Frozen Fire discussion

can someone explain to me what happened to dusty in the end? did she die? was she imagining?

She survived but the boy didn't i still don't know if the boy was her brothers soul or not

She survived. I had a hard time understanding the ending as well, but I read somewhere that the boy was suppose to be the embodiment of her brother's guilt.

Even though Dusty had an over-idealized fantasy version of Josh, the truth it is quite possible that it was he who committed the rapes, although this is not directly stated. It is implied that he committed suicide by weighing himself down and jumping of a cliff into a lake because he could not handle the guilt. His ghost seems to be The Boy, who has no memories but seems to have to set things right before moving onto the afterlife. He did not rape Loretta, a girl from a different town (as she was said to make the story up), but he did rape Angelica, which gave him great guilt that drove him to suicide.