Although I didn't have the talisman under control quite yet, Dr. Reed was fairly sure that it would come with time. And what choice did I have but to believe her? I managed to not kill or seriously harm Dominic on accident, so that was a step in the right direction. Maybe I would keep going that way.

But even if I suddenly solved how to get the talisman to do exactly what I wanted overnight, it didn't establish where it came from, how the hell it worked, and who was responsible for it. After Dr. Reed's class when everyone left, she and I stayed behind to work on answers to those questions. Without Sierra, Jack, and Dominic there to distract me, there was a better chance that we could get something done.

"You ready, Lindsay?" Dr. Reed asked.

I nodded, took the talisman out of my pocket, and handed it to her.

"I still don't understand how the hell this works. It's essentially an oversized gold button. It makes no sense," she said.

I shrugged. "No idea."

"And why would anyone make this? Who would know how? And why was it on campus grounds?"

"I still don't know," I said. "I think you're more qualified to answer these questions than I am."

"They're rhetorical, Lindsay. There aren't answers for them yet."

The word yet sounded promising. She clearly saw a path to answering the questions.

"So where do we start? I honestly don't know how we're even supposed to start finding those answers without anyone else's help," I said.

"That's why I'm thinking we need to start with the design. We can't date the gold chemically, but designs are telling about the who, where, and when mysteries." She handed the talisman back to me. "Tell me about it."

"I always thought it looked like a tree. Lots of branches that all stem from a single source. For something so chaotic, the design is so grounded, and even though it's done nothing but cause trouble, when I really look at it, it's peaceful. It's weird."

"And it's a talisman, which is usually for good luck and protection. For some reason, this one actually works, and it is a little too connected to you and way too good at its job."

"I'm literally not special at all, so I don't know why it likes me," I said.

"It's because you're the lost princess of Oregon." She laughed. "God, could you imagine if it was some stupid shit like that?"

I laughed. I definitely wasn't the lost something of anywhere, but the whole talisman situation was pretty much the definition of some stupid shit like that. "Dominic thinks it's because I'm a witch, and I think he might be onto something."

"Oh my god, that's even better." She smiled and shook her head. "I know I give him a hard time, but I like that kid. He's got a good sense of humor."

That couldn't be farther from the truth. "Then maybe you should stop smoking right in front of him since he does actually have asthma."

"It's not gonna kill him," she said.

"It might."

"But anyway," she said and pointed to the talisman in my hands, "this looks religious to me. Pretty much every religion has its version of the tree of life, and it's found all throughout history."

Even though I knew she just wanted to stop talking about how bad her smoking habit was for Dominic, I let her change the subject. We were finally getting somewhere good.

"Islam, Paganism, Christianity, Hinduism, Judaism, druidism. Hell, it's all over the place in Mesopotamian and Turkish design and mythology. It's a symbol for just about everything, from strength to love to knowledge to morality," she continued.

If the tree of life was found just about everywhere and symbolized a million different things, I wasn't sure how it was supposed to help us or narrow down the options any more. I bit my cheek. Where were we supposed to go from here? Either I was missing something, or this was just another question added to our list.

"Lindsay," someone said from outside the room, and although I knew who it was, I shoved the talisman back into my pocket.

Dominic. I still wasn't sure how the talisman was communicating with him, especially since I never asked it to do anything like that, but for some reason, I believed him when he told me it called him. Maybe it was because it did the same thing to me.

"Is it the weird connection thing again?" I asked.

He nodded. "And it's really pissing me off. I have a midterm that I really need to study for, and I have to deal with this shit."

"What weird connection thing are you talking about?" Dr. Reed asked.

"It's just that sometimes he knows where I am and shows up there just because he feels it deep within his soul. We still don't exactly get what's happening, but at least we kind of accept it now. It was just scary at first," I said.

"Well, we were just talking about him, so maybe that has something to do with it," Dr. Reed said.

There wasn't nearly enough time from when we mentioned him to when he arrived, but I didn't say anything. Besides, I avoided talking about Dominic as much as I could, especially since all he did was make fun of me for not knowing sign language as well as he did, but he still showed up.

Dr. Reed sat down at the desk in the front of the room. "So tell me about this feeling deep within your soul, Dominic."

"Yeah, I don't want to. It was awkward enough the first time," he said.

Dr. Reed looked over at me, and I nodded even though he remembered it a little differently than I did. It was significantly less awkward than every other conversation we had. I even thought it was nice that we were a little closer to understanding what was going on with the talisman.

Maybe it was less awkward for me since I wasn't the one who had to explain my stalker tendencies that weren't my fault.

I really lucked out with the talisman. It didn't make me act weird. It just tried to kill people on my behalf.

"It might help us figure out where the talisman came from or who made it," Dr. Reed said.

I blinked a couple of times. How was that supposed to help us figure out which religion's tree of life we had on our hands?

"Is that what you're doing in here?" he asked. "I was doing a little research on my own, and I think I might have found something that can help us out."

"I thought you had a midterm to study for," I said.

"I can do more than one thing at once," he said, but considering he always had a stick up his ass about ASL, I found that difficult to believe.

I thought for a moment. If I remembered correctly, he said that ASL was the only class he really cared about, so maybe he was being serious.

The more I thought I could figure out about him, the more I realized that he was an enigma under the surface. And I still didn't know why he bothered with the talisman since he didn't like me for reasons that I also didn't know.

Nothing made sense—not Dominic, not Dr. Reed, not the tree of life, not the talisman, and not the fact that I was possibly a secret witch.

I used to think that figuring people and patterns out was the one thing I brought to the table. I knew I was a disappointment in just about everyone's eyes. I knew my future was shaky. But now, the only thing I knew was that I wasn't even good at that anymore. My parents really weren't bluffing about not paying for my school and there was actually something unnatural at play with the talisman. I was convinced neither of those was true, but they were.

"Would you just explain it to me, you stubborn ass?" Dr. Reed's voice raised to a shout, and I realized I missed a chunk of the conversation thanks to my thoughts.

And it sounded interesting too. How did I distract myself like that?

Dominic shook his head and crossed his arms. "Why does it matter to you? Lindsay gets it, so I don't know why you need to know every detail about it. It's a little suspicious if you ask me."

Suspicious?

"I'm doing my job, and I'm not going to argue with a punk-ass kid over this," Dr. Reed said. "The voices in your head aren't coming from the talisman. You're just mental."

I had a few suspicions of that early on, but if Dominic and I felt the same thing, we would both have to be crazy. Maybe we were. It wasn't like I had much reason to believe otherwise.

Without saying anything else, Dominic walked back out the door. With a conversation like that, I wasn't sure why he got the feeling (if that was what we were calling it now) except that the talisman just wanted to waste his time. That didn't even seem unrealistic anymore.

"Do you still like him?" I asked.

She took in a breath. "He's a lot more than I'm willing to handle right now. I need as much information as possible, but he just wants to be obstinate."

"Tell me about it," I said. "I never did anything to him, but ever since the first day of class, he hasn't liked me."

"You know that's not true," she said.

What was that supposed to mean? She wasn't in that class, and I didn't even say a word to him before he started calling me stupid in sign language. And I never would have known what he meant if the girl next to me didn't tell me what he was signing. All I said was that I knew the class was going to be a waste of time, and so far, I was right. It tried to distract me from what really mattered: the talisman.

***

With a little more information and many more questions than earlier that day, I headed back to my dorm, and Jack caught me in the lobby.

Debbie waved at us as we walked by. She was a little less passive-aggressive with me ever since I checked the little box that essentially meant I had to give up on my parents' money and do everything myself.

Sierra wasn't back from her classes yet, so Jack and I had the room to ourselves. Usually, I spent this hour alone, but Jack wasn't rehearsing with his band for some reason.

"So why aren't you at practice right now?" I asked as I shut the door behind us.

"Harvey's pissed at me for leaving Trailfest for someone I wasn't actually dating," Jack said.

I was a little pissed too, but for different reasons. "What's wrong with that? Doesn't he have a best friend that he cares about?"

He shrugged. "I don't know, Lindsay. All we ever talk about is music."

"That sounds like a miserable ten hours per week."

"It's all we have in common, really. If we talked about anything else, that would be miserable." He chuckled to himself, even though it wasn't funny. He must have picked that habit up from me.

Out of all of Jack's bandmates, Harvey was the one I knew the best, and the only real judgment I had of him was that he shouldn't have been the leader of the band, but they let him for some reason. Maybe he just had a lot more undeserved confidence than everyone else.

"You have to have something else in common. I'm sure everyone has lied about dating the cutest person in the school at some point or another," I said.

"Are you ever going to let that go? I only said it because people understand my girlfriend is gonna be mad at me if I don't do what she wants better than any other explanation."

I laughed. That got uncomfortable real fast. I wasn't sure if it was true, but I let it go. "Okay, okay. If you want, I'll tell you about what Dr. Reed thinks about the design on the talisman."

"Does she know where it came from? Who made it?" Jack asked.

"Oh, we still don't know yet, but it's a tree and not the Kraken," I said.

"The Kraken? Who guessed that?" He laughed.

It was Dominic. Who was the stupid one now?

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Hello! Thank you so much for your patience. These past few weeks have been tough academically and personally for me, so I didn't have any time to write, especially last week, so I posted this one a little earlier than usual. Thank you so much for reading!

For today's question, would you say that you are good, okay, or bad at the following things:

Driving

Singing

Drawing

Cooking

Time management

I would say I'm an okay driver (I'm just impatient behind the wheel), a bad singer (but I don't care and will do it anyway), a terrible artist (art was my second lowest grade in high school—isn't that pitiful?), an okay cook (as long as I have very clear directions to follow), and pretty good at time management (I've definitely gotten way better over the past few years).