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This time, I’mnotleaving.

Another knock.

Then…

“Sydney,” a girl’s voice whispers excitedly. “Hurry up. It’s happening! It’s actually happening! Meet me at the field.”

She sounds familiar.

She sounds just like…

Amani?

But it can’t be.

The floorboards creak, followed by the sound of someone running down the stairs.

I quickly slide on my slippers and put on my housecoat, unlocking the door and pulling the key out of the lock. The hallway is empty and still poorly lit, but at least the power is on this time.

With my heart in my throat, I make a point of locking the door and then slipping the key into my pocket. Then I run down the stairs to the common room just in time to see the front door closing.

I hurry along, the fire down to embers, the room dark, and then burst out into the night. I catch sight of Amani running around the corner, and I follow along the path, running after her until we go past the lab and hit the gravel road that leads from the boat launch to the maintenance yard, the ground crunching beneath our feet and echoing in the trees.

She keeps going into the grassy field where empty boat trailers sit and then stops and starts twirling around with her arms raised to the sky.

“Isn’t this amazing?” she cries out.

I stare at her, trying to figure out what’s happening,howit’s happening, when I realize why Amani is spinning around and grinning like a fool.

White flakes are falling from the air.

It’s snowing.

It’s fuckingsnowing.

The cold hits me at once. My shins, my nose, my cheeks, the exposed section of my chest as flakes hit my skin and melt. I hold my robe closer, wishing I could make sense of this, wishing my brain could just keep up.

“They said it doesn’t snow here, not even in winter, and yet look at this!” she cries out, her breath freezing in the air. “This is a dream come true.”

I can only stand where I am and stare, blinking away the flakes that gather on my lashes. “You’re not real,” I whisper.

“Aren’t we lucky?” She continues to twirl, then points at me. “You’re so lucky that Everly didn’t care about your scholarship. Teacher’s pet that you are.”

I slowly walk toward her, terror starting to seep into my bones like the cold because Amani was sent home on the plane. Amani isn’t here. Someone else took her place.

But what if Amani didn’t go home at all?

“Amani. Are you okay?” I ask her, my voice shaking. “What happened to you? Where have you been staying? How do you know about Everly and my scholarship?”

“Sydney Denik, the golden child,” Amani says, laughing now. Round and round she goes. “Who would have thought? Well, that Professor Edwards dick will rue the day you become more successful than he is.”

I stop. No. None of this is right.

I look up at the sky. It’s still snowing, the flakes illuminated by the lights from the barn. It’s so quiet outside, so still, and the snow is getting thicker.

It’s getting colder.

This is real, I tell myself, feeling the flakes on my skin and in my hair, the biting ice. Snow in early June, strange but possible.But is she real?