The 9th Skip Misty Falls Lake (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781972012055)

In the summer of 1979, Crimson Hollow knows how to make danger look like tradition.

Misty Falls Lake is where families picnic, teenagers dare each other after dark, and adults repeat the same warnings without explaining why: don't swim alone, don't follow lights across the water, and never take the old counting games seriously.

For six teenagers-Sebastian, Candace, Jenny, Kalel, Erwin, and Webbeca-the last day of school should mark the beginning of an ordinary summer. Then Erwin skips a stone nine times and makes a wish.

At first, the lake seems to answer kindly. A chance appears. Luck shifts. People notice. But Crimson Hollow's oldest stories were never about gifts. They were about bargains, and the lake remembers what the town has tried to rename, bury, and forget.

When Webbeca reaches for more than luck, the old legends begin stepping out of rumor and into the streets: strange lights in the woods, red eyes on impossible roads, children who know songs they should never have learned, and a silver hand reaching from the town's buried past. As New Year's Eve draws near, the teens realize the danger is not just in the water.

It is in the crowd.

It is in the songs.

It is in the wish everyone is slowly learning to repeat.

The 9th Skip: Misty Falls Lake is a supernatural mystery of memory, obsession, friendship, and small-town silence-where the ninth skip grants possibility, the thirteenth demands a price, and some stories survive because a town is too afraid to remember them.