I freeze. Sawyer gives a hollow laugh. But the moment of panic passes.
Mrs. Brinkerhoff reaches out and gives me a hug. “Bridget wrote down your number—I hope that’s okay.”
I plaster a smile on my face. “Oh, how clever of her. Sure. Call anytime.”
After another round of thanks, they get back into the car and Mr. Brinkerhoff presses buttons on the dashboard, probably entering their next destination into the GPS. We walk back to the step and watch them pull away. And then they stop.
The back door to the car opens and Bridget gets out, without her crutches this time. “Yo, Jules!” she yells. She hops on one foot across the yard toward us. I stand up and go toward her.
“What’s up? Did you forget something?” I ask.
“Yeah, I forgot to give you a hug.”
Kids these days. I try not to roll my eyes, and I lean down so she can hug me.
She wraps her arms around my neck and puts her mouth to my ear. And then she whispers, so softly I can barely hear her, “Guess what? I know about the vision.”
Before I can say a word, she’s hopping back to the car and closing the door, and I’m watching them drive off, wondering, for the millionth time, if I’m losing my mind.
“She knows about the vision,” I tell Sawyer and Rowan once their car is out of sight.
“What?” Rowan asks. “How?”
I think about it for a long moment. “She must have read our text messages on your phone, Sawyer. I wouldn’t put it past her.”
“I don’t think anyone would believe her if she, you know, went to the media or something,” Sawyer says. “Did she say it threateningly? Or what?”
“No,” I say. “Just matter-of-factly, like she blurts out everything else.”
“It probably just makes her feel cool,” Rowan says. “I read your texts all the time. Makes me feel supercool.”
I punch her in the shoulder. “You’d better not.”
“Psh. Good luck trying to stop me.”
Sawyer rolls his eyes. “Anyway. If she wasn’t threatening, then I doubt we have to worry about it.”
“Me too.” I look sidelong at Rowan. “Do you really read my texts? That’s gross.”
She frowns. “Of course not. Don’t be a douche.”
• • •
Later, after Sawyer goes home and everybody is safe in their beds and Bridget Brinkerhoff is but a memory, my phone vibrates with a text message. I think it might be Tori, so I scramble to check it because I forgot to tell her Sawyer and Ben are fine.
But it’s not Tori.
It’s a message from a strange number I don’t have programmed into my phone. One I don’t recognize. I open it and read: Hey Julesies! Guess what? Now I’m seeing a vision too!
Epilogue
Five weeks later.
It takes a four-eyed, hilariously blunt thirteen-year-old kid with cancer to point out the logic of the visions to me. And it’s not until after we deal with her vision disaster that we realize we’ve hit a dead end.
As it turns out, Bridget Brinkerhoff is probably the best of all of us at solving the clues and carrying out the risky actions inside a vision. Maybe it’s because she has to face death on a regular basis that she’s so fearless. And maybe she’s just faking bravery, like the rest of us. But Sawyer and I, Trey and Ben, Rowan, and probably even Rowan’s not-fake Internet boyfriend, Charlie, would all agree that Bridget has a knack for figuring out what’s in store for our little world. She’s in remission now, by the way—a detail she nearly forgot to tell us after her last doctor’s visit.
Bridget’s vision? Stadium bleachers collapse at a graduation ceremony. At one point or another in the vision, she saw each of us dead, along with dozens of strangers.
But it’s over now and here we are: Trey, Rowan, Sawyer, Ben, Bridget, and me. All still alive. We lie on our backs in the grass next to our garden, staring up at the stars.
“We could go try to get the graduating class list. Narrow down the possibilities to try to find the next person with the vision.” It hurts my stomach to say it.
“It wouldn’t help much, since none of the graduates were in those bleachers,” Sawyer says. He holds my hand.
“Yeah, but maybe their families were.”
“Extended families, friends,” Trey says, “plus other students. Over a thousand of them. Face it, Jules. Unless the person finds us, we’re done here. The vision curse moves on without us.”
I close my eyes, wishing it to be true.
Bridget props herself up on an elbow. “So, I’ve been meaning to ask, who’d you get your vision from, Jules?”
“Nobody. I started it,” I say.
Bridget snorts. “You did not.”
I open my eyes and turn my head to look at her. “How would you know?”
“Ego much?” She grins.
I rip up a handful of grass and throw it at her face.
She laughs again and says, “No, come on. Really. Who’d you get your vision from?”
“I’m not joking,” I say. “I really think it started with me. I haven’t been in any tragedies.”
“Well, when did your vision start?” she prods.
Rowan props up on her elbow too, on the other side of Bridget. “Yeah, when exactly did it start? Do you remember?”
Slowly everybody else shifts to look at me. “Suddenly I feel like I’m on a talk show,” I say. I try to remember. “I don’t know. I had my vision for a long time. Several weeks.”