Of Starlight by Dan Rix Page B

are you alive?” I blurted.
    She flashed me a cryptic look. “Maybe I should be the one asking you that,” she said. “Are you alive?”
    A chill passed through me.
    Out of curiosity, I reached out and touched her arm. Cool skin met my finger, before she jerked away.
    She was real. Not a ghost.
    What about the time I’d seen her in my bedroom? “Did you . . . uh . . . did you still want me to avenge you?”
    She tilted her head, confused. “What are you talking about?”
    “Never mind.” That had been my subconscious, a hallucination created by dark matter. There hadn’t actually been a girl there. “So I heard you hitchhiked to the East Coast to see some kind of healer. Really? You just left in the middle of the night and didn’t tell your family or friends or anyone? You really did that?”
    “I got fixed,” she said. “Now may I go?”
    “What day did you leave?”
    “I don’t remember,” she said.
    “Were you sleepwalking that night?”
    “I don’t sleepwalk anymore!” she spat, and with that she turned on her heel and marched away.
    “Wait—“ I lunged forward and caught a wisp of hair, gave it a hard yank.
    “Ow!” she said, stumbling back. “Get away from me.”
    But I had it. A single strand of her blonde hair, gleaming in the sunlight.
    “You think they can do a DNA test?” I said, fidgeting while Megan compared the two hairs side by side on the roof of her car.
    “Who’s going to do that for us?” she said, and then she mocked, “Hi officer, here’s a bloody hair from a girl we killed. Could you tell us who it is?”
    “Maybe we could go to UCSB and find another grad student.”
    “They’re the same color,” Megan muttered, rolling the hairs between her thumb and forefinger. “Are we really considering the possibility that these are from the same person?”
    “Until we rule that out.”
    “Because they look like they’re from the same person.”
    I scooted in next to her. “What about the length?”
    Megan pinned the two ends together and pulled the hairs taught. Both were long, but one extended a few inches past the other. “They don’t match,” she said.
    “You can have different length hairs on one person’s head.”
    She went back to studying the bloody hair. “You said you got this from your trunk, right?”
    “Where it’s been for three months.”
    “If these are from the same person,” said Megan. “If Ashley and that girl are one and the same, what would that even mean?”
    “That is the question,” I said.
    “We kill her, she’s dead . . . then three months later, she turns up alive, but her dead body is still right where we left it. That doesn’t sound right.”
    “Oh, did you just figure that out?” I said.
    “Shush. I’m just wondering if we missed anything. Maybe she had a twin.”
    “It’s possible. Anything’s possible, Megan.”
    “So for three months, while her body was rotting in the wilderness, she was also kicking it in South Carolina? The same person?”
    “Supposedly,” I said.
    “Maybe she went invisible and hid in her room the whole time.”
    “That doesn’t answer anything,” I said.
    “What’s in South Carolina?”
    “I don’t know.” I let my backpack fall to the asphalt and leaned back against her Ford, letting fatigue close my eyes. “It’s her . . . I know it’s her. We killed Ashley that night, not someone else.”
    “So she’s back from the dead?” said Megan.
    “Yep. And I think I know what brought her back.”
    “What?”
    “Dark matter.”
    She peered sideways at me. “Is that good or bad?”
    I sighed. “I thought it was good at first. Now I’m starting to think it’s really bad.”
    “Mom, can I borrow your phone?” I asked, leaning into her office on Friday after school.
    “Sure.” Without looking up from her computer, she snatched the cordless phone off its stand and tossed it to me.
    “I mean your cell phone,” I said.
    She glanced up. “What’s wrong with that