"Lindsay, would you put your phone down for three minutes?" Dominic said from next to me on my dorm room floor. Sierra really needed to vacuum the carpet. She left little paper scraps everywhere. "Finals aren't going to magically go away if you ignore them for long enough."

I looked up for a moment before going back to my phone. "I know that."

This Pinterest board wasn't going to organize itself. With a chaotic clutter of whatever artifacts and information I could find from anything Oregon Trail to Pacific Native American tribes (plus a few potions just in case I was a little more magical than I thought), I was going to find answers. An answer for why the talisman ended up with me. An answer for how Dominic and I fit together. Maybe that was just because I was a Scorpio and he was a Capricorn. That was another thing that somehow made it onto my Pepe Silvia board. I really had lost control of it about a month prior.

"You're going to fail ASL, and you are going to take me down with you. I already see it happening," he continued with his textbook in his lap.

I was pretty sure he had never failed anything in his life, but I wasn't the one who had to live with that level of anxiety all the time. I had my own problems to deal with.

"Would you relax? We're not going to fail if the talisman has anything to say about it," I said.

Dominic let out a sigh. "And what if it doesn't have anything to say? You can't keep relying on that thing."

"Have I let you down yet?"

He didn't say anything to that. He and I both knew I hadn't.

A silence lingered between the two of us for a moment as he went back to studying, and I went back to my version of it.

Just like Dr. Reed had explained to me numerous times, there wasn't anything like the talisman anywhere, but there was something soothing about putting together a group of pictures of trinkets that all had some tree of life symbol on them.

"But seriously. The exam is in two days. Can you put whatever you're doing on hold until after that? Then you can ignore me for however long you'd like," Dominic finally said.

"I'm not gonna ignore you ever. I don't think we can get rid of each other even if we wanted to," I said.

A small smile snuck onto his face. "Probably not, as tragic as that is."

I set my phone down and pulled my textbook onto my lap. I still didn't understand how I was supposed to learn a whole new language from a book, but it wasn't like I had any better ideas besides maybe going deaf and absolutely having to learn it.

"Okay, so explain everything to me like I'm five," I said.

"Let's start at the very beginning of the semester. Please tell me that you remember the alphabet," he said.

I nodded. "That was last semester, and I got a C in that class, so I'm pretty much an expert at the alphabet."

"Oh God, Lindsay. No," Dominic said before a different thought crossed his mind. "It's kind of weird we haven't run into Harvey since you know when, especially since he's an assistant to teaching this class. Don't you think that's weird?"

I nodded. "Yep, but I stopped asking questions many moons ago."

"Especially since Dr. Reed definitely asked Dr. Rainier if he could make out any script on the talisman," he continued. "You noticed that, right?"

"Well, it's kind of our fault that Dr. Rainier's even teaching our class at all, and he's the head of the department of languages, so that's not that weird, probably."

"Your fault, Lindsay. I had nothing to do with that."

He had a little bit to do with that, but I let it go. He was getting distracted from studying, and I was all for that.

"So you don't think it's over then?" I asked.

I was hoping that kidnapping party at Harvey's was going to be the last bit of nonsense from the talisman. I was really, really hoping.

"I don't think it. I feel it. In my bones, in my veins, in my—" He trailed off for a moment. "We can't take that final. Something's gonna happen."

"What?"

"Everyone there knows too much." He looked me in the eyes, and it was like the stress that coursed through his bloodstream suddenly shot into mine like heroin, but much less relaxing. "I feel it, Lindsay, and I really don't think it's all in my head."

"It never has been. I'm not worried about you making things up. I'm just worried because I can't afford to fail that class. They'll kick me out of school, Dominic, and I still have people to prove wrong."

"Well, shit." He scratched the back of his head. "Shit, shit, shit."

He was really worked up into a panic about this, and I couldn't help but feel it too.

"I wish I could describe this to you. I know you think I'm crazy, but I just—" He stuttered for a moment. "You just have to take my word for it."

"Stop for a second. I don't think you're crazy, and you need to calm down because you're going to work yourself up into an asthma attack again."

He took a deep breath in and out. I nodded, and he did it again.

Good, good. That gave me enough time to collect my own thoughts before I could piece his together.

Before he could get his mind started down a train track to panic all over again, I spoke again. "Do you want me to take out Dr. Rainier? I've done it once, and I have no problem doing it to someone who's not so innocent."

Dominic's eyes widened. "What? No. He hasn't even done anything."

"Yet."

"One of these days, you're gonna get caught for attempted murder. You know that, right?"

"What if we compromise and I just make something happen to Harvey? I have a few days to think about how I'm not gonna leave any evidence."

He took a second to think about that proposal. "Actually, that would work for me ethically and morally."

I smiled. "You're the best."

"But I'm coming up with the plan. We absolutely cannot leave any trail back to us, and you cannot stray from it at all. Is that clear?"

I nodded. As long as I got my revenge for what Harvey did to me, Dominic, Jack, and Sierra, I didn't care how it got done and whose rules I had to play by. Besides, Dominic's rules were probably a little smarter and better thought-out than mine, even if they weren't nearly as creative.

"So we should probably get back to studying, then. None of this even matters if I fail the class the old-fashioned way," I said.

Dominic shook his head. "I'm already too distracted now. We have to strike first, and we have to strike hard."

I slid my textbook off my lap. "I feel like this is a trick or a test. There's no way you can possibly be okay with this."

"Sometimes the bad influence ends up beating the good influence," Dominic said.

Well, I certainly liked that, even though I was pretty sure that I was the good influence between the two of us.

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Hello everyone! Thank you so much for reading! Thank you for your patience, and I really appreciate your support, especially on this book. I know it's taking a while, but we're almost there, and I'm super into it now, even with all the edits I know I need to make in the future.

So for today's question, how old do you think you are emotionally? For example, would you say that you're a kid at heart, or are you more mature for your age?

I'm probably an eighty-year-old trapped in a young body. I love to crochet, I'm confused by all the new slang terms, my back hurts for no reason, and I am very bad at working technology that I didn't grow up with. Of course, I'm really not that old, but sometimes I feel like it. I am not looking forward to aging.