"Oh, hey!"
Karyn stopped in her tracks only a few dozen feet outside of the Bed Bath and Beyond. That was the very last voice she ever wanted to hear again.
"Hey, you two," Karyn wasn't sure whether Sarah or Jon was waving her and her mother over. Or Kara.
A brief headache. Karyn knew that Jon had turned into a clone of Sarah, but somehow she also knew that Sarah's twin sister had always been named Kara. There was a conflict between the wishes that she had heard and the wishes that she had not.
"You should come over here."
She shook it off. Jon or Kara, at this point it didn't matter, what mattered was getting away.
But she couldn't do that.
"What are you doing?" Bethany asked as Karyn discretely tugged her arm to steer her away from the two cheerleaders. "They want to talk to us. I think we should be polite."
"Those are the girls that are giving me problems in school," Karyn managed to hiss before the next volley was served.
"Mrs. Black, I think you should make your daughter come here and talk to us."
"Oh," Bethany put her arm around Karyn's shoulder and gently pushed her in the direction of the blondes, "they seem nice. I think you should talk to them."
Karyn's adrenaline began to spike. Her fight-or-flight instinct was paralyzed. They'd done something to her mom. What had they done to her mom? As she inched reluctantly closer, her mom's grip on her shoulder tightening with every bit of added resistance she tried to exert, everything that she'd been avoiding for the last hour, everything that she'd managed to push from her mind, came screaming back.
And then she saw it. It was in one of their hands. Round, reddish, almost inconspicuous. They had the stone with them.
If Karyn was ever going to get a shot, ever going to have any chance, this was going to be it and she had to take it.
