Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgments

1 Me

2 Secrets

3 Contagion

4 Boys

5 Lying

6 Truth

7 Power

8 Hurt

9 Evil

10 Kiss

11 It

12 Tears

13 Payback

14 Scandal

15 Information

16 Beauty

17 Payback, Part 2

18 Possession

19 Competition

20 Hurt

21 The End

About the Author

Also by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Copyright

To Laurie,

who taught me all

about survival

of the fittest

acknowledgments

Writing a sequel is definitely an interesting experience. For this one, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to everyone who read Golden and wanted to read more—friends, family, and readers, thank you so much for asking that all-important question: “What’s next?” Special thanks go out to some of my earliest readers, Anne Marie and Maddy Pace.

I’m also especially grateful to the people I’ve been blessed to work with for the past two years. Many thanks go out to Trish Parcell Watts for designing all of my beautiful covers; Noreen Marchisi, publicist extraordinaire; Web designer Allie Costas; and Holly Fredericks and Dave Barbour, for being behind the project from the start.

Most of all, thank you to the three people who I just can’t seem to thank enough, no matter how many acknowledgments I write: my editor, Krista Marino, for loving Golden, asking for a sequel, and knowing exactly how to help me make it the best it could possibly be; my agent, Elizabeth Harding, for believing in Golden from day one and for being the best champion any of my novels could hope for; and my mother/first reader/biggest fan, Marsha Barnes—the Gilmore Girls don’t have a thing on the two of us.

1

Me

If you want to be popular,

it’s not nearly as important that you know who you are

as it is that everyone else does.

“Lilah Covington

Is the hottest chick alive

And she’s mine. Hell yeah.”

Mrs. Mason looked somewhat scandalized by Brock’s poem, but honestly, if you assign your junior/senior English class the task of writing haikus, knowing full well that half the class is so drenched in testosterone that they can’t see straight, you’re pretty much asking for trouble. Quite frankly, she was lucky Brock had kept it PG.

Mrs. Mason cleared her throat. “Thank you, Brock,” she said. “That was certainly interesting.”

Funny, I thought. I was the subject of the poem, and even though I’d rewarded Brock with a coy and promising smile for his efforts, I wouldn’t have called the result “interesting.” A poet my boyfriend was not.

“Would anyone else like to share their haiku?”

Three football players raised their hands, and Mrs. Mason’s eye started twitching. Unless she wanted a repeat of The Disturbingly Explicit Haiku Incident of 2005 (don’t ask), she’d need to avoid calling on them. Honestly, the entire English department really should have given up on the idea of an annual poetry unit. What was the point in having us write haikus four years in a row?

“Actually,” Mrs. Mason said, her eye still twitching as some of the boys started snickering at the genius of their haikus, “let’s try something a little bit different.”

She picked up a piece of chalk and scribbled two words on the chalkboard.

I AM…

“I want you all to take fifteen minutes and write as many sentences as you can that start with these two words,” she said. “These sentences will be the basis of your next poem.”

The assignment wasn’t exactly revolutionary, but at least she’d had the foresight to skip the annual assignment on limericks.

Following Mrs. M’s directions, I lazily scribbled the prompt on the top of my page.

I am…

Let’s see, I thought, tapping my pen on the edge of my lips, who am I?

A mishmash of answers flooded my brain.

I was Lilah Covington.

I was the most popular girl in the junior class.

I was craving milk and cookies.

I was a child born to an unwed teen mother.

I was the only thing standing between this school and Fuchsia Reynolds’s reign of terror.

I was secretly addicted to Boy Meets World reruns.

And, according to Brock’s haiku (which was either mildly endearing or borderline offensive, depending on how well you knew Brock and whether or not you had feminist leanings), I was the hottest chick alive.

Needless to say, I didn’t think any of those answers were what Mrs. Mason was looking for.

Without looking at the page, I started doodling as the list of things I had no intention of writing down grew in my mind.

I was a person who lived by my own rules, but never, ever broke them.

I was shorter than I wanted to be.

I was smarter than I let on.

I was in control.

And I was slowly but surely losing my mind.

The moment the thought occurred to me, I drifted into the exact kind of nonsensical daydream that currently had me questioning my own sanity.

Three girls holding hands. Fresh dirt on an open grave. Pink. Purple. Blue.

“All right, time’s up!” Mrs. Mason’s voice brought me back to the real world. “Let’s see what you all ended up with.”

I looked down at my page, expecting to see nothing except doodles, but a single sentence stared back at me.

I AM BRIANNA.

“Weird.”

2

Secrets

If you tell more than one person, it’s not a secret.

If I guess it before you tell me, it’s not a secret.

If you lie to me about it, it’s not a secret.

If you tell me because you think it will make me

like you better, it’s definitely not a secret.

And if it’s not a secret,

you can’t possibly expect me to keep it.

“So if you had to choose between babysitting for Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie and babysitting for Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise, what would you choose?”

Fuchsia and I considered the options Tracy had offered us with a great deal of solemnity.

“Brangelina,” Fuchsia said. “Brad is so much hotter than Tom. And way less weird.”

I was slightly more practical. “TomKat. They only have one child under the age of ten.”

Since the boys were in their weekly lunchtime football meeting, Tracy, Fuchsia, and I were left to entertain ourselves, and we’d fallen back on an old standard. The three of us held the record for the longest-standing game of “What Would You Choose?” We’d been playing since my initiation into the group, halfway through the sixth grade.

“I’ve got one,” I said. “If you had to choose between having one huge boob and one small one…” I grinned wickedly. “…or having three of relatively medium size, what would you choose?”

Tracy squealed in horror. Fuchsia looked down at her own chest, as if it might offer up some kind of guidance.

I was totally the queen of “What Would You Choose?”

Ultimately, Fuchsia, an expert at bra stuffing, opted for the two of mismatched size, and Tracy, ever the follower, agreed a split second later.

“Hi, Lilah!”

I turned toward that too-perky voice and immediately identified its owner as someone who unquestionably sat on the other side of the cafeteria.

“Hi,” I said. Nothing more, nothing less.

The girl, who was obviously nervous, spoke again, her voice even more cheerful this time. “I just heard about that poem that Brock wrote you today. It’s just like so…” She sighed. “Romantic.”

Romantic? Seriously? I tried to determine whether she was sucking up or serious, and couldn’t decide which one was worse.

Beside me, Fuchsia’s eyes narrowed into slits. The only thing she hated more than Nons daring to defile the Golden side of the cafeteria was being reminded that I had a boyfriend and she didn’t.

“So if you had to choose,” Fuchsia said, her voice light, playful, and completely soulless, “between being caught dead wearing those shoes”—she flicked her eyes toward the girl’s feet—“or being stuck with a nose as completely horrendous as that one for the rest of your life…” Fuchsia zeroed in on the girl’s face and smirked. “Which one would you choose?”

“Ewwwww!” Tracy shrieked, making the girl blush crimson. “Neither.”

“Tracy, you know the rules. You have to pick one or the other, no matter how disgusting the options.” Fuchsia smirked again, and the scene in front of me blurred, until I saw Fuchsia the way she’d looked in the first grade, when she’d informed me that I couldn’t sit at her table at the Father’s Day picnic because I didn’t have a daddy.

“I do so have a daddy. I just don’t know who he is.”

I don’t know how long I zoned out for, or how many times the words I’d once spoken played over and over again in my head, but the next thing I knew, Fuchsia was calling my name, and the girl she’d laid the verbal smack-down on was gone.

“Lilah?”

I blinked hard, pushing the words out of my mind and forcing myself to see Fuchsia as she was today, not the way she’d been when we were six and I was the town scandal.

“Yeah?” I said.

“You never answered.”

I had to choose one. Those were the rules. I was the one who’d made them up, back when I’d introduced the others to the game, and I never broke my own rules—not in life, and not in “What Would You Choose?”

“The shoes,” I said. I didn’t elaborate. We’d been having fun, and Fuchsia had ruined it. What else was new?

“Sooooooo,” Tracy said, drawing out the word. “Guess what I heard.”

Fuchsia arched her eyebrows and leaned back in her seat. “Do I care?” she asked. She couldn’t take her frustration out on me, so she turned it on Tracy, who winced visibly.

For someone who’d been friends with Fuchsia since before she could walk, Tracy was surprisingly bad at dealing with her, which, more often than not, left me doing damage control on her behalf.

“Fine, Fuchsia,” Tracy huffed. “If you don’t want to know, I won’t tell you.”

Fuchsia looked down at her nails. “Touchy, touchy,” she teased, a smile in her voice, as if she hadn’t just gone off on a girl for daring to remind her that she wasn’t numero uno and hadn’t been since freshman year.

I gave Fuchsia a look, but didn’t say anything on the off chance that Tracy might actually fight back, preferably by mentioning Fuchsia’s escapades at Parker’s party the weekend before. No such luck. Tracy couldn’t quite handle Fuchsia on a good day, and given the fact that she was still in mourning over her recent breakup, these weren’t exactly the best of Tracy times. As soon as it became apparent that she wasn’t going to stand up for herself, I resigned myself to doing it for her. After all, friends help friends survive other friends.

Such was my life in between rounds of “What Would You Choose?”

“What did you hear?” I asked Tracy, throwing her a much-needed bone. Fuchsia shot me an annoyed look, and I stared her down. Clearly, she’d forgotten who she was dealing with here. This wasn’t the first grade, and I wasn’t asking to sit at her table.

She was sitting at mine.

“Was it the thing about Jackson?” I added, making my eyes impossibly wide and innocent.

Wait for it…wait for it…

Fuchsia leaned forward. “Jackson?” she asked, in what I’m sure she thought was a very subtle way.

Nothing about Fuchsia Reynolds was actually subtle, least of all the well-known fact that she was pretty desperate for a top-three boyfriend, though technically, that particular fact wasn’t well known except to those of us who had poured her into her bed after Parker’s party. Or at least that particular midnight confession wasn’t well known yet. With Fuchsia, it was best to always hold some crucial piece of information in reserve. “Blackmail” is such an ugly word. I vastly prefer the term “leverage.” And if that offends your moral sensibilities, I would suggest that you try keeping Fuchsia Reynolds in check for a week, and then we’ll talk.

“I still haven’t told you what I heard,” Tracy whined.

I turned my attention to her and thoroughly pretended that I’d never mentioned the utterly fictional “thing about Jackson,” relatively sure that Fuchsia would sheath her claws in hopes that I’d offer up some juicy details about her current crush. See? No need to bring up the party, no emotional blackmail, and I’d still managed to keep the peace. Yay for me. I totally deserved a cookie.

Tracy, looking as proud as a kindergartner giving her first show-and-tell, tossed her dyed blond hair over one shoulder and began to dispense the gossip she’d been trying to tell us for the past three minutes. “I heard that our favorite desperate Non may finally be making a move on her shaggy little would-be boytoy.”

I bit back a sigh and stared down into my milkshake. The words “favorite” (meaning highly favored or most liked) and “Non” (meaning a social nonentity, a loser, and three-quarters of the student population at Emory High) should never have even been used in the same sentence. At Emory, you couldn’t afford to have a favorite Non, because paying too much attention to the unpopular had a way of making you look pathetic, a la Tracy, who still hadn’t gotten over the fact that the new girl from California was (a) new, (b) a girl, and (c) from California. Unfortunately, when she’d first arrived, Lissy James had also been (d) attracted to Tracy’s then-steady boyfriend, Tate, and (e) socially impaired and utterly incapable of following even the most explicit instructions.

Double unfortunately, she was also (f ) the daughter of the sister of the man who was dating my mother. What did that make her to me?

Nothing. Or at least, that’s what I kept telling myself, despite the fact that there was something about Lissy James that put me in “friends protect friends” mode, even though the two of us were anything but. When Lissy had first moved to town, I’d tried to show her the ropes, but eventually I was forced to the conclusion that some people just don’t get it even if you hold the metaphorical ropes up to their faces and point vigorously. With Lissy, I’d done everything short of pretending to climb the ropes myself, mime style.

“Can we change the subject?” I asked, half wishing I was heartless enough to have let Fuchsia play mind games with Tracy to her heart’s content. “Your Lissy obsession is way past tired, Trace.” I kept my eyes on her until she looked away, silent.

Normally, I had a little more finesse than this, but when it came to all things related to Lissy James, the James family, or the night they’d somehow decided to let me in on the king-sized family secret, I had a tendency to lose my touch.

The Sight: a suite of mystical abilities to see what others could not…

Thinking about it had me glancing over at the other side of the cafeteria and wincing inwardly. I’d introduced her to my friends, my boyfriend, and the primo Goldens, the hottest of the hot, and socially challenged Lissy had practically voluntarily Non-ed herself. Now she was sitting with Nons, eating with Nons, and—if Tracy’s gossip was to be believed—on the verge of dating a Non. I didn’t understand it. Once upon a time, I’d offered her the world, and Lissy had chosen them over me. In all honesty, that still felt less than fabulous on my end.

Luckily, however, I wasn’t in the business of being honest with anyone, least of all myself.

As if she sensed me looking at her, Lissy glanced up, meeting my gaze. Her eyes flitted up and down my body. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was checking me out, which goes to show just how much she really needed my help, even if she didn’t want it. At Emory High, potential boyfriends were no guarantee against lesbian rumors. Luckily for Lissy, being under my protection was, and even if I hadn’t been strangely and masochistically driven to curb any and all Lissy-centric rumors, I still wouldn’t have been able to deny the fact that I knew the truth in all its twisted, freaky glory.

Lissy wasn’t checking me out. She was checking out my aura.

“It’s not like her uncle and your mom are even married.” Tracy’s pouting snapped me back to reality. “What do you care if we talk about her?”

That was a very good question, and one for which I had absolutely no answer. Lissy had made her decision—why couldn’t I just let her live with the consequences? She didn’t even like me. There was no reason for me to go out on a social limb on her behalf, and the fact that I continually found myself doing it—in direct violation of every rule I’d ever made for myself—was more than a little disturbing.

Knowing better than to let my thoughts show on my face, I shrugged and answered Tracy’s question as cavalierly as I could. “I don’t care if you talk about her,” I said, the lie slipping easily off my tongue, “but since she could probably talk about you…” I let the threat hang in the air. Tracy had the memory of an amnesiac goldfish, and she needed to be reminded at least once a day that Lissy James wasn’t the only one with a mystical secret.

Properly chastised, Tracy shut her mouth and ceased Lissy-bashing. Fuchsia looked up from her nails, suddenly interested in the conversation, and across the room, Lissy turned back to the friends she’d chosen over me.

“Do you know something I don’t?” Fuchsia asked, her eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly.

Other than everything? I thought.

“Come on—secrets are no fun, Li,” Fuchsia chanted in a singsong voice. “Especially when they’re Tray-Cee’s.”

“Hey!”

I ignored Tracy’s outraged squeak. If Fuchsia thought she was going to get any information out of me that I didn’t want to give, she was even more intellectually delayed than I’d thought. At Emory High, secrets were like currency. You traded them, bartered for them, bought silence with them. But when the secret in question centered on the fact that one of your best friends was a modern-day Siren who could bewitch guys with her singing voice? Those were the kind of secrets you just kept.

Still, I had to tell Fuchsia something. She was my best friend. My second-in-command. My biggest threat.

“Tracy tried to hook up with Tate right after the breakup, and he declined,” I said, thinking on my feet and giving Fuchsia the gossip she was lusting after. “Lissy overheard us talking about it in the bathroom.” The first part was true; the second part was not.

Tracy let out a horrified gasp, but I shut her up with one cautionary look. The easiest way to keep one secret was to let another piece of information slip, and the last thing either of us needed was for Fuchsia, whose mouth was roughly the size of Montana, to figure out that it had taken more than boob, nose, and dye jobs for Tracy to land her ex-boyfriend (the second-hottest guy at our school) in the first place. If secrets were currency in the high school world, boys were more or less Gold cards. No pun intended.

I didn’t even want to know what would happen if it got out that Tracy could seduce guys with her singing voice. Knowing Tracy, once her cover was blown, she’d probably hedge her bets and seduce the entire senior class, and I think we all know who’d end up cleaning up after that fiasco. Was it too much to ask for things to just return to normal?

Until a few weeks into the start of my junior year, life at Emory had been predictable: the Goldens threw the best parties, hooked up exclusively with each other, and kept the Nons in their places: figuratively under our feet and literally out of our way. Harsh? Yes, but this was high school, and I knew better than anyone: life was harsh.

Enter Lissy James. Within twenty-four hours of moving to town, she’d unknowingly hit on Brock (off-limits) and Tate (also off-limits), made friends with some of the biggest Nons in the class below me, puked in front of the entire student body, and failed to thank me even once for stopping the rumors that she was a pathetic boyfriend-stealing bulimic.

Instead, Lissy and her so-called Sight had turned my nice, normal life upside down. It had started with her little sister letting me in on the ginormous big-sis-has-mystical-powers secret, and it had ended with the three of us and Lissy’s Nontourage saving Tracy from Mr. Kissler, a power-grubbing math teacher who’d tried to kill her to steal her Siren (aka singing seductress) voice.

Even thinking about it made my head hurt.

In the weeks since our little adventure, Lissy, Tracy, and I had developed an understood agreement: Lissy kept her mouth shut about Tracy’s power, Tracy didn’t tell anyone about the freakiness she’d seen when we’d rescued her, and I did my best to ignore the strange daydreams I’d been having ever since.

I took another sip of my shake and forced my mind and my eyes back to the present.

“Wow.”

Ack! I thought as the word left my mouth. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Girls who were dating the most popular, best-looking guy in the entire school weren’t allowed to “wow” over other males, especially in the presence of my overzealous best friends, Fuchsia “I Want What You Have” Reynolds and Tracy “If I Can’t Have Tate Then I Want What Fuchsia Wants” Hillard.

“Wow what?” Fuchsia and Tracy asked in one voice.

I improvised and scrambled for a distracter. “Wow,” I said, zeroing in on a nearby pair of pants and saying a silent apology to their owner. “I didn’t know they made plaid the color of vomit.”

As I’d known it would, my comment sent them off on another tangent about the day’s worst fashion faux pas, and I had a chance to examine the real cause of my wow. He was standing on the other side of the room, leaning against the doorframe. Dark hair just long enough to cover what I felt sure were equally dark eyes fell in his face. He was tanned, ripped, and wore a thin white T-shirt and a pair of dark blue jeans so tight they must have gone out of style before I was born.

As if he could read my thoughts, the mystery boy looked up. His hair fell out of his eyes, which lingered on mine for just a moment before he shook his head and laughed without smiling at all.

“Who’s the new boy?” I found myself asking.

“New boy?” Fuchsia and Tracy spoke at once, and almost instantly, they whirled around and followed my gaze.

The boy in question frowned, first at them and then at me, before turning his back on us.

“What new boy?” Fuchsia asked. “Where?”

“Never mind,” I said, strangely bothered by the fact that he’d turned away. “He looks like a skeez.”

At my words, the boy turned back around, and from the way he was looking at me, I found myself wondering if there was something wrong with my face. Or my hair.

“Who looks like a skeez?” Fuchsia asked impatiently.

“The guy in the doorway,” I said.

For a long moment, Fuchsia said nothing, her eyes measuring the expression on my face, which I kept carefully blank. I knew better than to let people see more than I wanted them to.

“Lilah,” Tracy said slowly, looking from me to the door and back again. “There is no boy in the doorway.”

“Of course there…” As the words left my mouth, the boy turned his back on us again, and without moving, he disappeared. One second he was there; the next he was gone, and Tracy and Fuchsia were staring at me like I’d told them I’d decided to go Goth.

Luckily, my damage-control instinct kicked in.

“Oh,” I said, playing the whole thing off like a joke. “My mistake. That’s not a new boy. That’s just Lissy’s little friend.”

Taking one look at the Non girl on the other side of the caf, my friends dissolved into laughter.

“For a second there,” Fuchsia said, “I thought you were going crazy.”

Hoped I was going crazy, I corrected her silently. I also silently apologized to Lissy’s friend Audra. My newfound tendency toward daydreaming had me doing a lot more “Hey! Look over there!” maneuvers than usual, and even though Audra hadn’t heard me and probably wouldn’t have cared if she had, I couldn’t help but feel squicky about the below-the-beltness of it all.

But, I reminded myself, desperate times called for desperate measures, and I was nothing if not a survivor.

Having successfully averted a potential mini-crisis, I couldn’t help but look back at the doorway. The air blurred like static on a television, and there the boy was again, glowering in my direction.

Tearing my eyes from his, I brought my milkshake to my mouth. When I looked back up, he was gone, and for a split second, a shattered image filled my mind.

Three girls holding hands.

These hallucinations/daydreams/whatever were really starting to bother me, and it was getting harder and harder to pretend they weren’t happening. I so couldn’t afford to lose my mind right now—Fuchsia would throw a popularity coup faster than I could say “if you had to choose,” and I absolutely could not let that happen.

With a failed effort at a deep, cleansing breath, I stood up.

“Where are you going?” Fuchsia asked.

I turned back and pinned her to the chair with a well-executed shrug. “You’ll see.”

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

3

Contagion

Loser is a contagious disease,

and there’s no such thing as natural immunity.

“Hey, loverboy. Get your girlfriend’s attention, would ya? She’s doing the whole zoning out thing again.”

As I approached Lissy’s table, Audra tossed a rolled-up napkin in the general direction of the guy Tracy had so eloquently referred to as Lissy’s “would-be boytoy.” Dodging the napkin, Dylan smirked at Audra and flicked a French fry expertly toward her face.

And these were the people Lissy chose to spend her time with.

“Don’t call me loverboy,” Dylan said, his too-long hair obscuring his face from my view. Not that I was looking.

By the time I actually reached the table, Lissy seemed to have zoned in enough to add her own complaint. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said. “And I wasn’t zoned out.”

Likely story, I thought. On both counts. About that time, I remembered why I’d bothered to brave this side of the cafeteria to begin with. Hint: it had absolutely nothing to do with Lissy’s love life or her friends’ tendency toward impromptu food fights and only a little to do with the fact that my own friends were getting harder and harder to take.

“Lissy,” I said, announcing my presence. Audra immediately froze, halfway to chucking the fry back at Dylan, who, like Lissy, seemed completely unaffected by my sudden appearance in Nonville. “I need to talk to you.” I glanced away from her just in time to smile across the room at Brock and Tate as they entered the cafeteria, finished with their football meeting.

Brock smiled back, raking his eyes up and down my body and yelling out the words to his haiku.

“You what?” Lissy asked, like my request had been somehow less than explicit.

“I need to talk to you,” I repeated, never taking my eyes off Brock as he made a beeline for my table, and by the transitive property, for Fuchsia, Tracy, and what was left of my chocolate milkshake.

Lissy didn’t respond immediately, and after I mouthed a hello to Brock, I looked down at her and forced an icy smile onto my face. I didn’t want to be here, at her table, asking—okay, demanding—her help. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do, it wasn’t the coolest thing to do, and it wasn’t a Lilah thing to do. And yet, here I was.

Lissy glanced at me, frowned, and looked over at the table I’d just left. Then she looked back at me and blinked several times.

I refused to ask her what she was blinking at. When it came to what Lissy James saw with her magic aura-seeing eyes, I preferred to know as little as was humanly possible. “Can you just come to the ladies’?”

I turned away before she could respond. It was a trick I’d picked up from Fuchsia back in middle school. If you didn’t give people a chance to answer, they couldn’t say no.

“Ow-oooooowwww!” The half-grunt, half-yell clearly came from the Golden side of the cafeteria. Roughly translated, “ow-oooooowwww” was guy-speak for “so hot.” I knew without turning around as I walked, my skirt swishing around my thighs, that at least half the male population of the school was checking out my butt. In general, I took more or less the same philosophical stance toward such butt-staring as I did toward Brock’s haiku: it was better than being ignored.

“Could your skirt get any shorter?” Lissy huffed, and then she made a small eeping sound, like she hadn’t meant to huff anything out loud.

“Lissy,” I teased, relieved that she’d actually followed me, “don’t argue with success.”

I opened the door to the ladies’ room and waited until it was shut firmly behind us before turning to face her.

Lissy was pretty, probably prettier than she knew, though not as pretty as she could have been if she’d been the type to accept fashion advice from well-meaning upperclassmen named Lilah. Her hair was thick and a little bit wild, her eyelashes were long and dark, and the scowl on her lips was only somewhat unflattering.

Without thinking, I glanced at myself in the mirror. A little girl with dark hair, flawless skin, and sooty eyelashes stared back at me, her expression solemn.

Air crackling, trembling like the surface of rough water.

I blinked hard, and when I opened my eyes, the sooty eyelashes were my own, made thicker by long-lasting mascara and a steady hand with an eyelash curler, necessary adaptations for Goldenhood.

Despite what I’d seen in the mirror, I managed to tear my eyes away from my now-solid reflection and turned my attention back to Lissy. My hallucinations had started the day she’d pulled me into her world of weird, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I had a sinking suspicion that she was my best chance at making them stop.

“I can’t do this right now,” I told her, not knowing quite where to start.

“But you’re the one who brought me in here.” Lissy was clearly confused.

“Not the talking,” I clarified. “The other thing.” I didn’t believe for a second that Little Miss Aura Seer had no idea what was going on with me. If anything, her Sight gave her too much insight into things I preferred to keep private.

“Ummmm…what other thing?”

I hated it that she was playing dumb and doing it so well. This was my life we were talking about here.

“I want you to make it stop.” I spoke slowly and clearly with the hope that maybe, just this once, she’d understand. It was about time that someone did.

“Make what stop?”

I glanced at each of the four bathroom stalls, making sure they were empty. “You know what,” I said, my voice low. “I need you to stop the…” I wiggled my fingers in front of my eyes.

“Spirit fingers?”

I rolled my eyes. “No,” I said, forcing my voice to stay calm. “Not spirit fingers. The hallucinations.”

She bit her bottom lip and tilted her head to the side. “What hallucinations?”

I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged them to my body. Was she really going to make me spell this out for her?

“All I know,” Lissy said, looking down at her shoes and avoiding eye contact altogether, “is that in the past thirty seconds, you’ve gone from being lavender to violet to practically black, and your connections look like they’re doing the hokeypo—”

“That,” I said. “Stop with the that.”

“The that?” she repeated. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, and if we’d been anything even close to friends, I might have giggled at the absolutely bewildered expression on her face. But the situation was dire, and we weren’t friends, so I didn’t even smile.

“Stop playing your freaky Sight games with me,” I blurted out. The last thing I’d wanted to do today was end up in the girls’ bathroom talking about the one thing I’d sworn never to mention again, and yet…

“Sight games?” Lissy asked.

The moment I realized that she wasn’t playing dumb was the exact same moment the bathroom door opened and Mountain Morrison walked in. Once upon a time, when we were seven, she’d had a real name—Mindy—but there was a distinct chance that I was the only one who remembered what her actual name was, and even I couldn’t pinpoint the exact day she’d stopped being Mindy and started being Mountain. In elementary school, I’d been a little more concerned about finding friends with stay-at-home moms than with chubby little Mindy, who did the after-school program I was forced into when I couldn’t find anywhere else to go.

“Sorry,” I told her. “Occupied.”

Mindy (who wasn’t nearly as big as she’d been when she’d earned aforementioned hideous nickname) turned in slow motion to look at the four obviously empty stalls. Clearly, she’d missed out on the girl-talk lessons when the rest of us had learned that “occupied” meant “private conversation in progress.”

“I think the second-floor bathroom is open,” I told her, careful to keep my voice absolutely devoid of any emotion that might cue her in to the fact that I was on the verge of a Class A freak-out.

Beside me, Lissy frowned.

I so did not have time for this. “Mindy,” I said softly. “Second. Floor. Bathroom.”

And just like that, she was gone, and Lissy was staring at me like I’d announced a secret love of kicking puppies.

I’d long since come to terms with the fact that I hadn’t gotten to where I was by being the world’s nicest person. The word “bitch” might not have been a total misnomer, and there were days when even I didn’t like me. Maybe I should have just let the poor girl use the bathroom, but come on! I was in crisis, and the second-floor bathroom was always open. And honestly, would it have killed Lissy to realize that I was probably the first person all year to call Mindy Morrison by her real name?

I stepped forward and flipped the lock on the bathroom door. The last thing I needed was another silent battle with Lissy over whether or not the toilets were open for business. I didn’t have to justify myself to her.

I just had to ask for her help.

“Listen,” I said bluntly. “I think I may be in trouble.” I bit my bottom lip and looked away. Admitting weakness was as good as asking someone to use it against you, and there was no way that those particular words should have come tumbling out of my mouth.

I waited, and Lissy said nothing. I’d actually asked for help (more or less), and her only response was some silent inner rant at the fact that I’d commandeered the bathroom for my own purposes. Asking another girl for help was never a good idea. I knew that. What was it about the James family that had me tossing all the rules out the window? What was I even doing, locked in a bathroom with the most recently Non-ed member of the sophomore class? I mean, there was such a thing as geek by association. And to top it off, I’d left Fuchsia alone with Tracy, the boys, a need to prove herself, and a skirt that was at least an inch shorter than mine.

“Well, excuse me,” I blurted out in response to Lissy’s accusing silence and “you kick puppies” facial expression. “I’m sorry if there are bigger things going on here than some massive Non’s tiny bladder.”

Somehow, that hadn’t sounded quite so horrible in my head. But before I could take it back and explain myself more calmly, Lissy turned, unlocked the door, and fled the bathroom. After everything I’d done for her, the one time I actually needed something she walked away without so much as a single word.

“This is my swing, and you can’t sit on it.”

The surface of the door quivered, and though I tried to fight it, I couldn’t help but step toward the scene I saw playing along its surface.

The little girl’s darkly lashed eyes clouded over as the blond child on the swing issued decrees like a playground princess.

“Only people who have purple shoes can use this swing.”

The dark-haired girl glanced down at her own white Keds. Her mother had promised they’d go shoe shopping right after Mommy’s next big test.

Her mother made a lot of promises.

“I can too play on that swing,” the dark-haired child said bravely. She glanced over at the other little girls in their group. “Can’t I?” She hadn’t meant it as a question, but they took it as one.

“No,” the girl on the swing said loudly. “You don’t have purple shoes, so you can’t play.”

The other two purple-shoed girls remained silent and looked away.

After a long moment, the dark-haired girl, a look of determination on her face, turned away from her silent playmates. “Fine,” she said. Head held high, she stalked over to the swing and gave the bossy little girl sitting there a good shove that sent her flying backward. The others stared at her, half in horror, half in awe.

“Your shoes aren’t purple,” the dark-haired girl explained daintily. “They’re blue.”

“Lilah?”

My head was so full of images and memories that it took me a few seconds to recognize my own name. I hadn’t thought about that day on the swing for years, and now I hadn’t just thought about it, hadn’t just remembered it.

I’d seen it.

“Are you okay, Li?”

Just like I’d seen the boy in the jeans.

“Earth to Lilah, do you read me?”

Just like I’d seen my four-year-old self staring back at me in the mirror and three girls with sad eyes holding hands over their mother’s grave.

“Lilah?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just have some killer cramps.” It seemed like the logical lie. We were, after all, in the bathroom, and if there was one thing that other girls at least pretended sympathy toward, it was cramps.

“I’ve got some Advil,” Tracy offered. “You want?”

I nodded silently and forgave her for every headache she’d given me so far this lunch period. Tracy was a witch if you crossed her, and she wasn’t the brightest eyeliner in the set, but if you were friends, she would follow you to the bathroom to make sure you were okay. And to regloss her lips.

“Thanks, Trace,” I said as she handed me an Advil.

“No problem,” she replied, pulling some berry-flavored gloss out of her purse. “Fuchsia was about to make me puke,” she complained without preamble. “She’s so all over Tate it isn’t even funny.” Tracy was incredibly talented at talking while applying lip gloss. Without being asked to, she handed me the tube, and I leaned toward the mirror, my stomach still flipping itself inside out as I pushed down the mess of images swimming around in my mind and tried to cling to reality.

I’d have to deal with the whole seeing things that weren’t there thing eventually, but right now, talking to Tracy was just about all I could handle.

“Fuchsia,” I said lightly, “is all over everything male.”

“And some things that aren’t,” Tracy added wickedly. Apparently, I wasn’t the only one who remembered Fuchsia’s performance at Parker’s party. Tracy’s wicked expression melted into enormously pathetic-looking Little Orphan Annie eyes. “You don’t think Tate actually likes her, do you?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Of course not,” I replied, capping the gloss and handing it back to her. Truthfully, though, if Tracy wasn’t careful, Fuchsia was going to end up dating her ex, and I was going to be left to pick up the pieces and negotiate the truce. And if that happened, I could kiss the few good times the three of us did still have together goodbye.

“Good,” Tracy said, happily accepting my lie because it was what she wanted to hear. “I don’t think Brock likes her either.”

The comment hit me like a steel gong. Why would Tracy say that? It wasn’t like I was actually worried about Brock liking Fuchsia. Brock and I had been together for almost two years, and just that morning, he’d written me a poem, albeit a bad one. He still liked me, and only me. I had nothing to worry about.

The door to the bathroom opened, and another slightly chubby girl poked her head in.

“Occupied,” Tracy said, without even glancing away from the mirror.

Then again, I thought, if Tracy was in here with me, that meant that Fuchsia was out there with Brock…alone….

“Let’s go,” I said, faking a shudder without ever looking at the bathroom intruder.

Tracy picked up where I’d left off and, as was her habit, took it one step too far. “Definitely,” she said. “This place reeks of Non.”

The Non girl’s cheeks blushed scarlet, and I couldn’t help but feel like the puppy kicker Lissy thought I was.

Stop this, I told myself sternly. There was a time and a place to have a conscience, and unless you wanted to be the one getting kicked, high school wasn’t either of them.

And besides, I thought as I opened the door and stepped back into the cafeteria, I had to face the fact that I had much, much bigger things to worry about.

Like, for example, the fact that Fuchsia was sitting in Brock’s lap. And the fact that the boy no one else could see was standing behind them, staring at me.

Again.

4

Boys

She who has the boys

makes the rules.

His eyes were dark, measuring, and locked on my face, not my breasts, which typically got far more visual screen time with boys my age than my high cheekbones or clear blue eyes. The mystery boy could see me, that much was clear, and as he skulked around the Golden table, his eyes on mine, I couldn’t pretend that I didn’t see him. And, even though I didn’t want to admit it, I had a sinking feeling that he wasn’t a hallucination.

It didn’t take me very long to decide that there was exactly one way to deal with Not Really There Boy, and that was to ignore him the way I ignored my more corporeal but equally annoying Non admirers. Since I didn’t have the stomach for explicitly crushing their little dorky hearts, I wasn’t left with many options, but usually, ignoring them eventually did the trick, and they got over me. With any luck, Hallucination Boy would do the same.

Even if he didn’t, and even if he wasn’t, in fact, a hallucination, that wasn’t my primary concern. I’d broken at least ten social commandments when I’d cornered Lissy to ask her for help, the most important of which was “Thou shalt not leave Fuchsia Reynolds alone with thy boyfriend.” Currently, my so-called best friend was sitting in Brock’s lap, her skirt hiked up to Timbuktu and her hands on his face.

I didn’t let my annoyance show as I walked toward the cozy twosome. Fuchsia was my friend, which meant she definitely wasn’t supposed to be giving my boyfriend a lap dance, but she was also Fuchsia, which meant that if I let her get away with it, she’d do it again.

“Pumping him for information about Jackson?” I called out as I approached the table. “I hate to tell you this, Brock,” I continued, my voice light, joking, and deadly, “but she’s using you for your hot friends.” Fuchsia tore her eyes away from Brock’s just long enough to glance not-so-subtly around to see who had heard my completely innocuous question and my not-so-innocuous comment. I’d put her in an awkward position. To deny that she was using Brock to get to his friends, she’d have to explain what she was doing in his lap, but without denying it, she looked desperate, and desperate didn’t land a girl an A-list guy.

With Fuchsia sufficiently distracted, I ran my hands through Brock’s thick hair, leaned over his chair, and kissed him upside down on the mouth a la Kirsten Dunst and Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man. I was doing an absolutely splendid job of ignoring the almost tangible stare of the dark-haired, not-there stranger and putting Fuchsia in check, all in one fell swoop.

“What was that for?” Brock asked when I pulled away.

I leaned down next to his ear. “Just for being you,” I said. “And for being nice to my friends, even when they are kind of…you know.” I made sure that Fuchsia heard the last, oh-so-sincere sentence. Clearly, I wasn’t insulting her. I was thanking my boyfriend for looking out for her, even in her present pathologically skanky state.

Fuchsia’s eyes narrowed. It had me shaking in my boots. As if.

“Aren’t you going to kiss me back?” I asked Brock, allowing my bottom lip to jut out just a little. Almost instantly, Brock was on his feet, and Fuchsia, ousted from his lap, was trying her best to look like getting up had been her own idea.

Just as Brock’s lips were closing in on mine for the second time that lunch period, I felt someone else’s breath on my neck and low-spoken words in my left ear. “Well done, Princess.”

“Aaaaarrrrgggkk!” The sound I made as I jumped away from the whisper and fell to the floor wasn’t exactly identifiable, but it was loud enough that when I looked up, everyone in the entire school was staring at me.

No biggie, I told myself, refusing to allow a blush to creep up my cheeks. People stared at me all the time. It came with the territory. Instead of cringing at the fact that I was sprawled across the floor, I took the opportunity to show off my legs.

When in doubt, show some skin.

“Nice. Real nice,” the not-there boy said, a smirk on his red lips. “Classy, too.”

This was so not good. No one else could see him. No one else could hear him, and ignoring him didn’t seem to be working too well. Luckily, however, I was nothing if not flexible, so I initiated Plan B. I let Brock help me up, had him walk me to class (deftly keeping him out of lap-dancing distance from Fuchsia, who was still steaming over my Jackson comment), and prepared myself for a confrontation. If this guy thought I was going to let him suck me into some kind of hallucination-induced social downfall, he was in for a rude awakening. Weird stuff of the Lissy James variety may not have been my strong point, but getting my way was.

My nonexistent “I am…” poem came back to me. I was Lilah Covington. I was the most popular girl in the junior class. I was Brock’s girlfriend, and I was in control. I’d worked hard to be that person, and it was going to take more than a little vision trouble and a flirty best friend to change that. I looped my hand through Brock’s as we walked down the hallway. Touching a guy was like putting a label on him, and I wanted it to be perfectly clear to all people (real and imaginary) in the near vicinity that Brock was mine and that, as his haiku had so eloquently stated, I was Brock’s.

As we walked, Mystery Boy followed us, never more than a couple of steps behind me. I wondered if he was looking at me, and for some reason, I suddenly felt self-conscious in a skirt that I knew had fit me perfectly that morning.

Once I was safely in the classroom and had convinced Brock that he really didn’t want to maul me in front of a poster of Oliver Cromwell, I kissed him goodbye and closed the door firmly behind him.

Alone with my imaginary stalker at last.

“This how you get your kicks?” I asked Mystery Boy. “Watching other people make out?”

Normally, I wasn’t so blatantly nasty, but there was something about this guy (other than the fact that I shouldn’t have been seeing him at all) that rubbed me the wrong way.

“Retract your claws, Princess,” he said, sitting down on top of the teacher’s desk and smiling darkly at me through a mess of black hair. “I’m not here to bring down your court.”

“Don’t call me Princess.” My words hung in the air, and I felt ridiculous. I had an invisible (to everyone else) stalker, and I was worried about the fact that he was giving me condescending nicknames? “If you’re not here for the jollies,” I said, trying to get a grip on the fact that the life I’d worked so hard to perfect had taken yet another turn for the strange and uninvited, “why are you here?”

“Oh,” the boy said, shrugging as if that was a completely unimportant question. “I’m not.”

“Allow me to demonstrate,” I retorted. “This is you”—I pointed my finger at his smirking lips—“and this is here.” My gesture broadened to include the entire room. “It would stand to reason that this would be you, here.”

“Really?” the boy asked. “Because the last I checked, I wasn’t here, or at least, I wasn’t now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That, Princess,” he said, “is for you to find out.”

And with that, he disappeared, leaving me standing, furious, in the room by myself.

Air crackling, fading to black and white: sharp contrasts, static, and three rings of color blazing in the air. Blue. Purple. Pink.

I don’t know how long I stood there, absorbed in the colors of the air before a voice broke into my thoughts.

“Lilah?”

“Fuchsia,” I answered, automatically forcing back the tears that wanted to protect my eyes from the bright lights I’d seen microseconds before. If I let Fuchsia think she’d made me cry, I was as good as dead.

Lilah Covington didn’t cry over spilt milk or attempted boyfriend steals. She got even. And when I got even, I did it without letting anyone know that I’d ever been bothered or hurt or worried at all. It’s a simple fact of human nature: if you don’t show your emotions, people assume you don’t have them, and that tends to convince them that they can’t hurt you and that you won’t think twice about hurting them. And, believe it or not, that’s a good thing, no matter how incredibly wrong those people might be.

“You didn’t have to be so pissy at lunch. Brock and I were just having fun.”

That was the Fuchsia Reynolds version of an apology, plus an acceptance of the fact that she needed me not to be “pissy.” Chalk another one up for pretending to be invincible.

“I was just having fun too,” I said, testing her. “You’re so touchy today.”

I could see her warring with herself, trying to decide whether or not it was worth picking a fight. It wasn’t. “PMS,” she replied with a shrug.

I nodded and, after a moment’s deliberation, allowed myself another friendly grin. There was enough suckiness in the air already; I didn’t need a fight with Fuchsia making things worse. Besides, of the two of us, I was the one all the boys had been checking out. I was the one who’d left the cafeteria with Brock. Fuchsia was the one who’d had to apologize.

For the moment at least, I was totally, utterly, completely in control, and for the first time, maybe because I knew how close I’d come to losing it, it scared the hell out of me.

5

Lying

The easiest way to lie

is to convince people you’re a bad liar

and then prove them wrong.

“Success.” I mumbled the word into my locker as I closed the door. I’d managed to make it through the day without(a) another visit from Mystery Boy, (b) Fuchsia publicly molesting my boyfriend, or (c) saying another word to Lissy “Holier Than Thou” James. I hadn’t exactly cured world hunger, but given my disastrous lunch period, I was willing to call my day a success.

“Hey, babes,” Fuchsia called out. I turned around. I was only “babes” when she was ready to forget about guys long enough to be a real friend or when she was getting ready to start messing with me. It was a real toss-up.

“We’re going to the mall. Wanna come with?”

And apparently it was the second option. Fuchsia was all smiles and kindness, but she knew exactly what my answer was going to be before I gave it. I’d picked up on that particular trick in middle school when she’d taken to inviting me to her house when she knew I had a dentist appointment. That way she got bonus points in the friend tally for asking me, but didn’t have to settle for being the second-prettiest girl there.

“Trace and I were going to go on Saturday,” I said. “Right, Tracy?”

Tracy was, to put it nicely, a teeny tiny bit needy. There was no way she was going to turn down a mall invite, especially if it meant that she got to pretend that I’d asked her before I’d asked Fuchsia.

“Right,” Tracy said.

“Since when?” Fuchsia demanded. She knew my tricks almost as well as I knew hers.

“We’ve been planning it for a while.” Tracy answered Fuchsia’s question, relishing the moment way more than she would have on a day when Fuchsia hadn’t hit on Tate. “You can come if you…you know…want to.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

“Oh.” Fuchsia practically sniffed the word, and I felt a small twinge of guilt. Fuchsia and I played mind games with each other. It was what we did. That didn’t mean I had to like it.

“Maybe we could all go next week,” I offered. “If Saturday doesn’t work for you, Fuchsia.” It was as much of a peace branch as she was going to get after the day I’d had.

Tracy stiffened. She didn’t forgive quite as easily as I did, and she didn’t like me offering to change our fictional plans to accommodate someone who’d spent all of chorus ogling her ex.

“I gotta go,” I said, walking between the two of them on my way out. “Trace, figure out what works for you guys and then give me a call?”

Tracy smiled, her muscles relaxing now that I’d at least pretended to put her in charge. “Sureness.”

“Laters,” I called over my shoulder.

There was a simple reason that I couldn’t jet off to the mall, and that reason should have been waiting for me in front of the school, as per our carpool agreement that morning. Needless to say, she wasn’t.

When my mom had up and bought me a car two weeks earlier, I’d been delighted. Bumming rides in Brock’s SUV and Fuchsia’s blue convertible had worked well enough, but having a car of my own took away some of Fuchsia’s leverage and was, as Brock had so eloquently put it, “hot.” I wasn’t stupid enough to think that my mom’s sudden generosity had nothing to do with the fact that she and Corey Nowly were getting serious, but I wasn’t completely opposed to parental bribery.

Having my own car, unfortunately, had definite drawbacks, such as my mom’s tendency toward volunteering me to sporadically chauffeur a certain sophomore and her little sister home from school. Thus, instead of cruising to the mall with Fuchsia and Tracy, I was forced to work on a little dilemma I liked to call “Where is Lissy, and why isn’t she waiting for me in front of the school?”

A cursory check of the hallway revealed that she wasn’t at her locker. Class had been out for a full ten minutes, so I didn’t think there was much of a chance that she was still in a classroom. Since Emory High wasn’t exactly the Colosseum of high schools, that only left a few possibilities: the cafeteria, the bathroom, the library, and the gym. The one and only time I’d ever seen Lissy involved in athletic activity involved her being hit in the head with a football, so I ruled out the gym. The cafeteria was the closest (and therefore the least likely to cause me to be seen wandering around the school looking for someone I wasn’t even supposed to like), so I decided to try my luck there.

Luck, as it turned out, was on my side. I opened the cafeteria door, and there was Lissy, sitting on top of a table and listening intently as Audra talked, either oblivious of or neutral to the fact that she’d inconvenienced me at all.

“Yes, he’s kind of scraggly, and I will admit, his ‘I’m a tortured teen’ routine takes some getting used to,” Audra was saying, “but he’s also obviously into you. And, God knows why, since he’s such a surly piece of work, but you seem to like him, too. So what’s the deal?”

Lissy blew a frizzy wisp of hair out of her face. “The deal is that we’re just friends. The deal is that I’m not sure how I feel about him, and I’m not about to date someone just because my Sight says I should.” She paused. “And he’s not that surly.”

“Lissy, Dylan’s been my best friend since we were twelve. Trust me on this one. He’s surly.”

“Eavesdropping, Princess?”

I jumped at the sound of Mystery Boy’s voice. I’d hoped never to see him again, and yet here he was. This cafeteria was so totally cursed.

“No,” I said, keeping my voice low enough that Audra and Lissy, who were still engaged in their own little debate, couldn’t hear me. “And don’t call me Princess.”

Mystery Boy paid absolutely no attention to me, keeping his eyes on Audra and Lissy. “It’s the age-old story,” he said. “Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. Girl is somehow convinced that she couldn’t possibly like boy. Boy suffers endless torment waiting for girl to come to her senses.”

Great. Now my hallucination (I was back to that story, and I was sticking to it) was going all philosophical on me.

He turned back to me and shook his head. “You can’t fight destiny, Princess,” he said. “You might want to tell that to your little friend.”

“She’s not my…” Before I could get the words out of my mouth, he’d disappeared, and Lissy and Audra had discovered that they weren’t alone.

And then, in the next instant, they were, because my mind, my body, every fiber of my Queen Bee being was taken over by some sort of vision I couldn’t begin to understand.

Air crackling and the colors of the room blurring into nothingness.

A girl with platinum blond hair, a soft smile on her face, and a metal ring on her finger. A dark-haired guy with his shirt off, muscles shining with sweat. Bruises.

“You ready for this, boy?” I didn’t see the voice’s owner, but could hear the emphasis on the last syllable, could see bruised muscles tensing in response.

“I don’t want to fight you.” The shirtless guy was obviously lying, his body rebelling against misplaced restraint.

“Then maybe you should have left Helen alone.” Five voices spoke the same words in different rhythms, each seemingly unaware of the others, and the blond-haired girl stood there, twirling her ring.

Air crackling, blurring, and hardening into colors that weren’t there. Purple. Blue. Pink, melting away to golden white.

Nothing.

“Lilah?” Lissy spoke my name hesitantly. “Are you okay?”

Answer: no, definitely not, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

What was happening to me? What I’d just seen—it looked real, felt real, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. The details were burned into my mind—a shirtless guy who looked all too much like my very own mystery boy; a girl with platinum blond hair.

“Lilah?” Lissy’s voice was smaller this time.

“I’m fine.”

I wasn’t fine. I needed help, but I wouldn’t, couldn’t ask for it again.

“You ready?” I asked, but I didn’t bother to wait for an answer. I’d passed up a trip to the mall, hunted all over the school, and endured another brutal round of what I refused to describe as visions. If Lissy still wanted a ride home, she could darn well follow me.

I made it out of the school in record time. I clicked the keyless entry button on my key ring, threw open the door to my car, situated myself in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and shifted into reverse before Lissy managed to scramble inside. “Thanks for waiting,” she said dryly.

“Thanks for coming,” I returned, mirroring her tone exactly.

Lissy’s eyes opened wide, and she nodded almost imperceptibly. Then she blinked several times, obviously seeing something in me that couldn’t be seen with the naked, nonmystical eye.

“Don’t start,” I told her when she opened her mouth. The last thing I needed after my Mystery Boy–filled day was an aura checkup. I desperately missed the days when Lissy’s power had been a secret and I’d thought she just had an unfortunate twitching problem.

“Seriously, Lilah, are you okay?” Lissy was nothing if not persistent. “Because you don’t really look okay….”

I flipped on my turn signal. “Fine,” I said.

“Are you…sure?”

“Positive. Are you okay?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “Because you’re looking kind of…” I trailed off, casting a mock-sympathetic look at her frizzing hair. “…frazzled.”

“I’m fine,” she said, looking out the window instead of at me, and then, as I’d known she would, she grew quiet. Her hair actually wasn’t anything some gel and a thorough reading of Cosmo wouldn’t fix, but I couldn’t afford for her to be asking what-happened-back-there kinds of questions when we picked Lexie up from the middle school. Luckily, playing the frizz card worked, and the two of us rode in a silence that only broke when Lexie James blew into the car, a broad smile on her pixie face.

“You wouldn’t believe what happened today,” she said, and just listening to her say it, I was overcome with the feeling that I couldn’t possibly believe what had happened today. Part of me even wanted to hear what had happened, and it had been years since anything related to middle school had even remotely interested me. I hadn’t even been interested in the middle school when I’d gone there myself.

“I was showing Molly how to smile with only half of her mouth, and…”

I never got to hear what unbelievable thing had resulted from the half-mouth smile lessons, because about that time, Lexie picked up on the way I was death-gripping the steering wheel and the fact that Lissy couldn’t keep from glancing over at what I presumed was a very revealing mass of moving light around my head.

“Are you okay, Lilah?” Lexie asked, her story immediately forgotten. “Because you look—”

I didn’t let her finish the sentence. “Just driving,” I said, blurting out the first true thing that came to mind.

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” Lexie said simply. For someone three years younger than me, she was a little too with it for her own good. Or, for that matter, mine.

Why, oh why, did I have to carpool with the James family? Trekking all over the school to find Lissy was bad enough, but trying to keep a secret from a thirteen-year-old Truth Seer was a million times worse, especially when that Truth Seer happened to live for finding a way to use her power to (and I quote) “do something really good and Sighty with it.”

“You look like something’s the matter,” Lexie said, wrinkling her brow at me. “Something is the matter,” she continued, her eyes lighting up as she assessed the truth of her own words. She still got a kick out of using her Sight. According to what she’d told me when she’d very earnestly spilled her heart and all the family secrets, she’d been a late mystical bloomer, and her biggest fear in life had been that she’d be the only female in the history of her family to be Blind. Now that she had True Vision (“the ability to see truth as a visual property”—she’d recited the definition so many times that everyone in the superpower loop knew it by heart), Lexie was determined to use her Sight every chance she got.

It was almost cute in a way that, at that moment, wasn’t cute at all.

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” I told her, knowing that she’d see I was telling the truth: I really didn’t want to talk about it.

“You two never want to talk about anything real with me,” Lexie complained from the backseat, her eyes morose and her voice censuring.

“Hey,” Lissy said, “leave me out of this.”

“Is it dangerous?” Lexie asked, completely ignoring her sister. I had to admire her ability to do so without really meaning to. “People are always trying to keep me out of danger.”

Fresh dirt on an open grave.

“It’s not dangerous,” I snapped, pushing the image out of my mind and concentrating on the road.

“Say that again,” Lexie instructed, wrinkling her forehead, completely unaffected by my snapping. Lissy, on the other hand, was glaring at me like I’d tried to permanently disfigure her little sister.

“Say what again?” I asked.

“That thing about the danger.”

Only two more miles to go. How in the world was I going to make it two more miles?

“It’s not dangerous,” I repeated, hoping against hope that what I was saying was true. Mystery Boy hadn’t looked dangerous, except in a sexy James Dean kind of way. “Though it might be lethal to my social life,” I added.

In the rearview mirror, I could see Lexie chewing on her bottom lip in deep concentration.

“I don’t know about the social life part,” she admitted candidly, “but it might be dangerous. I bet you need our help. Does it have something to do with that singing Siren girl?”

“No,” I said. One more mile. If I could keep her from asking the right questions for one more mile, I would be safe.

“Lex, it’s probably just ordinary school stuff.” Lissy, who’d suffered more than one Lexie inquisition since her little sister had “found” her Sight, came to my rescue. “There’s nothing supernatural about it. If she doesn’t want to share, maybe you should leave her alone.”

I was momentarily grateful for Lissy’s leave-her-alone policy until I realized what she’d just said.

“There’s nothing supernatural about it,” Lexie repeated. “Nothing supernatur…yes, there is!” Her eyes got as wide as saucers, and she stuck her tongue out at Lissy in what I had to admit was a very flattering (and probably overpracticed) way. “There is something supernatural about it,” she said triumphantly.

Lissy turned to look at me. “Does this have something to do with what just happened in the cafeteria?”

I pulled into their driveway. “Okay, ride ends here,” I said, deliberately not answering Lissy’s question. “Thanks for your time. Have a nice day.”

Lissy stared at me a second longer and then opened the door and slipped out of the car. “Whatever,” she said, closing the door behind her and walking away from me again.

Lexie stayed in the car and climbed into the front seat. “It’s okay if you don’t want to tell us,” she said, even though I could see in her baby blues that she was dying to hear every last detail. “I just thought we might be able to help, but I don’t even know if we really can for sure. It’s too fuzzy to see.”

She wasn’t trying to guilt-trip me into anything; she wasn’t leaving any information out. She was just being Lexie.

“Bye, Lilah.”

“Wait.” The word was out of my mouth before I’d decided to say it. “If I tell you,” I said slowly, “you have to promise not to tell your sister.”

Lexie looked at me for a while, considering her options. “Okay,” she said finally, her voice soft. We sat in silence for a moment, and then she spoke again. “Lilah?”

“Yeah?”

She smiled brightly. “This could be fun.”

6

Truth

Gossip:

If I say it, it’s true.

And if it isn’t, it doesn’t matter.

“Maybe he’s a stalker,” I said. “If the math teacher can be a magical murderer, I don’t see why I can’t have an invisible stalker.”

“No.” Lexie shook her head, her expression overly serious. The two of us were still sitting in my car in her driveway. It had taken about half a second after I’d finished telling her about Mystery Boy and the funky daydreams for her to zero in on what she considered the most important thing: the boy.

“Try again,” she said brightly.

“Angel?” I guessed. Not that he’d particularly looked like an angel, but I’d seen enough It’s a Wonderful Life takeoffs to wonder if I’d been cursed with a dark and broody bad boy as a guardian angel.

“Sorry, nuh-uh.”

Darn. Of all the explanations I’d come up with, that was the one I liked the most.

“Guy from the future come to warn me about the Apocalypse?”

“Nope.”

Okay, now I was reaching.

“Ghost of Christmas Past?”

“Liiiiilaaaaaah.” Lexie sent me a tortured look. Like I said before, she took her Sight seriously, even though the fact that she still broke into a happy dance every time she “saw” something made it a little difficult to take her too seriously.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Just ghost.”

Lexie bit her bottom lip, thinking, and then she turned to me, her eyes wide. “Can I get a full sentence?”

“He’s a ghost.”

The resulting smile spread slowly enough that I actually watched it take over Lexie’s face. “He’s definitely a ghost,” she said. “A ghost boy.” She grinned. “A boy ghost.” I wasn’t sure which part my enthusiastic companion was relishing more: the fact that we knew we were dealing with a ghost or that the ghost was male.

“So now I’m what, haunted?” I asked.

“Nope.” Lexie paused. Apparently, she was as puzzled by the answer as I was.

“Okay,” I said, rolling with the punches. “He’s a ghost that only I can see, but I’m not being haunted.”

“Ohmigod.”

I took one look at the expression on her face and shook my head. “No, Lexie,” I said, knowing exactly where her mind was headed. It was, after all, the place my mind had been heading all day. It was a place I was religiously trying to avoid by using terms like “hallucination” and “daydream.”

It was a place that Lexie was, in typical Lexie fashion, ecstatic to go.

“He’s a ghost you can see,” she said. “Just like you’ve been seeing weird memories in the air and just like you saw that thing with him shirtless…”

I silently prayed that she’d be distracted by the idea of a shirtless guy.

“Lilah, you have the Sight!”

“No, I don’t.” My voice came out harsher than I meant for it to, but either mean didn’t work on Lexie, or she knew I didn’t actually blame her for saying what I’d been trying not to think all day.

“Yes, you do. You really, really…” As the “really’s” mounted, her smile grew. “…really, really do.”

Something about the fourth “really” convinced me just enough to make me distinctly uncomfortable. For three years, I’d gotten along just fine in high school without any powers other than an ability to be almost supernaturally strategic. A mystical complication was the last thing I needed, with Tracy spazzing every five minutes about her breakup with Tate, and Fuchsia practically sniffing at the crotches of the only two guys in school who were, by girl law, strictly off-limits. I wasn’t dumb enough to think this so-called Sight would make things better. After all, Aura Vision (with a teensy bit of help from Tracy) had more or less officially Non-ed Lissy on her first day of school.

No matter how much I thought through the millions of reasons why I didn’t want the Sight, I couldn’t escape the truth of what Lexie had said. The problem with talking to Lexie was that she believed things so strongly that sometimes it was hard not to believe them too.

“It’s impossible,” I forced myself to argue. From my limited (but not as limited as I would have liked) knowledge of the Sight, it was a family thing, and the only family I’d ever had was my mom. And my mom was, most emphatically, not married to Lexie’s uncle. Yet.

Before Lexie could reply to and decimate the “impossible” argument, my cell rang. Eager for a reason to stop Truth Fest ’07 in its tracks, I glanced at caller ID and answered. “Hey, Fuchsia.”

“Lilah Covington,” she returned immediately. “Guess who Parker’s with at the mall.”

Parker Noles wasn’t exactly top three (Brock, Tate, and Jackson) material, but he was Golden, and that meant he was ours.

“Who?”

“Think plaid.”

Plaid?

“You know, the girl with the vomit-colored pants?”

“Right,” I said, remembering that I’d used those very pants to distract Fuchsia and Tracy from the fact that I was drooling over a boy they couldn’t even see. “So she’s the one at the mall with Parker?”

“Miss Fashion Faux Pas herself,” Fuchsia said. “She’s still wearing those awful pants, and let me tell you, one word: fugly.”

“Fugly?” Lexie asked curiously from beside me. I hadn’t realized that Fuchsia was speaking loudly enough that my thirteen-year-old companion could hear her too.

“Not now,” I mouthed to Lexie. “I’m sure it’s nothing,” I told Fuchsia. “Trust me. I’ve seen those pants.”

Lexie tilted her head to the side, watching me with wide blue eyes.

I shifted the phone to my other ear and mentally encouraged Fuchsia to talk more quietly. Lexie was all things sweet and innocent and good, and I didn’t want her anywhere near Fuchsia Reynolds, even via cell phone.

“It’s totally got to be a dare or something. I mean, puh-lease.” If anything, Fuchsia’s voice was getting louder. “Lilah? Are you even listening to me?”

“It’s got to be a dare or something,” I repeated, keeping one eye on Lexie and groaning at the fascination more than evident on her face.

“I mean, don’t you think? If Parker’s with Plaid Girl, it’s got to be a dare, right, and how pathetic is that? Someone should buy that girl a clue.”

I refrained from suggesting that Fuchsia invest in a few clues herself. Parker was known for playing the field. That was part of the reason he wasn’t top-three material. For all we knew, he was diseased. With one guilty look at Lexie, I said as much out loud, and Fuchsia latched on to my words like they were gospel.

“I bet he gave her something,” she said, even though, as far as I could tell from what I’d actually heard her say, she’d seen Plaid Girl and Parker together for less than five minutes. “Or maybe she gave him something,” Fuchsia corrected herself, rewriting my words to fit her needs. “That’s soooo…”

“Soooo what?” I asked.

“Call on the other line.” She was practically salivating to spread the Plaid Girl Is Diseased rumor. “Gotta go. Love-ya-bye!”

I hung up the phone and turned to Lexie, who seemed relatively unfazed. She was whispering to herself under her breath, staring at her hands as she spoke. “Well,” she announced cheerfully a moment later, “you don’t see dead people, or at least, that’s not your Sight, not exactly.”

“Good to know,” I said, visions of The Sixth Sense flying through my head.

“And FYI, Plaid Girl doesn’t have any diseases,” Lexie added earnestly.

I stared at her, horrified.

“What?” she asked innocently. “I got bored.”

“Corrupting the young and impressionable, Princess?”

This time, I managed not to scream as he whispered words into the back of my neck. Instead, I twisted around. “Listen, Ghost Boy,” I said.

“Ghost Boy?” Lexie asked, her eyes lighting up. “Where?”

“She’s a cute kid,” Ghost Boy said, jerking his head in Lexie’s direction. “Sure you want to drag her into this?”

“Into what?” I asked.

Ghost Boy leaned forward. “I could tell you,” he said, “but watching you figure it out is half the fun.”

“Figure what out?” He didn’t answer, and if I hadn’t been overcome by the mental image of him bruised and shirtless, I might have threatened to forget about the whole thing.

“What do you want?” I gave him my best “you’re beneath me” look, to which he remained annoyingly immune. “Aren’t dead people supposed to want something?” I asked impatiently. The sooner I could figure out what I had to do to get rid of him, the sooner I could go back to life as it should be.

“I’m not dead, Princess.” He leaned back in the seat, measuring my reaction.

“If I say you’re dead, you’re dead,” I said flatly. “And stop calling me Princess.”

He paused just long enough that I thought I might have won. “I’m not dead.”

“And that would make you a ghost because why?” I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that. “Speaking of ghosts, don’t you have something else to do? Someone to haunt, or some lights to flicker or something?”

He didn’t take the hint, and he didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he leaned forward and put his hand under my chin. I was about to jerk back when, in a single motion, he touched his lips lightly to mine and disappeared.

“Wow, you’re really red,” Lexie said. “What did he say to you this time?”

My lips tingled where he’d touched them, and my face burned with fury, embarrassment, and the fact that, for a dead guy, he wasn’t a bad kisser. I opened the car door and got out. Anything to get away from those particular thoughts.

“If he was like that when he was alive, no wonder he’s dead,” I muttered. “I would have killed him myself.”

“Ummm…Lilah?” Lexie appeared beside me, interrupting my thoughts.

“Lex, I’m tired, can we call a time-out on talking about this whole me-having-ghost-Sight thing?”

“Li—”

I cut her off. “Please?”

Lexie swallowed hard. “Okay,” she said, “but when you turn around, don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

When I realized that we were standing in Lexie’s driveway, I made a conscious decision not to turn around, but it didn’t save me from the absolute horrors that were already headed my way.

Lexie smiled weakly at the person standing behind me. “Hi, Grams.”

7

Power

Getting the upper hand is easy.

Keeping it is hard.

Grams, aka Caroline Nowly, aka the town eccentric, wasn’t exactly my favorite person. In fact, she didn’t even make the top twenty, which was a pretty weak showing considering that I couldn’t even think of twenty people in this town that I actually liked. Not that I hated her. It was more like…

She freaked me out.

“Lilah, my star, this is absolutely wonderful news.”

My star? This was exactly the kind of crazy-old-lady talk that made me wonder why “Grams” wasn’t in a nice little home on the other side of the state where she couldn’t possibly harm any innocent bystanders by giving them stupid nicknames or trying to regale them with cryptic messages about the Sight. As far as I had been able to tell in the months my mom and Corey had been dating, those were the only two things Lexie’s grandmother was capable of doing.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to problem-solve. Saying “I’m not your anything, now leave me alone” wouldn’t get me what I wanted, which was to take back the fact that I’d carried on an entire “I see dead people” conversation in front of Caroline Nowly, matriarch of the James family and resident Sighty mojo queen.

“What’s absolutely wonderful news?” I asked, putting as much boredom into my voice as I could manage on short notice.

“Your Sight,” she replied immediately.

“What Sight?” I asked, forcing my voice to remain completely uninterested.

“Nonsense!” she boomed.

I arched an eyebrow at her, waiting. If that was all she could come up with, I wasn’t impressed.

Lexie stared at me incredulously, like I was some kind of foreign species just because I was strangely immune to her grandmother’s orders, which everyone else seemed to instantly jump to obey.

After a prolonged silence, the grandmother in question spoke again. “I see.”

In the high school world, I would have counted those two words in response to my silence a success, but the way she said it made me wonder exactly what it was that she “saw.”

“Lexie, dearling,” Grams (Lexie talked about her that way so much that I couldn’t help thinking of her as Grams, even though I would have died before I’d said it out loud) said, “would you give the two of us some time to talk?”

Lexie glanced up at me, a worried look on her face. “Are you going to be okay?” she asked me, her blue eyes clear and solemn.

“I’ll be fine,” I told her.

Thirty seconds later, once Lexie was gone, I realized that if she hadn’t been so concerned with my well-being, I probably would have refused to talk to Caroline at all.

It was strange. Now that Lexie was gone, her grandmother was “Caroline” to me again. Nothing against Lexie, but I liked it better that way.

Caroline took my hand in her own and prodded me toward the front porch. I was debating exactly how to handle all of this (I couldn’t exactly push her down and make a run for it, and I had a sneaking suspicion that Caroline Nowly wasn’t the type to shy away from the kinds of quippy barbs I’d been using defensively all these years) when the vision hit me.

A woman: dark hair, light eyes. Bulging stomach.

“She’s really in there?” a little girl asked, placing her hand on the woman’s pregnant belly.

“Of course she is,” another, slightly older girl replied sagely. “Mother already said she was. Don’t you ever listen, Sorcha?” Casually, as if she wasn’t terribly interested, the older girl put her hand on the mother’s stomach as well.

With her touch, colors solidified in the air around them: purple, blue, pink.

And then, there was nothing.

The first thing I saw as the vision slipped away and the real world pieced itself back together was Caroline Nowly smiling at me maniacally. Okay, maybe “maniacally” is a bit of an overstatement, but she was definitely staring at me like she could see into my head.

Oh God, I thought. What if she can?

“The Sight,” she said in a low, almost musical voice, “is a precious gift.”

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. The images of the woman and the little girls were still too fresh in my mind to deny that I had seen them.

“For generations, our family—”

That snapped me out of it. “Your family,” I corrected sharply.

“Soon enough to be yours again, child,” the infuriating old woman replied.

What was that supposed to mean?

Wracking my brain for a way to break the intensity of the moment, I grabbed my cell phone out of my purse. As my fingers moved across the keys at a furious pace, Caroline wrinkled her forehead.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I replied in my best “something” voice. Apparently, the great Caroline Nowly either didn’t know what text messaging was, or she wasn’t used to people messaging their friends during her sacred Sight speech. Either way, it broke her stride enough to give me time to text Tracy and push the image of the woman and her children out of my mind.

Me: How’s mall?

Tracy: Parker diseased, Fuchsia pissed. Found good pants, tho.

“The Sight comes in many forms. It is rarely simple, and to harness its power, you must learn to listen, learn to understand, and learn to—”

“One sec,” I interrupted her, turning my attention to my phone again and biting back a wicked grin.

Me: Cute pants?

Tracy: Cute on me. Fuchsia gelous.

I did a double take at Tracy’s creative spelling of “jealous.”

“Phone!” Caroline’s booming voice had me looking up, and I couldn’t quite keep the surprised expression off my face.

“Say what?” I asked.

“Phone,” she boomed again. “Now!”

I started to arch an eyebrow at her, but didn’t get very far before she had my phone in her hands. For an old woman, she was pretty fast.

“That happens to be my personal property,” I said tersely. “And you have no right—”

“Listen!”

I opened my mouth to argue, but she leaned forward and cut me off. “The Sight is a gift, but like any gift, it has its limitations, and to hold the power without learning those limitations can be a death wish.”

“Say what you want,” I said in my patented bored-now voice. I glanced down at my nails and blinked slowly, doing my best impression of someone who was so uninterested they could barely keep their eyes open.

“Close your eyes.”

I couldn’t help frowning at her. It was hard to look bored if your eyes were already closed.

“Close!”

I decided to humor her. The sooner she said what she had to say, the sooner I could forget she’d ever said it and call Tracy to discuss whether or not we were actually going to the mall that weekend. Honestly, I was kind of surprised she’d gone with Fuchsia today, unless, of course, she’d gone to keep an eye on Fuchsia.

Leaving Fuchsia alone was never a good idea.

“Pay attention, dearling,” Caroline said, back to the low, singsong tone and the stupid nicknames. “The Sight touches your eyes, and it touches your heart, but your brain is your own. You must use it to enhance your Sight, not to ignore it, and certainly not to convince yourself you don’t have it.

“You’ve seen a ghost, child, and unless my guess is wrong, you’ve seen more than just that.”

I didn’t reply. At least with my eyes closed, I didn’t have to look her in the eye.

“You’ve seen memories living in the air around you.”

I can neither confirm nor deny that statement, I thought. Aloud, I said nothing. The silent treatment was a powerful weapon. Of course, it would have been more powerful if the person I was giving it to wasn’t absolutely content to ramble on by herself indefinitely.

“You see the past.”

“And the ghost?” I opened my eyes.

“Close!”

I closed my eyes, cursing myself for having broken the silence. I knew better than to give in first. My ability to outcool, outcalm, and outlast anyone was supposed to be legendary.

“What is a ghost,” Caroline asked softly, touching my eyelids with soft hands, “except for a trace of the past caught in the present? Yours is the gift of retronition. Some see what will be; some see what is. You see what was.”

Retronition. I tried the word out in my mind. Despite the fact that I was entirely against this whole Sight thing on principle, I had to admit that it had a ring to it.

No, I reminded myself immediately, it might as well be called Nontronition, because that was what it could do to me if I let down my guard.

I’d been there. I’d done that. I had no intention of doing it again.

“I know you, girl. I see you. You think you can ignore it, think you can make it go away, but you can’t. It’s a part of you now, as much as your lungs or blood or heart. The Sight takes hold of you, and it doesn’t let go.”

My eyes flew open, and this time I had no intention of closing them again. If I wanted the Sight to let go, I could make it let go. It didn’t control me. I was the one in control.

“Memories are all around you, Lilah.”

No stupid nicknames this time. Just my name.

“You can’t escape them any more than you can escape what you are. The world is full of memories for those who can see them: yours, those around you, those long forgotten by everyone else. The air cracks with them, Lilah, and you can see those cracks.

“The dead, caught in the past, will talk to you, and you will see them no matter how many times you tell yourself they don’t exist, and just when you think you’ve managed to escape your gift, you’ll touch an object and the touch will bring with it a flash, violent and intense, of where it’s been before you held it.”

Oh, goodie. I had even more Sight crap to look forward to.

“Wherever you go, whatever you do, the Sight is a part of you now.”

No. It wasn’t.

“The past is everywhere, Lilah dear, and you can’t escape it.”

“She’s right, you know,” a male voice whispered in my ear, and this time, my hand shot out to grab the whisperer by the neck. I was getting so sick of this.

“You can’t escape any more than I can, Princess.”

“Wanna bet?” I asked.

“Pardon?” Caroline asked, and I remembered that despite all her so-called knowledge about the Sight, she couldn’t see the dark-haired boy standing behind me or hear his gloomy words.

I pushed the boy away from me, surprised at how warm his neck had felt to my touch. “Observe,” I told them both. “This is me, escaping it.”

I turned on my heel and fled down the driveway, not even bothering to stop at my car. I lived across the street and one house down. I could come back for the car later.

“The past is everywhere,” I mimicked under my breath. “Yeah, right. The past is over.”

And if I had anything to say about it, it was going to stay that way. Fumbling for my keys, I cursed.

Air crackling. A dark-haired child on a worn porch, all alone…

“Arrrrrgggggg!” I screamed out my frustration and slapped at my front door until the image that danced upon it faded away.

“Locked out again, sweetie?” A voice came from behind me.

“I have my keys in here somewhere,” I muttered. It looked like my mom was home early from the hospital. I tried to remember whether or not she was supposed to be on call tonight and couldn’t.

As my fingers closed around my keys, I turned, making an effort to smile. “Found them—”

I cut off my own words.

“What’s that?” I asked, my breath caught in the back of my throat as I stood frozen to the front porch in shock.

My mother looked down at her hand, or more specifically, at her ring finger. She smiled at me tentatively, her face crinkling around the edges in worry.

“What’s that?” I repeated dully, even though I knew the answer.

“Corey proposed.”

I turned back around. I couldn’t handle this right now. My conversation with Caroline played in my head.

“For generations, our family—”

“Your family.”

“Soon enough to be yours again, child.”

I so could not handle this right now.

“Lilah…”

“Not now,” I replied, forcing my body to thaw enough that I could jam my key into the lock. Channeling everything I was trying not to feel into my motions, I wiggled the key back and forth in the lock, forcing the door open before life as I knew it could end.

As I ran into the house and up the stairs, images and words flew through my mind with every step: Fuchsia in Brock’s lap, Lissy walking out on me in the bathroom, Lexie’s “ohmigod,” Mystery Boy leaning toward me. The ring on my mom’s left ring finger.

And then I knew. This time, it didn’t matter how good I was at keeping things under control. Life as I knew it was already over.

8

Hurt

What they don’t know

can’t hurt you.

I didn’t slam my door. I wasn’t seven years old again, this wasn’t a temper tantrum, and slamming a door wouldn’t make anything go away. Instead, I shut it behind me as quietly as I could and immediately flipped the lock. I knew my mom well enough to know that she’d be on my heels.

“Lilah?”

Right on schedule.

“Baby, are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I forced my voice to sound normal. She couldn’t see me, so I didn’t have to worry about the fact that underneath my perfect tan, I’d gone pale, or about the way my eyes were seconds away from watering.

“Baby, can we talk?”

I was always “baby” when she felt sorry for me. I hated it that somehow, I’d become a person to feel sorry for.

“Mom, I’m fine, but I really don’t feel like talking right now.” My voice sounded calm and icy, even to my own ears, but wasn’t that just typical me? When the going gets tough, the tough get icy.

“Lilah, baby—”

“I have a call on my cell,” I interrupted her. “I can’t talk to you right now.” I dug around in my purse for my phone.

If you made it true, it wasn’t a lie.

Unfortunately, that’s when I remembered that good old Grams still had my phone in her wrinkled hands. Apparently, in addition to having a firm desire to drag me into Freaksville, my soon-to-be-stepgrandmother was also a total klepto.

“Hey, Fuchsia,” I said brightly, pretending I had my cell with me and talking loudly enough to make sure my mother would overhear. “No,” I said, feigning shock. “No!” I paused. “Shut up! She didn’t!” One more long pause. “And what did he say?”

Three minutes, six “shut up’s,” three “get out’s,” and one “I can’t believe her” later, my mom finally gave up, and I sighed quietly as I heard her walk slowly back down the steps. I couldn’t deal with her right now. I had more important things to think about, like…like…

Like anything.

I sucked in a jagged breath, wracking my mind for distractions. I really didn’t want to cry.

“You’re tough,” a now-familiar voice admitted reluctantly.

I lifted my head to meet his dark eyes. There was a scathing retort on the tip of my tongue, but I surprised myself by shaking my head. “You haven’t seen tough until you’ve seen two freshman girls fighting over the same senior guy,” I said, my voice sounding distant and wry. “That’s more than tough. That’s brutal.”

“Brutal, huh?” For once, his voice was soft, and for the first time since we’d “met,” he wasn’t glaring or smirking in my general direction.

I shook my head again, unsure whether I was shaking off his question or the tears I could feel in the corners of my eyes.

Mystery Boy took a step closer to me. “Aren’t you going to tell me to leave you alone?”

“Would you listen?” I asked pointedly.

“No,” he replied.

I shrugged. “Then what’s the point?”

Who was I kidding? I wasn’t in control. The tears were coming, whether I wanted them or not, and for the first time in years, I just wasn’t up for a fight, with him or with anyone else. In fact, I was even glad that Caroline Nowly had my cell. This way, I didn’t have to think about dealing with the rest of my world.

“This ain’t you, Princess.” His voice had a hard edge to it, but his face didn’t change. I could almost picture him as the carelessly impassioned lead singer of a rock band. “You don’t wonder about the point. You define the point, you finesse the point, you manipulate it to suit your own little devices, but you don’t wonder about it.”

I had to remind myself that he wasn’t really there and that I didn’t need him. He wasn’t helping me with a problem. He was the problem.

“Like you know me,” I said, staring him down. “Need I remind you that you’re dead? And even if you weren’t dead, I am so totally out of your league.”

He smiled, and I gritted my teeth. Didn’t he know when he’d been dismissed?

“I’m not dead”—his face was almost expressionless, but his voice was mocking—“not interested, and not really sure you’re worth helping in the first place.”

“Helping?” I asked with a snort. “You call this helping?” He was a ghost, and I was…well, I was a retronitioner. Wasn’t I the one who was supposed to be helping him? As if he even deserved my help.

“You can see me. You’re the first one who’s been able to.” He leaned back on my desk, his eyes on mine. “I’ve been stuck in the same place, the same time, for fifty years, and you’re the only one who’s ever seen me before the fact.”

“I suppose you want me to ask ‘before what fact?’” I said, my voice bordering pleasantly on sarcasm.

“Before someone dies.”

“So you’re admitting you’re dead….”

“Are you trying to be dumb?” he asked, raking his hand through his thick hair and turning away from me. “I said I’m not dead.” As he spoke, his shoulder muscles tensed, pulling at the tight white shirt he wore. “I don’t die. I never die. I just wake up day after day, doing the same thing, trapped in the same moment, but every once in a while, the other players change, and when they do, someone dies.”

“How?”

“How?” He shook his head and turned back to face me, his eyes piercing mine through the hair that fell into his face with the motion. “I kill them.”

And then, just like that, he was gone.

“Figures,” I muttered. “It’s just like him to show up, go all ‘people are going to die’ on me, and then leave.”

What was I saying? My ghost had just told me that he killed people, and I was irritated that he’d left without saying goodbye? Clearly, my mother’s news on top of everything else had made me completely delusional.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to strategize. Worst-case scenario, this Sight thing was here to stay. If I couldn’t make it go away, the only option was to figure out a way to use it that would help me, rather than force me to acquire a Lissy-esque twitching problem.

At that exact moment, because fate hated me and had decided I deserved to suffer, someone knocked on my door.

“Still don’t feel like talking!” I yelled, my voice painfully pleasant. “When I want to talk about it, trust me”—I spat out that last phrase—“you’ll know.”

Logically, I knew that using my rarely harnessed but incredibly potent Threat Voice on my mother wasn’t a good idea, but since I was obviously delusional anyway, I cared about logic about as much as I cared about the chess team’s win-loss record or Lissy’s love life.

“I have your phone.”

Why was it that every time I thought about Lissy James, even for a second, she showed up?

“Keep it,” I told her through the door. When she didn’t respond or show any signs of leaving, I forced myself to come up with something mean enough that once I said it, she’d leave me alone. “Shouldn’t you be off somewhere doing the whole ‘woe is me, do I like him or don’t I?’ thing over your surly little boytoy?”

Why wasn’t she leaving? What part of “I don’t feel like talking” plus the absolute snarkiest comment I could manage didn’t she get?

Lissy cleared her throat and spoke again. “So I guess you heard about…” Wisely, she didn’t finish the sentence. “Grams told me about your…” She trailed off again.

The moment the air around me started to get fuzzy, a surefire sign that I was about to go into retronition over-drive, I stepped forward and opened the door. I still wasn’t entirely sure how the vision thing worked, but from what I’d gathered, memories were fair game, and the last thing I wanted was to see some highly revealing and inevitably poignant look at Lissy’s past. I was already a charter member of the Have Lissy’s Back club, and seeing a vision of little-kid Lissy might make it even harder for me to keep in mind that she had no one to blame for her social status but herself. And possibly Tracy.

Come to think of it, Fuchsia hadn’t helped much either.

“Phone.” I held out my hand. Lissy bit back a smile.

“What?” I asked. Given the fact that she was wearing those shoes, I didn’t really think there was a reason in the world for her to be smiling at something I had said, especially when I hadn’t said anything funny at all.

My tone wiped the smile off her face, and she shrugged. “You’ve been talking to Grams,” she said.

“And?” I prompted, plucking my phone from her hands.

“And now you’re talking in single-word commands.”

“Very funny.” I stared at her, waiting for her to leave. She didn’t.

“I know what it’s like not to want the Sight,” she blurted out.

I didn’t want her to know what it was like. What went on inside my head was private. It was bad enough that she could see my aura. Having her empathize with what I was feeling made me feel naked, unprotected, and utterly alone.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Things will be better once I come to accept it because I can’t make it go away, and if I just embrace who and what I am, we can all join hands, skip in a circle, and live happily ever after as a family of close-knit circus freaks.”

My visual field blurred and I found myself looking at a four-year-old Lissy, her small face stricken.

I hadn’t meant to make her look like that.

“Sorry,” I told the little girl, and as soon as I did, real Lissy was back and her eyes were open wide. Clearly, Lissy had believed that the Lilah Covington apology was little more than a myth. It was nice to know she’d reached such firm conclusions about me in the few weeks we’d known each other.

“Are you okay?” she asked me finally. “I mean, a lot has happened.” She frowned and glanced down at the floor. I think she might have understood how lame she sounded.

“I’m fine,” I told her, forcing my face to convince her that it was true. I wasn’t going to let her see me cry, and standing there, listening to her for once in her life ask me how I was doing, all I could think about was how this day had gone from bad to worse to eighties-perm-level catastrophe.

Lissy stared at me for a few seconds, her instinct to flee warring with whatever it was she saw in my aura.

“Honestly,” I said, pushing her over the edge and giving her full permission to leave without feeling guilty, “I just want to be alone.”

Lissy nodded and left, and even without the benefit of visions, I had a clear mental image of the way she’d looked walking away from me in the bathroom. Was it any wonder I hadn’t told her about Mystery Boy, the murdering allegedly-not-dead ghost?

After she left, I couldn’t help but think that it was a good thing that it was Lissy and not Lexie who had come to bring me my phone. After all, Lexie was a Truth Seer, and if I’d told her that I really wanted to be alone, she would have known that it was a complete and total lie.

9

Evil

Law of nature:

Boys are dumb; girls are evil.

Now that I had my phone back, I felt like I should call someone, but what was the point? What could I expect anyone to do about the fact that my vision (not to mention my life) had been hijacked by mystical Sight? Or about the part of my pathetic soap-opera-esque existence where my mother had gotten engaged to Corey “My Family Is Intent on Torturing You” Nowly?

The truth was that this wasn’t exactly the kind of situation you could buy a Hallmark card for. It wasn’t something that could be fixed with a mani, a pedi, and some down-and-dirty girl-talk or by letting Brock massage my shoulders or jam his tongue down my throat the way he always did if we made out for more than three minutes at a time.

“I’m not calling anyone because I don’t want to talk to anyone,” I said firmly. Even without Lexie standing there shaking her head morosely at me, I knew I was lying to myself. Once upon a time, I’d been good enough at it that I’d barely even noticed, but the last twenty-four hours had forced me to the realization that the identity I’d made for myself was coming dangerously close to cracking and falling away.

The Lilah I’d made wouldn’t have been in this position, because she was the master of her own destiny.

Fuchsia would have been too scared of that Lilah to even think about looking at Brock. In fact, that Lilah would have Non-ed any Golden girl who’d sat anywhere near Brock’s lap, and she would have blacklisted any Non who’d walked out on her. She wouldn’t have enjoyed doing it, but the Lilah I’d created when I was in the sixth grade would have done it all without a second thought, just to survive.

What had happened to me?

“’Twas my shield.” I heard the woman before I saw her, and even though I closed my eyes against the vision, the scene played out against the backdrop of my eyelids.

“Your shield,” Lissy said, repeating the woman’s words. Lissy’s hair was calmer, darker, her skin glowing white, but even that unearthly shine paled in comparison to the woman next to her, who spoke again without even moving her red lips.

“The sign of my heart. The heart of my line.”

“The heart of my line.” I shook my head. Was there supposed to be any rhyme or reason to these visions? The ones about Mystery Boy I could understand, and the ones from my own past weren’t completely mystifying, but why was I seeing Lissy? Who was the woman she was talking to? Why couldn’t I convince myself that I really, truly did not care?

I forced myself to turn the cell over in my hand and scrolled through the phone book, pausing every once in a while. Eighty-nine names later, I still hadn’t found anyone worth calling, so instead I took on the all-important task of staring at my shoes. They were nice shoes: strappy and pink and high-enough-heeled that I was almost tall. Tracy had bought the same pair in white after the pink ones had passed my fashion approval.

As I kept my eyes on my shoes, my vision blurred, not because I was seeing something supernatural, but because I was staring at my feet so hard that I didn’t even blink.

When life gives you lemons, stare at your shoes, I thought dully.

My phone vibrated in my hands, and I wiped the water out of my eyes to get a good look at the caller ID: blocked.

A blocked ID meant one of three things: (a) It was my mom, whose cell didn’t show up as having a number, (b) Someone was purposefully blocking their ID so I couldn’t screen their calls, or (c) Brock was calling from his landline. I weighed the options as the phone numbed my hand.

“Hello.” I didn’t actually decide to answer. It just happened.

“Babes, I am sooooooooo sorry.”

I only knew one person who said the word “so” with that many “o’s”: Fuchsia, which meant that she was (a) calling from my mom’s phone (unlikely), (b) blocking caller ID because she knew I wouldn’t want to talk to her, or (c)…

There was no C. I wasn’t that far off my game.

“Sorry about what?” I asked coolly.

“I heard about your mom,” Fuchsia said. Sometimes this town was way too small. “Can you even say traumatic? Doesn’t she know this kind of thing can scar you for life?”

“It’s not like she’s peeling the flesh from my bones,” I said dryly, and a second later, it occurred to me that, given my current situation, talking about any skin peeling that wasn’t spa-like in nature probably wasn’t the best idea. My visions were unpredictable, and the last thing I needed was a retrovision of some poor sap being tortured during the Spanish Inquisition, just because I’d accidentally tapped into something I had no desire to see. With a shudder, I elaborated on the sarcasm Fuchsia had wisely chosen to ignore. “She’s just getting married, Fuchsia,” I said, doing my best impression of someone who didn’t care. “Nothing scar-worthy.”

“So it’s true.” Fuchsia jumped immediately on the first half of my statement. “Your mom and that guy are getting married?”

“Yes,” I said. There was a long pause on the phone, which I finally filled by babbling. “It’s not like I want her to be alone forever.”

“Of course not,” Fuchsia agreed readily, “but still!”

“It’s not that big of a deal,” I asserted. Why should it have been a big deal? According to the town busybodies, my mom and Corey had been practically engaged for ages.

“I mean, I guess it makes sense,” Fuchsia said tentatively. “She is still really young and everything. I mean, she had you when she was how old? Sixteen? When you think about it, she’s not even as old as the people on Sex and the City.”

My mother and the word “sex” in the same sentence? Fuchsia was the one who was going to scar me for life.

“Do you think she and Corey will have a baby?” Fuchsia rushed on.

“Fuchsia,” I bit out.

“Yes?”

“Not helping.”

“Sorry,” she said, and for once, I really felt like she was. On days like today, it was easy to forget that Fuchsia had her good moments too, but she did. When we were twelve, she stayed up all night with me after our first scary-movie marathon because she knew I couldn’t sleep, and she would have been the first to go for the jugular of any other girl who’d hit on my boyfriend. She was a force to be reckoned with, and I had a long and drawn-out history of doing the reckoning, but at the end of the day, we were friends.

“I’m telling you, Li, I can be over there, stat, with ice cream.”

Considering that Fuchsia ate less than Tracy, who ate less than an undernourished gymnast, it was a very generous offer, but I wasn’t about to let her see me in emotional-breakdown mode. She may have been my friend, but she was still Fuchsia, and I hadn’t completely lost my mind.

“Thanks, babe, but I just really want…”

What did I want? The answer disturbed me.

“I have to go to the library.”

“The library?” Fuchsia asked, prickling at the fact that I’d turned down her offer. “Li, I knew you were upset, but I didn’t know you’d lost it. Just because your mom’s marrying into that family doesn’t mean you have to…you know…conform.”

“Conform?” I repeated dryly.

“More like Nonform.”

I snorted. “Conform” and “Nonform” didn’t even rhyme. Fuchsia totally sucked at making up new words. “For your information,” I told her, “I’m meeting Brock at the library. We’ve got a little study thing going on.”

That got a response out of her. “Why didn’t you say so?” she asked. “God, Li, you scared me.”

“You know me better than that,” I said, and it might have been the biggest lie I’d ever told. Fuchsia Reynolds didn’t know me at all.

“Tell Brock I said hi and to forget about our plans tomorrow,” she offered sweetly. “He’s going to want to totally be there for you.”

Their plans?

I will not ask what plans, I will not ask what plans. I repeated the mantra in my mind.

Forget what I said about Fuchsia not being all bad. I take it back. She was quite obviously a completely heinous person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

With one more silent promise not to ask what she was talking about, I made myself laugh in response to her words.

“That?” I asked, pretending I’d been well clued into whatever plans she supposedly had with Brock. “Fuchsia, sweetheart, I don’t even think he was serious about that.” I paused and then extended my own sweet offer. “I’ll ask him if you really want me to.”

“No.” Her answer came immediately, and I let out the breath I’d been holding.

I still had it.

“Oh! There goes my other line,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Gotta go. Thanks for the call, babes. It means a lot.”

“Anything for you, Li,” Fuchsia said. “Love-ya-bye.”

I translated “love-ya-bye” to mean “die, bitch,” but hey, at least she’d called, and I knew better than to expect anything else. Being popular isn’t about being liked. It’s about not being ignored.

Moving quickly, I hung up the phone and immediately hit number one on my speed dial. As long as I could get ahold of Brock first, I was golden. No pun intended.

“Hello?”

For some reason, now that I had him on the phone, I was having technical difficulties deciding what to say.

“Hello? Uhhhh…”

Brock was the only guy I knew who could make an “uhhhh” sexy.

“Uhhhh to you, too,” I said in my own sexy voice, going completely on autopilot.

“Oh. Hey, Lilah.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I wrote another haiku,” he said. “Wanna hear it?”

“Actually, Brock,” I said, not exactly in the mood for a good haikuing, “I was just calling because I found the perfect place for us to have a little alone time.” Content that I’d distracted him from poorly written poetry, I continued. “It’s dimly lit, there’s no one there, and our parents totally won’t object.”

That got his attention. “Ohhhhh,” he said, and I could practically see the grin spreading on his face. “Lilah.”

When he said my name, it sounded exactly the way it should have on his lips: Lilah, one name, like Cher, Madonna, or J.Lo. Though, in retrospect, J.Lo might have been two names….

“So are you up for it?” I asked him, keeping my fingers crossed.

“Definitely.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Meet me at the library in ten.”

“The library?”

I hit End in the middle of his question. If he thought there was even a remote chance of a library make-out session, Brock would be there. Much like his haikus, his thought process was rather single-minded.

I stuffed my phone in my purse, threw my purse over my shoulder, and opened my window. It was times like these that I wished we actually had a trellis like teenagers on television always did. Instead, I had to contort my body to reach the closest tree branch. In a move that would have been a lot easier if my mom had actually been home often enough that I’d had to sneak out on a regular basis growing up, I climbed halfway down the tree and then jumped. My strappy pink heels wobbled as I landed, but didn’t give out.

At the exact moment that I was starting to feel proud of myself for managing a well-executed sneak-out, a cheerful voice spoke up behind me.

“I can’t believe we’re sneaking out. Is this cool or what?”

I silently counted to three before turning around to stare straight into the widest, most earnest truth-seeing blue eyes on the planet.

“Lexie.”

If she noticed that I sounded less than thrilled to see her, she didn’t let on.

“Lissy said you wanted to be alone,” Lexie said, “and, obviously, I could see that you didn’t.” She shook her head. “I mean, it’s not even about the way the air got all fuzzy. It just felt wrong, and besides, everyone knows you wouldn’t want to be alone right now.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder gently.

A woman with dark hair, red lips, and a very pregnant stomach.

I let the image wash over me, took it in, and then shrugged it off.

“So where are we going?” Lexie asked.

“We,” I said, stressing the word, “aren’t going anywhere.”

Lexie shook her head impishly. “Lilah,” she said seriously, “that’s just not true.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. It was useless. I couldn’t yell at her. I couldn’t sarcastically ask if it was past her bedtime. I couldn’t even tell her to go home and bug her actual older sister.

All I could do was answer her. “We’re going to the library.”

Lexie waited patiently for me to elaborate.

“I need to look something up.”

“What something?” she asked softly, her dancing eyes ruining her attempt at sounding casual.

“There’s a slight chance,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that telling her was a mistake, “that Mystery Boy killed someone. Or several someones.”

Five voices echoed in my head.

“You should have left Helen alone.”

Who was Helen? Without saying another word, I started walking. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

Lexie matched my pace and, as always, she said the first thing that came into her mind. “Lilah?”

“Yeah?”

“If there’s a slight chance Mystery Boy killed someone, what’s the chance that he’s going to kill somebody else?”

Looking at her, I could tell she wanted an exact percentage, like 84.2 or 11.6, but I didn’t answer. At this point, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.

10

Kiss

A kiss is never just a kiss.

“Wow. You have broad shoulders. Do you play football?” Lexie didn’t give Brock a chance to answer. “I bet you play football,” she continued, and then, with a hugely conspicuous wink in my direction, she nodded to confirm her words. “He plays football.”

Brock stared at Lexie, trying to wrap his mind around her mile-a-minute chatter and the fact that for some bizarre reason, I’d brought an eighth grader with me on our library “date.” Somehow, when I’d asked him to come, I hadn’t pictured him actually being there in the middle of everything. How was I going to do the research thing with Brock literally breathing (and, knowing him, wanting to do who knows what else) down my neck?

“You’re Molly’s brother, right?” Lexie continued, blissfully unaware that Brock was in a state of chatter-induced shock. “Molly’s great.”

“Uhhhh…thanks.”

Lexie looked intently at Brock for a moment, and then she turned back to me. “I’m going to go work on the thing,” she said. Lexie was more or less incapable of lying, a side effect of True Vision that made her the most unstealthy person ever to exist in the history of the world. Sometimes I wondered how she made it through her all-truth, all-the-time existence. It was a miracle that she didn’t have some kind of complex.

“You two have fun,” Lexie instructed me seriously. With that, she was off to do something “good and researchy” with her Sight, and I was alone with Brock.

“She wanted to come,” I said, playing with the tips of my hair.

Brock, still a little shell-shocked, just nodded. I leaned my head toward him, and he snapped out of it, the edges of his lips curling upward into a slow smile. “Missed you today,” he said, leaning forward to pull me into a kiss.

“I’m not dead, Princess.”

Mystery Boy’s words echoed in my mind, and as Brock’s mouth covered mine, my lips tingled with the memory of the ghost’s kiss. I closed my eyes and my mind against any and all retrovisions in the near vicinity and tried my best to lose myself in my oh-so-hot boyfriend’s embrace. That endeavor lasted approximately three minutes, at which time I felt his tongue in the back of my throat.

Carefully, I pulled myself back. Once upon a time, kissing Brock had been a dream. Now even the possibility of a Hollywood heel-popping moment was pretty much out of the question. Either his tongue had tripled in size, he’d totally lost his mojo, or I’d somehow lost mine. Sadly, given recent events, I couldn’t rule out the last explanation.

“You okay, baby?” he asked, brushing the hair out of my face.

I looked down. We’d been together so long that sometimes I forgot to expect him to ask things like that. Brock was all smiles and goofing off and declarations of my hotness. A serious moment like this one was rare.

“I’m okay,” I said, and the response surprised me. Lilah Covington was never okay. She was fabulous, she was amazing, she was incredible, but she was never just okay. Guys like Brock didn’t date okay.

“You seem…” Brock trailed off.

“Different.” I finished the sentence for him. Somehow, it was less painful than letting him finish it himself.

Brock stared at me for a long moment, no doubt internally debating whether or not this was the kind of situation an impromptu haiku could fix. “We could talk,” he offered finally, his face contorted with the massive effort it took to make such an offer.

“That’s okay,” I said. Okay again? I thought. Could I get any more boring?

To make up for it, I dragged my finger lightly down his chest. “I just…” I gave him a long pause of my own and kissed his neck. “…miss you,” I finished finally, and as the words left my mouth, I realized they weren’t true. I hadn’t missed him. We’d spent most of our high school existence as a couple, and now I didn’t even miss him when he wasn’t there. Being together was the status quo, a social necessity.

Was it pathetic that I missed missing him?

“Did Fuchsia tell you something?” Brock asked suddenly, his eyes intense. “Because you know I wouldn’t do that to you, baby.”

Those weren’t exactly the kind of words that inspired confidence. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask what exactly it was that he wouldn’t do to me, but I wasn’t about to give him two lines to read between. The less he knew about what I knew, the better.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, forcing confusion to appear in my voice as pure, unadulterated bitchiness.

“Lilah, I swear, it was nothing. She just needed some help putting together this bookshelf thing yesterday, and my shoulder started cramping, so she sort of rubbed it for me, and…” He was starting to look kind of frantic. “I swear, she kissed me, not the other way around.”

I knew just by the way he held his head that he’d kissed her back. That was why Fuchsia suddenly had the guts to play Brock-games with me. She’d kissed him, he’d kissed her back, and now she actually thought she could get him.

My mind whirled. My best friend and my boyfriend had kissed, and for that, I thought, they must die. The fact that I could almost still feel Ghost Boy’s breath on my face was completely irrelevant, as was the fact that I was stuck with Fuchsia and Brock whether I wanted them or not.

“Of course she kissed you,” I said evenly. “You’d never kiss her.” I looked him straight in the eye and wondered if he heard the unspoken threat: You’d never kiss her because if you did, I would ruin you. Not that it would be easy. Brock was more or less numero uno, the quarterback, every girl’s fantasy, but if he thought he could play me and live to tell the tale, he was out of his gorgeous jock mind.

“God, I love you, Lilah.” He let out the breath he’d been holding and pulled me against him. I let myself bury my head in his chest. It hadn’t hurt until the moment he’d said he loved me. Before then, I’d just been angry on the inside and icy on the surface. But now…

It was the first time he’d said he loved me. Ever. I could feel my shields crumbling around me, could feel the almost comforting anger melting into something much, much scarier.

He wasn’t supposed to be able to hurt me.

I wasn’t supposed to let myself hurt.

And, if I hurt, I wasn’t supposed to show it.

I forced myself to rationalize it all away. He’d just said he loved me, hadn’t he? He’d chosen me, not Fuchsia. He’d asked me if I was okay and wanted to know the answer. He was Golden and hot and mine, and if he screwed around on me again, I would find a way to bury him. What more did I want?

“That’s beautiful, Princess, really, but there’s something I think you should know….”

The voice caught me off guard. What was with this ghost and showing up at the worst possible times? He was like the Ghost of Christmas Ruin-My-Life.

I turned my head away from him, reorienting myself on my boyfriend’s chest. Brock’s arm crept around my back, and for a moment, he just held me.

I hurt.

“Like I said before, very sweet, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot less sweet when you’re holding a corpse.” His voice was low, his demeanor annoyingly casual.

“What are you talking about?” I hissed. It was weird—even though I knew no one else could hear him and that everyone could hear me, I couldn’t refrain from responding. Even stranger, doing so felt good.

Ghost Boy shrugged. “I’ve been doing this awhile,” he said, leaning back and letting his dark hair fall out of his face. “In the beginning, I couldn’t tell who it was going to be, but trust me, by number four I was a pro, Princess, and like I said before, you’re looking at him.”

“Looking at who?” I snapped. “And stop calling me Princess.”

“Uhhhhhh…Lilah?” Brock’s hesitant voice reminded me of the fact that my head was resting on his chest, his arms still wrapped around my body.

“I’m fine,” I said, answering his unasked question, and I groaned internally. First I was okay, now I was fine. Not to mention the fact that I was talking to thin air. I was never going to be able to live this down.

“I’m telling you, Princess,” Ghost Boy said, already flickering out of my vision and back into the past where he belonged. “He’s the one.”

Somehow, I doubted that Ghost Boy was talking about a romantic “the one.” At this point, if Brock was my one, then I was totally and completely screwed. I could survive his overzealous tongue and the horrible poetry and the fact that he’d kissed my best friend for now, but surviving for life? That was another story.

This wasn’t life. This was high school.

“Do you want me to…” This time there was a long pause, no “uhhh.” “Do you want me to go, Li?”

I weighed my emotions.

Yes, I want you to go to hell.

Yes, so long as you don’t “go” near Fuchsia.

No, you may suck as a boyfriend, but you’re a pretty great pillow.

I didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, I peeled myself away from the warmth of his chest. “I should probably check on Lexie,” I said. As far as strategy went, it wasn’t my best moment, but hey, I’d just learned that my best friend’s lips had been attached to my boyfriend’s—the boyfriend, I might add, who I’d just learned was “the one,” whatever that was supposed to mean.

“You’re not going to…you know…see anyone else, are you, Lilah?”

Yes, I wanted to say, I’m going to immediately go out and lose it to your best friend. So much for all that time you’ve invested.

When I looked up, half ready to tell him that just to measure his response, I took in the way his eyes crinkled around the edges, the way they always did when he was nervous before a big game.

“No,” I said softly. “Of course not.”

He leaned down and kissed the top of my head, and that small show of affection was like a knife to my gut. By the transitive property, it was Fuchsia kissing the top of my head…or Brock kissing the top of Ghost Boy’s, depending on how you looked at it.

I took a deep breath. In my world, control was everything; losing control meant losing it all, and I wasn’t about to risk losing anything, especially not Brock, to Fuchsia.

“Bye, Li,” Brock said, falling back on the rhyme I’d always thought was cute coming from him.

The second he was gone, I let out the breath I’d been holding. I hadn’t cracked. I hadn’t lost it. I hadn’t lost him.

“Guess what.”

I jumped at the sound of Lexie’s voice.

“What?” Talking to Lexie, I could feel the tension draining slowly out of my body.

“There’s something in this library that will help us,” she said. “And I think it’s purple.”

Purple?

“How’s it going to help us?” I asked. “Is it a book?”

Lexie shrugged. “You tell me,” she said, “and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

I bit back a sigh. She was just trying to help. She couldn’t help it. She was Lexie.

“What’s her name?”

I knew the kind of vision it was going to be before I took in the words, before I heard the voice or saw the voice’s owner. It was the kind of vision that wasn’t separated from the real world by static or air, the kind that I saw in my mind and out of it, even as I kept Lexie in sight.

“I can’t see her,” a slightly smaller voice complained. “Mother, tell Bree to move.”

The older girl didn’t deign to acknowledge her sister’s request, but she inched over so they could both see the baby in their mother’s arms. “What’s her name?” she asked again.

The younger girl stared at the baby so hard she almost didn’t hear her mother’s answer.

“Meara.”

Unlike the rest of the world, Lexie didn’t insist on repeating my name over and over again while I was caught up in a vision. Instead, she watched me with some kind of scholarly fascination and held her questions until I was coherent enough to answer them.

“What did you see?” she asked when I came out of it.

I lied to her face, even knowing she could see it as a lie as clearly as I’d seen the two little girls. “Nothing.” Until I met Lexie, I hadn’t fully realized how much I needed to be able to lie.

“It’s no fun when we both know you’re lying anyway,” Lexie said, but she shrugged it off. “Lissy never wants to talk about what she sees, either.”

“So we’re looking for something purple?” I asked, quickly changing the subject lest she compare me to Lissy again. I ran my fingertips along the edge of the closest shelf. “And to think that I’d thought we were here to look at newspap—”

The buzz started in my hand and worked its way up my arm and into my body, a flush of energy that forced my arm hairs onto their ends. My muscles tensed, and my hand contorted itself into a claw, death-gripping the bookcase the way Fuchsia held her daddy’s credit card.

The pressure in my arm was unbearable, and as it pushed its way through my body, up my spine, and toward my neck, I could feel myself on the verge of being engulfed whole. The force threw back my head and blocked out the sounds of the world around me.

A stocky boy slamming an undersized nerd into a purple shelf.

A girl with platinum blond hair, high in a ponytail, watching silently.

A boy with black hair and mean eyes.

Blond-haired girl staring on.

A guy with sandy blond hair, his arm around a cheerleader.

A ring on her finger, hair high in a ponytail, she watches.

Dark brown hair, with green eyes, and an accent, and then another boy with broad shoulders and a lazy, charming grin.

Blond hair, always blond, watching, waiting, twirling the ring on her finger.

Brock. Ghost Boy. Brock. Flying fists, red, red blood, and a blond girl watching it all.

As the vision faded from my mind’s eye, the tension drained from my body. “You know,” I told Lexie, shaking out my poor cramping hand. “When your demon spawn grandmother told me this could happen when I touched things, she didn’t say it would hurt.”

“Did you just call Grams a demon spawn?”

I massaged my hand and ignored the question. Okay, so maybe demon spawn was a slight exaggeration, but I’d had a horrible day. It wasn’t like I’d said she was ugly and wore hideous muumuus all the time and shouldn’t have been allowed to reproduce. In a way, “demon spawn” was almost a compliment.

Okay, so it totally wasn’t, but my hand hurt.

For practically the first time since I’d met her, Lexie was silent, and I wondered whether it was with awe or because I’d actually managed to do the impossible: hurt the feelings of the kid who saw good in everything and everyone. Next I was planning on destroying Christmas and barbecuing the Easter bunny.

“Lexie, I didn’t mean to…”

Lexie giggled. “Demon spawn?” she squeaked.

Meekly, I shrugged, and Lexie managed to get ahold of herself enough to ask me the question I was beginning to expect her to ask every time I had a retrovision of any kind.

“Sooo,” she said, drawing out the word and trying to sound casual. “What did you see?”

11

It

The It Factor:

If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

And if you don’t think you have it,

then you’re right.

“So, there are a bunch of guys,” Lexie recapped, her nose crinkled in concentration. “And they’re all really cute.”

My hand still aching, I tried to speed her thought process up a little. “And there was a girl…”

“Only one girl, and all those guys?” Lexie said, sighing at the very thought of it.

I tossed my hair over my shoulder and out of my face. “Don’t get any ideas,” I told her, overcome with the feeling that Lexie shouldn’t date until she was thirty.

Lexie grinned again, but then got back down to business. “And the first guy was beating up on some poor little dork?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure they weren’t just play-fighting?” she asked hopefully.

I shook my head. “Trust me, Lex, the little guy was a total No—a dork.” I corrected myself at the last minute. “Non” sounded so harsh if you really thought about it. “The other guy was most definitely beating him up.”

I could tell by the look on Lexie’s face what she thought about that, and honestly, I agreed. As flattering as it could hypothetically be to have guys fighting over you, it was completely asinine when one of those guys had a six-pack and the other one didn’t have much of a pack at all.

“And then Brock was there,” Lexie continued.

I nodded.

“And Ghost Boy.”

I looked down at my fingernails. The polish on my right hand had chipped when I’d gone into violent-vision mode. “That about sums it up,” I said.

Lexie opened her mouth and then shut it again. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe something’s missing. Maybe you’re forgetting something important. It’s kind of hard to tell. The air’s not fuzzy, not exactly, but it’s not—”

“Shhhhhhh.” The librarian shushed Lexie with one of those “shhhhh’s” that conveys more or less an entire sentence complaining about today’s youth.

“So about this purple thing.” I changed the subject and lowered my voice, not because the librarian had asked us to, but because talking about the random “purple thing” and how it was going to help us in our murder investigation was more than a little sketchy. “Any idea what it is?”

Lexie just stared at me. If she’d been anyone else, I would have assumed that she thought I was being dumb, but Lexie’s mind didn’t operate that way.

“What?” I asked. “Am I missing something here?”

“The vision is the purple something,” she blurted out, absolutely unable to hold the revelation in a moment longer.

I arched one eyebrow, waiting.

“Well, it’s not purple,” she corrected herself. “That’s not what I meant to say, and it’s not true, but what is true is…” About halfway through the sentence, Lexie decided in favor of gesturing over talking. With a half grin on her face, she pointed directly to my left at the bookshelf I’d touched a moment before.

Tentatively, I ran my finger along the edge of the shelf, leaving a trail on its otherwise dusty surface. I braced myself for another vision, and when it didn’t come, I looked down just long enough to realize that underneath all the dust, the bookshelf was a hideous shade of purple.

What were the librarians thinking? It totally clashed with everything.

I forced myself to focus. The library’s total lack of color coordination was not my problem. My problem was the fact that Lexie’s Sight had given us exactly one clue, and from the looks of it, that clue was leading us to yet another cryptic vision and a whole bunch of nothing useful.

“This is what we’re looking for?” I asked. Lexie gave me another of her classic Lexie looks, and without being told, I rephrased the question in the form of a statement. “This is what we’re looking for.”

Lexie paused for a long moment. I could practically see her fighting the urge to wrinkle her nose as she stared at the air in front of her. To Lexie’s credit, her face stayed triumphantly twitch-free. It gave me a little hope about my own future prospects of living a tic-free existence.

“So this isn’t what we were looking for?” I surmised when she didn’t answer. Her eyes glazed over, and she didn’t respond.

“Lexie?” She just stood there, never blinking, waiting for something; I had no idea what. After about a minute, her face paled, and her body started shaking.

“Cute kid. You sure you want to drag her into this, Princess?”

Ghost Boy’s words echoed in my mind, and I reached out to grab Lexie’s arm.

Cold.

“Lex, you’re scaring me.”

I tightened my grip on her arm and shook her gently. A shiver passed down my spine, and for a moment, I could feel what the twerpy boy in my vision had felt—my face pressed into that horrible purple bookcase, another boy’s nails digging painfully into the back of my neck.

“Lexie.”

Meara.

“Snap out of it already.”

My tone penetrated her mind, and she shuddered once without seeming to realize she’d moved at all. When she spoke again, her voice was little. “I’m sorry,” she said, back in the real world. “I was just trying to see…”

“The Sight isn’t everything.” The words came out harder than I’d meant them to, but I couldn’t stop myself from saying them.

“You don’t mean that.” She patted my side consolingly.

Without realizing I was doing it, I stepped between Lexie and the hideous purple bookshelf of doom. “Let’s just call it a night.”

“Didn’t you want to do the researchy thing? With the newspapers?” Lexie asked. “Because I think this was the purple thing we were looking for, only it’s not anymore. I mean, it’s still purple, but maybe we’re not looking for it anymore because we found it. Or maybe…”

At this point, I really had to ask myself what I was doing at the library with an eighth grader researching something to do with the Sight. I mean, by all rights, I should have been home letting Tracy and Fuchsia console me with ice cream. Then I remembered that Fuchsia was the boyfriend-stealing queen of Skanky Town and that I’d come here in the first place because getting to the bottom of the Ghost Boy mystery had seemed somehow more appealing than fighting the good popularity fight all night long.

One look at Lexie had me remembering the way she’d looked when she’d thrown herself into divining the truth about that fugly bookshelf. She’d gotten caught up in it. She’d let it take over.

“No research,” I said quickly. If, for some incomprehensible reason, I still wanted to go through a bunch of old newspapers looking for murders in the morning, I’d do it on my own. Ghost Boy (I was so past ready for him to have a name) had been right about one thing. Whatever was going on, this was my fight, not Lexie’s any more than the Fuchsia/Brock situation was.

“Let’s just go home,” I said. I wracked my brain for a truth to pacify her with. “I’m really tired.”

True.

“It’s been a long day.”

So true.

“That skirt is laughable.”

Also true, though I hadn’t meant to say it out loud and cringed at the fact that there was a distinct chance I’d said it at high volume. I had one of those voices that carried, the kind of voice that people listened to even when I wasn’t talking to them.

Miracle of miracles, the librarian didn’t shush me, and the owner of the skirt, a passerby who looked vaguely familiar in that sits-on-the-other-side-of-the-cafeteria way, blushed a deep, splotchy purple.

Way to go, Lilah, I thought. I’d trained myself to pay attention to what was hot and what was not, and that wasn’t the kind of thing a person could just turn off, but I wasn’t in the habit of blurting out fashion assessments, especially if it meant hurting someone I didn’t even know in front of the nicest, purest person I’d ever met.

For a moment, Lexie stared at me with such concentration that I was afraid she was going to be sucked up into another body-shaking vision. Instead, she just turned to the other girl and patted her arm. “She doesn’t mean it,” Lexie said, and then she winced at the lie in her own voice and corrected herself. “Well, she does mean it about the skirt, but she doesn’t mean it to be mean, you know? She’s just sad and tired and her head hurts.”

It took me a second to realize that Lexie was defending me to the flabbergasted Non, whose name I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure whether to love her for doing it or hate her for being able to tell so easily what I was feeling and broadcasting it to the population at large.

Who was I kidding? I couldn’t hate Lexie.

“And maybe the skirt isn’t that great, but you have an awesome smile, and I always say that facial expressions make the outfit.” As Lexie talked, the other girl visibly relaxed. In another five seconds, Skirt Girl was going to be the number one member of the Lexie James fan club, and I couldn’t even process what was happening. It was like the frigging Twilight Zone or something.

Lexie bit her bottom lip as she appraised the skirt. “Maybe you should give it a slit,” she said thoughtfully.

“Give it a slit?” the girl asked, with a look that alternated between wariness, utter confusion, and adoration.

I recognized the determination on Lexie’s face, and sighed, unable to deny her. “You should give it a slit,” I said, allowing Lexie to test out the fashion truth in that statement.

“Yup,” Lexie said, looking pleased with herself and, strangely, with me. “A slit.”

At the tone of her voice, I was overcome with the feeling that a slit would indeed improve the skirt, and I could see Lexie’s cheerful proclamation taking effect on her victim as well.

“Thanks,” the girl told Lexie, before looking at me through absolutely dazed eyes.

As the girl walked off, seriously considering the slit, I played the scene over in my mind. I wasn’t sure, but there was a distinct chance that through some twisted turn of events, I’d just given solid fashion advice to a Non. Without even meaning to. I always thought about things before I did them. Always. And yet, I hadn’t. Add to that the fact that Lexie had thoroughly (and unknowingly) crushed my Invincible Queen of Icy Town image, and I was feeling a little unhinged.

“Don’t feel bad,” Lexie told me softly.

Was I really that transparent?

“You didn’t mean to hurt her feelings,” she said solemnly. “It just happened.”

She thought I was freaking out over the way my words had affected the girl, when really, I was obsessing over the fact that my mental control tower had taken yet another hit.

“She knows you didn’t mean to,” Lexie continued in a soothing voice.

Suddenly, and with no warning whatsoever, I felt bad about feeling bad about the wrong things. Lexie had taken it for granted that I hadn’t meant to be mean. When was the last time someone had given me a break like that? More or less once upon a never, and here I was, agonizing over the fact that I’d been nice to someone without mulling it over first.

Just call me a puppy kicker.

“You’re not mean, Lilah,” Lexie said fiercely. “Not you.”

The emphasis on the last word choked me up a little. I shook my head. The kid was clearly misguided, and part of me wanted to let her know that I wasn’t this good person she thought I was, and that, hey, that was one of the sacrifices I’d had to make and, at least until a few weeks ago, I’d always been okay with that.

Without thinking, I leaned back on the hideous purple bookshelf, and the vision shot into my body through my elbows, jarring my bones as it traveled full speed toward my head.

Ripped muscles, popping knuckles, opposite a shirtless boy.

“You don’t want to fight me,” says Ghost Boy.

“You should have left Helen alone,” says the muscles’ owner.

And somewhere with them is a blond girl, hair in a high ponytail, ring on her finger.

Fists and muscles, muscles and fists, blood and bruises and then silence.

Muscles. Body on the ground.

Muscles and blood, blood and dead, dead muscles.

“I told you that you didn’t want to fight me.”

And the blond girl watches, watches. Always watching, hair in a high ponytail, ring on her finger.

The words and images bled into one another, a mess of information that never quite lined up and instead banged around inside my head with the force of an entire football team on steroids.

“Are you okay, Lilah?” Lexie asked, her voice bordering between tentative and suspicious.

I couldn’t believe that she hadn’t realized beyond all doubt that I’d had another touch-triggered vision, but if she couldn’t see the way my heart was pounding or the sweat pouring off my forehead, I wasn’t going to tell her.

“Cute kid. You sure you want to drag her into this, Princess?”

“Let’s just go home,” I told Lexie. “I don’t think I can take any more of this.” I carefully omitted any and all mention of whether or not I was okay. There were ways around this Truth Seer thing, and for Lexie’s sake, I had to find them.

She had more faith in me than I had in myself, and she was dying to put her Sight to the test, but I wasn’t going to let anything happen to Meara again.

Whatever that meant.

12

Tears

Never let them make you cry.

Girls and tears

are like sharks and blood.

When I got home (side note: climbing up the tree in heels? Way harder than climbing down), I had twenty-seven new emails waiting for me in my inbox. Four of them were from people I didn’t know, eight of them were from people I might have known, two were from Brock, three were forwards from Tracy (I swear, if one of them was another one of those idiotic fall-in-love chain letters, I was going to kill her), one was an actual email from Tracy, two were from Fuchsia, six were from other extraneous Goldens, and the single remaining email was from someone who I deeply suspected was Lissy James.

My finger hovered over the delete key, but I couldn’t bring myself to delete such gems as “FWD: I swear this works!” “What’s up?” “Hey girly” and “Haiku for U.” One guess as to who that last one was from.

With a flick of my wrist, I switched off the screen. I could deal with the messages tomorrow.

Unfortunately, the same could not be said for dealing with my mother, who took that moment to knock on my door for what I could only assume was the forty millionth time that night.

“You going to answer?” As always, Ghost Boy appeared without warning, but this time, he didn’t call me Princess, which was, of course, just fine with me. Really.

“It’s none of your business,” I told him tersely.

“Lilah, baby, can we please talk?” Outside the door, my mom paused. “You can’t ignore me forever, kiddo.”

“That sounds like a challenge,” I mumbled under my breath, and though I could tell he was trying hard not to, Ghost Boy grinned. The smile, a real one this time, with no trace of a smirk, changed his entire face. His dark eyes softened playfully, and his upturned lips looked downright inviting.

I still maintain that I did not miss those lips calling me Princess in that half flippant, half affectionate way of his, and I also absolutely was not considering taking their lip-y invitation.

“Not quite ready to play nice with Mommy yet, Princess?” he asked me.

“Don’t call me Princess,” I hissed under my breath, and then, just to prove him wrong, I walked over to my bedroom door, flipped the lock, threw the door open, and stared at my mother.

The moment she saw me, she let out a long breath, and I tried not to feel guilty about the fact that she looked like she’d been hit by an emotional semitruck. What did she have to look all traumatized about? Her boyfriend had just proposed to her; mine had played a rousing game of tonsil hockey with my best friend. She was getting ready to start a new life with a new family she loved; I was, inch by inch, losing everything I’d worked for since I was nine years old.

I’d won enough to realize that in the great battle of Emily Covington versus Life, my mother was winning. My status, however, was somewhat questionable, and I hated losing.

“Hey, you,” my mom said softly. She’d greeted me the same way every day she’d come to pick me up from one of my many babysitters’ houses when I was little.

“Hey.” I begrudgingly returned the word. I couldn’t not. It was too deeply ingrained in me. For as long as I could remember (and I couldn’t help but remember, even though I knew it was a dangerous pastime these days), the two of us had made allowances for each other. So what if I had a little trouble remembering my curfew? So what if she’d spent most of my formative years in high school, college, and med school, respectively? So what if I only ate sugared cereal? So what if she refused to tell me a thing about my mystery father?

We’d always survived: Emily and Lilah against the world. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing Gilmore Girls-y about having a mother who was a mere sixteen years older than me, but the two of us got by. She’d bought used textbooks so I could have new shoes, and I’d been the one to make her breakfast in bed (sugared cereal, of course) after she’d pulled three all-nighters in a row.

“That’s my girl.”

My throat closed up a little. For a moment, I thought Ghost Boy had spoken, but when I played the words back in my head, I realized they were my mom’s. One look over my shoulder told me that Ghost Boy, much like my dignity, was gone.

“Sweetheart—” my mom began, and I cut her off as gently as I could.

“Mom, I’m just really, really tired tonight,” I said. “I know you love Corey, and I want you to be happy.”

Years melted off her face as I spoke. Why was it that I could make girls my own age quake with fear without even meaning to, but couldn’t go to bed angry with my mother? Not even when she’d practically ruined my life by pulling a Brady Bunch-esque maneuver with a family I wanted to forget about altogether.

Okay, so maybe I didn’t want to forget about Lexie, but that was only because she was Lexie.

Meara.

I pushed the name and the feelings that came with it out of my mind. I’d been doing just fine ignoring my final lapse in the library, and now was not the time to give in to the familiarity that played in the back of my mind, the visions that wanted, begged to come every time I heard my own mind-voice speak the foreign name.

“Are you okay?” my mom asked me finally.

“I’ve been better,” I said honestly (maybe Lexie was rubbing off on me, or maybe I was just way too tired to care), “but I guess there are probably people out there who are worse.”

Pretty much our entire school thought my life rocked, and maybe, objectively, it did. I wasn’t even sure anymore, and there was a distinct chance that I’d always sucked at being objective.

“Brianna.”

I stared at my mother, sure I’d heard her wrong, only to discover that her lips weren’t moving. When they did move, she spoke a different name. My name. “Lilah.” She paused. “Thank you. I couldn’t do this if I didn’t think I had your support.”

So now she tells me that she couldn’t have done this to me without my permission, I thought. If I’d known that little fact, I might have held out longer.

“Mom, I’m just really tired.”

I figured that as long as I was sleeping, I didn’t have to worry about any of it: no engagement, no Sight, no ghosts.

But immediately after falling asleep, I discovered that I was wrong.

Fists and motion, motion and fists in a soundless room. The world was a blur of colors and sounds that should have been but weren’t. I opened my mouth to speak, but could not. There was movement all around me: frantic and controlled, deliberate and pained. Everything was moving too fast for me to see.

Hit. Hit. Flash. Hit. Tanned flesh, metal blade.

Three rings of color on a silver shield. The image appeared out of nowhere, and with it, the motion slowed until I could see the outline of a boy to my right. And a boy to my left. And two behind me. And one in front of me. And Brock.

Brock?

“You should have left her alone,” he growled, and somewhere behind him, I could make out the outline of a blond girl, watching it all.

Hit. Hit. Flash. Hit. Tanned flesh, metal blade. Red, red blood.

This time I could see the motion, could see the boys moving in and out of the space in front of me, disappearing and reappearing, fighting the same fight in different ways.

Red, red blood.

The colors on the shield throbbed, gently at first. I watched, my attention torn from the boys, from the motion that had been, from the blood, and from the shield itself. All I saw were the colors. Not red. Blue. Purple. Pink.

Three girls holding hands.

Blue. Purple. Pink.

The oldest, raven-haired, her face expressionless, gripping the others’ hands so tightly that the youngest squirmed.

Blue. Purple. Pink.

Each girl holding on to the others, forming a makeshift triangle with their pale, tensed bodies.

Blue. Purple. Pink.

Then they were gone, and the room was empty. No shield. No boys. It was a boyless, shieldless room, and I waited, trapped by the silence of it all.

“So you’ve come.”

The voice was inside of my head and outside of my head, and in the space of the otherwise silent room, it was everything. Soft, gentle, and commanding, it spoke to me.

“I’ve been waiting.”

I turned around, hoping to catch sight of the voice’s owner, but there was nothing. No one.

“It’s been many years, my daughter.”

Mother.

The word came to my mind before I could stop it, and as soon as it did, my lips freed themselves from the hold of the silence, and I spoke. “Who are you? What do you want with me? Show yourself. And hello! Not your daughter.”

There was an almost indiscernible pause, and then the voice spoke again. “Stubborn. Always stubborn.”

I snorted, and as I did, the room fell back into silence and the scene before me changed again.

A pale girl with slightly frizzy brown hair stared at a dark-haired woman, entranced by the words she spoke. I’d seen this before, but here, now, I couldn’t hear them. Why couldn’t I hear them? I moved to stand beside Lissy—the brown-haired girl—and suddenly, the dark-haired woman disappeared, and Lissy and I were standing in a burning room, the flames dancing all around us, the smell of smoke thick in the air.

Lissy was standing beside me, and another Lissy (God, there were two of them…what was the world coming to?) was in front of me, her transparent eyes searching mine the way her real ones did when she was being completely dense. Holding her gaze in mine, I nodded. Her hand reached toward me. Into me.

“Sorcha.”

Did I speak the name or did I hear it? With the flames flickering toward us and the echo of footsteps running down the hallway, I couldn’t tell.

Transparent Lissy sank back into her body, and for a moment, I could see streams of light in the air around her. Blue. Purple. Pink. A man’s screams. The energy rushing out of my body, and flames all around us. Blue. Purple. Pink.

And then there was nothing.

I woke up in a cold sweat, more confused than I’d been when I went to sleep, which was saying something considering that I hadn’t been able to wrap my mind completely around my life for approximately the last sixteen hours. I turned to look at my clock, and found myself staring into the darkest pair of eyes I’d ever seen.

I tried to scream, but I couldn’t. I was as frozen and voiceless as I’d been at the beginning of my dream.

He stood there, staring at me with those midnight irises of his, and it was only when my eyes adjusted to the dark and his blinked one, two, three times that I recognized him.

“What is your problem?” I demanded. Of course, now my voice was functional. This wasn’t some threatening dark-eyed phantom. This was Ghost Boy, the noncorporeal peeping Tom, which was a completely different story.

“My problem?” he repeated, his voice quiet but not soft.

“In case you haven’t noticed, this is my bedroom,” I said. “In fact, this is my bed, and this is me in my bed.” I gestured toward my pajama-clad body and then whipped my hand up to point it directly at his nose. “And this is you in my room watching me sleep. I mean, can you even say creepy?”

“You called me here,” he said, his voice even and his dark eyes amused. “Not the other way around, Princess.”

I snorted.

“Are you okay?”

The question took me by surprise.

“You were calling out as you slept. Saying things.” He looked down at the floor. “Your heart was racing.”

“If you tell me you had your head on my chest listening to my heart…”

“Not hardly,” he retorted. “I hear you.”

I stared at him skeptically.

“Even when I’m there, in the middle of it all, I hear you.”

It was strangely hard to be mad at him when he was talking about listening to my heart beat. I smoothed the covers out around me and sighed. “Can’t you just tell me what you want?” I asked. “No more cryptic messages, no more ‘you figure it out,’ no more idiotic dreams.”

“You dreamed about me?” he asked, a cocky smile spreading slowly over his face.

“No,” I replied immediately, but we both knew I was lying. Ghost Boy had been in my dream, fighting with Brock and the guys from my library visions. And now he was here, talking to me, listening to my heart beat.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

He stared at me for a long moment, the half grin still on his almost boyish face.

“What? You can see me in my pajamas, and I can’t even know your name?” I pressed.

He leaned forward, and as he pushed a single piece of hair out of my face, the edges of his body blurred, and I could see him fading back into the past.

“Cade.” He paused, and I got the sense that he was struggling to hold on. “Lilah, my name is Cade.”

For a moment longer, we stared at each other, his eyes flickering in and out of existence. Lilah and Cade. Cade and Lilah. No Princess, no Ghost Boy. Just us, and then, he was gone.

13

Payback

The Popular Girl’s Creed:

Payback’s a bitch and so am I.

When I woke up the next morning, life didn’t look quite so bad, not because it had actually gotten any better (the first thing I saw when I woke up was an image of a three-year-old me throwing up on my teddy bear), but because something about having learned Ghost Boy’s name made everything seem a little less hopeless. The day before, I’d been so tired—tired of dealing with Fuchsia and Tracy, tired of doing things I didn’t want to do, tired of watching my life spin slowly but surely out of control. Getting the Sight had just compounded all of that.

But now, I knew Cade’s name, and—God knows why—knowing it made me feel in control of my own Sight, and that made me feel ready to do what needed to be done to get the rest of my life back on track. I was going to take names, take charge, and put Fuchsia Reynolds firmly and irrevocably in check. And Emory High would be a better place for it by the time I was done.

Step one: ignore icky vomit vision. I’m proud to say I didn’t so much as twitch. The Sight could throw whatever it wanted at me today. I could handle it or, for that matter, not handle it as I chose, just like I’d chosen, for the moment, not to think about Cade or the way he’d said my name.

Step two: kick-ass outfit. I strolled over to my closet and reached past the show-some-leg skirts, past the lowrider, you-wish-you-had-these-abs-and-this-belly-button-ring pants, and straight to the back where I kept my emergency clothes: the ones that were the perfect fit, the perfect color, and a gallon of sex appeal all rolled into one. After I’d selected a killer outfit, I dug through my drawer for the underwear to match: a truly lethal water bra and a lacy black thong.

Something about wearing black underwear made me feel powerful.

By the time I got to applying eyeliner that emphasized the way my blue eyes tilted up just slightly at the corners, giving them a nearly catlike look, I’d almost forgotten how much my life sucked, how much it hurt to think of Brock telling me he loved me for the first time mere seconds after admitting that he’d lip-cheated on me with my best friend. The hurt was still there, lingering in the back of my mind along with the name of my ghost boy and the familiar pressure of memories that weren’t mine, but today, I was in charge. If I was going to do any Sight-related (and therefore Cade-related) investigations, it was going to be on my terms. Not his. Not the dark-haired woman I’d incomprehensibly called Mother. Mine.

Step three: email Katie Blanche. Every school has a Katie Blanche. She’s the girl who devotes her entire life to knowing everything about everybody because knowing it is almost as good as actually being somebody herself. Don’t get me wrong. Katie was Golden, she was just hanging on by her teeth, or, more precisely, by the world’s biggest mouth. I suppose there were Non gossipmongers too, but the thing was, people listened to Katie. She was pretty, she was passably popular, and today she was going to be my very closest friend.

Even as I switched on my computer screen, the wheels in my mind were turning, and by the time I’d opened my Internet server and found my way to my inbox, I was ready.

To: littlemissthang72

From: MidnightSunshine17

Subject: Party!

Heya Kates. We totally missed you at Parker’s party last weekend! You *are* coming to the one at Tate’s house on Saturday, yes?

I knew for a fact that she hadn’t been invited to Jackson’s and that she wouldn’t officially be invited to Tate’s. Katie was Golden, but she wasn’t a VIP, and on any given weekend, chances were that someone wasn’t speaking to her. Luckily for her, this weekend that someone wasn’t me.

We can only hope this weekend will be as *interesting* as last week. I mean, Fuchsia table dancing and then ending up giving a more…well, personal dance to Jackson’s cousin…his FEMALE cousin. How hilarious is that? I swear, if I hadn’t pulled her off and brought her home, they totally would have made out. Fuchsia is lucky to have friends like us. Still, if it happens AGAIN this weekend…

I stopped to consider my work. Normally, I would have called instead of emailed, because calling didn’t produce a little electronic paper trail leading all the way back to me, but Fuchsia had pretty much drawn a line in the sand the second her lips had touched Brock’s. If she wanted to play hardball, I’d play.

And I’d win. It felt good to know that again, and it felt good not to feel bad about it. Fuchsia needed to learn a very important lesson about not messing with me, and I was going to enjoy teaching it to her. And if that made me a bad person, so be it.

After typing up a full page of cheery sentences meant to disguise the true purpose of the email, I hit the send button. With any luck, by the time I arrived at school, Fuchsia, completely unbeknownst to herself, would be ready for me. Satisfied that I was well on my way to simultaneously teaching Fuchsia a very valuable lesson about not screwing me over, avenging the tears no one (except for perhaps any lurking ghost boys in the vicinity) had seen me shed, and letting the entire school know just who ran the show around here, I turned my attention to the next order of business.

Lexie. I had to convince her either that I was no longer doing research or that I didn’t want her help, neither one of which would be easy. For starters, I wasn’t dumb enough to believe that having a Truth Seer on my side of things wouldn’t make unraveling the mystery of Cade (was it strange that I liked saying his name so much?) any easier. As tempting as it was to tell her about my dream, hoping to figure out what exactly the guys from my library vision and Brock had to do with shirtless Cade and the blond girl, and who exactly Meara, Sorcha, and Brianna were, I was determined to keep Lexie out of it for her own good. Despite the fact that my memory of the dream was fuzzy at best, I remembered the blood, remembered the dead hands. I also remembered the way Lexie’s body had gone a pale, ashen white the day before.

She had to stay out of it. Case closed. Since I couldn’t exactly lie to her and since she refused to give up on me, even when she should have, my only option was to avoid her. I pictured her eyes wide and disappointed, and it just about killed me, but I knew that, more than anything, I had to keep her safe.

So, of course, I did the most logical thing. I breezed down the steps, into the kitchen, out the back door, across the street, and into my car without saying a word to anyone. Lissy and Lexie could find their own rides to school. I pushed down the feeling of guilt that rose in the back of my mouth. They’d survive.

And so would I.

With one last glance at the house, I pulled out of the driveway, doing my best to ignore the way my vision blurred on the edges and the all-too-familiar words that echoed in my mind.

“Your family. Not mine.”

“Soon to be yours again, child.”

“Whatever,” I murmured under my breath as I cruised down the street. I’d come to terms with my Sight, and I wasn’t going to dwell on Lissy or Caroline or the fact that my mother was getting married. There were things I could control and things that I couldn’t, and right now, I was content to focus all of my negative energy in Fuchsia’s direction.

I thought of the “I Am” poem that I hadn’t written the night before.

I was Lilah Covington.

I was a girl who refused to be a victim.

I was still craving cookies and milk.

I smiled. I was the girl who knew Cade’s name.

Cade and Lilah, Lilah and Cade.

The memory, recent and sweet, lived in the air in front of me. I ignored it, but the edges of my mouth tugged up in a smile as I pulled into my parking spot, front and center. Once upon a time, it had been Fuchsia’s, and everyone else had known better than to take it, but that was before I’d gotten a car.

Things changed.

I stepped out of my car exactly three seconds before Fuchsia pulled up. Tracy bounded out of the passenger seat without giving Fuchsia’s pursed lips so much as a second look.

“Did you get my email?” she asked me. “Are you okay? God, Li, we’ve been so worried!”

“Don’t worry,” I told her as I lifted my eyes to meet Fuchsia’s. “I’m fine.”

Not okay. Fine.

“In fact,” I said, hooking my arm through Tracy’s, “I’m fabulous.”

Without a word to my ex–best friend, I steered Tracy toward the lawn, leaving Fuchsia in our wake and never looking back. If she was half as smart as I gave her credit for, she’d be starting to feel nervous right about then.

Just wait, I promised her silently.

As Tracy and I ambled over to the Golden side of the lawn, all eyes were on us. This wasn’t exactly a new thing, but today, I knew there was more at work than just our magnetic appeal.

“Is it true?” Elle Jacobs asked me. She was a third-tier Golden and not anywhere near my normal inner circle, but today, I made a very special exception.

“Is what true?” I asked.

“Did Fuchsia Reynolds really hook up with Jackson’s girl cousin?” Elle asked.

I glanced at Tracy out of the corner of my eye. She looked back at me. Whatever my lead was, I knew she would follow it. Fuchsia was single, and I was not, and that meant that in Tracy Land, Fuchsia was the competition, and I was the most desired ally.

Still, this whole situation was going to take some finessing. Could I have just let the rumors (not to mention the pictures from the party that I hadn’t yet released to the public) speak for themselves? Sure. By lunchtime, half the people at our school would have been convinced that Fuchsia was a lesbian, and Fuchsia, politically correct soul that she wasn’t, would have been horrified.

But that was so not my style. First of all, it’s totally not fair to lesbians everywhere. I mean, who wants Fuchsia as their poster child? Nobody, and the last thing I wanted to do was accidentally hurt someone else when the only person I wanted to stick it to had a stupid name and skanky lips. I was in control, I was in charge, and I was so over hurting people who didn’t deserve it.

I’d just concentrate on the people who did.

“No,” I said flatly in response to Elle’s question. “Fuchsia isn’t into girls.” I gave Elle a disdainful look, playing the role of the overprotective best friend to perfection. And then I put the last nail in Fuchsia’s coffin. “In fact, she’s like totally the opposite.” I lowered my voice. “Don’t tell anyone I told you, but she’s hooked up with like fifteen guys this month.”

“Really?” Elle asked, perking right back up.

Tracy stared at me, still dismayed that we weren’t substantiating the lesbian rumors. I mentally rolled my eyes. She’d catch on sooner or later. “Well,” I said delicately, “at least she says she’s hooked up with a ton of guys. I mean, I know that a bunch of the stories aren’t true, because Jackson only likes dark hair, and Tate isn’t exactly over Tracy yet….”

“Tate?” Tracy hissed. “She told you she hooked up with Tate? That is such a lie. He wouldn’t touch her with a…with a…”

“Ten-foot pole?” I suggested calmly. “I know. Fuchsia just likes the attention. It’s sort of her thing. Pretty soon, she’ll be telling people she hooked up with Brock.” I shook my head, oozing sympathy for poor, delusional Fuchsia.

“That is so entirely pathetic,” Tracy said, and I could tell by the look on her face that she’d known about the whole Brock thing and hadn’t said a word to me. Luckily for her, I didn’t have the stomach to deep-six more than one friend at a time, and my sights (no pun intended) were set entirely on Fuchsia.

“But anyway,” I told Elle seriously, “I know she’s hooked up with at least like five or six guys in the past couple of months for real.”

“Hook up” was a wonderfully ambiguous phrase at Emory High. If you kissed someone, you guys hooked up. If you more than kissed someone, you guys hooked up. If you went all the way, you hooked up. So I wasn’t lying. Fuchsia had kissed or at least, you know, had a moment with a ton of guys in the past month. And if people decided that they’d done more than kiss, that was quite simply not my problem, and I refused to let myself even think about it or about the kind of person this whole thing made me.

“Who has she hooked up with?” Elle asked, fascinated.

On the surface, I looked torn. Should I let people continue thinking that Fuchsia liked girls, or should I disclose her hookup history?

Inside, I was smiling. I don’t have many moments of pure evil, but this was one of them.

“Norman Fitzhugh,” I said finally.

“FUCHSIA HOOKED UP WITH PITS EWWW?!” Elle’s voice had a lovely propensity to carry.

I nodded. “Listen, I only told you so you’d know not to believe the rumors, okay?”

Elle nodded. “Yeah. I mean…”

“So just make sure people know that Fuchsia’s totally into guys,” I ordered.

Translation: tell people that Fuchsia hooked up with Norman “Unique Body Odor” Fitzhugh, or, as he was commonly called, Norman Pits Ewww.

Thirty seconds later, Elle was gone, and my work was done.

“Did Fuchsia really hook up with Pits Ewww?” Tracy asked me curiously.

I nodded. “It was dark, and everybody at the party was supposed to be Golden anyway. It totally wasn’t her fault, and I promised I wouldn’t tell, but…I mean, it’s better than people thinking she’s into girls, right?”

Actually, it was much, much worse. Even though it would have taken more power than I had to completely Non a primo Golden like Fuchsia, she was most definitely going to be in popularity quarantine for at least a month. No guy wanted Pits Ewww’s leftovers, and no girl feared the chick that none of the guys wanted.

Fuchsia was still Golden, but she wasn’t untouchable. She wasn’t me. She wasn’t Tracy. She wasn’t, for lack of a better word, Platinum, which anyone who’s even the least bit fashionable will tell you is the new gold.

I considered the term and what it meant, what it stood for, and who I was. There were Goldens, there were Nons, and there were the very hottest of the hot. Maybe I didn’t always feel like I fell into that last category, and maybe I didn’t deserve to, but after the week I’d had, I needed to.

I hooked my arm again through Tracy’s. We were Platinum, and if Fuchsia ever wanted back in, she’d have to come crawling back to me.

14

Scandal

“Scandal” is composed of two Latin words:

Scan, meaning play by the rules,

and dal, meaning no one gets hurt.

I managed to avoid seeing Fuchsia until lunch. Instead, I spent my time doing exactly two things. First, I constructed a plan of attack on the Cade front. As painful as the library visions had been, if I was going to make any sense at all out of my crazy montage dream, I’d have to start somewhere, and the scene of the visiony crime seemed as good a place as any. Long story short, I was library bound in a big way, right after school. I half expected Cade to show up out of nowhere and give me his broody ghost commentary on this plan, but he hadn’t shown up since our interlude the night before.

Interlude. I mulled over the word. It sounded so scandalous.

And speaking of scandal, I spent the rest of my morning putting the finishing touches on my Fuchsia sabotage. There wasn’t really that much to do. People like to talk, especially when they’ve got my permission to gossip about someone who, quite honestly, has never been very nice to anyone. Ever. In the past three hours, Norman Fitzhugh had become a god among loser guys, and he’d recovered from whatever initial confusion he might have felt and was now relishing the position. Once the rumors started, I didn’t even need Katie and Elle to do my dirty work—good old Norman was doing it for me.

My only remaining problem was finding a replacement. Three is a magical number, and if I really wanted Fuchsia to squirm, I was going to have to pick a new second-in-command. There were a few viable contestants. I needed someone who was ready and willing to have my back, not because she thought I needed her, but because she wanted me to need her. There were about four or five girls who seemed like potentially good choices, and I ultimately decided to try a few on for size before I made my final decision.

“Hey, Bridget. I love that skirt. It’s so you.”

Bridget Stone scored high on all my important criteria. She was hot. She had an impeccable sense of fashion, she was scared of me, and there was a distinct chance that with a little help from me, she could land Jackson Hare. Perfect.

“Lilah,” Bridget said, her eyes lighting up. “Hi!”

I tossed my hair over my shoulder. “Listen,” I said. “Tracy and I were talking, and…” I leaned in for the kill. “Would you like to eat lunch with us today?”

And that’s how Fuchsia found us at lunchtime. Bridget, Tracy, and I were deeply involved in a conversation about Tate’s upcoming party, and the boys were throwing wadded-up napkins at each other. I had my hand in Brock’s hair, and Bridget was expertly playing footsie with Jackson under the table.

There were no extra chairs.

“You would not believe the day I’ve had,” Fuchsia huffed.

Tracy, Bridget, and I continued talking.

“Lilah,” Fuchsia hissed. “In case you didn’t notice, I’m talking to you.” She turned to Bridget. “And hello! You’re in my seat, sweetie. Move along.”

“Why don’t you go sit with loverboy over there?” Bridget asked, gesturing toward the Non side of the cafeteria, where Pits Ewww was doing what could only be described as a rendition of “Who da man? I’m the man!”

I had to give it to Bridget. She was good.

“Lilah,” Fuchsia said, gritting her teeth. “Why is she in my seat?”

I smiled at her. “Because I asked her to sit with us.” I turned from Fuchsia to Jackson. “You’re coming to Tate’s tomorrow, right?” I asked.

Jackson nodded.

“Bridget’s car broke down. Can you give her a ride?”

Bridget played along like a pro, leaning over to reveal more of her cleavage.

“Sure,” Jackson said easily.

Bridget twirled her hair.

Fuchsia glared at me, and then, without another word, she stomped off to sit with Katie, Elle, and a handful of other second-tier Goldens. Within minutes, she’d be regaling them with stories about what a horrible friend I was and how I was spreading lies about her because she’d hooked up with Brock, and they’d tell her that I was the only one who had stood up for her that morning. Once she left, they’d talk about how sad it was that she was still claiming to have hooked up with my boyfriend, when I was clearly the only real friend she had left.

On some level, I realized that in a perfect world, I would probably be using my powers for good rather than evil, but…

“And the princess defeated the wicked witch, and they all lived happily ever after.” With a slight ripple of the air, Cade appeared at my side and leaned against the table directly in between Brock and me. “Isn’t that how the story goes, Princess?”

Just seeing him made my heart beat faster, harder.

“There’s more at stake here than popularity.”

The fluttering in my chest was rapidly replaced with a strong feeling of complete and utter annoyance.

Who was he to make me feel guilty for spending one morning getting my life back on track? He was the one who’d wanted me to fight back. He was the reason I felt strong enough to do it. And now, he was criticizing me for it. He didn’t want me to be a victim, and he didn’t want me to be a bitch.

Then what, pray tell, did he want?

“Lilah.”

His use of my real name started the fluttering right back up again. I tried to remember that I was annoyed with him, that I was supposed to be in charge here, and that nobody told Lilah Covington what to do.

Flutter. Flutter. Flutter.

“I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t want to hurt him, but if you don’t take your hand out of his hair, it’s going to happen…right…now.”

I raised a single eyebrow in a silent question. It was all I could manage without the people around me figuring out that I was seeing and hearing things that they weren’t, but I knew Cade would understand what I was asking: what was going to happen right now?

“I don’t know how it happens, or why,” Cade said. “All I know is that sooner or later, the two of us…” He gestured to Brock with his eyes. “…are going to fight, and when we do, I’m going to win, and he’s going to die, and I’ll have to live with that until the next one comes around.”

I withdrew my hand from Brock’s hair. Under the table, I let my fingers graze Cade’s legs. He was a ghost, but I could see him. I could feel him.

Flutter-flutter.

“We can’t do this, Lilah,” he said softly. “This is how it starts.”

His lips on mine. That was how it had started. The memory played out on the air in front of me. My head held high, my cheeks pink with outrage, his lips closing over mine for the briefest second before he disappeared back to the past.

Back to the bodies, cold and dead and motionless.

I brought my eyes up to meet his once more, searching for the answers to my bazillion questions.

“I wish I could, Princess,” he said, and his body started flickering in and out, chopping up his words. “But I can’t.”

Flutter.

I set my lips and concentrated on bringing him back. I was tired of this crap. He’d leave when I said he could leave, and not a second earlier. No guy—dead or alive—was going to walk out on me. Not today. Not after everything else.

Blue. Purple. Pink.

The colors invaded the static that only I could see.

Three girls holding hands. Fresh dirt on an open grave.

Not this, I thought firmly. Not now. Show me Cade. Cade-Cade-Cade.

With a flash of bright light, I saw him, but this time, he didn’t see me. He was in a cafeteria—this cafeteria, but things were different. The walls were white, not faded yellow. The tables were new.

He leaned against one of them, the same way he’d leaned against my table the moment before. His dark hair was in his eyes; the expression on his face was nothing short of dangerous. I followed his smoldering gaze across the cafeteria. In reality, Fuchsia was sitting over there, shooting darts at me with her eyes. In the vision, offset a few feet from reality, a girl with bright blond hair pulled into a high ponytail worked a poodle skirt for all it was worth. She played with the white ribbon in her hair, and next to her, a guy roughly the size and build of a buffalo put his arm protectively around her shoulder.

And from afar, Cade watched.

Don’t look at her, I told him silently. Look at me.

The scene jumped, but as much as the movement jarred me, I didn’t show any visible signs of what I was seeing. Vision Girl…who? Me?

“You called, Princess?”

I smiled at Cade’s dry, incredulous voice and said nothing. He was here, and he was now, and he was looking at me. All was right with the world.

“Lilah, I need to talk to you.”

The words broke my concentration, and Cade faded away again. I turned to the person who had interrupted my little ghostly rendezvous, half expecting it to be Fuchsia, back for another round. The moment I saw Lissy James, I groaned internally. This lunch period was crucial. It was the Lilah Show, wherein everyone realized that I was still the definitive Golden Girl. Vacating my seat for a one-on-one with Lissy would give Fuchsia an opportunity, albeit a small one, to make her next move, and talking to Lissy in public so wasn’t in my script.

“No offense, but I’m kind of busy right now,” I said, reaching again for Brock’s hair and hoping she’d get the point. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to talk to her. Strangely enough, I kind of did, but that didn’t matter. I couldn’t talk to her. Not now. I couldn’t even bring Cade back or venture into his world again, as much as part of me wanted to. I had to be here and now and perfect.

“Lilah—”

“Look, sweetie,” Bridget said, adopting the tone of voice Fuchsia had used with her almost exactly. “She said she’s busy, so why don’t you run along and play with your little Non friends and leave the big kids alone, okay?”

I’d wanted a sidekick who’d back me up. So why did I feel like smacking Bridget upside her ponytailed head?

“Give us a second,” I told Bridget, and she wisely shut her mouth.

“I can’t do this right now,” I told Lissy. I really, really couldn’t. She didn’t leave, and I waited for her to understand.

Without a word, she took a step back, and I understood that she didn’t.

“Lissy—” I said her name, but she cut me off.

“Lexie said you needed my help. I guess she was wrong.”

I felt several pairs of eyes on me. I wasn’t about to give Fuchsia any grounds on which to mock me and stage a comeback, and so I said the only thing there was left to say. “I guess she was.”

The silence between us was thick, and I could feel the air trembling with the history Lissy and I shared. I so wasn’t in the mood to see any of it, and I forced the memories to stay back, out of sight.

Lissy turned to leave, and I’d no sooner breathed a silent sigh of relief than she turned around and stalked back to our table. If Bridget opened fire again, I thought, Lissy was on her own.

Yeah, right.

“I promised Audra I’d ask,” Lissy said, her voice brusque as she arrived back at my table. “Did Fuchsia really hook up with Norman Fitzhugh?”

At that question, the tension that had been building in me since Cade had disappeared melted out of my body in a single moment of great satisfaction. If Lissy and Audra had gotten the memo, the rumor had been thoroughly spread.

“I don’t know,” I said innocently. “Why don’t you ask Norman?”

15

Information

It’s not what you know.

It’s not who you know.

It’s what you know about who you know.

I’d like to go on the record as saying it totally wasn’t my fault that I fell asleep in sixth period. Soul-stealing calculus teachers aside, nothing interesting ever happens in math class, and let’s face it, taking down someone like Fuchsia Reynolds and keeping my conscience at bay while doing it was hard work. Plus, it wasn’t like I’d actually gotten a good night’s sleep since well before the engagement, and my daily dose of caffeine and sugar just wasn’t doing it for me.

I looked down at my notebook and let my dark hair fall gently into my face. In the background, someone droned on and on about factorials, but all I heard was a mix of “blah, blah, blah” and the sound that teachers always make in those Charlie Brown movies that no self-respecting teenager would ever admit to having seen.

I breathed in and out, and for once my brain remained remarkably clear. No colors burning themselves into my mind, no memories oozing from the air and into my head. There weren’t even any contingency plans floating around on the Fuchsia front, just the teacher’s monotonous droning and a sense that for just a few minutes, I could let my guard down.

I should have known better.

“So young.”

The voice was pure, and I felt it in my bones as much as I heard it. Somewhere in the back of my head, I realized I’d fallen asleep, but here, in this place, I couldn’t do anything about it. All I could do was listen and watch.

“You were both so young.” She paused. “Are so young.”

“Both?” I asked, giving her a steely look from beneath my high ponytail. “What both?”

“Never mind that, child. You will see, sooner or later.”

“Tell you what, how about we go with sooner, party of one, because patience—it isn’t really my strong suit.”

“You need each other. Your gifts, they’re part of a whole.” She drew circles in the air with her fingers, familiar circles: rings of color on a silver shield.

Pink.

Purple.

Blue.

“And once whole…,” she continued as the rings shined so brightly that it should have hurt my eyes, but didn’t. “…may no mortal hands tear them apart.”

“Hallelujah, amen, whatever,” I said. I further protected myself from her weird and cryptic nature by clapping sarcastically, but the dark-haired woman wasn’t moved by my display. Instead, she leaned forward and gently touched my cheek.

“You need her.”

“Who?” I blew a single strand of hair out of my face, completely exasperated.

The woman looked to the side, her red, red lips curving up in a simple smile, and all of a sudden, I was in a memory I recognized all too well. Lissy, Lexie, Tracy, Dylan, Audra, and me standing in a classroom. The fire. The powerful man ready to leave us to die, and then Lissy starts coming out of her body. She reaches for Lexie, and I can see the colored lights streaming off the younger girl’s body. They’re moving and growing and so very pink that I almost can’t look at them.

And then Lissy turns toward me, and memory-me nods slightly. Her hands dip into the pure purple light surrounding my body.

This is Lissy’s memory, and so I don’t see her colored lights as clearly, but I don’t need to. I know without looking that they’re blue.

Pink.

Purple.

Blue.

“She needed you, my daughter.” The woman was there beside me again. “And you need her.”

Boys yelling.

Fists flying.

Another dead body on the ground. Brock-Cade-Brock-Cade and a blond girl in a poodle skirt smiling over a dead body.

This time, the blonde stared straight at me. “They kill for me,” she said. “Don’t you wish they’d kill for you?”

My eyes flew open, and only years of practice kept me from making a fool of myself. I’d practically made a career of fitting in when it mattered and standing out when it mattered more. Keeping the vision a secret, at least now that I’d managed to get past (or at least ignore) the emotional chaos of the day before, was nothing. That morning, I’d resolved to do three things: stay in control, teach Fuchsia a lesson, and solve the Ghost Boy mystery. So far, I was doing pretty well on the first two, which led me to number three. I allowed myself to consider the dark-haired woman’s words, and in an effort to at least look like I was taking notes, I doodled my thoughts in the margins of my math notebook.

You need each other.

Once whole, may no mortal hands tear them apart.

Pink. Purple. Blue.

They kill for me. Don’t you wish they’d kill for you?

I thought about the image of Brock lying in a pool of his own blood, thought of the tortured look on Cade’s well-sculpted face as he told me, again and again, that someone was going to die. I thought of the blond girl, her poodle skirt, and the sick, satisfied smile on her face.

“They kill for me. Don’t you wish they’d kill for you?”

The girl’s words sent chills down my spine as the pieces slowly fit together in my mind. I’d seen the way Cade had looked at her. She’d been in my vision all along, watching the fight, twirling the ring on her finger. I’d thought she was watching with horror, but by her own words, they were fighting over her and she was glad.

But what did this have to do with Brock? Or me? Or the other guys I saw moving in and out of my Cade visions? If this whole thing was really about some fifties love triangle, where did I come in?

As much as I wanted to concentrate on that part of the mystery, and the excellent visual in my mind of shirtless Cade, the rest of the vision nibbled at the edges of my thoughts, subtly but constantly demanding my attention. I kept flashing back to that day with Lissy and Lexie, and Tracy’s pathetic attempt to seduce the evil math teacher. I hadn’t known what was happening then, but now I knew. Lissy had stopped him from leaving by tying our auras to his, and once all three of them had been attached, he’d been destroyed.

Lexie’s was pink.

Mine was purple.

Lissy’s was blue.

Just like the rings of light I kept seeing hanging in the air. It was after that day that I’d started seeing things. It had started small. My attention would wander, and I’d imagine a scene from my own past. Bits and pieces of images would hop into my head unexplained, and then I’d seen Cade, and the images became more frequent, more intense.

I’d helped Lissy destroy the bad guy, and somehow I’d ended up with the Sight.

I knew this was her fault, I thought.

You need her.

The voice was an echo in my mind, a memory of the words the dream-woman had said. She needed you. You need her.

The words were depressingly close to the ones Lissy had spat at me during lunch. Lexie says you need my help.

In the five minutes before the last bell rang, I considered my options. I could go against Lexie’s truth-speaking dictate and the dream-woman’s prophetic-sounding words. It wasn’t like this whole Sight thing was totally new and uncharted territory anymore. I’d even started to use it on cue. I also wasn’t totally clueless as to what was going on. Obviously, the freaky mojo centered on the blond chick and my ghost boy. Whatever was happening had been happening for a while, so a little walk through the newspaper archives at the library might give me a better idea of what this ghostly love triangle entailed.

My second option was to suck it up and ask Lissy to join me. I’d helped her (however inadvertently) with the Kissler situation, so it wasn’t like she could turn me down. Besides, I had Lexie on my side, and I of all people knew how convincing that kid could be.

My third option involved taking Lexie back to the library and letting it slip that there was danger involved. Lissy would follow, and I could use them both to figure out what exactly was going on. But I couldn’t do that. There was something about the library that had given me a distinctly wigged-out feeling, and Lexie had practically done a corpse impression trying to divine the truth about the whole Cade situation. Whether I wanted to admit it or not, there was something more dangerous than a lip-happy ex–best friend going on here, and Lexie had to stay out of it. I’d deal with it alone before I’d drag her back into it.

You need her.

The reminder echoed again in my mind. Just what I needed on the day I’d managed to get everything back under control—supernatural nagging.

The final bell snapped me out of my train of thought. I decided to let fate decide it. If I saw Lissy on my way off campus, I’d shove her in the backseat of my car and take her with me. If I didn’t, I’d go to the library alone and deal with “needing” someone later. I slung my oversized purse (backpacks = so overrated) over one shoulder and sauntered out of the room.

Walking through a high school hallway is sort of like being a secret agent. Your mission is to collect classified information being exchanged by enemy operatives. It can happen anywhere: at the lockers, the water fountain, the girls’ bathroom, even the boys’ bathroom if you can pull it off. You must, however, achieve the goal of your mission while undercover as a person who couldn’t care less about what anyone else says or thinks.

I stopped at my locker, more to eavesdrop on Elle and Katie than to pick up my chemistry textbook. Atomic elements could wait until study hall the next day. Fresh gossip, on the other hand, had a half-life of about twenty minutes. After that, it became old news, quick.

“Well, I heard that he gave her some kind of fungus.”

“A fungus? Where?”

Katie gave Elle a look. “You know…down there. Pits Ewww must have all kinds of funguses.”

Fungi, I corrected silently, but I didn’t say anything out loud. Grammar Nazis didn’t make homecoming court.

“Lilah!” Katie squealed, leaning over to give me a faux hug, the kind where another girl touches her forearms to yours and shrugs her shoulders a little bit. “We were just talking about the party tomorrow.”

Yeah, I said silently, and I’m completely deaf, but whatever. Undercover Lilah was on the job.

“It’s going to be great,” I said. “I heard that Bridget Stone is going with Jackson Hare. Wouldn’t they make like the cutest couple ever?”

Elle and Katie both nodded vigorously and squealed.

“Are you and Brock going?” Katie asked. I could tell by the hungry look in her eye that she was dying for a new piece of gossip, and that Fuchsia had tried to redeem herself by claiming to have hooked up with Brock.

Some people never learned.

“Of course,” I said. “I mean, I may let Fuchsia tag along with us, so that she can, you know, pretend that that whole fungus thing never happened.”

“You heard about the fungus too?” Elle asked.

I declined to answer. Sometimes, silence is the most incriminating response.

Katie leaned toward me. “Fuchsia’s telling everyone that she and Brock are together,” she said, shaking her head. “How sad is that?”

“Yeah,” I said, “and last week she said she hooked up with Tate, and the week before that, it was Jackson, and we all know she’s not exactly a Bridget, if you know what I mean. Besides, you know how guys are. If any of them had actually hooked up with Fuchsia, the whole world would know about it. I mean, look at Pits Ewww.”

Elle and Katie nodded. My word was gospel.

“So things are fine with you and Brock?” Katie pressed.

Were they? Did I want them to be?

My pausing to think was giving the girls way too much information, so I played my trump card.

“Brock told me he loved me yesterday.”

And today, I was using it as ammunition in the Great Girl War. I couldn’t let myself think about it, couldn’t let it get to me and wear me down to the place I’d been the day before.

Katie and Elle squealed. Loudly.

I leaned back against the locker bank, knowing that I’d damage-controlled everything I could, when my stomach flipped itself inside out and an electric shock jumped into my body, jarring my bones with the force of a painful, unexpected vision.

“Loser.”

Large hands on small shoulders, pounding the smaller boy’s body against a bank of lockers.

“Did I say you could talk to Jessica?”

“I just asked her for her h-h-h-history notes.”

“Did I say you could ask her for her history notes?”

The larger boy relaxes for a minute, and then slams the smaller boy back up against the lockers. Metal clangs.

“No.”

“I don’t want to hear it, because last I remembered, I didn’t say you could talk to me, either.”

Large hands on small shoulders, cold metal on his back.

“You should have left Helen alone.”

“Lilah?”

I had no idea what Elle and Katie had been saying, so I improvised and tried to distract them from the way my body had tensed the moment the vision had entered my mind. “You don’t think she’s pregnant, do you?”

“Who?”

It wasn’t something I wanted to do. In the beginning, channeling everything I felt about what Fuchsia had done to me into doing something to her had made me feel better about things, made me feel like I wasn’t the same little kid who didn’t have the right shoes or a daddy or a cookie-cutter mom and couldn’t do anything about any of it. But now, taking it this far didn’t make me feel better.

It made me feel mean.

“Who else?” Elle asked Katie pointedly, taking my pregnancy comment and running with it. “I mean, don’t you think she’s put on a little weight?”

I eased myself off the locker bank and pressed down my screaming conscience. Fuchsia would have done it to me, I thought. I know she would have.

My head ached with the thought, and I sternly reminded myself that I had problems right now that extended above and beyond high school rumors.

“Listen, guys, I’ve got to go, but do me a favor?”

They nodded.

“If you see Fuchsia, be nice to her. Now’s the time when she really needs friends like us, you know?”

With another faux hug, I was out the door. I couldn’t get away from the locker banks, or for that matter, from what I’d just said about Fuchsia, fast enough. I was halfway to my car when I ran, quite literally, into Lissy James. We both went flying, and I silently cursed her and my luck as I rose to my feet.

If I hadn’t stopped at my locker to talk to the girls, I wouldn’t have gotten the touch-triggered retrovision, and I wouldn’t have been rushing out to the parking lot at the exact same time as Lissy. I’d left the decision up to fate, and fate had spoken.

“You need a ride?” I asked.

“You’re offering?” Lissy’s tone was wary, not defensive, and that gave me the push I needed to ask her for help a second time.

“It would require a detour by the library,” I said.

“The library?”

I didn’t repeat myself.

“You need my help, don’t you?” She gave me an odd, not entirely unattractive smile.

“Maybe.”

Lissy looked at me again, but this time her eyes flitted to my left and right, then above me, before settling on my face.

“Okay,” she said.

This was, quite possibly, the first civil conversation I’d had with Lissy James. She hadn’t treated me like I was a horrible person. She hadn’t walked away from me. She hadn’t said no.

It was a start.

16

Beauty

Cleopatra probably wasn’t nearly as beautiful as most

people think she was,

but she was probably a hell of a lot smarter.

On the drive to the library, I realized three things.

First, I realized that Lissy James should never be allowed to touch a radio dial. Her taste in music was horrible, and she seemed unacquainted with the whole “the driver picks the music” concept. It was times like these that I was glad I was an only child.

Next, I realized that Lissy wasn’t exactly an angel on the bitch front. She couldn’t quite suppress her glee at the fact that Fuchsia wouldn’t be in a position to be talking about anyone anytime soon. It occurred to me that there was a distinct chance that if she knew I’d orchestrated the whole thing, she would have approved.

And the third thing I realized was that I was still craving cookies and milk.

As I pulled into the library parking lot, I flipped the radio back to my station of choice, and Lissy shuddered.

“Don’t go there,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes.

I rolled my eyes back at her, and then I turned the radio off, just to be safe. “Before we go in, we should probably get a couple of things straight,” I said.

Lissy looked less than enthused at the idea of me imparting any kind of wisdom. Color me shocked. If ignoring Lilah’s advice had been an Olympic sport, she could have medaled.

“This stuff is important,” I told her. “Okay?”

“Okay.” Lissy waited.

“One, you can’t tell Lexie anything about any of this.”

Lissy opened her mouth to say something, but I didn’t give her the chance. Rule number one was the most important rule, and if I had to do a song-and-dance number (complete with baton twirling) to get the point across, I was fully prepared to do it.

“Trust me on this one,” I said. “The other day in the library, Lexie was trying to do something Sighty with what I was saying. One second she was there, the next she was gone, eyes glassy, no response, totally pale. Whatever’s going on here, it’s dangerous, and Lexie does not need to be a part of it.”

“You took my little sister to the library?” Lissy asked incredulously.

“Lissy, focus.”

“Okay,” she said finally. “No Lexie.”

The two of us were in agreement on something. It was remarkable, really.

“Anything else?” she asked.

Given the fact that Lissy was more than a little conspicuous about her own Sight, I felt the need to clarify one other point. “Once we get in there, keep your voice down. Don’t mention anything supernatural if you don’t have to. And try not to cause a scene.”

“I don’t cause scenes,” Lissy objected.

“Says the girl who did what on the first day at Emory?” I asked.

As a reward for mentioning her show-stopping barf performance, Lissy gave me a death glare, but she couldn’t argue the point. She did have a slight tendency to cause scenes, in an awkward Lizzie McGuire kind of way.

“Can we just get on with it?” she asked, crossing her arms over her chest.

“No Lexie,” I said. “No scenes.” I paused. “I think that about covers it.” I took a deep breath, and then, without further ado, I told her everything I knew. Cade and the boys he’d killed. The platinum blonde with the sickly seductive smile. The dreams, the woman.

“Shannon.” Lissy whispered the name and looked over her shoulder, as if she expected the dark-haired woman to appear out of nowhere.

“Shannon,” I repeated. The name was little and cute and totally didn’t fit the woman I’d seen.

“The First Seer,” Lissy explained. “She’s my a million times great-grandmother, or something like that. Grams says she was infinitely blessed. She had all of our gifts, so she saw pretty much everything.”

“And now she’s in my dreams,” I said. “Oh, joy.”

“It’s not a dream,” Lissy said, her voice quiet and matter-of-fact. “It’s a visitation. Sometimes she comes to people with the Sight in times of great need. She leads them….” Lissy trailed off, and I did the math.

“So this Shannon chick helped you out with the whole evil math teacher thing?” I asked.

Lissy nodded. “She showed me her shield. Kissler had a copy of it hiding the door to his evil room of darkness and doom.”

“How sweet.”

Lissy snorted. There was a slight chance that she may have laughed as well. Lissy James? Laughing at something I said? What happened to thinking I ate puppies for breakfast and babies for lunch? Don’t even get me started on the afternoon snack….

“So…yeah…Shannon helps people. Our kind of people, I guess.”

Lissy James and I had a joint kind of people. Weird.

“Whatever this Shannon chick is trying to tell me,” I said, “it has to do with us, and with what happened with Mr. Kissler, and what’s going to happen with Cade. And Brock.” I mentioned my boyfriend almost as an afterthought. “And possibly something about these three girls whose mother died.”

Lissy bit her bottom lip in what I could only assume was deep thought. To me, it looked a little like she was constipated. Lexie was right—Lissy totally needed to practice those facial expressions in a mirror. About the time I realized that I found that fact oddly endearing, I forced myself to concentrate on what was important: finding out about the boys Cade claimed to have killed.

“You ready for this?” I asked Lissy.

She nodded, still nibbling on the corners of her mouth.

I opened my car door and walked quickly into the library. No need to draw more attention to myself than was necessary.

Lissy, however, tripped and stumbled. She managed to catch herself. In the course of doing so, she emitted a high-pitched squeaky sound.

I arched one eyebrow at her.

“That wasn’t a scene,” she argued.

“Uh-huh,” I said. She gave me a look, but took my teasing for what it was and didn’t say another word. I smiled, and somehow, she managed to follow me into the library without so much as another stumble. I was tempted to give her a gold star.

“Where do we start?” Lissy asked the moment we were both safely inside.

“Old newspapers,” I said with more certainty than I felt. “And yearbooks.” I’d seen visions of Cade in his own time, in our school cafeteria, and touching the water fountain had triggered my Sight and shown me glimpses of the other boys. I could only infer that, once upon a time, they’d gone to Emory High.

In fact, from the looks of the boys, once upon a time they’d ruled Emory High as much as any male could.

“I take it you want the yearbooks?” Lissy asked.

I inclined my head slightly. “How’d you guess?”

Lissy opened her mouth and then closed it again. A few weeks earlier, I probably would have thought she was simply incapable of forming a coherent sentence, but I was beginning to read her body language well enough to know that she was stopping herself from saying something she wasn’t sure she should say.

I waited.

“Your aura kind of wagged when you said the word ‘yearbook,’” Lissy admitted.

Despite the fact that she was breaking the whole “don’t talk about the supernatural” rule, I had to ask. “Wagged like a dog’s tail wags?”

Lissy nodded, a sheepish look on her face.

“Huh.”

“So I’ll take newspapers,” she said, changing the subject from auras with a surprising amount of stealth. “And look for…” She trailed off, waiting for me to supply the answer.

“Deaths,” I said. “Of teenage guys. Start about fifty or sixty years ago.” I paused for the very slightest second and tried to keep my voice even. “I think someone may have had a knife.”

Lissy nodded, and for one horrible moment, I thought she would reach out to comfort me. Since I wasn’t exactly sure how much comforting I wanted, I opted for pushing her buttons instead. “Chop-chop,” I said lightly. “Newspapers don’t read themselves.”

I won’t describe the face Lissy made at me then, except to say that it wasn’t flattering in the least.

As she headed off to look for newspapers, I walked to the information desk. “I’m looking for yearbooks,” I said.

“Have you checked the high school library?”

I hadn’t, and that was a stupid mistake on my part, but she didn’t need to know that. “Do you have them here?” I answered her question with a question.

“A limited selection,” she sniffed. “But you really would be better served—”

“And the limited selection is located where?”

The librarian paused, just for a moment, and I gave her my best impression of a genuinely sweet smile.

“Purple bookshelf,” she said. “Back wall.”

As I walked, I couldn’t help but think that I should have known. The ugly purple bookshelf had given me a touch-triggered vision, and Lexie had told me on our first library adventure that help would come from something purple. As I approached the bookshelf, I issued a steely glare in its general direction. My body still ached from my last touch vision. I so wasn’t looking for another one.

Cautiously, I knelt next to the shelf and pulled out the first yearbook I saw. 1999.

In a town our size, you pretty much only have one yearbook, and it covers everyone from kindergarten through senior year. Traditionally, other than class pictures, the entire book is dominated by pictures of high schoolers. For a brief moment, I considered the book in my hand. The year I was nine had not been my best, and honestly, I wasn’t entirely sure I wanted to remember it. Before my Sight could get any funky ideas, I put the yearbook down and reached for another, aiming for one with a more weathered, tattered cover. 1987.

Much better. I opened it to the middle, and the first thing I saw was a picture of a blond boy with enormous shoulders and hair that was, objectively, out of control. Moving on instinct, I placed my fingertips on the picture, and the moment I did, I sank into it, my mind absorbed in another place, another time.

“Davis. Davis, MY MAN.”

The sounds of a guys’ locker room were drowned out by a single voice, and the blond boy nodded toward the guy who’d yelled his name.

“Say it ain’t so, buddy. Say it ain’t so.”

“Say what ain’t so?” the blond, who I could only assume was Davis, asked.

“You and Cindy on the outs? That girl is…” Rather than search his mind for an adjective, the speaker let out a long, low whistle.

Davis slammed his locker shut. “Cindy and I are fine,” he said. “She knows she’s got a good thing here.” At the word “here,” he gestured to himself. “Anyone tell you otherwise?”

Davis’s friend didn’t speak for a moment, and Davis advanced on him. “You tell whoever it is that he’s dreaming, and that if he knows what’s good for him, he’ll stay away from Helen.”

“Helen?” I mouthed the question, even as the other guy spoke it, but Davis stormed off without another word, and the moment he rounded the corner, he disappeared into nothing.

“Okay.” I spoke the word under my breath and looked again at the picture I was touching.

IN LOVING MEMORY: JOHN MICHAEL DAVIS, CLASS OF 1987.

“He disappeared.” My thoughts were coming out of my mouth so quickly that I couldn’t have stopped them if I’d tried. “He walked around the corner, and he disappeared. And then, somehow, he died.”

Taking out my cell, I quickly texted Lissy. It occurred to me briefly to wonder how I had her number in my phone book, but with the vision still fresh in my mind, I had other things to worry about.

John Davis, I typed into my phone. 1987.

I hit send, slapped the yearbook shut, and reached for another. Flipping through the pages of the book was like walking through a crowded room. The sounds and memories the pictures represented flitted in and out of my head. 1958 was a wash, as was 2000, and my temple was starting to pound with the memories I couldn’t keep from dancing across my mind.

I played with the idea of getting as far away from the yearbooks as possible, but somehow, I didn’t think old newspapers were going to be that much better, and I wasn’t ready to give up. Now that I’d seen Davis, the whole murder and mayhem aspect of this felt more real. Not that he’d been a particularly stand-up guy, but he had been real and alive, and I couldn’t help but remember the way things always ended in my visions of Cade: blood and flesh and death.

1957.

The moment I touched it, I shivered. No visions came—I didn’t see anything, but I could feel it in the way the hairs on my arms stood straight up.

The first thing I looked for was an “In Loving Memory” page, and I found it almost immediately.

IN LOVING MEMORY OF TAD BRADFORD.

I’d seen him before: dark hair, preppy, cocky look in his eyes. Roughly the size and build of a buffalo.

I’d seen him in my visions, his face blurring into the faces of four other boys, among them John Davis, the guy who’d picked on the dweeb in the library, and the guy who’d shoved another boy up against a school locker bank.

I’d seen him this afternoon in the cafeteria, his arm wrapped protectively around the shoulder of a girl with a shining blond ponytail I was starting to despise.

Beside me, my phone buzzed, and when I picked it up, the text message from Lissy stared me in the face.

Bingo.

Now I had a perfectly reasonable excuse to put the book down and back away, find Lissy, and reap the benefits of her newspaper sleuthing, but somehow, I couldn’t. Deliberately, I placed my fingers on Tad’s photo and willed my mind into the past. This time, the information came as a single punch to my brain, and I saw so many things at once that it literally threw me backward.

I saw Tad, King of the World, with his best girl, my favorite platinum blonde.

I saw Tad on the football field, Tad drinking with his buddies.

Tad roughing up the kids from the wrong side of the tracks. Tad leering at them, his boys on his heels.

Tad behind the wheel of a brand-new car, his arm around someone who wasn’t the blonde.

Tad watching the blonde talk to another boy.

Tad’s fury rising.

The other boy—Cade?—not realizing the blond girl was using him.

As I recovered from the mass of images I’d been bombarded with, I couldn’t help but think that boys were dumb. And that Tad was an ass.

With those two equally important thoughts in mind, I flipped the page. My phone buzzed again, but I ignored it. I was a girl on a mission.

“Where are you?” I muttered under my breath. “I know you’re in here somewhere.”

And then, there he was—in the yearbook in front of me and standing beside me, looking over my shoulder.

“Not my best picture.”

I made a concerted effort at not reacting as Cade’s voice reached my ears. “No,” I said, “it’s not.” Entranced by the yearbook, I didn’t look up at the real Cade and instead stared down at the page. The photo was grainy, and he was in the process of turning his back to the camera, too cool to be caught on film.

In the here and now, Cade knelt by my side, and I resisted the urge to touch the picture.

“You killed Tad.” It was a statement, not a question.

Cade didn’t respond.

“For her?” This time, it was a question. I took a stab in the dark at the girl’s identity, based on the name I’d heard over and over again in my visions. “For Helen?”

Cade froze at the mention of her name.

“She was using you, you know.” I couldn’t help but impart some of my alpha-girl intuition on him.

He looked at me, his eyes funny and intense and dead serious all at once. “What do you mean ‘was’?”

He’d no sooner gotten the words out of his mouth than the air around him cracked, and he disappeared back to the past. Back to the time of the picture I couldn’t bring myself to touch.

“Lilah, I texted you like four times.”

“Uh-huh,” I said, still distracted by the picture on the page in front of me. I wondered who Cade had been in 1957, who I would have been if I’d lived then.

“Do you enjoy driving me crazy?” Lissy asked, her tone bordering somewhere between exasperation, annoyance, and a whine.

“You found something,” I surmised. “So did I.” Without bothering to explain it to her, I carefully (and stealthily, I might add) ripped Cade’s page out of the 1957 yearbook, folded it twice, and stuck it in my back pocket.

Lissy looked duly shocked that I had violated library property. I rolled my eyes. “So are you going to give me that look or tell me what you found?” I asked.

For a moment, it appeared as though my question was going to prove somewhat rhetorical.

“Fine,” Lissy said.

I waited.

“First, I looked up John Davis. He disappeared from Emory High in the middle of the school day sometime in the fall of 1987, and his bloodied body was found several hours later, at the exact spot where he’d last been seen.”

I pictured the locker room in my mind.

“No one was ever arrested for the murder. His girlfriend was inconsolable.”

At the word “girlfriend,” I looked down at the book, where Cade’s picture had been before I had commandeered it as my own. There, peeking through the ragged edges of the torn page, was a familiar set of blue eyes, a familiar blond ponytail.

I turned the page, and as I read, Lissy did the same over my shoulder.

HELEN LANDON: FALL PRINCESS.

I started flipping the pages, and once I started, I couldn’t stop. Winter Queen, homecoming court, head cheerleader…

Helen Landon was everywhere in this book. And, I was convinced, she was evil.

“1957,” I told Lissy. “Tad Bradford. Helen Landon. Cade…” I trailed off, realizing I didn’t know Cade’s last name. “I need to know what happened.”

“Yes, Your Highness,” Lissy said.

She was getting brave. Good for her.

“Thanks,” I said.

Lissy balked for a moment, then blew a wayward strand of brown hair out of her face. “You’re welcome.”

I closed the book on Helen Landon and followed Lissy to the newspaper archives, and in perfect respect of the “no scenes” rule, neither one of us said a single word.

17

Payback, Part 2

Apparently, I’m not the only bitch.

I wasn’t surprised when we managed to pull up the article on Tad Bradford. The newspaper writer referred to him as an “upstanding young man.” The irony wasn’t lost on me as I remembered all I’d seen of said young man beating up on anyone and everyone who was smaller, weaker, and poorer than he was and cheating on his girlfriend.

Needless to say, Tad Bradford was not my favorite person. And I couldn’t help but notice that he had a stupid name.

Tad’s body had been found just outside the school. He’d been stabbed. Both the suspect (one Cade Kent) and the victim’s girlfriend (another upstanding young citizen, Miss Helen Landon) were missing. The reporter never came out and said it, but it was strongly insinuated that Cade had somehow abducted Helen and run for the border.

“This is how it started,” I said, more for Lissy’s benefit than my own. “With Tad and Helen and Cade.”

“Your Cade?”

I paused for a few seconds too long. “He’s not my Cade.”

Lissy gave me a look, which I ignored. “Helen and Tad were the golden children. She was the homecoming queen; he was the quarterback. They both came from wealthy families….”

“They were upstanding young citizens,” Lissy finished for me, dryly. She knew as well as I did that the pretty, shiny people of the world weren’t exactly known for their kindness in the face of adversity. In fact, most of the time, they were the adversity.

“And then there’s Cade.”

“Your Cade.”

“I could have sworn my lips were moving,” I said, and I tapped my chin thoughtfully with my finger. “Yes, yes they were, which seems to indicate—tell me if I’m wrong here—that I was talking. And when I talk…”

“Yes?” Lissy gave me another look, marginally less attractive than the first.

“You listen.” At her “whatever” expression, I continued. “Cade was the bad boy. The rebel. He had it rough—no money, big family, dad in jail, that kind of thing.” As I talked, the details became clearer and clearer in my mind. It was weird—I’d seen the past, and I’d read about it in the newspaper, and now I just knew. “Cade had it for Helen,” I said. “Bad.”

“Methinks I sense a love triangle coming on here,” Lissy said.

I nodded. “It wasn’t much of a triangle, not at first, but then Tad, upstanding young man that he was, started fooling around a bit, and Helen…”

Blond ponytail, sickening smile.

“…Helen didn’t like that at all. And so she brought Cade into it. She got her claws into him, and then boom, Cade and Tad were fighting.”

How many times had I seen the fight playing out against the backdrop of my mind?

“Tad started it. He came after Cade.”

“And Cade stabbed him?” Lissy asked.

I couldn’t imagine Cade, my Cade (I blamed Lissy for making me think of him that way), pulling a knife on someone.

“So Tad dies,” Lissy said. “And Helen and Cade disappear. Everyone figures they’ve run off, but really they get stuck in some sort of freaky time loop….”

I waited.

“That’s about all I’ve got,” Lissy said.

I sighed. “We could so use a Truth Seer right now,” I muttered. Had this whole debacle been a movie, Lexie would have popped out of nowhere right about then, but thankfully, my life hadn’t become that predictable—yet.

“But what does Tad have to do with John Davis?” Lissy asked.

I didn’t need to compare the two newspaper articles, but I did anyway. “Same wounds,” I said. “Same high school.” I thought of my visions, and Lissy, with one squinty look at my aura, plucked the thought from my head.

“Cade,” she said. “Whatever he did to Tad, he did to John Davis.”

“And not just John Davis,” I said. “Look at the dates on these papers. October 19, 1957. October 19, 1987.”

It didn’t take us long to find the remaining two boys from my vision. Teddy Call, a basketball hottie with dark hair, blue eyes, and a hell of a left hook, had died on October 19, 1967; Joseph Amity a decade after that.

“Ten-to-one odds says there’s another one from ’97,” Lissy said.

I made the executive decision that we didn’t need to look for the proof. Every decade, on the same day, like clockwork, a popular, good-looking, upstanding young man died.

“He’s the one,” Cade had told me, looking at Brock.

Brock, who hated it when any other guy looked my way.

Brock, whose tongue had taken up temporary residence in my best friend’s mouth.

Brock, who had told me he loved me the day before.

“It’s Brock.” When I said the words out loud, they became real.

“What’s Brock?”

I got the sense that Lissy was deliberately playing dumb.

“He’s the one.” I repeated Cade’s words. “Lissy, think. Once every ten years, the hottest guy in school disappears, leaving behind a super hot girlfriend who sobs when he’s found dead.” I paused. “Who’s the hottest guy at our school?”

“Brock.” If Lissy had been a little more with it, she would have known not to answer so quickly when she was talking to the girlfriend of the guy in question, but at this exact moment, I didn’t care.

“And what’s tomorrow’s date?” I threw out the next question, even though it was the one whose answer I least wanted to hear myself.

“October 19,” Lissy said. “2007.”

So now I knew. I knew the meaning behind Cade’s cryptic warnings. I knew what the fists I’d seen flying meant. I knew that in less than twenty-four hours, my boyfriend was going to become victim number six, unless I could figure out how exactly this was happening, and why Cade was killing these guys when I could tell just by looking at him that it was the last thing he ever wanted to do.

Our library trip had provided me with plenty of information. Great, mystery more or less solved, but the one thing it hadn’t given me was a single clue as to how to stop it.

“You know, right about now, I really could use some direction,” I said out loud, and at that exact moment, my life decided to become a full-out movie drama.

“Direction!”

It was just one word, but despite that fact (or maybe because of it), I knew exactly who I would find standing behind me when I turned around.

“Grams,” Lissy said, sounding about as thrilled as I was.

“Come,” the grandmother in question said, sticking to her one-word commands.

Lissy shrugged. “At this point,” she said, “why not?”

I had at least three dozen answers to that question, but Caroline Nowly stopped me in my tracks.

“There are answers to your questions,” she said, “whatever they may be. I don’t know what you’ve gotten yourselves into, dearlings, but there are things you should read.” She paused. “Things you should know. The First Seer does not take visitations lightly, and neither do I.”

I looked at Lissy, and the silent question passed between us. How had her grandmother known about my dreams?

“You made me promise not to tell Lissy,” a cheerful voice said next to me. “You didn’t say anything about not telling Grams.”

I tried to glare at her and failed miserably. It was certifiably impossible to glare at Lexie James.

“I thought that was implied,” I said under my breath. “And I thought I told you to stay out of this.”

“No,” Lexie said, still smiling. “You didn’t. You just stopped talking to me and stopped picking me up from school and whatnot.”

Obviously, from her tone of voice, Lexie hadn’t taken any offense.

“So I figured you were trying to keep me out of it, which meant that it was dangerous, which meant that you needed help, which meant…” Instead of finishing her extraordinarily long run-on sentence, Lexie gestured toward Grams.

“You’re still staying out of it,” I told Lexie, in my best “I rule the school” voice.

Lexie batted her eyelashes angelically. Beside me, Lissy groaned.

“Come,” Grams said for the second time. “It’s time I gave you girls your books.”

I glanced at Lissy first, then at Lexie.

“Our books?”

Our exit from the library was most definitely what I would define as scene causing. Caroline “I Always Wear a Muumuu” Nowly was utterly incapable of stealth. As I drove on autopilot to Lissy’s house (apparently, good old Grams had been preparing for this day), I fiddled with the radio controls, trying not to think about the fact that, though our trip to the library had been as much of a success as I could have hoped for, it had objectively (according to the rules I had outlined) been a dismal failure.

Caroline Nowly, in addition to being the most conspicuous person ever born, was incapable of speaking in anything short of a booming yell. By the time we’d left the library, everyone within a thirty-mile radius had heard me referred to as a dearling. Talk about scenes.

Lexie may have been riding in her grandmother’s car, but she was so totally with Lissy and me in spirit. She’d never stopped smiling, and I knew better than to think that Miss All Sight, All the Time didn’t have a plan of her own.

And now, I was on my way to the James residence to get a book. Like there weren’t enough of those at the library. And yet, despite myself, I was intrigued. My skin hummed as I drove closer and closer to the house, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was standing on the edge of something bigger than big.

Three girls holding hands over an open grave.

The oldest, hair dark like their mother’s, staring off into the distance; the youngest, an almost comically solemn expression on her pixie face. The middle sister’s expression fell somewhere between the other two, and somehow, it seemed too big for her face.

She totally needed to practice that look in the mirror.

Pink. Purple. Blue.

I put the car in park, checked my reflection in the rearview mirror, and unbuckled my seat belt. It was the unflattering facial expression on the middle sister’s face that clued me in.

I swear, I thought, if that little book tells me that those three girls are Lissy, Lexie, and me, and that the grave was Shannon’s…

I didn’t have time to complete the thought. Brock Phillips, boyfriend extraordinaire /lip-cheater, was standing in the driveway, and all of a sudden, I had much bigger things to worry about.

18

Possession

Possession is nine-tenths of girl law.

“Brock.” Lissy spoke his name before I had the chance, and her eyes did this fluttery thing they always did when she saw his aura. For the record, watching someone who may or may not have been your younger sister in an extremely irritating former life aura-flirting with your questionably unfaithful boyfriend? Not my idea of a good time.

“Hey,” Brock said. The first time he’d met Lissy, he’d turned on the charm, let the good-old-boy smile speak on his behalf. I couldn’t help but think of Fuchsia and wish that my boyfriend were a little less charming. Then again, if he’d been less than the popularity god that he was, would I have dated him in the first place?

“Hey, Lilah,” Brock said. There was something in his voice that I didn’t quite recognize. It wasn’t his puppy-dog tone from the day before, when he’d been trying to make things up to me. It wasn’t his “you’re hot” voice, which he used more to remind other people of that fact than to impart the message onto me. It was different.

“What’s going on?” I asked, keeping my voice as light and flirty as I could given the circumstances (and by “circumstances,” I mean the fact that Caroline Nowly, her muumuu, and Lissy’s overexuberant younger sister were quickly approaching).

“I had to see you,” Brock said. For a moment, he looked extraordinarily like a shirtless soap-opera star, despite the fact that he was wearing a shirt. It was a good quality to have in a boyfriend, though I was starting to suspect, not the most important one.

I stepped closer to him, lowering my voice in the hope that maybe, just maybe, Caroline Nowly would let us be and wouldn’t order Brock to “come” or “leave” or, I don’t know, “jump” or “wash” or whatever she wanted him to do.

“You were so mad about the thing with Fuchsia, and some of the guys were talking, and…”

His expression was serious—not good. Neither was the tension in his neck, or (from what I could gather from the expression on Lissy’s face) the movement of his aura.

“Is there another guy?” Brock blurted out.

“What?” I asked, truly shocked. Somehow, he’d arrived at the conclusion that I’d cheated on him? An eye for an eye kind of thing?

“Another guy,” Brock said, and in that moment, the expression on his face went from adorable puppy-dog concern to macho, offended male bravado. I could see the air around him cracking, the cracks jumping onto his skin like sparks from a flame.

This was so not a good sign.

“Lilah, baby, just because of that little thing with me and Fuchsia, you start seeing another guy?” Brock shook his head. “Baby, you can’t do that to me.”

He’d never called me “baby” so much in his life. It was almost as disturbing as the fact that he’d announced his infidelity to our entire audience (aka three generations of Lissy’s family, since her mother had picked this moment to come stand on the lawn).

“You cheated on Lilah?” Lexie asked, her voice aghast as she came to stand next to me.

Lissy gave him a murderous look. “Forget saving him. Maybe he deserves to die,” she muttered.

Lexie looked thoughtful. “No,” she said. “Probably not, but…” She trailed off. “He’s not really going to die, is he?”

The air around Brock was moving, breaking. Shards of this moment were dropping to the ground, and the visual surrounding his body—this time, this place—was slowly peeling away.

“You’re my girl, Lilah. Mine.”

Once upon a time, he’d said those exact words to me, and then our lips had touched for the very first time, and I’d fallen seriously in like with the guy every girl wanted.

The guy who ruled the school, as much as any male could.

The king to what I could only presume would be my eventual homecoming queen.

“Who is he, Lilah? What’s his name? Where did you meet him?”

“Are you deranged?” I asked, my voice low and dangerous. “Seriously, were you totally dropped on your head as a young child? Or, I don’t know, severely electrocuted in the past hour and a half? Because if you’re not suffering from some kind of trauma-induced psychological condition right now, then I can say with a pretty high degree of certainty that the little hamsters on the wheel in your brain just died and the wheel stopped spinning.”

When I get riled, sometimes I start talking in metaphors that don’t make much sense. It’s an impulse I’d learned to curb by the time I was ten, but now I was on a roll, and I couldn’t seem to stop myself. All of the control I’d mastered, all of the rules I’d played by, all of the rules I’d forced everyone else to play by, were melting away. And all that was left was me.

And I was, quite honestly, royally pissed off.

“You cheated on me,” I said, and for once, I didn’t care who heard it. “And hello! You did it with my best friend. And then you told me you loved me, like that would make it all better. And now? Now you’re accusing me of being with another guy? What is wrong with you?”

My words fell on completely deaf ears.

“Who is he?”

Blackness broke through the cracks in the air. It surrounded Brock, and wisps of eerie darkness crept toward me, caressing my skin, absorbing my anger until I wasn’t sure why I was yelling.

“Who is he?” Brock asked again, only this time, the eyes looking out at me weren’t Brock’s. Even when he was jealous, even when he was stupid, even when he was jamming his tongue gracelessly down my throat, Brock had never looked at me like that. Pure, raw ownership emanated from his very being. He looked arrogant. Self-assured. Angry.

He looked like Tad Bradford wearing a Brock mask.

“Who. Is. He.”

It was a demand this time, not a question, and the air around me began to crack as well. Memories that weren’t mine—thoughts, desires, emotions that weren’t mine—flooded my body.

Make him pay. Make him pay. Make him pay.

“His name is Cade,” I said, and the instant his name left my mouth, there he was, standing beside me, the air quivering with his presence. I glanced at Brock/Tad, and his jaw tightened in anger.

“Where is he?” he asked. “Everyone knows better than to mess with my girl.”

“She’s not yours.” Lexie’s voice was soft but commanding. “She hasn’t been yours for a very long time.” She hooked her hand through Lissy’s. “She’s ours.”

Brock let out an inhuman growl, and another foreign thought replaced the chorus of “make him pay” playing in my head.

Save Meara. Save Meara. Save Meara.

The feeling—utter helplessness, terror, sadness—crept up my back like a bug with a mind of its own. My heart pounded, even as the first voice broke its way back into my thoughts.

Make him pay. Make him pay. He is yours. Make him pay.

The thoughts battled in my head, emotions that weren’t entirely mine and weren’t entirely not mine warring for control of my body. I thought of Brock with Fuchsia and how he was as much to blame as she was, and I wanted nothing more than to lead Brock straight to Cade. Cade, who had kissed me. Cade, who knew I was out of his league. But then there was Lexie, standing there, claiming me in a way that no one ever had before, and Brock, threatening that, threatening the one person I’d sworn to protect.

Make him pay. Save Meara. Make him—save her—he is—she is—yours.

A hand on the back of my neck banished the thoughts. The light pressure made my spine tingle in a far less creepy way, and as my entire body warmed to Cade’s touch, my mind calmed.

“Cade.” I whispered his name even as I tried not to, and somewhere inside me, my defenses broke down.

I could feel his lips on mine, the day we’d barely kissed.

I could feel him watching over me as I slept.

I could hear him calling me Princess, see him kneeling beside me in the library.

Brock or Tad or whoever was speaking with my boyfriend’s lips was right. There was someone else, his name was Cade, and standing there, raw and confused and on the cusp of something so dangerous I could feel the air popping with memories of death and loss, I had to admit that there was a distinct possibility that I was in love with him.

Now my life really was a bad movie. There was about a ninety percent chance my boyfriend was possessed, I was quite possibly in love with a ghost (who had somehow killed the possessor of my boyfriend), and I realized that murders featured on the front page of an October 19 newspaper had to have been committed sometime before then.

Say, for instance, October 18. Today.

“You,” Brock growled. At first, I thought he was yelling at Lexie again, or at me, but when I saw his gaze connect with Cade’s, I knew that, for the time being, Lexie was safe. Brock had a new target.

“You can see him?” I asked Brock, and only years of practice keeping my cool in high-pressure situations allowed me to keep my voice steady and even.

“She’s my girl,” Brock told Cade.

Cade’s hand squeezed my shoulder. “Princess?” he whispered under his breath, his eyes still on Brock. “I’m sorry.”

I didn’t get a chance to ask him what he was sorry for, because he turned his attention to Brock. “You don’t want to fight me,” he said, and only I heard the pleading tone in his voice.

Brock took a step forward, power and anger clear in his movements. He did want to fight, and his mouth only confirmed the message his body was sending. “You should have left Helen alone.”

Those, apparently, were the magic words.

Make him pay. He is mine.

The voice came from outside my head this time, and before I could even process what it had said, the air around me shattered into a thousand pieces, and the hole left in the fabric of space and time swallowed Brock whole.

I clung to Cade for a moment longer. “No,” I said. “Don’t.”

He stiffened, his eyes darkening with pain. “I’m sorry, Princess,” he said. “I’m so, so sorry.”

And then he was gone, back to the time and place where I’d first seen him fight. I knew in a way that was beyond knowing that Brock was there, too, and that Helen, perky, blond, evil Helen, was watching. Smiling.

My mouth set in a determined line, I reached blindly for my back pocket.

“What are you doing?” Lexie asked, the same moment that Lissy verbally noticed Brock and Cade’s disappearances. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Lissy’s mother move forward and saw Grams hold her back.

I carefully unfolded the picture I’d stolen from the library what seemed like a million years ago (actual time: more like half an hour, tops). It was creased where I’d folded it, but the image was clear: Cade, his face turned away from the camera, his hands shoved into the pockets of his jeans.

“If that Helen chick thinks that she’s going to use my boy to kill my…other boy, she’s got another thing coming,” I growled. And not wanting to give Lexie any more warning than that, I braced the picture against my legs and pressed my fingertips to it. I willed my mind to become one with the photograph, forced myself to find that time, that place.

“Lilah, what are you doing?” Lexie asked again.

I was moving on instinct, and beside me Lissy did the same. She came out of her body as she’d done the night this all started with Kissler in the burning classroom, and she thrust one astral hand toward me, and one toward Lexie.

“She needed you. You need them.”

I pushed the voice out of my head and ignored Lissy’s aura aerobics. I stared at the picture. I thought of everything I’d seen—the flying fists, the shiny blond ponytail, John Davis and Tad Bradford, the others. Brock. Cade. I pressed my hands flat against the picture, an unseen force guiding my motions, and in one jarring blink of an eye, the picture absorbed me whole.

Air cracking. Black everywhere.

Pink. Purple. Blue.

“I don’t want to fight you.”

“Then you should have left Helen alone.”

Brock and Cade circled each other, and beside them, Helen Landon smiled and played with the ring on her left hand. “I just love this part!” she said.

“Oh really?” I asked, stepping forward and interrupting her little monologue. “Because honestly, I think it’s getting a little old.”

Her blue eyes opened wide, and as she processed the fact that I’d crashed her little perpetual death party, Brock threw himself at Cade, and the fight began.

19

Competition

If you acknowledge them as worthy competition,

you just might lose.

For three or four seconds, I stood there, watching the two of them. Their bodies collided, and the sound was something akin to crunching gravel crushed slowly under a solid steel heel. It was sickening and low, and I felt it in my flesh as Brock’s nearly anvil-shaped fist moved toward Cade’s face.

“Lilah? Where are you? Are you okay?”

I recognized Lexie’s voice inside my head. I didn’t have time to wonder what it was doing there before a second mind-voice chimed in.

“You’re gone, but traces of your aura are still here. I bound you to us.”

Huh. So it was sort of like an aura phone—their minds to mine, connected by aura streams that only Lissy could see.

Back in the real world (okay, perhaps “real” is an overstatement…back in the time-loop world of the photo I’d touched) Cade dodged Brock’s blow, but a left hook immediately followed, and Brock’s fist connected with Cade’s jaw.

“Stop it,” I ordered, moving forward and forcing Lissy and Lexie’s voices back in my head. “Both of you stop it, right now.”

Brock should have recognized the voice I was using. It was my “stop it if you ever want to get any ever again” voice. My “stop it before I hit you where it hurts” voice. It was the voice of the Ice Queen; the voice of a person who didn’t know the meaning of the word “mercy.” And it was having absolutely no effect.

“You’re not supposed to be here.” Helen’s bottom lip stuck out in an exaggerated pout.

I got the distinct feeling that someone didn’t play well with others, especially other girls. Well, that officially made two of us.

“I don’t follow rules,” I said, keeping my voice pleasant, the deadly smile never leaving my face. “I make them.”

With those (over) confident words, I swung my gaze away from Helen and back to the boys, who had yet to yield to my order to cease their neanderthalean altercation. “And right now, rule number one is that everyone is going to keep their fists”—and knives, I added silently—“to themselves.”

“They can’t hear you,” Helen said, a smile replacing the pout. “I don’t know why you’re here, but they’re here for me.”

I didn’t dignify that claim with a response. I had no idea what magical mojo she was pulling here, but I did know that, Fuchsia incident aside, Brock was mine, and there was no question in my mind about Cade.

“They’re both such good kissers,” Helen continued. “And they’re here for me.”

It took me a second to understand what she was saying, and then a vision hit me.

Fuchsia and Brock in a room. Fuchsia running her hands through Brock’s hair, flirty as ever. Fuchsia, leaning in and hesitating for just the smallest second before the kiss. Helen in the room. Helen in Fuchsia’s body. Fuchsia kissing Brock. Helen kissing Brock.

It took me a moment to process what I’d seen. Helen had been there—inside Fuchsia’s body—when Fuchsia had kissed Brock. And maybe Fuchsia would have done it anyway—she was certainly thinking about it—but maybe she wouldn’t have.

I’d completely destroyed her, and there was a slight chance that her skankiness was mystically fueled.

“Such good kissers,” Helen said again, twirling the ring around her finger.

I’d come here to stop this, and now, more than ever, I was determined to do so.

“Stop it,” I said again, louder this time.

“It may be some kind of magical barrier. Maybe they can’t hear you.”

Thank you, Captain Obvious (aka Lissy James).

“Definitely a magical barrier. They can’t hear you.”

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that the psychic aura connection went both ways. Lissy and Lexie were picking up on my thoughts, seeing the scene through my eyes.

“You may as well go home,” Helen said. “He’s mine now.”

Her eyes were on Brock, hungry.

I snorted. “You think you’re the first one who’s tried to take him?” I asked. “Puh-lease. Compared to the world I live in, you’re nothing. That little thing you pulled in Fuchsia’s body? So what? You think she hasn’t tried to work her way up to it a million times before? You think there aren’t a dozen girls out there, waiting for the second they can take what I have? Do you think,” I gritted out, “that I somehow don’t know that? That I’m not ready for it, for you?”

“The boys are here for me.”

She was a broken record. Mine. Mine. Mine. Like I’d never come up against that before.

“News flash, blondie. Maybe in your time, you were something special, but those clothes, that hair, and that waistline? You’re out of style, out of fashion, and right now, totally out of luck.” I advanced toward the fight, determined to put a stop to it if I had to physically come between them.

“Uh-uh-uh,” Helen said, and the moment the sound left her mouth, an invisible force threw me backwards, away from the boys.

“Uhhh…Lilah? Not just an audio barrier.”

“Yeah,” I replied silently. “I got that. Thanks. Any idea how to break it?”

Somewhere in the backmost portion of my mind, I could hear Lexie’s mind-voice going over and over the possibilities, sorting out the truth of her own spoken statements, but the sound was faint.

“I love this part,” Helen said. “Ohhh, look, they’re getting rough!”

Cade’s fist crashed into Brock’s mouth. No knife yet, but given the circumstances, that was somehow less than comforting.

I tried again to reach them, knowing I’d be stopped by the implacable force field of doom but unable to give in, especially to her. To Helen. This time, the barrier lashed out at me before I pressed against it, slashing my skin with violent waves of nearly electric force.

“No interruptions,” Helen decreed. “They have to finish.”

“Finish? Don’t you mean kill each other?” My voice didn’t shake, but inside I was screaming, barely aware of the blood that trickled down my forehead, a souvenir of my last attempt to break up the fight.

“They kill for me.” Now she was gloating. “Don’t you wish they’d kill for you?”

I moved toward her, intent on strangling her with her own supernaturally shiny blond hair.

“Well,” she pressed on, her words holding me to my place with magical force. “Don’t you?”

Apparently, the question wasn’t meant to be rhetorical, and even as I refused to answer her, refused to give in to her even that much, the answer coursed through my veins.

I may be popular, I thought. I may be, nay, I am a little harsh, and yeah, maybe I like being the center of attention. Maybe I like feeling like I matter to even one person, and if that person is someone who matters to everyone else, all the better. Maybe I like to be on top, because I know how much it sucks to be on bottom. Maybe…

I shook my head and cleared it of maybes. Bottom line, if you said I was a completely horrible person, there’s a distinct chance that you wouldn’t be lying. I’m mean, and I’m selfish, and I do whatever I have to do to keep my head above water. I wear the right clothes, and I say the right things, and I live in a world where that is all that matters.

But I am more than just that, and I would never wish this on anyone.

Not Brock, who says he loves me, but doesn’t really know me in any way that matters.

Not Cade, who has done this so many times before.

I wouldn’t even wish something like this on Fuchsia, even if she had been one hundred percent herself during the kiss that shall not be named. Cafeteria exile was one thing—death and destruction were completely another, a subtlety that had been somehow lost on my blond companion.

“No.” I spoke the word aloud, trying to block out the sounds of the fight, trying not to see the blade that had just appeared in Brock’s hand.

Brock’s, not Cade’s.

“No,” I repeated. “I don’t wish they were fighting for me. I don’t want that.”

Helen twirled the end of her ponytail around one finger and smiled at me coyly. “It’s just as well,” she said. “They’re not fighting for you. They’re fighting for me.”

“They’re not fighting for you. They don’t know you.”

My words fell on deaf ears.

“They don’t care about you.”

She responded to that with a smile that, had it been audible, would have sounded something like “I can’t hear you, la la la la la.”

“Try talking about her boyfriend. I don’t think she’ll like that very much.”

I accepted Lexie’s silent advice the moment I received it. “Tad didn’t care about you.”

This time, I had Helen’s full attention. “He died for me.”

I shrugged off her claim as if it were completely trivial. “Was that before or after he repeatedly cheated on you?” I paused for a microsecond. “Oh? After? Or maybe before and after? Maybe good old Tad is doing the horizontal hokeypokey with some ghost chick as we speak?”

“He died for me.”

I was sensing a mantra here, and everyone knows teenage-girl mantras are a sign of weakness. I continued pressing her while trying to pretend that Brock and Cade weren’t circling each other, and that Brock wasn’t holding the blade loosely in his right hand. I knew that Cade would get it away from him, knew that in the end, Cade would be the one with the knife, the one to live—if you could call being stuck here, in this moment, living.

“Tad didn’t care about you enough to keep his lips to himself.” I lashed out at Helen, giving voice to my own well-suppressed feelings. My lips curled into a sneer as I threw everything I had at Helen, hoping it hurt her the way it would have hurt me. “Does it make the poor itty-bitty blond girl feel better that Tad cared enough about her to fight Cade?”

Her hand left her hair and went to the ring on her index finger. Inside the force field, Cade sidestepped the knife, and it caught only the tip of his skin, leaving an angry red line in its wake.

“Keep her talking. Whatever’s going on with the boys, she’s at the center of it. As long as her attention’s on you, it’s not on them. The show can’t finish without its director.”

“Lexie?” I silently sought verification of Lissy’s mind-words, and the instant Lexie gave it, I continued my harassment of the ghost girl.

“News flash, brainiac,” I said, going for the jugular with the same lack of mercy she was showing the boys. “Tad would have fought Cade for walking down the street on the wrong side of town. He would have fought Cade over the last slice of pizza.” I shook my head in mock pity. “Tad would have fought Cade over any other girl.”

The unspoken words dripped from my voice. You aren’t special. This isn’t about you. You. Are. Nothing.

For a moment, Helen’s lips trembled, but then she thrust out her chin and turned her attention back to the fight. While we’d been talking, Cade had taken the knife from Brock, the way I’d known he would. He held it in his left hand. The scene was all too familiar.

“So now Cade’ll kill Brock,” I said, forcing my voice to sound neutral, light. “And you’ll have your fix, for what? Another ten years? And then ten years from now, you’ll realize again that no one loves you, that no one has ever loved you, and that when you disappeared from the real world into whatever magical, mystical time warp this place is, no one missed you at all.” I tilted my head to the side. “Did you know that Tad had a whole spread in the yearbook, and they didn’t even mention your name? That people think you took off for the border with Cade? That somebody else won prom queen because you weren’t there to win it?”

I paused. “Do you even realize that it’s not your school anymore? That if you came there now, you wouldn’t be on the homecoming court, and the boys wouldn’t look twice at you, and that, if you were lucky, maybe I’d take pity on you and ask the other girls to stop writing things about your uneven breasts and your presumably loose legs on the bathroom walls?”

I paused again. “Do you even realize that without magic, they’d choose me?”

I’d had years of practice sounding more confident than I felt, and it was paying off. Big time.

Helen whipped her head around. “You?” she sniffed. “You think you’re so pretty. So special.”

I didn’t. Not really, but she didn’t need to know that. No one did.

“I’m beautiful,” Helen said. “I am the girl men die for. I am the one who starts wars.”

“And you have a spot right here on your chin.” I pointed daintily with my middle finger.

“I am Helen.”

Like this was news. “Sure, you’re Helen,” I said. “Allow me to not give a rat’s ass. In my world, you’re nothing. In your world, the one you left to come here, you’re nothing. For all anyone else knows, you died, and all that happened was that the next girl in line, the one you thought was your friend? She was so traumatized by your disappearance that it was all she could do to keep up appearances, take over your spot on the cheerleading squad, date all the boys, and rule in your absence.”

I didn’t know for sure if that had happened, but I could easily imagine what Fuchsia would do if I disappeared off the face of the earth tonight.

“I am Helen. My beauty is unsurpassed.” Her voice shook. Beside us, the fight continued.

“Helen of Troy.” Lissy’s voice rang out in my head, throwing off my game by the smallest of margins. I avoided mentally blasting her, however, because all of a sudden, Psycho Chick’s claim of identity took on new meaning.

The face that launched a thousand ships. The woman men had died for. The one who had started a war and sunk an empire.

Suddenly, I was overcome with memories: of Trojans and knights, of love and betrayal and beauty. Of power. Cleopatra. Helen of Troy. Guinevere and Lancelot, Morgan and Arthur.

And here, amidst the gorgeous, flawless eyes that stared back at me, among the perfect complexions, the bloodshed, and the even, symmetrical features, I saw it. The ring: slender and sleek, with an insignia in a language so ancient I doubted any of the wearers could understand it.

But I did. In that moment, that individual instant in time, my mind connected with Lissy’s and Lexie’s, and I saw things through another set of eyes: color rose off my body in waves, pale purple lights that streamed off at odd angles. I saw the past in the air, the future on the tips of my eyelashes, and like a person putting on contacts for the first time, I saw everything so incredibly clearly.

I saw the truth.

“You see.”

This time, it wasn’t Lissy’s voice, or Lexie’s. It was Shannon’s, that First Seer whose infinitely blessed eyes I had seen through just now, for the briefest period of time. And then, that ultimate clarity, that vision, was gone, and Helen, Brock, Cade, and the knife melted back into place as if no time had passed at all.

“I am Helen. I am unequaled.”

“Take off the ring and say that.” The challenge was out of my mouth before my brain had completely configured it. I’d seen the ring in my visions: seen it on her finger from day one, seen it a moment ago on dozens of women throughout history.

“Take off that ring and tell me they love you,” I said. “Take off the ring, and let them choose.” I arched one eyebrow. “Or are you afraid that without it, you’re nothing? That even here, you’re nothing more than a memory that didn’t even get a memorial in the yearbook: the prom queen that wasn’t, the girl who used to be It.”

“I’m not afraid of you,” she said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. “They will choose me. I am beautiful. I am Helen.”

I stepped forward, and feeling Lissy and Lexie with me, their energy feeding into my body through the aura strings I’d glimpsed with Shannon’s eyes, I moved with lightning-quick speed, and before I knew it, my hand was on the ring. Helen blinked, and the force field cracked audibly as she turned her attention to me.

Invisible hands clawed at me, but I held tight to the ring.

“Platinum,” I observed out loud, getting a better look at it. “Why am I not surprised?”

“I am Helen. I am—”

“Nothing,” I said. “I am Lilah, and I don’t need a ring to make boys like me. They fall at my feet. They shove each other to get a better look at my butt.”

They’ve been my lifeline since I was ten years old, I thought, but I didn’t dwell on it.

“They may kiss you,” I continued, “but they love me.”

Did they? I didn’t let the question show on my face.

Helen said nothing.

“You may have been something special back in the day,” I told her. “You may wear a platinum ring that your boyfriend gave you once upon a time, but I am Platinum. I’m It, and these days, Emory High is my school.”

Beneath my touch, the ring heated up, changing colors as it did in bursts of blue, pink, and purple, and finally black before dissolving to nothingness under my touch.

Almost instantly, the boys stopped fighting. The blade dropped from Cade’s hand and clattered to the floor, hitting the concrete beneath their feet.

“Lilah?” Brock said, and it was him again. Tad Bradford was gone from his face.

“Helen?”

Cade’s words cut into me. He’d said her name, not mine. She smiled at me, and for the briefest second, the ring I’d destroyed moments before began to piece itself together around her finger.

“Cade.” I said his name, lowering myself by showing that I cared, that his actions could affect me.

“Princess?” At his words, the ring began to dissolve once more.

“Cade.” I said his name again, not bothering to temper my voice, my emotions.

Like the eyes of a patient waking up from a coma, his eyes began, slowly, to clear.

“Lilah.”

A moment later, he turned back to Helen. Her hair, vibrant, white blond a moment before, was a more ordinary honey color now. Her eyes were no longer crystalline. Her lips pulled down into a more than marginally unattractive frown.

“You know, she should really practice those expressions in the—”

“Lexie, shhhhh!”

Ignoring the sisterly conversation in my head, I turned back to Helen.

She looked at me, her eyes wide and hateful, and in an odd way, almost sad. “You wanted them,” she said. “Now they’re yours.”

The air around her cracked, and before I could blink, she’d disappeared entirely: no more blond ponytail, no more “I am Helen” speeches, no more female competition in the room. Life was as it should be, except that the moment she disappeared, the ring of Helen of Troy reappeared on my finger, and Brock picked up the blade on the ground and turned back to Cade.

“You should have left Lilah alone.”

20

Hurt

Once you feel it,

it’s real.

Great. Now they were fighting over me. Because that was so much better than them fighting over a wannabe Helen. I could feel the ring changing me. My hair grew in length and thickness until it broke free from its ponytail and flowed freely to my waist. My eyes, catlike to begin with, widened and tilted up at the edges. My lashes doubled in size, and I could nearly taste the reddening of my own lips.

I was wearing the ring, I was beautiful, and they were fighting over me.

“Seriously, guys. Not. Cool.”

I’d spoken the truth when I’d told Helen I wouldn’t have wished this on anyone. Even now, even with the ring on my finger forcing my heart to race giddily at the sight of the boys’ movements, I didn’t want this.

“I told you Lilah wasn’t evil,” Lexie told Lissy triumphantly. I would have laughed, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the fight in front of me.

“Stop.”

They didn’t heed my command. I tried desperately to pry the ring off my hand, but the moment I touched it, it burned my fingers.

“If you don’t stop this, I’ll never talk to either of you ever again.” Since Brock wasn’t much of a talker, I added to the threat. “I won’t make out with you either, Brock.”

I may as well have been filing my nails. They ignored me, ignored my pleas, and under the influence of the ring that clung to my finger, Brock lunged at Cade.

“You don’t want to do this,” Cade said. “I’ve been here before. I’ve done this before. You won’t win. You can’t, and when you lose, you’ll die.”

“No, he won’t,” I burst out. “No one is going to die.”

“He touched you,” Brock said, certainty in his voice. “That’s why you’ve been so weird lately. God, Lilah, have you seen the way he looks at you? The way you look at him?”

There was hurt in Brock’s voice, the kind of hurt I’d felt the day before, and it didn’t bring me any satisfaction. I didn’t—couldn’t—love him, but I didn’t want to hurt him. Still, I couldn’t deny that the Sight had changed me, and that Cade had been a large part of that.

“What kind of slut are you?”

Brock’s words stung me. He was hurt, and he was lashing out, and I knew it, but I was still tempted, very briefly, to take the knife from him bodily and castrate him myself. Luckily for Brock, the hair on the back of my neck still stood on end with the wrongness of this place, this moment of frozen time that should never have happened. And besides, I had to consider that, given the freaky ring aspect of the whole thing, Brock might not have had control over what he was saying, and castration may have therefore been a wee bit harsh.

“Put the knife down, Brock,” I said. “This room, this place, this ring—” I held up my finger mutinously. “It’s getting to you.” I forced my expression to soften to something between a puppy-dog smile and a come-hither invitation. “Let’s go home.”

Brock’s grip on the knife tightened, and his face twitched, fighting against something I didn’t understand.

The knife inched toward Cade.

“Cade, please.” I turned my plea toward the ghost boy. My ghost boy. “Don’t let him hurt you. Don’t hurt him.”

“He cheated on you,” Cade said softly. “He said horrible things to you just now.”

Great. So my chivalrous ghost was going to defend my honor with my still possibly mystically influenced boyfriend.

“Cade.” I paused. “Ghost Boy.” My lips curled up even as my eyes filled with tears I hadn’t seen coming at all. “Figment of my imagination, pain in my ass.” I looked him in the eye. “Please.”

He nodded slightly, and I knew that he wouldn’t fight Brock, that should the knife end up in his hand, things would end without (further) bloodshed. The ring was on my finger now, not Helen’s, and Cade was resisting—would continue to resist—its thrall. For me.

“Brock?” My voice was little, my eyes still on Cade.

Brock looked back at me, torn. “Lilah, baby, I love you. I’ve got to. Don’t you see? If I get rid of him…”

“No, Brock.”

“He touched you.”

There it was again—a chance to deny it. A chance to tell Brock that nothing had ever happened. A chance to get the knife out of his hand. I clawed at the ring on my finger, but it didn’t budge.

“He touched you.”

The moment was passing, and all I could think about was that if Cade didn’t fight back, if this ring really did intend for blood to be shed here today, my ghost boy might become a ghost for real.

Blood-streaked flesh, still on the floor.

He could die.

“He didn’t touch me.” I said the words calmly. Right now, my denying everything was Cade’s best chance at survival. As I spoke, as I verbally gave up what I wanted most, the ring around my finger flickered in and out of existence like a lightbulb on its last leg. “Do you think I’d let him touch me?” I asked Brock, forcing myself to convince him.

Brock tilted his head to the side, taking in my claim. I was, all things said and done, an excellent liar. Cade didn’t move, but somehow he still managed to flinch at my words.

I had to get the knife away from Brock. I had to save Cade. Forget the fact that I had no idea where (or more to the point, when) he would go once I saved him, I had to do it. I’d seen too many bodies lying dead in this spot, and there was pretty much no fury of emotion like a quarterback scorned. Especially a quarterback under the control of a ring that had once belonged to Helen of Troy.

“There’s nothing going on between us, Brock.”

Another nonflinchy flinch from Cade; another flicker from the ring on my finger.

“He’s nothing to me.”

Another strip peeled slowly off my heart.

I stepped forward and took Brock’s hand, thinking I’d have a chance to right things with Cade the moment I got the knife away from Brock. I pressed my cheek against Brock’s and repeated the words, willing him to hand me the knife.

Cade, Cade, Cade beat my heart.

“He’s nothing,” I said again, putting the haughty tone Brock recognized all too well in my voice, which I then lowered to a purr, resting my head on his shoulder. “I love you.”

The ring bleeped out then, and it didn’t come back. For the second time, the knife fell to the floor.

Cade nodded—whether with understanding of the lie or acceptance of it as truth, I couldn’t tell—and the next moment, everything went black.

Pink. Purple. Blue.

The colors rose from nothingness, blurring into and out of my field of vision, fading finally to a white so bright it could only mean one thing.

“This whole visitation thing?” I said out loud, the words striking my ears surprisingly softly. “Not my cup of tea.”

“You did well, my daughter. You’ve never traveled to the past before.”

“Yeah, well, I’m kind of new at seeing it, too. What can I say? I’m a quick learner.”

“Are you?” Her question challenged me. How had I gotten used to my Sight so quickly? Was I really learning, or was I…remembering?

I lifted my eyes to meet Shannon’s and thought of what it had felt like to see through her eyes. To know through them.

“You do remember,” she said softly. “In your dreams, in your heart.” She touched my temple gently with the side of her hand. “The mind forgets,” she said. “The soul does not.”

Suddenly, the term “old soul” was taking on a whole new meaning. I shook my head. I was a high school junior. I spent my time staying on top and painting my fingernails. How old soulish was that?

“Brianna.”

The sound of the name reminded me of other visions I’d had, and then I remembered what I had done to get the ring off my finger, what I had said to quell Brock’s supernatural jealousy and save Cade from the fate he’d been forced to dole out to others for the past fifty years.

With any luck, he was alive. And, you know, waiting for me in my bedroom at home.

“Cade?” The word came out as a question that got stuck halfway out of my throat. I didn’t know why I was asking her this, except that knowing what she could see, I figured she should know better than anyone what had happened—where Cade and Brock had gone, where I (or at least my body) was now.

“All will be as it has been meant to be.”

There were a few too many linking verbs in that sentence for me to fully parse it given my current state.

“Brock?” I tried a different question.

“All will be as it has been meant to be.”

“Helen? The ring?” It was worth a shot.

“Gone. Neither will bother you again, my daughter. Your will was too strong, the bond too firm, and her essence too pure to fall to the lure of absolute beauty, absolute power.”

The will was mine.

The bond was Lissy’s, tied with her nimble little aura-manipulating hands.

I didn’t need to be told whose essence was pure.

“She is not the only one.” Shannon lifted the thought from my head and cupped my chin with her hands. “You are more than you give yourself credit for being.”

My whole life, everyone had thought just the opposite.

“He will see you for who you truly are.”

“Who?” I asked, letting the question hang in the air between us. Was she talking about Brock, who, as it turned out, may have actually loved me after all? Cade, who’d appeared out of nowhere and made everything out of nothing?

“The Champion.”

“But who?” I knew better than to take vague for an answer.

“You will see, Brianna.” She smiled then. “You all see. My daughters.”

Blue. Purple. Pink.

“I think she’s waking up.”

“Lilah, my star, are you all right?”

My eyelashes fluttered, and slowly, four faces came into focus.

Lexie’s boasted a lopsided grin, like she couldn’t decide between worry and pure ecstatic joy at the sheer amount of Sight in the near vicinity. Lissy was, as best as I could tell, looking at my hair and wondering how in the world it had survived time travel and a visitation without frizzing in the least (a secret I will take with me to the grave). Lissy’s mother had her lips pursed slightly, and the back of her hand was on my forehead. And Grams…

Grams was smiling. Beaming, really.

I knew her well enough to know that was never a good sign.

“Uhhhhh…Lilah?”

Brock. In the present, in one piece, and completely and utterly confused. I wondered what he remembered, and without even realizing I was doing it, I reached forward, brushed my hand against his temple, and probed his memory, pulling images from his mind and playing them out against the backdrop of my own.

He remembered coming over here to talk to me about…something.

He remembered seeing me in the driveway and thinking that my breasts looked hot.

He remembered hoping he hadn’t screwed everything up, because he’d wanted me from the first moment he’d seen me.

He vaguely remembered a haiku that involved the phrase “your lips are better.”

And after that, nothing.

Nothing about Helen, nothing about Cade, nothing about the words I’d said to stop the ring’s reign of terror over the male species.

“Brock,” I said gently. “Go home.”

“Okay,” he said, wrinkling his forehead. “Are we okay?”

Once upon a time, I’d despised the word. “Okay” was for losers, Nons, and people without perfect figures.

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re okay.”

Brock leaned forward and gave me a kiss, and as his lips brushed mine, I closed my eyes and thought of Cade and wondered if I’d ever see him again or if Brock and I would ever be anything more than just “okay” again. I pulled away from our kiss, and mumbling his goodbyes, Brock made his way down the driveway, climbed into his car, and drove away.

As he pulled out of sight, Grams (who I couldn’t call Caroline anymore, even in the sanctity of my own mind) took the rest of us inside. There, on the kitchen table, were two leather-bound books. The covers were worn and tattered, the pages uneven.

Grams picked one up and handed it to Lissy. Lissy took in the design on the cover: a starburst over three intersecting circles. She opened it, keeping one suspicious eye on Grams the entire time.

“The Book of Light,” she read.

“You’re not the first to have Aura Vision,” Grams said. “There have been other Aura Seers in our family. This book was theirs, passed down from one to the next.” She froze the question on Lissy’s lips with a stern look. “Now it’s yours.”

Lexie and I locked eyes for a split second, and then Grams held out the second book. To me.

I shot a sympathetic look at Lexie before turning my attention to the design on the book’s cover.

“I’m always the last to get everything,” Lexie moaned, every inch the martyr.

“There’s a reason for that, dearling.”

Lexie, Truth Seer that she was, couldn’t argue with Grams’s words.

“Here,” I said, holding my book out to Lexie. “You can look at mine.”

The symbol on the cover looked strangely familiar, and the book was warm, too warm in my hands. I breathed a small sigh of relief when Lexie took it from me and gingerly opened the cover, her awed smile lighting up her entire face.

“The Book of Remembrance,” she said.

“Let me guess,” I said. “I’m not the first person with retrovision in this family?”

Had I just admitted that they were, by any stretch of the word, family? How completely and utterly bewildering, not to mention disturbing.

“No, child, you’re not.”

I cleared my throat and met Grams’s eyes one last time. “By any chance,” I said evenly, “was one of the other retroseers named Brianna?”

21

The End

All’s well

that ends with something I can work with.

A week later, life was more or less back to normal. Fuchsia was back at my lunch table. In a way, she’d been Helen’s victim as much as the rest of us. Of course, she’d also been microseconds from kissing Brock before Helen had interfered, but still. The way I see it, you keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and in high school, sometimes, one person can be both. If the whole sordid Helen affair had taught me anything, it was that high school betrayals weren’t the end of the world. A single kiss was nothing to kill over, and maybe, just maybe, complete social annihilation was overkill as well. Besides, Fuchsia had been the first person to give me a best friends forever necklace in the fifth grade, when she’d started noticing boys and the boys had started noticing me. She’d invited me to my first slumber party, I’d helped her through her first breakup, and every once in a while, we had a seriously good time over fruit smoothies.

Besides, someone had to put a stop to the rumor that she was pregnant with Pits Ewww’s quadruplets, and it wasn’t like Tracy was rising to the challenge.

So far, Fuchsia had been on her best behavior. She’d even totally apologized for claiming to have made out with Brock, which, in our little code, meant that she’d apologized for going near him in the first place. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever trust her again. I wasn’t even sure if I ever had. But I was willing to deal her in for the next round of “What Would You Choose?” and that had to count for something.

Things with Brock were better too. He was sweeter and more charming than I could ever remember him being. He left flowers at my locker and bought me milkshakes at lunch. He’d (thankfully) given up writing his own poetry, and had actually started downloading famous poems to go with the flowers. It was amazing, really.

He never mentioned the day he’d come to Lissy’s house to find me, and I hadn’t probed his memory again.

As for Cade, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to go back to the library. Part of me was afraid to know what had happened. I hadn’t seen him again—not in my dreams, not with my Sight, not even when, late one night, I’d gone off the deep end and placed my fingertips on the crinkled page I’d torn out of the 1957 yearbook. I’d sat there staring at it, willing my mind into it, tears that he never would have wanted me to shed streaming down my face.

Nothing had happened, and my handy-dandy Book of Remembrance had informed me that sometimes, the past moved on. Hot spots grew cold, ghosts grew weary. Memories faded from the air and from the mind, and sometimes, a photograph was just a picture, worth a thousand words.

Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade…

Well, you get the point.

So like I said, things were back to normal. Fuchsia was Golden again, and I was unquestionably back on top (but had decided not to spread the use of the term “Platinum,” which now reminded me far too much of Helen’s ring). Brock adored me, and Cade was nothing more than a picture I kept in an old copy of Emma in my nightstand.

See? Everything was normal.

A little boy holding on to his mother with one hand and an ice cream cone with another.

I glanced around study hall, trying to identify the source of the memory.

Correction: things were almost back to normal.

While I pondered whether or not I was supposed to draw anything significant from the ice cream vision, and whether or not bangs were coming back in style (God, I hoped not), Lissy James slid stealthily (at least for her scene-causing self ) into the desk next to me.

On a day-to-day basis, we didn’t really talk to each other at school. It was a rule I’d left uncharacteristically unspoken, but social divides in high school were like laws of nature, and for the most part, neither of us fought the wind.

“Can I help you?”

She rolled her eyes at what she probably interpreted as some kind of weird, condescending tone in my voice (which, of course, wasn’t actually there…the girl was paranoid), and slid a familiar brown book across the table toward me.

Glancing calmly around, I looked down at the page she had marked.

Femme Fatale.

The words were written in letters so scripty that, had I not had years of practice decoding fancy girly scrawl in notes passed during class, I might not have been able to read it.

A woman who, imbued with supernatural beauty and power, manipulates the hearts of men, ultimately compelling them to cause their own deaths or the deaths of others.

Also known as a black widow, a white lady, or a succubus.

With my gel pen, I glibly added my own girly inscription to the bottom of the page, while Lissy gawked at me in horror.

Sometimes the power comes from a focus object, such as a piece of unfashionable jewelry, I wrote. The jewelry then takes on a life of its own. Wearers beware: accessories can kill more than an outfit.

Satisfied, I slapped the book shut and handed it back to Lissy. She blew a wisp of hair out of her face, somewhat stunned. Whether she was surprised that I’d written in her ancient book with purple gel pen, that I’d processed everything I’d read remarkably quickly, or that I’d managed to form a coherent thought of my own, I wasn’t sure.

Without saying a word to her, I reached into my purse (a Kate Spade knockoff so good that only Lexie could tell it was fake) and pulled out my own book. Meeting her eyes for just the smallest fraction of time, I slid the book over to her.

She took it from my hands and looked down at the page I’d marked: a family tree. The First Seer had had three daughters: Brianna, who had inherited her mother’s ability to see the past; Sorcha, the annoying middle child, who could see auras; and Meara, the Truth Seer, who was still, to me, largely a mystery. The book said nothing about her after Shannon’s death, only that she was the youngest, and that she was pure.

I knew that if Lissy took the time to flip three pages forward, she’d see a drawing, done by the second retroseer in Lissy’s line, a chick named Clarabelle (poor girl).

Somehow, I was betting that despite everything I’d told her about all my visions, Lissy still would have been as startled as I was to see our faces staring back at her from Clarabelle’s drawing of Meara, Sorcha, and Brianna. I’d come to terms with the whole past life thing. I mean, after all, it made perfect sense. I’d always found Lissy James more than a little annoying, we constantly argued over radio stations when we carpooled, and she’d never heeded a single piece of advice I’d thrown her way. She thought I was bossy and mean and probably stuck-up. Was it any wonder that in a former life, we’d been sisters?

Okay, reincarnation, visions, superpowers, and femme fatales. Maybe my life wasn’t back to normal, but you know, at Emory High, I made the rules, and this season, I’d decided that normal was highly overrated.

About the Author

Jennifer Lynn Barnes grew up in Oklahoma and went to college in Connecticut, at Yale University, before moving to England to study autism at the University of Cambridge. She can’t see auras or cute ghost boys, but she is suspiciously good at predicting what will happen next on all of her favorite TV shows. Jennifer wrote her first book, Golden, while she was still a teenager, and her next book, The Squad: Perfect Cover, is due out in February 2008. To learn more about Jennifer, visit her online at www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com.

Also by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

GOLDEN

TATTOO

Published by Delacorte Press an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright © 2007 by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

All rights reserved.

Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.randomhouse.com/teens

Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at

www.randomhouse.com/teachers

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Barnes, Jennifer (Jennifer Lynn).

Platinum / Jennifer Lynn Barnes.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: When beautiful and popular high school student Lilah realizes she has “the Sight,” a mystical ability to see things others cannot, she resolves to use her special powers to prevent a tragedy.

eISBN: 978-0-375-89067-3

[1. Extrasensory perception—Fiction. 2. Visions—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.B26225PIn 2007

[Fic—dc22]

2006025263

v1.0