“I tried to warn you. You have to let me go!”

I sat up in bed. My T-shirt was soaking wet. My pillow was wet. My hair was wet. And my room was sticky and humid. I guessed I’d left the window open again.

“Ethan Wate! Are you listenin’ to me? You better get yourself down here yesterday, or you won’t be havin’ breakfast again this week.”

I was in my seat just as three eggs over-easy slid onto my plate of biscuits and gravy. “Good morning, Amma.”

She turned her back to me without so much as a look. “Now you know there’s nothin’ good about it. Don’t spit down my back and tell me it’s rainin’.” She was still aggravated with me, but I wasn’t sure if it was because I had walked out of class or brought the locket home. Probably both. I couldn’t blame her, though; I didn’t usually get in trouble at school. This was all new territory.

“Amma, I’m sorry about leaving class on Friday. It’s not gonna happen again. Everything’ll be back to normal.”

Her face softened, just a little, and she sat down across from me. “Don’t think so. We all make our choices, and those choices have consequences. I expect you’ll have some hell to pay for yours when you get to school. Maybe you’ll start listenin’ to me now. Stay away from that Lena Duchannes, and that house.”

It wasn’t like Amma to side with everyone else in town, considering that was usually the wrong side of things. I could tell she was worried by the way she kept stirring her coffee, long after the milk had disappeared. Amma always worried about me and I loved her for it, but something felt different since I showed her the locket. I walked around the table and gave her a hug. She smelled like pencil lead and Red Hots, like always.

She shook her head, muttering, “Don’t want to hear about any green eyes and black hair. It’s fixin’ to come up a bad cloud today, so you be careful.”

Amma wasn’t just going dark. Today she was going pitch-black. I could feel it coming up a bad cloud, myself.

Link pulled up in the Beater blasting some terrible tunes, as usual. He turned down the music when I slid into the seat, which was always a bad sign.

“We got trubs.”

“I know.”

“Jackson’s got itself a regular lynch mob this mornin’.”

“What’d you hear?”

“Been goin’ on since Friday night. I heard my mom talkin’, and I tried to call you. Where were you, anyway?”

“I was pretending to bury a hexed locket over at Greenbrier, so Amma would let me back in the house.”

Link laughed. He was used to talk about hexes and charms and the evil eye, where Amma was concerned. “At least she’s not makin’ you wear that stinkin’ bag a onion mess around your neck. That was nasty.”

“It was garlic. For my mom’s funeral.”

“It was nasty.”

The thing about Link was, we’d been friends since the day he gave me that Twinkie on the bus, and after that he didn’t care much what I said or did. Even back then, you knew who your friends were. That’s what Gatlin was like. Everything had already happened, ten years ago. For our parents, everything had already happened twenty or thirty years ago. And for the town itself, it seemed like nothing had happened for more than a hundred years. Nothing of consequence, that is.

I had a feeling that was all about to change.

My mom would have said it was time. If there was one thing my mom liked, it was change. Unlike Link’s mom. Mrs. Lincoln was a rage-aholic, on a mission, with a network—a dangerous combination. When we were in the eighth grade, Mrs. Lincoln ripped the cable box out of the wall because she found Link watching a Harry Potter movie, a series she had campaigned to ban from the Gatlin County Library because she thought it promoted witchcraft. Luckily, Link managed to sneak over to Earl Petty’s house to watch MTV, or Who Shot Lincoln would never have become Jackson High’s premier—and by premier, I mean only—rock band.

I never understood Mrs. Lincoln. When my mom was alive, she would roll her eyes and say, “Link may be your best friend, but don’t expect me to join the DAR and start wearing a hoop skirt for reenactments.” Then we’d both crack up, imagining my mom, who walked miles of muddy battlefields looking for old shell casings, who cut her own hair with garden scissors, as a member of the DAR, organizing bake sales and telling everyone how to decorate their houses.

Mrs. Lincoln was easy to picture in the DAR. She was the Recording Secretary, and even I knew that. She was on the Board with Savannah Snow’s and Emily Asher’s mothers, while my mom spent most of her time holed up in the library looking at microfiche.

Had spent.

Link was still talking and soon I’d heard enough to start listening. “My mom, Emily’s mom, Savannah’s… they’ve been burnin’ up the phone lines, last couple a nights. Overheard my mom talkin’ about the window breakin’ in English and how she heard Old Man Ravenwood’s niece had blood on her hands.”

He swerved around the corner, without even taking a breath. “And about how your girlfriend just got outta a mental institution in Virginia, and how she’s an orphan, and has bi schizo-manic somethin’.”

“She’s not my girlfriend. We’re just friends,” I said automatically.

“Shut up. You’re so whipped I should buy you a saddle.” Which he would’ve said about any girl I talked to, talked about, or even looked at in the hall.