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wrist?
     Thirty-two stitches too. And a headache.” When there looked to be no end to the arm wrestling, Marci came over.
    “Listen, Alex,” she said. “There was something I wanted to ask you. About… what you found in the woods.”
    I stared at her. If C.A. had asked the question I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised, but Marci is the last personwho’d want to hear the gory details. “What do you want to know?”
    “It’s, um… the girl. When you found her, what did she look like?”
    “You really want to know?” She nodded. “She was naked, and her tongue was lolling out of her mouth…”
    “Stop. Oh, God, that wasn’t what I meant. I mean, what did she
look
like? Did she look like me? Like the other one did?”
    I thought about it for a minute. I wasn’t sure how to answer her. Nobody who died like that could ever really look like someone
     alive. But I knew what she was asking. “She was about our age. Mid-twenties, you know, and white. But don’t worry, Marce.
     Other than general stuff like that, she didn’t look like you.”
    “Phew. That makes me feel better. I’m not sure why, but it does. I didn’t really think some… maniac was hunting me, not logically
     anyway. It’s all so silly, isn’t it? But that other girl really had me all spooky, and when I heard about the second one I
     didn’t know what to think. Thanks, Alex.”
    She pecked me on the cheek and practically skipped across the room to watch Mad finish off C.A. Even on his day of chivalry,
     he wasn’t about to let some dame beat him. The two other girls looked positively feral with glee, and even C.A. didn’t mind
     losing. “Victory is mine,” he said. “And now which of you lovely ladies wouldn’t mind getting the champ-een another drink?”
    I sat there watching them, feeling the ache creep farther into my cranium. I’d had plenty of death last summer, and now it
     looked like a killer of a very different kind had set up housekeeping. He was out there somewhere,and he liked to turn live women into dead ones, and although no one had had the nerve to use the words “serial killer,” it
     was just a matter of time.
    But that wasn’t the only thing on my mind as I stroked Shakespeare’s silky snout. Yes, I’d been terrified when I found the
     body. I might even have been within feet of the killer, and within seconds of becoming girl number three. But there was something
     else. As frightened as I was, I had to admit that for the first time in nearly a year I actually felt alive. I’d spent the
     past eight months living in a netherworld between I’m-okay and everything’s-fine. I hadn’t gone on a movie date, hadn’t slept
     with anyone, hadn’t even cried about Adam too much because after the first few weeks even my well had run dry.
    But I knew for sure that when I was running through the woods, when I was flying down the hill and pedaling back to town,
     I wanted to live. I wanted to pick up whatever pieces I had left, try to fit them together and make some sense of my life.
     I wanted to get back into the game. I just wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. And I was more than a little freaked out
     to realize that the only thing to shake me out of the doldrums had been the very thing that put me there. To wit: someone
     else’s demise.
    How creepy am I?
    I was thinking about all this as I sat there, listening to the four of them drink and giggle and flirt. But I was also pondering
     another thing as well: I’d lied. The truth was, the second dead girl did look like Marci. Maybe even more than the first.

4

    W ORD TO THE WISE: IF YOU HAVE A SPRAINED LEFT WRIST , don’t try and drive a Renault Encore with a stick shift and no power steering. If I’d sprained my right one, it would have
     been impossible. Either way, I didn’t have much choice but to take my own car, since Mad showed no inclination to stop snorting
     martinis with my roommates. I got to the
Monitor
around one and found the