but this is the only way."

I squeezed my eyes shut as if doing so would transport me to another place. I knew the flames couldn't possibly be high so soon, considering that Trey was working with nothing but a lighter. But my heart was still beating so fast that I began hyperventilating. I imagined tall, crackling flames reaching my legs and lapping against my skin. When our charred bodies would be discovered my mother or father would have to fly to California to identify me, and who knew if the spell Laura had cast on me would prevent them from ever knowing the truth about what happened to the daughter who never arrived in Florida as she was supposed to?

"I can't do this," I whispered hoarsely. "Please put the fire out. Use the rest of the water. I can't do this. I can't die this way!" I screamed, covering my face with my hands. The thick smoke was already making my eyes water and my throat burn. There didn't seem to be any air at all entering the car from outside. Every molecule in my body screamed out oxygen.

"Just breathe," Trey said calmly, placing his hand on the back of my head and forcing my face against the opening along the side of the door. "You have to stay calm and just breathe!"

The boxcar jolted forward by an inch. A scream rose within my chest. The train moved again, and with horror I realized that it was resuming its journey. No one had noticed any smoke coming from our boxcar, and how could they? There wasn't any. There was no way for it to even escape our container. I had a vision of someone opening the plug door of our boxcar in Long Beach, and plumes of dark, acrid smoke pouring out of it.