Chapter 21: Say It Night

By 1:50 on the morning of April 14, seven hundred people were standing on the quad in the dark.

Some of them held candles in paper cups.

Most of them held phones.

The counter on the forum read 7, and Bell Hall rose behind the crowd with its roof black against the sky.

I stood on the fountain steps with a bullhorn Dane had borrowed from the senate office.

Elias was beside me.

Roxanne, Brock, Dane and the lab partner stood on the steps below, in a row, with their hands at their sides.

"What if nothing happens?" a boy shouted from the back.

"Then you go home," I said into the bullhorn. "And you've lost an hour of sleep."

Nobody laughed.

At 2:13 the quad went still.

At 2:14 the dormitory doors opened, one after another, around the whole green.

People came out in pajamas and bare feet, with their arms hanging loose and their eyes wide open.

They didn't see us.

They walked straight toward Bell Hall, in a slow stream across the grass.

Somebody screamed, and someone else started to cry.

"Don't touch them yet!" I shouted. "Stand in their way! Make a ring!"

Seven hundred people moved.

They linked arms across the quad, three and four deep, and the sleepwalkers walked into them and stopped.

Right in front of me was a girl in a pink sleep shirt.

I knew her face before I knew her name.

She was the girl who had said Saint Jo, everybody, and filmed me with her phone in Statistics.

I stepped down from the fountain and took her face in both my hands.

"Wake up," I said. "Look at me. Tell them what you did."

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Dead Girl's Wheel of Wish from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.