Audrey had only ever trusted one hippie, and that was Jessica McKittrick. Joanie's mom was the grooviest, dreamcatchingest, Keep On Truckinest, back-to-the-gardenest chick Audrey had ever met, but she loved Joanie, and she loved the people Joanie loved, and thank god that included Audrey. All other hippies could cram into a big yellow taxi and drive it off a fucking cliff, as far as Audrey was concerned.

So she was having a little trouble putting her faith in a nurse who smelled like a VW bus on the way back from Woodstock.

"What is that?" Audrey said.

Lark jabbed a needle into the cap of a brown glass bottle and drew out the contents into the syringe. "Haloperidol," she said. "It's an antipsychotic."

"Joanie's not psychotic."

"Audrey," Kenya said. "Let her help Joanie." Audrey wasn't sure she trusted Kenya anymore, either. She definitely didn't trust Sarah, standing in the corner of the exam room like she knew everything about everything.

"Your friend has taken a large dose of a powerful hallucinogen. Her brain is on a little vacation right now." Lark flicked the syringe, and an air bubble floated to the top. She pushed it out until a fat drop of liquid emerged at the tip of the needle. One of the fluorescent lights overhead was on the blink, and as it flickered the droplet shifted from amber to emerald to sapphire. "This is going to help bring it back home."

Lark pulled up the sleeve of Joanie's t-shirt, a Jessica McKittrick original made of three different Dublin High School Fighting Irish volleyball practice jerseys, in three different shades of green. She ran an alcohol swab over the thick knot of Joanie's deltoid and stuck the needle in.

Joanie didn't react one way or another. Her body kept shaking, jostled by unseen hands. Back when The BabyShakers had no name, Audrey spent a week at the library looking up all the weird shit she could find, determined to prove her worth to the twins by bringing in a name as instantly iconic as the Pixies or Joy Division. Her favorite was Grisi Siknis, this fucking insane disease that teenage girls in the jungle in Nicaragua would get. It was a completely mental thing, but it was contagious. Like if one girl got it, all of a sudden thirty others would have it. Girls with the Siknis would completely freak the fuck out. They thought devils were trying to attack them, or maybe fuck them, or both. They'd run around and shake violently and chop at people with machetes. Obviously this was a great band name, but the twins were just humoring her – they'd come up with The BabyShakers when they were like twelve, and had no intention of naming themselves anything else.

Maybe Joanie was fighting devils. Maybe in her mind she was in a humid jungle, swinging a blade at anything that wasn't green, instead of shivering on the crinkly paper of an exam table in the goddamn Health Center at whatever hour it was in the morning.

Keep distracting yourself with trivia. Don't think about Joanie's shoulder and the little bead of blood that the nurse is dabbing with a cotton ball. Summer afternoons in Joanie's backyard pool, those broad shoulders the perfect perch for chicken fighting. You two were so dominant the other kids in the neighborhood eventually refused to play anymore. But Joanie would still indulge you and carry you around the pool, the all-time champions on an infinite victory lap, your thighs, goosepimpling in the evening air, locked around her head. The bone and sculpted muscle of her shoulders dug into your legs, but in a pleasurable way – they were soft and hard at the same time, chunks of granite wrapped in velvet. You wanted to build a nest up there.

When the sun went down Joanie's mom would come outside in one of her endless collection of flowy peasant dresses, her chunky necklaces clacking, and tell you your dad called and it was time to go home. But sometimes she said that you could sleep over if you wanted, and you always wanted. You'd have dinner with Joanie's family, always takeout from some exotic place you didn't even know existed in Dublin, and you would laugh like a lunatic at her dad's jokes. This was back when he still told jokes. And then you and Joanie would stay up late, watching The Princess Bride for the thousandth time on the TV in her bedroom, a luxury you never got used to, and you would rest your head on her shoulder, just for a minute, and you would feel the soft down of her skin on your cheek, and you would feel the coiled potential in that deltoid underneath, and your last thought before falling asleep would be that you were safe, both of you, together. All-time champions.

Lark had another needle out now, attached to a vial for collecting blood. "You're taking her blood?" Audrey asked.

Lark shot a not particularly subtle glance in Kenya's direction. Audrey wasn't stupid. She knew that Kenya and Joanie had some super-cool secret club that she wasn't invited to, and it looked like Sarah and this nurse were part of it too. "We need to do a toxicology report," the nurse said. "Find out exactly what happened here."

Lark wrapped a rubber strap around Joanie's bicep. A vein bulged in the crook of her arm. Lark stuck in the needle, and the vial filled with blood so dark red it almost looked black. The nurse seemed concerned as she withdrew the needle and unwrapped the tourniquet. "Is it supposed to be that dark?" asked Audrey. Lark didn't need to answer. Instead she sealed the vial and left the room.

Audrey took Joanie's hand, feeling the pulsing in her fingertips – Morse-code messages she couldn't decipher. She couldn't do anything for Joanie. She just wanted to talk to her, like they hadn't talked in months. She wanted to talk about music, find out if Joanie secretly loved "How Bizarre" as much as she did. Her attempts to get the twins to learn it had been met with such derisive laughter she had to pretend she was joking. She wanted to hear how Joanie's mom was doing. She wanted to tell Joanie about kissing Xander, to see how she would react. She wanted them to be a team again. But Joanie had a new team.

"What the hell is going on?" Audrey said, almost whispering. She had to, to keep herself from screaming. "What are you two not telling me?"

They didn't answer. Kenya at least did Audrey the courtesy of looking guilty, but Sarah just stared at her. Yelling at Sarah in the car had felt good, but Audrey still hadn't gotten any kind of satisfactory answer from her. "You know we met before," Sarah said, again not answering the fucking question Audrey just asked her. "I was in a state. Kenya remembers. I vomited on her." Kenya looked away, annoyed. This wasn't anything she wanted to talk about. "But you were so kind. You held my hand, just like you're holding hers. You talked to me. You made me feel safe." Audrey could just recall comforting a drunk girl at a party last year. But it wasn't Sarah. It was some blond sorority girl. It wasn't Sarah at all.

Sarah put her hand on her hand on Joanie's, sandwiching it between hers and Audrey's. "We're not telling you what you don't need to know," she said.

Lark returned, pushing a gurney. Sarah took her hand away. "It's going to take a little bit for the Haloperidol to take effect," she said. "It'll go faster if we get her on ice."

The four of them lifted Joanie off the exam table, two at the shoulders and two at the feet. Audrey gripped Joanie's left shoulder, the one where Lark had injected her. Her fingers conformed to the familiar shape of it. They laid her on the gurney. Like everything in this world it was too small for Joanie, unequal to the task of containing her.

Audrey pulled her hand away from Joanie's shoulder. There was a ragged rose of blood dead center on her palm. A painless stigmata. Audrey felt an impulse. As Kenya and Sarah helped Lark wheel Joanie's unwieldy body down the hall, she raised her hand to her mouth and licked off the blood. The exam room door slowly closed behind them.

Then it wasn't the exam room door. It was dark wood, heavy and ornate, with a crystal knob. As it closed, Audrey saw someone on the other side, in a richly appointed room, looking at her through the shrinking crack. It looked like that kid Tim.

When the door closed it melted into blue water. Audrey's throat seized up. No air could enter her lungs. The world around her was translucent blue, fading to black. She tried to call for help but no sound came out. The crystal blue fluid surrounded her and penetrated her. She could hear Van Halen for some reason.

--You're thinking of the Force, dude.

Before it all went black she saw them swimming up: devils. Devils everywhere.

--Who is this?

"Audrey?"

She could breathe again. She was on her knees on the floor of the exam room, clutching her throat. Her heart pumped in time with the flickering fluorescent light, reflected in the fat black bracelet on Sarah's wrist. Sarah was standing in the doorway, holding two white buckets. "Help me get some ice," Sarah said.

Sarah didn't notice, or maybe just didn't care, that Audrey had nearly just drowned on dry land.

Audrey stood up on wobbly legs and wiped the last few flecks of Joanie's blood on her skirt. She took a bucket and followed Sarah to a break room with a table, a refrigerator, a couple of vending machines and an ice machine. Sarah opened it and started filling her bucket with the metal scoop.

Audrey rubbed her throat. She could taste chlorine. "I don't think we've met before," she said. "You must be thinking of someone else."

"Maybe you're thinking of someone else." Her bucket was full. She handed the scoop to Audrey. The handle was so cold it almost burned.

Audrey saw herself swinging the ice scoop at Sarah, hitting her square in the face. Take a shot at the nearest devil. Blame it on Joanie's siknis. It's an epidemic.

Instead she plunged the scoop into the ice and started filling her bucket. There was no point in asking Sarah anything, that was clear. Not how she knew Joanie, or why she had involved herself in this. Now what she was doing with Shawn, though on that front who cared, really. Who cared. Audrey didn't care. Shawn had been a rebound, the next available warm body at a time when that was all Audrey needed. He did his best to give her more than that. It had just gotten embarrassing. Sarah could have him, if she wanted him. Audrey couldn't quite understand why she would want him, though.

Keep distracting yourself with this petty bullshit. Don't think about Joanie

They carried the ice buckets down the hall, past dark, empty exam rooms, and a lab flooded with bright white light. Audrey looked in and saw the vial of Joanie's blood resting in a plastic rack.

They made a left turn down another hall to a sports therapy room, filled with equipment that looked several orders of magnitude more state-of-the-art than anything else in the Health Center. Kenya and Lark had Joanie stripped to her underwear on the gurney, next to a soaking tub half-filled with water. It felt wrong, to see Joanie here nearly nude in the presence of others. Audrey wanted to throw a sheet over her. They didn't deserve such magnificence.

"Put the ice in there," Lark said. Audrey and Sarah dumped the ice in the tub. They each took one of Joanie's legs and helped Lark and Kenya lower her into the ice bath. As Audrey guided Joanie's foot into the frigid water, she saw something she had never seen before. Joanie had a tattoo. A purple Bowie knife, on her left ankle.

Audrey felt the knife in her own heart, a minor betrayal. Audrey and Joanie were going to get matching tattoos the day after high school graduation, but Joanie chickened out. Audrey went through with it, getting a tiny peanut on the inside of her bicep. But she also got another tattoo, something that Joanie had no knowledge of. So maybe they were even.

Don't think about Joanie, holding your ankles as you laughed and splashed and fought with the new neighbors, the kid who looked like a teenage Evan Dando and his perpetually angry little sister. They didn't know the full extent of your chicken fighting prowess yet. The second time they came over, Joanie wore a two-piece for the first time that you could recall in the presence of anyone other than yourself. She always hid herself under these demure, skirted monstrosities that her mom stitched together. Real Bride-of-Frankenstein-at-the-beach stuff. But now Dando Jr. was getting an eyeful, and she didn't seem to mind. She seemed to like it.

The kid sister noticed it too. She was jealous of Joanie and didn't even understand why. She said the kick was an accident, but it looked deliberate to you, in the second before Joanie tipped over backwards, taking you down with her. The sister's foot caught Joanie right on the jaw, and her unclipped toenail slashed Joanie's lower lip. A thin trail of blood arced through the water from Joanie's mouth as she sank, unconscious, to the bottom. You kicked free of her shoulders, broke the surface for a breath, then dove down to haul her back up. The guy joined in, and together you managed to get her up onto the edge of the pool.

Joanie wasn't breathing. The guy was freaking out, useless beyond brute labor, yelling at his smugly satisfied sister. But you were calm. You summoned everything you could remember from the first aid class you took the previous summer. You put your hands together over Joanie's heart and pushed, playing "Runnin' with the Devil" in your head to get the rhythm right. Then you tilted her head back and pinched her nose, and as your lips touched hers you tasted the salty, metallic tang of her blood, and you knew you were going to save her.

The four of them watched Joanie in silence. She was shaking less now, even though she was submerged up to her neck in 50-degree water. Audrey had an idea.

"I'm going to the bathroom," she said, and she left the sports therapy room to go find Joanie's blood.

Lata, Caroline and Renee enter the Tower.