Sarah's sprightly little Miata felt like a big old muscle car with a thrumming diesel engine, the way her own self-satisfaction was flowing through her veins. Jon had spent the entire day taking things from her, bit by bit, step by step, and she'd figured out how to crack the system. She'd figured out how to fight back.
Nobody beats out Sarah McMillan. Nobody is better than Sarah McMillan.
Nothing else mattered. It didn't matter that everyone's night was ruined. It didn't matter what happened to that little gremlin girl. What mattered is that Jon knew now that he can't just mess with Sarah McMillan and get away with it. There was nothing that was going to bring Sarah down.
Even rolling up her own driveway, maneuvering her car into the great big garage where her father kept his classic car collection, it felt like a bigger action than it normally did. Sarah wasn't just driving home, she was returning triumphant.
But as she shifted her car into park, something didn't feel right.
Sarah brushed off the feeling. She wasn't going to let anything ruin how she felt in that moment, not even herself. She strode our of her car, heels clicking on the cement floor of the garage, and swaggered her way to the--
There was that feeling again. Sarah's grandparents had bought a new house in Arizona the year before, and they'd kept all of their things and their furniture and just moved everything from the old house to the new one. And even though it was a bigger house with a different floor layout, they'd basically arranged everything the same as it was in the old house. The first time Sarah had gone to visit, it almost gave her a sense of vertigo: the space was both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. Like she'd entered some alternate universe where her grandparents had just always live in this new house.
That was the feeling that Sarah experienced as she opened the door to the main part of the house, but she couldn't put her finger on why. Something was different. Something was out of place.
And though Sarah tried to ignore it, the feeling persisted even as she stepped through the laundry room and out into the grand living room. She could hear sounds coming from the TV, and turned to look over the back of the sofa at a screen that she had not left on when she'd left. Samuel L. Jackson's unmistakable frame filled half the screen as he brandished a milkshake in his right hand, whipped cream flinging itself off the top as he swung around looking in every direction.
"I have had it with these motherfucking boys in my motherfucking yard!"
Then the video paused. "Sarah?" came a girl's voice.
No.
"Sarah, is that you?" Now the voice was joined by a head popping up from over the back of the sofa. "Why didn't you tell me you were going to Jon's house? I wanted to come, too!"
Sarah's eyes blinked involuntarily several times, and with each blink her short-term memory re-processed something she had just seen.
The raven ornament that loomed atop the garage's light fixture.
The crocheted spider that sat within the windshield of her father's 1986 Camaro.
The extra pile of clothes in the laundry room, all of them black.
The little bat stickers that gave oddly tasteful accents to the living room bookshelf.
And the girl who was now staring back from the sofa, expectantly, at Sarah.
"What are you doing in my house, Zoe?" Sarah finally demanded, unwilling to accept the clues she had just seen with her own eyes.
"What do you mean?" Zoe was genuinely surprised. "Of course I'm in your house. I'm your sister."
