"Go, Han, seriously."

"Okay. But I'm really sorry that your party got quitted." Hannah shuffled over to the door.

"Hey, Han? I like my card."

"You didn't look inside."

"Don't have to. I like it because you made it for me."

Hannah's face split into one of her daisy smiles, the kind that reminded Jane of sunny days. "It's about you and me."

As the door shut, Jane heard her parents' voices drift up from the foyer. In a rush she ate Hannah's snack, shoved the basket into the folds of the drapes next to the bed, and went to the stack of her schoolbooks. She took Dickens's The Pickwick Papers back with her to the bed. She figured if she was working on school stuff when her father came in, it would buy her some brownie points.

Her parents came upstairs an hour later and she tensed, expecting her father to knock. He didn't.

Which was weird. He was, in his controlling way, as reliable as a clock, and there was a strange comfort in his predictability, even though she didn't like dealing with him.

She put Pickwick aside, turned the light out, and tucked her legs under her frilly duvet. Beneath the canopy of her bed she couldn't sleep, and eventually she heard the grandfather clock at the head of the stairs chime twelve times.

Midnight.

Slipping from bed, she went to the closet, got out the rogue knapsack, and unzipped it. The Ouija board fell out, flipping open and landing faceup on the floor. She grabbed it with a wince, as if it might have broken or something, then got the pointer thingy.

She and her friends had been looking forward to playing the game because they all wanted to know who they were going to marry. Jane liked a boy named Victor Browne, who was in her math class. The two of them had been talking a little lately, and she really thought they could be a couple. Trouble was, she wasn't sure what he felt for her. Maybe he just liked her because she gave him answers.