"You seriously expect me to believe that you don't want my kidneys after your daughter announces she's going to slowly die of renal failure? I'm her only living sibling. I'm not a geneticist but I know what that means; I'm probably the first choice as a donor because my kidney would be the least likely for her system to reject. And you probably already got all of my medical information from the kind staff at the Northern Reserve Academy," Trey hissed.

Violet smiled weakly at her father and said, "You can always count on Trey to deliver the real talk."

"Yeah. Well, like father, like son, I suppose," Mr. Simmons said with a hint of something that might have been bitterness or amusement. He pushed the envelope a little further toward Trey across the table, then removed a pen from his shirt pocket and set that down on the table as well. "Like I said, no strings. Go ahead, read it."

A long moment passed, and the time on Laura's mobile phone under the table changed to 4:24 PM. It was time for me to excuse myself, and the longer I waited, the greater the likelihood we might find ourselves in a compromised position, but I desperately wanted to make sure Trey didn't commit to anything in my absence. In slow movements, he tore the envelope open and withdrew a stapled packet of papers. The contract was ridiculously wordy. There were pages of sections followed by articles, with a Schedule A and a Schedule B attached at the back.

"You've got to be kidding," Trey said, tossing the packet down on the table. "I can't read all of this right now. I didn't go to law school."

Confident that Trey was going to refuse Mr. Simmons' offer, I cleared my throat. "Excuse me. I need to use the bathroom," I said, motioning for Trey to let me out of the booth. I caught a momentary glimpse of Henry out of the corner of my eye and immediately inferred from his expression that he knew exactly what I was about to do: make my getaway from the hotel. But he didn't say a word, and thankfully didn't raise suspicions by shadowing me across the restaurant and into the airy lobby.

Seagulls overhead called to each other as I rushed across the busy street to the place where Trey and I had agreed to meet. It was strange indeed to find myself on the opposite side of the country from where I was supposed to be at that exact moment-which was in Florida, with my dad. Once I trotted up the stairs to the portico where we had agreed to meet, I leaned against a white pillar to rest. I had no clue how Trey was going to elegantly (or inelegantly) excuse himself from that situation without Mr. Simmons following him.

The sky had become a pale shade of yellow signifying my least favorite time of day, that wasteful gap of minutes between afternoon and evening during which parents drive home from their jobs and homework gets done. I yawned in a way that made me aware of just how much every single muscle in my body ached.

Five minutes passed. Then ten. My hands and feet began tingling with anxiety.

Exhaustion fueled my panic. I began second-guessing this little plan that Trey and I had constructed. Something had obviously gone wrong. There was a chance I might have to decide between roaming Long Beach on my own, penniless, without identification and without an identity, or turn myself into the police. I should have tried to have a private word with Henry while I had the opportunity. Trey and I both should have known better than to attempt to gain the upper hand with someone as sinister as Michael Simmons, especially in our state of sleep deprivation. It was idiotic of us not to have made undoing the glamour spell that Esther had cast on me our first order of business. Even if looking like someone else had been a benefit over the last few days while we were on the run, now it was a liability if I fell into police custody.

Enough time had passed that I started making bargains for myself. First, I decided that when fifteen minutes had passed, I'd cross the street to get closer to the hotel and listen for sounds that might suggest police had been summoned. But fifteen minutes passed and during my sixteenth minute of waiting I decided that at twenty minutes I'd make a run for it back to the train station. It was close to rush hour now and far more likely that I'd be stopped for not having purchased a ticket, but I'd worry about that when the time came.

When exactly twenty minutes had passed since I stepped behind the pillar where we'd agreed to meet, with a heavy heart I slid the mobile phone into my back pocket and summoned the determination necessary to override the pain in my feet. Just as I stepped forward into the portico, I saw Trey headed toward me, motioning for me to stay where I was.

"Back, back. They might be following me," he urged, joining me seconds later.

Even if Mr. Simmons and the entire local branch of the FBI had been hot on Trey's heels, it didn't stop him from kissing me as soon as he reached me. He pulled away with a mischievous grin and lifted a white envelope from his coat pocket to cover his mouth with it.

"You didn't sign it?" I sounded like I was exclaiming instead of asking.

Trey folded the envelope and stuffed it into his pocket. "Can't sign anything until I read it. I don't want to end up on Judge Judy because of a bad contract. Check it out." He flashed two hundred dollar bills between his fingers. "Courtesy of my man Mr. Simmons."

I shook my head. "I am so confused right now. You didn't sign the contract but he gave you two hundred bucks anyway?"

"Come on. I'll explain after we get out of here," Trey said.

***

Three hours later, as we sat on Laguna Beach gorging ourselves on gourmet takeout pizza, Trey recalled in detail what I'd missed after I left the hotel.

"First, I told him that the only way I'd even consider signing this B.S. contract was if he forked over two hundred bucks in cash, right there. I wish you'd seen his face," Trey said before taking a huge bite out of his slice of BBQ Chicken pizza.

I kind of wished I had been there to see that. Mr. Simmons did not strike me as the kind of guy who enjoyed being ordered around. "That was ballsy. I mean, what if he didn't have that kind of cash on him?" I think the most money I'd ever found in my mom's wallet was around eighty dollars, and that was around the holidays, so it was way more than what was usually in there. Sometimes when I'd gone fishing in her wallet for a couple bucks to buy lunch at school, all I'd found was some gum wrappers and lint-caked stamps. "What was your Plan B?"

"Didn't have a fallback plan. In fact, homeboy's initial response was, 'I don't have that kind of money on me.' I believed him. I automatically started thinking about how hungry we were going to be tonight," Trey admitted. "But then Violet was like, 'Dad, come on.' And he whipped out his wallet and pulled out the cash. I knew it! A guy like that probably carries five hundred bucks around with him everywhere he goes, at least."

The last time I'd had two hundred bucks in my hands, it had been the weekend of the Rake Sale when the junior class had done lawn work around town to raise money for the ski trip that Violet wanted to organize. "I don't get it," I said worriedly. I'd crashed out on both of the bus rides we'd taken from Long Beach down to Orange County, and was feeling a lot sharper than earlier in the day. "What's Violet's deal? Why did she meet with me in Weeping Willow last week to insist that you sue her dad for your share of her inheritance? And why would she speak up to help you today? I don't buy for a second that she feels guilty and genuinely wants to help us."

Trey slurped on his soda so hard through the straw that it made a scraping noise against the bottom of his cup. "What's your take on the whole Alport Syndrome thing? Do you think Violet's really sick or just straight-up lying?"

I leaned back and stretched out against my beach towel, which we'd purchased minutes before a shop a block away from the shore had closed for the evening. It was almost dark out. Locals wearing windbreakers walked their dogs as the tide came in. "There's no way I trust Violet to tell the truth. I mean, it makes sense for sure that she's sick now that the curse isn't on her anymore. But I don't know. Still fishy that they're so adamant about you taking the money."

Trey fell quiet and tossed the crust of the slice of pizza he'd been eating back into the box. "So, here's his plan, if I agree to his ridiculous terms. He says that training for the Olympics at this level is really expensive. Mischa's probably responsible for paying her coach's fees as well as her own room and board out here in Long Beach. Plus there's gym rental, leotards, and probably private tutors, too. Now that Mischa's dad is..." Trey hesitated before saying the word we'd both come to avoid, "uh, dead, Mrs. Portnoy is probably stuck paying all of Mischa's fees, and Amanda's fees, by herself."

"Right," I said, having a hunch about where this was going. "Neither of them have won any major awards yet, so they probably don't have corporate sponsors."

"He's proposing to confront Mischa tomorrow at the gym and tell her that he knows everything about the game you guys played at Olivia's house, about Olivia, about Candace, and about what we did in Michigan. He's going to offer to formally sponsor her and Amanda all the way up until the Olympics in August if they make it past the trials in June. All she has to do in exchange is fly back to Wisconsin this weekend."

"And then what?" I asked. "Does Laura still think we have to play the game with Father Fahey to break the spell?"

Trey flopped backward onto his beach towel and rolled over on his side. "Don't know. We didn't get that far."

"What about... us," I trailed off, not inferring us as in me and him as a couple, but rather the search for us. The news coverage. Our parents. The last time we'd charged the mobile phone we'd phone in Laura's bag had been at the high school we'd crashed in Arkansas, and I had no idea what newscasters were saying about us. "Are people looking for us? Do people think we're dangerous?"

"No one said anything," Trey said, sounding tired.

My gaze drifted toward the horizon. White-capped waves drifted in toward the shore. It was almost dark by now, and we'd call attention to ourselves if we remained on the beach much longer. "What are we going to do, Trey?" I asked solemnly. "I mean, where are we going to sleep tonight? What are we going to tell Mr. Simmons? Should we even stick around? If he's bringing Mischa back to Willow then maybe we don't even need to-"

Trey leaned over and silenced me with a soft kiss. "First, we're going to clean up our picnic and find one of these waterfront houses with a hammock or some decent outdoor furniture so we can crash out. Then, we'll know when we wake up whether or not we should even bother reading this," he waved the envelope around in the air carelessly. "Because Laura said as a measure of good faith or whatever that she'd reverse the glamour spell on you tonight so that it rolls out with the tide."

I sat up straight at full attention, eyebrows raised. "What!"

Trey grinned from ear to ear. "That's right. If all goes well, you'll look like regular old McKenna in the morning."

"And if it doesn't, then Laura doesn't know what she's doing and I'm probably stuck looking like this forever," I surmised.

"Don't say that. All it'll mean is that we'd have a perfectly justifiable reason for getting out of here tomorrow morning instead of sticking around to see whatever trick it is that Mr. Simmons has up his sleeve." Whenever Trey said Mr. Simmons, he added a little extra venom to his pronunciation.

We didn't have to walk far to find a mansion along the beach that had cushioned benches built inside the perimeter of its private porch. There were lights on in a second-floor window of the house, suggesting that whoever lived there was already in the process of getting ready for bed. I taciturnly thanked our hosts for their generosity-there were even expensive Pendleton wool blankets folded in a corner of the bench for us, which we took advantage of because the temperature dropped soon after the sun went down.

Curled up next to Trey, I drifted in and out of deep sleep, practically hypnotized by the roar of the surf. More than once, I startled awake having no idea where I was and had difficulty falling asleep again because I lacked a mirror to see if I resembled my true self again. It took all of my effort to avoid wiggling out from under Trey's arm to reach for the mobile phone in my back pocket so that I could use the reverse view on the camera to check my appearance. But Trey had said the curse would be reversed by morning, and I knew that magic tended to strictly mind its own definitions of terms. Morning did not mean morning as in 12:01 AM. It meant morning as defined by physical science: the sun peeking over the horizon.

Finally, my physical weariness and the stench of smoke clinging to my hair got the better of me and I slept for several hours straight. When Trey first nudged me awake, he stirred me out of a vibrant, fully-engrossing dream, which I forgot as soon as my eyes opened. My first thought-still hazy from sleep-was one of alarm. "Are they awake? The people who live here?" I asked.

Trey gently brushed a lock of hair off my face with a vague smile. It was just past dawn, and seagulls called to each other out over the ocean. The air was still chilly; the sun wasn't high enough in the sky yet to provide its classic Southern California heat. Overhead, the sky was pink from the sun in the East, and the breeze smelled salty and clean. The morning was so peaceful that I wondered if I was actually awake and not still dreaming. I knew from the look in Trey's eyes without even checking my reflection that Laura had delivered on her promise. "It's gone, right? I look like myself?"

"You're you again," Trey confirmed. He expressed his relief with an intense, passionate kiss, so all-consuming that within a few short seconds it became evident that what we'd never had a chance to do together in Weeping Willow without the interruption of meddling ghosts was about to happen. In that moment, breathing in the familiar scent of Trey's skin, there was nothing I had ever wanted in my whole life more than to share that with him before we were once again separated by forces beyond our control. The skin on his back felt painfully, irresistibly familiar against my fingertips. The light stubble on his chin and upper lip tickled my face. My entire body craved his touch. We were meant to be together; this was the way things were supposed to be. The way things would have been if Violet Simmons hadn't thrown both of our lives off track.

"I, uh, don't have anything," Trey said after bolting upright into a sitting position. The passion between us seemed abruptly to blow away on the cool air that swept across me in his absence. "I mean, I used to carry something around in my wallet, just in case, but I didn't take anything unnecessary with me to Northern Reserve, you know?"

It took me a second to understand what he was trying to communicate as my brain was still expecting the events of that morning to play out the romantic way it had seemed a few moments ago like they would. "What?" I asked, and then immediately after realized why he was standing and stretching, putting more physical distance between us. "Oh, Trey, it's..." I drifted off, not knowing quite what to say.

"It's a bad idea," he said for me, and descended the porch's stairs onto the beach. Over the Tigerwood wall separating the porch from the sand, I watched him strip down to his boxers, ditching his shoes and clothes. He ran straight into the water, his pale body even a lighter shade than the alabaster sand he crossed. He yelped as a cold wave washed over him, and knowing now that it was only a matter of time before the owners of the house where we were crashing began their day, I folded up the blankets we'd used and followed him.

The water was much colder than I was expecting as I inched my way into the oncoming waves with trepidation. In fact, it was downright freezing. A good fifteen feet ahead of me in the deeper water, Trey's head bobbed up and he called, "Come on in! It feels good once you get used to it."

Boys were crazy when it came to water, a fact that I remembered well from summers spent at the park district pool in Weeping Willow. They were always the ones to cannonball into the frigid temperatures of the deep end, taking the get-it-over-with approach, while I was a fan of slowly acclimating to the temperature of the water. "It's cold," I shouted, taking a few more baby steps until oncoming waves reached my shins.

Trey disappeared under the water and emerged a few seconds later a few feet away from me. "Come on, McKenna. You know you want to want to go swimming," Trey teased with a devilish fire in his eyes as he strode toward me. He held out both of his hands, fingers wiggling, threatening to attack me with tickles.

"No!" I squealed, on the brink of laughing. "No!"

Instead of tickling me, Trey tackled me from below as I backed away and threw me over his right shoulder. Although I kicked him and pounded on his back in protest, he carried me directly into the cold water. A wave rolling to shore covered both of us and knocked me out of his clutches. It completely submerged me and took my breath away with its temperature. "I hate you!" I squealed at him as I took short breaths, adjusting to the coldness and the power of the water.

"Now, we both know that's not true," Trey disputed, treading water a few feet away. "I would venture to guess that's actually the opposite of the truth." He dodged under the water again, disappearing for just long enough to make me start to panic that he'd been pulled out to sea or bitten by a shark before he tugged me under by pulling on my leg. We splashed around and put so much energy into chasing each other across the waves that I forgot that this was the very same ocean in which Candace had died less than six months ago.

Candace, who had joked at the beginning of the school year about wanting to see what Trey was hiding under his army jacket.

Despite the shock of the cold water to my system, it was fantastic to let the waves carry away the stench of smoke from my hair. It was even more wonderful to pass an hour without thinking about inheritances, curses, or dead girls. To just be normal kids again, acting reckless at the beach, earning ourselves nods of amusement of early risers who were walking their dogs along the sand at that hour.

We were having so much fun, I forgot that whenever the spirits that had been thwarting us since the fall slipped from our minds for a while-even just for a few minutes of pure joy-there was always a reason why. It was usually to distract us, and once we were back on the sand, letting the sun dry our underwear before we put our dirty clothes back on, fear overcame me that this time was no different.

***

At a Starbucks not far from the beach, we sullied Mr. Simmons' contract with muffin crumbs and greasy fingertip stains as we read through it multiple times. I kept one eye on the temporary pre-paid cell phone Mom had given me before dropping me off at the airport, which was charging at a nearby outlet via a charger that the barista had loaned us. Without it, we stood no chance of getting back in touch with Henry without seriously jeopardizing our safety.

Although neither of us were practicing attorneys (obviously), it seemed like a pretty straightforward document. It included three main sections, written in legalese. The first stated that Mr. Michael Simmons acknowledged paternity of one Trey Andrew Emory, and as such, was establishing a trust fund effective as of the date on which the contract was fully executed. As per the arrangement of the trust, Trey would receive eight thousand dollars monthly until his twenty-first birthday, at which time the monthly allocation would be increased to ten thousand dollars. Additionally, if Trey were to provide Mr. Simmons' attorney with proof of enrollment in an accredited university or college, Mr. Simmons would pay all tuition fees and the cost of study materials. The funds would be dispersed in a manner determined by Trey, whether he wanted a check mailed to him or a wire transfer deposited into his checking account.

The second part of the contract, Schedule A, detailed what would happen in the two possible scenarios of Mr. Simmons' death. In the first, if Mr. Simmons were to die before his wife, Trey would inherit fifty percent of his net worth with the exception of the house owned by the family in Weeping Willow. Upon the subsequent death of Mrs. Simmons, the house would be sold and the value from the sale would be split evenly between Violet and Trey after any necessary taxes were paid. In the other scenario, if Mr. Simmons were to die after his wife (or be divorced from her at the time of his death), Trey would inherit half of everything instantly. All of Mr. Simmons' property valued at over one thousand dollars would be sold and shared by Violet and Trey.

There seemed to be no mention at all about any obligation on Trey's part to contribute to Violet's wellness. In fact, it seemed too good to be true. It was so bafflingly tempting that Trey folded it and stuffed it back into the envelope.

"I hate this. I hate even having to read this, or being in a situation of even needing to entertain this asshole's proposition," he sulked.

It all seemed like more money than I could even fathom. "Yeah, but you are in this situation. He's your biological father and he owes you, and that would have been true even if Violet hadn't killed Olivia and Candace," I reminded him.

Leaning back in his chair, he folded his hands over his belly. "So, you think I should take it," he surmised.

"I'm not saying you should take it, but what's the alternative? Regardless of what happens with Mischa. I mean, before all of this happened, what did you envision for your future? What did you want to be?" I asked. Before last fall, Trey was just the mysterious guy with a bad attitude who lived next door who had become a bit of a loner since we were friends in early childhood. I couldn't imagine what kind of plans for himself he'd had back then.

Trey scowled in frustration. "I don't know. Just graduate and get the hell out of Weeping Willow, I guess. Maybe move to Milwaukee and do stuff as a mechanic?"

I suppressed the urge to inform him that there was no way I could imagine him as a mechanic. However, imagining him moving into a college dorm room with a duffel bag full of polo shirts and khaki shorts wasn't any easier. Neither was it easy to envision him accepting the offer from Mr. Simmons and establishing a new, grown-up life in another city, complete with an apartment, furniture, and utility bills. It was impossible to envisage Trey at any point in the future; he existed only in the here and now, slumping across from me in an upholstered chair.

"Anyway, maybe it's all pointless. Even the payment terms are bullshit. My mom has access to my checking account in Weeping Willow and I'd need a whole bunch of ID to open another one, which would be problematic for about five million reasons," Trey said hopelessly.

I knew better than to suggest to him that there surely had to be ways around that hurdle; one of his dark storm cloud moods had settled in. There was probably no way Trey could stay in the U.S. for much longer, anyway. The same may have quite possibly been true for me. That may in itself have been the trick Mr. Simmons was trying to play: Trey would inevitably be apprehended by cops when he tried to collect what he was owed.

It was after ten in the morning, and I wondered what was happening an hour by car north of us in Long Beach. "What's the plan for getting back to Henry or Mr. Simmons about next steps?" I asked.

Trey shrugged. "We call Henry, I guess." He cast a wistful glance through the windows to the beachside community outside and added, "Or, we just make a run for it. I don't think his plan to lure Mischa back to Weeping Willow has much of a chance."

Even though earlier that morning I'd felt just as in love with Trey as I'd been in the fall, the feeling of anxiety that had pervaded the last five days of my life settled back into my stomach. We were two asteroids hurtling around the universe without purpose or destination. I still felt a sense of urgency in my gut to prevent Mischa from killing any more people, but going about that now seemed infinitely more complicated since we would essentially have to compete with Mr. Simmons to reach her first.

"Excuse me," I said to a hipster with a villainous handlebar moustache who'd sat down right in front of the outlet where Laura's phone was recharging. He did a double take after inching his chair over, and I remembered that in some parts of the country, my picture was airing on the nightly news. I did my best to shield my face as I unplugged my phone and turned it back on.

I'd just handed the charger back to the barista behind the counter when the phone's default screen loaded. One missed call from Henry had come in over an hour ago. Since I'd tossed the SIM card to my own mobile phone in the trash back in Chicago, I'd been wondering if my parents had been calling and texting the number of the pre-paid phone Mom had given me before dropping me off at the airport, but there was no way to find out.

Trey and I agreed to call Henry on speaker and raise the issue of Trey's predicament regarding receipt of payments from Mr. Simmons. "If he wants me to sign this contract and take his money so badly, then maybe he'd be willing to hook me up with a fake social security number and new ID," Trey rambled.

Henry answered before we even heard the first ring. "Where are you guys?" he asked in a voice that sounded a little muffled, like he was intentionally trying to be quiet.

"We'd rather not say," I answered as I held eye contact with Trey.

"Listen. This guy, Mr. Simmons, is totally out of hand. He won't stick to the plan. This morning when he met us in the lobby he insisted that we come straight to the residence hotel where the gymnasts are staying and confront Mischa," Henry said.

Trey sat back in his chair and threw his hands up in the air. "Then it's settled. There's no point in the contract. We can just take off."

I shook my head, trying to make sense of this all. "If he didn't think he'd need our help convincing Mischa to come to Wisconsin, then what was yesterday all about?"

"He said it might be best if he addressed Mischa without you and Trey. But he still needs you to play the game, McKenna. Laura's made that abundantly clear to him."

Pure terror shot through me as my first thought was that Mr. Simmons needed me to be present when we played the game with Mischa and Father Fahey to break the curse because it had skipped me, just like it had skipped Mischa. I believed with all my heart that Jennie had protected me from evil the first time I'd been subjected to the curse's evil power, but there was no way I could count on protection a second time.

Then Henry clarified why Laura believed that I had to participate. "Only you can be the storyteller. You're the only one who can do it."