“I’ll do whatever I want with him,” I shouted, but Eli merely laughed at me. The cruel sound crawled over my skin.

“You’re missing one very important detail, Amelia,” he said. “You can’t share your future with that boy, because there is no future for you. He’ll age, but you’ll stay the same, forever, dead—unchanging. Futureless.”

“I don’t have to stay here and listen to this,” I spat. “And I’m not going to.”

I spun on my heels to leave, to go anywhere but here, and fast. Before I could run away, though, Eli grabbed one of my wrists and whirled me back around to face him.

Immediately, I became aware of a rough burning upon my wrist at the place where Eli’s fingers gripped me. I looked down at my arm and gasped. Just beneath Eli’s fingers, pale pink streaks appeared on my skin: abrasions, caused by his too-tight grip.

As Eli had said, it wasn’t possible. Yet as I struggled, the marks beneath his fingers grew brighter, more irritated.

“Eli, my arm!” I looked back up at him in panic. Eli, however, didn’t seem to hear me. His eyes, bright and frenzied, bored into mine. I tried in vain to yank my wrist from his grip while I clawed at his fingers with my free hand.

“Stop it!” I shrieked. “You’re hurting me!”

Eli ignored my demand and tugged me closer.

“But maybe I’m forgetting something too, Amelia. After all, isn’t your death one of the reasons you came to see me? You did want to know about your death, didn’t you?” That malicious smile changed into something darker, something wilder. “Well, honey, let me fulfill your wish.”

“No! Let me go,” I cried out just as I lost the tug-of-war with my arm. Eli finally pulled me to him, his face only a few inches from mine.

“Too late, Amelia. Too late.”

“Please,” I gasped. I couldn’t quite catch my breath, and the bones in my wrist strained under his grip.

“Don’t beg. It’s unbecoming,” Eli whispered. Then he jerked me even closer to him, pressing his body to mine. “Now, I’m going to tell you something very important and then I’ve got to get to my second appointment today. I don’t have much time, so listen carefully: you didn’t fall off that bridge.”

“No,” I moaned. “I fell. I know I fell. I didn’t jump.”

“Shut up,” Eli commanded. “You didn’t fall. And you didn’t jump, either.”

“W-what?” I shook my head, unable to think clearly, unable to understand.

Eli leaned in until his cold lips brushed my earlobe. Softly, almost too softly for me to hear, he whispered, “You were pushed.”

Without warning, Eli let go of my arm.

I hadn’t stopped struggling and so I flew backward from the momentum. I fell toward the ground, staring wildly up at Eli’s twisted face.

The last thing I heard, before my vision went black, was the loud crack of my head against my own tombstone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Chapter

Twenty-Three

It was the same as always.

I opened my eyes to the terrible, familiar water. It churned and frothed around me, whether from the river’s current or my struggles, I couldn’t be sure. The water obscured my vision, battered against my weakening limbs, and pried at my lips, trying to open them and inundate my lungs.

My lungs ached for air, and my arms ached from flailing. Black spots—the by-products of a lack of oxygen—began to dance across my eyes.

Another nightmare. I was in another nightmare.

The rational part of my brain recognized this fact. It spoke softly, quietly telling the rest of my brain that this horror would end soon, that I always awoke from this wretched scene even if I did so as a dead girl. I knew this much: if I stopped struggling, the nightmare would eventually end and I would wake up in the graveyard.

And after I woke up, I would be able to return to Joshua. The very thought of his name gave me hope. It gave me a reason to let go of the fight no matter how much it went against my somewhat ironic survival instinct.

So I stopped struggling. I let my arms and legs go slack. I let the current pull at them, let it catch them and drag them. I closed my eyes just so I wouldn’t have to watch this part of the nightmare happen, and I opened my mouth to breathe the inevitable air of the graveyard.

Yet water instead of air rushed into my open mouth. I choked on it, inadvertently allowing in more water. I opened my eyes, but I still saw the dark river around me, not the sunlit cemetery.

Something was going horribly wrong.

I’d never choked before. In no other nightmare had the water actually entered my lungs. I always woke up just before the point of death. Always.

But not now, it seemed.

My lungs screamed in my chest since the water burned them far worse than the lack of air had. My whole body moved in a frenzied response to the burning in my chest, arms flapping and legs scissoring beneath me.

I flailed, I flailed, and then—

Impossibly, I rose. Within seconds, my head emerged from the water.

I felt wind, and the heavy pelting of rain against my skin. The rain came from all directions, pouring down on me in a torrent and then splashing back off the river and into my face.

My body began to react again. I coughed twice and choked up some of the water from my lungs. My hands slapped weakly against the surface of the river, mostly ineffective in their battle to keep me afloat.

While I floundered, I felt the strangest sensation along my wrists, under my jaw, in my chest: a heavy thumping that reverberated throughout my body. Without being terribly cognizant of what I was doing, I clenched one hand to my heart.

Only then, with my hand pressed against my chest, did I realize what was happening: my heart was beating. That was a pulse, thumping at my wrists and under my jaw.

I was alive.

I opened my mouth to scream—from fear, from joy. And for help. If I was truly alive, I needed help, fast.

But another noise cut off my scream: laughter, loud and crazed, from somewhere high above me. Individual voices blended together in their frenzy, with only the occasionally distinct shriek.

Despite the uniformity of the laughing voices, they all sounded so familiar. Who were they? Where were they?

I squinted up through the rain. Far above me I could just make out the shape of High Bridge and the crowd of figures standing at its edge.

Don’t you remember this scene, Amelia? Isn’t everything awfully familiar?

The silky voice—a darker version of my own—whispered in my head. I frowned as I continued to cough and choke up more water. What was happening here?

I looked back up to the bridge and the figures on it.

“Help,” I pleaded. The word came out as a feeble moan, barely loud enough to reach the bridge.

At the sound of my voice, one of the figures moved away from the pack. Its head whipped away from the other figures, and it met my gaze. Even through the rain, I could see that the figure was a boy.

I may not have been able to make out his features. But I could, at that moment, have easily described his square jaw, his perfectly straight nose, and his short blond crew cut.

Because I knew the boy now staring down at me from High Bridge.

I’d only known him for a short time, really, before my death. Only for my senior year, the one I’d practically forced my mother into letting me attend at Wilburton High School. The boy now watching me would have been in my graduating class, if I’d had the chance to graduate.

I remembered him. I remembered everything about Doug Davidson.

Doug, the most popular boy at school. The one with the most friends, the fastest car, and the richest parents. The one who had befriended me the minute I stepped into Wilburton High. The one who had . . . had . . .