Free Doll Bones by Holly Black

watched as the bus pulled out of the station in a cloud of exhaust, taking with it both the crazy guy and their chances of getting to East Liverpool by morning. All the adrenaline Zach had felt back in the station burned off of him, and he felt tired down to the marrow of his bones. Eye-droopingly exhausted. He leaned against the brick wall and wondered if it was possible to fall asleep standing up.
    “Where are we?” Alice asked finally, her breath clouding in the air.
    “And how are going to get out of here?” asked Zach, pushing off from the wall. “We don’t even know what town we’re in.”
    Poppy followed. “There’s only two buses to East Liverpool that take this route, and if we wait to take the next one—in the afternoon—then we won’t have enough time to take the bus back by tonight.”
    “Forget East Liverpool. We’ve got to get home,” Alice said, digging out the cell phone that she was only allowed to use for emergencies.
    “Sure,” Zach said. “But we can’t do that, either, can we?”
    Poppy pulled the bus schedule from one of her pockets, along with a raggedy map. “You can look at this stuff if you want, but it’s not going to tell you anything I haven’t already told you.”
    Alice took the bus schedule and opened it, studying the names of stations as though she were going to be able to figure out where they were just by finding a name that struck her as feeling like the right one.
    “Hold on,” Zach said, walking the other way down the alley, so that he could see the front of the bus station. He walked back again. “East Rochester. There’s a sign that says so—but where is that?”
    Poppy crowded next to Alice, so they were squinting together at the schedule in the dim moonlight. “There were only two more stops before East Liverpool,” Poppy said finally. “We almost made it.”
    “We’re not even out of Pennsylvania yet,” said Alice. “We didn’t almost make anything.”
    Poppy unfolded the map and tapped it grandly. “Look, that says Ohio.” Then she shook her head. “Oh, it says Ohio River .”
    Alice pulled her coat more tightly around her, sitting down on the back steps of a building. Dumpsters loomed to one side of her. “Can you call Tom and see if he’ll pick us up?” Her voice sounded on the verge of panic. Calm, but not likely to stay that way.
    Poppy just looked at her. “My brother will never come all the way here. Not in that junker car of his.”
    “Your sister, then?” Alice asked, chewing on the end of one of her braids.
    Poppy shook her head. “She broke her phone and hasn’t gotten a new one yet. I couldn’t get ahold of her if I wanted to.”
    Alice looked at the face of her phone, frowning. “I guess I could call my aunt Linda. She’d be mad, but she’d come.”
    “Would she tell your grandmother?” Zach asked.
    Alice sighed heavily, a little shudder going across her shoulders. “Probably. And then I’ll get grounded forever and have to quit the play and be totally miserable. But what else are we going to do?”
    Zach tried to imagine a single thing they could tell Alice’s grandmother to try and make sense of what they’d done. She wouldn’t want to hear about a creepy, possibly-still-headless doll, a ghost, and a curse that, more likely than not, didn’t even exist.
    “I won’t go back,” Poppy said, sitting on the steps next to Alice. “I’m going to wait for the next bus and keep going.”
    “But you said that the next bus wasn’t coming until the afternoon, so you won’t make it home before Sunday,” Alice said. “Where would you sleep?”
    Poppy took a deep but unsteady breath. Zach could see that the idea of Alice leaving her made Poppy feel a lot less daring. He didn’t want Alice to go either; she was good at making crazy ideas actually work. If Poppy came up with the idea that they needed an ancient temple under the waves, Alice was the one who would actually find the discarded chunks of concrete to build