Free Truth or Dare by Jacqueline Green

small-town lore, Syd,” she’d insisted. “Just like all that talk of a curse.” Sydney had been quick to agree; of course there was no such thing as curses and ghosts. But deep down, she couldn’t deny that it
was
eerie, how linked the deaths of the Lost Girls all were.
    When Meryl Bauer died, ten years ago over the weekend of Echo Bay’s annual Fall Festival, people called it a tragic accident. But thenNicole Mayor died four years later, on the exact same weekend, in almost exactly the same way. Sydney had only been in sixth grade then, but still she remembered hearing the comparisons. Nicole and Meryl had both been young, rich, beautiful. They earned themselves the nickname the Lost Girls, and soon claims arose of two ghostly lights, flickering over the Phantom Rock in the dead of night. People began to talk. Were their deaths connected somehow? Was it possible that the Fall Festival was cursed?
    Then the next Fall Festival, it happened again. The girl was Kyla Kern, a senior at Winslow Academy. Like the others, she was young and rich and beautiful, but it was different this time, because Sydney
knew
her.
    At the end of sixth grade, all Winslow students were paired up with a junior “buddy”—someone to advise them and act as their mentor. Even though Winslow’s middle and high schools were in two separate buildings, they neighbored each other and were attached by a covered pathway, so it was easy for the seniors to meet their seventh-grade buddies for lunch or study dates or here’s-how-to-talk-to-a-boy demonstrations. Kyla had been assigned as Sydney’s buddy. She was everything Sydney wasn’t—beautiful, popular—and Sydney had been almost starstruck by her. But then just a few months later, before she ever got to “mentor” Sydney, she was dead.
    Sydney thought Kyla’s death was the eeriest of them all. It had happened the Saturday of Fall Festival. The next day all Winslow seniors were supposed to participate in the festival’s boat float parade, so that night, the seniors took their boats out on the water to party as they put the finishing touches on their floats. Kyla and her friends’ float was said to be the best; it had pyrotechnics and everything. But something wentwrong with the wiring that night, and out of nowhere, the boat went up in flames.
    Everyone was able to swim to safety. But when they got to shore, they realized Kyla wasn’t with them. By the time the search-and-rescue crew went looking for her, her body was gone. It wasn’t until a week later that it washed up on shore, covered in burn marks. The local news preyed on that story like vultures. Pictures of Kyla were plastered everywhere, and immediately there were claims of seeing a third light flickering over the Phantom Rock.
    Two summers later, Sydney was sent away to the Sunrise Center. When she came back, obsessed with photography, she couldn’t shake the idea of photographing the ghost lights from her mind. But years later, she still hadn’t succeeded. Sometimes she swore she saw them—three lightning-quick flashes dancing across the Phantom Rock. But then she’d blink and they’d be gone, and she never could be sure what, exactly, she’d just seen.
    The sound of rain pulled Sydney abruptly out of her thoughts. It exploded above her car with a breathless, pounding rhythm, the kind of rain that drummed down from the sky out of nowhere. The kind of rain that made people stop and listen.
    Except there were no raindrops landing on her car.
    Sydney’s eyes shot upward, widening at the sight above her. It was seagulls, dozens of them, the air pulsing with the beating of their wings. They were swooping down frantically, a solid mass in the darkness. Lower they nose-dived, lower, lower, until suddenly they were
there
: in the sweep of her headlights and in front of her windshield and blocking her view, a blinding wall of white.
    “Holy shit!” Sydney screamed, swerving out of the way. She must have jerked the wheel too