This is where Anne's frog family lives. Lived?

I finger the coppers I have in my secret pocket and walk into the town.

"Sasha? What the heck are you doing here? I thought King Andrias was sending you girls home." Sadie Croaker approaches me, her pet spider next to her. Archie, his name is. I bend down and scratch him on the head.

"He-it...Marcy-well..." The harsh reality of it hits me like a ton of bricks, and I wipe the tears I didn't realize were flowing down my face. Townspeople surround me, asking similar questions.

"It's complicated." I choke out.

A few hours later I stand in front of the Sundew's tea shop. It's where Grime and I stayed for dinner and during the battle of the bands. I turn my sword over in my hands. Felicia Sundew leads me to the spare room, stopping at a door with a crosstitch hanging on the door.

"Ivy Sundew. What are you doing there?" Felicia bangs on the door.

"Nothing."

"Mhmm...well carry on." She takes me to the room across the hall and opens the door. I want to say something but I bite my tongue, desperate to not say anything.

"Here's your room Sweetheart." Felicia pats me on the shoulder and goes back downstairs to her shop. I sit down on the bed and scroll through my phone with whatever apps the lack of internet lets me use. The bedspread is a light green, and I wrap it around me, pulling it over my head.

I should leave, go to the abandoned mill where we were before. Toad Tower. Newtopia. Anywhere but here.

Marcy's probably dead, Anne's at home with loving parents, and Grime's somewhere on the road, eating his cooking. It always smells like roadkill (partially because that's what it was) and ashes but I'd kill to eat one of them, or at least try to and end up chewing for 5 minutes before giving up. I plug my earbuds in and zone out, the crickets peeping and the bugs buzzing.

Marcy's haunting expression greets my eye, and then she falls to her knees, tears in her eyes.

I just didn't want to be alone.

She didn't want to be alone, but now she was, even if she's not dead. I left her, Anne left her. Andrias is probably all she has left. It makes me sick that Marcy depends on Andrias like she does.

Now look what you've made me do.

The deep voice almost echoes. Multiple screams echo, including my own. I close my eye.

I open it and I'm at my house. Not home, a house and a home are different. Where my parents and siblings live is a house. Toad tower was a home. The mill was a home.

Then my parents come.

Sasha, you're a Waybright. Act like it.

Stop the vandalism, they told me. I tried that, but it wasn't good enough. Get better grades. I tried that too. It wasn't good enough either. My brother and sister were better at everything, it seems.

Do they even care that I'm trapped here? That I'm missing? That I have been? That I'm living in a stranger's home as a fugitive? Probably not.

I wake in a cold sweat, my pulse going faster every second. I bite my tongue for the hundredth time today, I get up off the bed and step outside. The night is new, the moon hanging in the sky. A couple street lights flicker in the center of town, and I slump to the ground next to one. I run my finger around the edge of the photo, the one I keep hidden in a secret pocket.

My arms are draped over Anne and Marcy's shoulders, BFFS scrawled underneath in my messy handwriting.

Maybe if just one thing didn't happen, then I wouldn't be here. Maybe something I did. It probably was something I did. Anne doesn't want to be my friend anymore, and Marcy was clearly trying to keep us together, but she's naive. She also got us trapped in a world away from our lives. Every time I close my eyes I see her face, devastated, before starting to cry.

She was so desperate to not be alone she stranded us here. And I abandoned her with the man who stabbed my eye out and has probably killed her by now. And god knows where Anne is. I stare at the sky, twinkling with stars and the red moon, and I close my eyes and go back to the Sundew's.

Meanwhile, Marcy floats in a tank, her eyes shut, hooked up to all sorts of wires.

Don't you think it's time to say goodbye to those childhood friends of yours?