No surprise there.

And evidently juvenile criminal records aren’t searchable, because I couldn’t find a single word about her illustrious criminal past.

Then, finally, around two-thirty in the morning, I tripped over a stroke of brilliance. I searched for Nash’s old school. The one where he’d met Sabine.

Her name didn’t come up in any of the hits, but when I added the word arrested to the search, I struck gold.

Two years ago, about three months after Nash started at Eastlake as a sophomore, a fifteen-year-old female sophomore was arrested at his old school for assaulting a teacher. Two months after that, a fifteen-year-old female sophomore was removed from school property for possession of alcohol. The news stories—both from the same online paper—didn’t say whether or not the two girls were the same person, but I had no doubt that they were. However, after that, all the trouble at Nash’s old school seemed to have been caused by boys.

The logical conclusion? Sabine was either expelled or she moved.

But where did she go between Nash’s last school and Eastlake? I knew I’d heard the name of her most recent school— Sabine had told Emma during their first conversation in junior English.

Valley something. Or something Valley. Valleyview? No. Oak Valley? No, but that was closer. It was something to do with nature.

And just like that, I remembered: Valley Cove. Sabine transferred to Eastlake from Valley Cove High School. I remembered Em saying that Sabine had joked that the town sported neither a valley nor any obvious cove.

After a little more searching, I came up with a single, year-old article in the tiny Valley Cove local newspaper—miraculously online—about a female junior who was suspended for vandalizing school property. She was caught in the act of spray painting “lewd images and crude language” on the side of the school building in the middle of the night.

Yup. Sounds like Sabine.

By the time I closed my laptop at three in the morning and snuck into the bathroom to brush my teeth, I was thoroughly convinced that Sabine was an unrepentant criminal. But I had absolutely no evidence that her crimes had ever included murder.

I SIT UP IN BED and unease crawls beneath my skin like an army of tiny spiders. I blink sleep from my eyes and my room comes into focus, dark, but for the glow from a security light outside my window. Something is wrong, but I can’t tell what. Not yet. But my scalp feels prickled—my hair wanting to stand on end.

I smell it first, even before I hear it, and the spiders beneath my flesh writhe frantically. I know that smell. Once, a squirrel got trapped in the old trash can we rake leaves into, and when Dad found it, it smelled like this. Like rot. Like warm death.

My heart thumps painfully and I hold my breath. I don’t want to smell that putrid stench, but I want to taste it even less, so I clamp my jawshut.

Next comes the sound—a broken cadence of footsteps, punctuated by a horrible sliding sound. The steps are soft, but they get louder. Coming closer. My pulse races and I scoot back against the headboard, putting a few more worthless inches between me and whatever is step-sliding its way toward my room.

I should run. But I can’t move. I’m frozen, morbid curiosity and paralyzing dread warring inside me while my door creaks slowly open.

My door shouldn’t creak. It never has before. But it creaks now, and a gray hand pushes the doorknob.

I’m breathing too fast. I want to scream. Screaming has never failed me, but now my voice is as still as the rest of me. Waiting. Terrified.

Sweat drips down my spine. I feel it bead on my forehead and in the crooks of my arms. That gray hand leads to a wrist, which leads to an arm, which then leads to a shoulder, and before I know it, she’s there. In my doorway. Staring at me through dead, milky eyes.

I can’t breathe fast enough, and each breath smells like her. Like decay. Like things that should be rotting peacefully in the ground, not dripping thick, foul fluids on my carpet.

But the worst part is that though she should be blind, I know she sees me. Though her cracked, colorless lips shouldn’t be able to move, they open. And though her throat has already rotted through, raw tendons peeking at me through the holes in her flesh, her voice still works, and I still recognize it.

I can never forget it, though I haven’t heard it since I was three years old. Since the night she died. Since the night I died, and she took my place.

This walking, rotting, stinking corpse is my mother.

“I want it back,” she says, and at first her voice is a whisper. She hasn’t used it in thirteen years. “You squandered it, and I want it back.”

“Mom?” I don’t realize my own voice is back until I hear myself speak. Oh, how I’ve always wanted the chance to speak to her, just one more time. But not like this. This is wrong, so fundamentally perverse that I can’t believe this is happening. Yet I can’t deny it, either. Not with her stench in the air, polluting my lungs. Not with her hands reaching, reaching…

“You’ve wasted it. You’re not living, you’re just dying very slowly.” Each word is an obvious effort, but she keeps going. “Give it back to me.” She step-hobbles closer, and some part of me understands that her legs don’t work right anymore. But the miracle, really, is that they work at all. She should be nothing but bones after thirteen years in the grave.

My skin crawls, and fear is the battery keeping my heart beating. I want to run, and I’m sure now that I can, physically. But I can’t run from her. She’s dead, and smelly, and oddly squishy, but she’s my mother.