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Chapter One

Piper

Monday

Piper Phillips sat on the edge of the wooden chair in her front hallway, one leg crossed over the other in the shape of a number four.

She’d rubbed a hole into the toe of her white sock, and chose to ignore it.

With one tennis shoe laced on her foot and the other dangling from her hand, Piper had stalled mid-task, staring at her front door in a haze.

She’d found herself doing that a lot lately, drifting off mid-task.

It felt like a Neverland space, like a weird in-between place where she simultaneously existed and didn’t—a mini-hibernation, perhaps?

Perhaps.

It felt like something lurked on the other side. A vague, nebulous danger that was about to upend her world.

So maybe this experience was more like the freeze part of “fight, flight, or freeze.” Like if she were very, very still, she’d survive.

Piper blinked herself out of her state and slid the tennis shoe onto her socked foot, stomping down to press her heel into place.

With her chest resting on her lap, Piper reached for the laces, twisting them into a bow.

The doctor said she was fine—well, that all her test results came back “within range.”

That was good, right?

The practical explanation she gave herself for this weird little quirk she’d picked up was that in the years after her dad died, Piper had wrapped herself in the crush of grief, and recently the pain was shifting and losing some of its heaviness.

Maybe, in the absence of that familiar weight, this was what she’d be left with.

It wasn’t bad.

It was kind of cottony and soft.

Besides, when her body hit pause, there didn’t seem to be a lot she could do about it.

Just last week, Chanti Gupta—Piper’s ride-or-die friend since their “Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret” years—had brought over her tarot deck to look for cosmic answers to this new sensation Piper was experiencing.

It was a given that Chanti would end up sitting at Piper’s kitchen table fanning the cards out.

After all, Chanti seemed to have her fingers on the universal pulse in an uncanny, often disturbingly accurate, kind of way.

Always had.

Way back in eighth grade, Chanti had been an aficionado of the Ouija board, making her a high-demand guest at every sleepover.

And Chanti would only go to the sleepover if Piper was there, too.

Being established besties with Chanti meant Piper had a ticket to a social life that would otherwise exclude her.

True then, same now: Chanti was the extrovert, and Piper was content to stay home and read.

Back in the summer before high school, something spooked the shit out of Chanti, and she refused to tell Piper about it or be anywhere near a Ouija board again.

Tarot took its place.