It took about half an hour of running around town, a wailing Blair at my back, before we finally got off the city roads and into a place where the police might have a harder time finding us. Bixby Park had two modes—sunny fields with playgrounds and a shockingly well-maintained public restroom, and spooky foresty paths. Okay, some might call them ‘serene hiking trails that took you away from the hubbub of city life’ but when I was twelve, I read some horror story off the internet about a girl who got eaten by ghost wolves in a Bixly Park, and haven’t been able to shake the association.

Unfortunately, those forest paths were my only real way to get hidden enough that I could have an actual conversation with a ghost who liked to moan and cry loudly. Airpods could explain me talking to myself, but they couldn’t explain the air sobbing back at me. So we spent another half an hour winding through the woods until we’d gone a solid ten minutes without seeing any hikers, and were solidly in the thick of the trees.

In a weird way, even if Bixby Park had never been haunted before, they definitely were now, thanks to me. I was still unsettled in the quiet, empty part of the woods. Even knowing that ghosts existed—and that the only ghosts I’d ever encountered were just my annoying friends—didn’t loosen the clenched knot in my stomach.

The knot tightened every time I considered my shopping cart of stolen loot too. I’d stealthily stashed it behind a dumpster when leveling up myself and Blair, thinking it would be safe, but now I was worried about the cops finding it or homeless people finding it or some degenerate with a posse of degenerate friends finding it. That would be a lot of work only to have it all stolen.

But I had made it back to the main road before the police even came into view, so they weren’t too likely to have grabbed it. And as long as I was back by sundown, which I’m pretty sure is when people start skulking through alleys, I was pretty sure I could just reclaim it. Besides, I had bigger things to worry about. Because as much as stolen shopping carts and haunted woods occupied my brain right now, I also did have a very upset friend. And as annoying as she was being, I also just felt bad. And I didn’t like that.

“I just–I just–I just wanna be able to do my things again,” Blair sniffled, voice dropping to hiccup filled gasps. “There were so many things I wanted to do in my life.”

“Things like what?” I asked, trying to keep my voice low as we crunched through pine needle-covered paths. Was this park big enough to get lost in? If the needles covered the paths too much more, could we find our way back?

“Like–like, I was gonna get my degree. I was gonna go into medicine. I was gonna help people.” Tears streaked down Blair’s face, highlighting them in odd places as light filtered down from the trees above. “Joni knows.”

Joni sighed. “Girl, you were getting your CNA.” Her voice was flat, both unaffected by Blair’s tears and the actual haunted forest we were getting lost in. “Which is good and all, important and stuff, but keep your story straight. You weren’t going to med school.”

“What’s a CNA?” I asked, finally coming to a stop after realizing I couldn’t find a path at all. We’d found our way out of the woods before, right? We couldn’t be that lost.

“My parents wanted me to go to med school.” Blair flopped on the pine needles, staring glumly at a parade of ants marching through her. “I just wanted to help people.”

We sat in an awkward silence, our eyes slowly drifting towards the ants traversing Blair’s ghostly body while she sniffled. I wondered if they could hear her.

I should be wondering how I could cheer her up. Or wondering about my shopping cart or about whether I should’ve been dropping breadcrumbs behind us as we wandered the woods. But instead I was wondering whether ants could hear banshees.

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After a few very long minutes, Blair finally sat up. Her face was locked into a serene determination, one that made me nervous. “Okay Sammi, I’ve decided. My kick-the-bucket list item is to help Cara.”

Joni’s eyebrows shot up, Christopher’s shot down, and mine stayed where they were but I kinda big-eye ogled at her. I’d been right to be nervous.

“Okay okay okay wait. That’s definitely not the point of the kick-the-bucket list,” I said, waving my hands. “That’s not—the point was, like, ‘oh Sammi, you got us killed, now you have to help us do the things we always wanted to do.’ And by ‘things we always wanted to do,’ we’re talking like, Disney World or the Grand Canyon or, I don’t know, Las Vegas. Fun stuff. Besides.” I crossed my arms, sealing my point. “You were not lying around wishing you could help Cara before you died. ”

“No,” she agreed, sniffing. “But I wanna help people. I always did.”

“So let me, like, I don’t know, donate food to poor people or something.” Something easier. Something better than this. “I’ll go rob a supermarket or something.”

“Don’t wanna rob a supermarket.” Blair crossed her arms. “I wanna see this Cara thing full and done until everyone is happy and safe and satisfied.”

“Honestly, though?” Christopher said, hanging upside down from one of the tree branches. “There’s like, no way robbing another store is guaranteed to be easier than helping Cara out. You might just create another Cara.”

“So we may as well help her out!” Blair punctuated her sentence with a pleased smile, and I knew there was no getting around this. Or, at least, no getting around this unless I wanted to be a total dick to the friend I already killed.

“All right then,” I said, teeth grit. “Let’s… let’s help people. Let’s get Cara’s stuff fenced.”

Blair’s eyes melted into pools of ghostly goop. “Really?”

I felt kinda offended at her question. Like she was expecting me to go back on my promise of granting them kick-the-bucket list items. “Yeah. Really. Promise 100%.” I leaned back on my heels. “Nothing about this God thing says we can’t help people, so if that’s what you want, I don’t see why we can’t mix a little malicious good will into our schemes.”

“As long as we’re staying reasonable,” Joni said.

“And using our heads,” Christopher added.

“Yeah yeah.” I waved them away. “And having fun, obviously, cause the last thing I want is for this to be boring. We can make that all work out.”

Blair floated back up in the air, tears gone. “Okay then. So what’s the plan?”

The plan was a Sammi Special, which meant I came up with most of it and left enough wiggle room near the end in case things didn’t go well.

Step 1: Find Henry Miller.

This was hard. I actually had no idea where he lived. We checked some sites, those sketchy, deep-web lookups, but they all required payment that I didn’t have. Can’t lie to a phone screen.

Step 1a: Head to Bridgeport, where his typical clientele lingered, and just ask questions until someone turned up something.

To get to Bridgeport, I needed a ride. And to get a ride, I probably needed to get a car. And to get a car, I needed to get back to the road.

Which means the real first step was step 0: Get out of the woods.

“Okay,” I said, after a good long time of talking out the various plans. “I need you all to fly up as high as you can to figure out how we get out of the woods. We might be lost, like, bad.”

I was expecting them to panic, but instead I just got a look from Joni. One of those looks, not where I actually said anything stupid, but rather where she knew information no one else did and she was pretending we were all stupid because of it.

“Sammi. You need to pay attention more. We took the left path into the woods, then a right at the next fork, then took the third path for the next three intersections, before accidentally taking a left at a dried river that looked like a pathway until we finally ended up here. If you go to the top of this hill, you can see where the dried river picks up, so we just need to reverse all of that and we’ll make it back.” She crossed her arms and huffed a lock of hair out of her eyes. “Duh.”

I wanted to be sassy back at her, because obviously that wasn’t something I’d been paying attention to while trying to run from the cops and also keep Blair quiet. But honestly, without her attention to detail, I really coulda been lost in here for hours, if not years. And I didn’t really have it in me to get into a fight just so she felt vindicated in her memorizing of my frantic pathing. So instead, I absorbed her snark with a big, Blair-ish-ly-innocent grin.

“Oh Joni, what would we do without you?”