The thing I just couldn't get past was that Morgan had looked me in the eye and confirmed the fear that had been nibbling away at me since the last day of junior year. Things were changing, whether I wanted them to or not. And as Delia, Annabelle, and Zo discussed the myriad of potentially disconcerting aspects of our encounter with “the other side,” I just kept thinking that the next time something like this happened—if there was a next time—there might not be four necklaces or four tattoos or—I don't know—four enchanted nose rings. If Morgan came back a year from now or two or five, she might come bearing one gift. Just one.
“We'll figure the necklaces out,” I said, confident of that, if nothing else. “That's what we do. We figure things out.”
Delia beamed. “One for all, and all for—”
“Milkshakes!” Zo interrupted Delia's proclamation, and when Annabelle started snickering, I let myself join her and forced the paranoid depresso-Bailey part of my brain back into hibernation. Yes, we were seniors. Yes, we'd be going out into the big bad world soon. No, I didn't even want to think about what it would be like to get a one-on-one visit from Morgan, and no, I wasn't going to pay any attention to her “things are changing” speech.
Instead, I turned my attention to Zo's request for a milkshake. “Sorry,” I told her, “but we don't have time. As it is, we'll probably be late getting back to school.”
“Unless, of course, these necklaces hold the secret to time travel,” Zo said, wiggling her eyebrows and making dramatic dum dum DUM sounds under her breath. Beside me, Annabelle seemed to be seriously considering Zo's tongue-in-cheek suggestion about time travel, but Delia waved it away with a flick of one hand. “If there were time travel involved, Morgan would have given us watches.”
None of us dared to challenge Delia's logic on that one, so we opted for hurrying through the food court and out to the parking lot as quickly as we could. We'd have to hit every light on the way back to avoid being late, and sadly, most of our teachers didn't see seniority (or conversations with ancient beings of power) as an excuse for tardiness. Go figure.
As the car came into sight, I began digging for my keys. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Delia slide her sunglasses from the top of her head to the bridge of her nose, and my brain latched onto her movement, processing in slow motion as the glasses cast a fleeting shadow that slithered across her face and disappeared into her smooth skin a moment later.
I turned to look more closely at Delia's face, but in doing so, I stopped watching where I was going. When you're as much of a walking disaster as I am, that is never, ever a good thing.
“Oamphl”
Annabelle may have been the linguistic prodigy, but I was without question the one who excelled at making up nonsense words and sound effects to punctuate my dismay at—for instance—falling over a giant pile of gravel that came out of nowhere for the sole purpose of tripping me. I hurtled face-first toward the ground, but Zo—her reflexes fueled by the vast number of calories she'd just consumed—managed to catch me before I went completely splat.
“Thanks,” I said.
Zo shrugged. “No problemo.”
I was overcome with a sense of déjà vu, because the two of us had definitely had this exact exchange on multiple previous occurrences. Trying and failing miserably to look inconspicuous, I took a deep breath and concentrated on getting the instinctual postfall embarrassment under control. Being a fire starter meant that burning cheeks had the potential to lead to actual spark-age, and the last thing I wanted was to draw any more attention to my tragic lack of grace.
Unfortunately, even as I managed to clamp down on my pyrokinesis, I couldn't shake the feeling that my little performance hadn't gone unnoticed. Someone was watching me. I was sure of it. A wave of mortification at being gawked at by the entire senior class washed over my body, until I had convinced myself that there really wasn't anyone in this town who hadn't seen me flailing around like an infant octopus with too much energy and not nearly enough coordination. I worked up the courage to glance around, but found that aside from the four of us, the parking lot was eerily empty.
Mark the calendars, I thought. This may be the first time I've made a fool of myself and not run into the Ex-Boyfriend Who Shall Not Be Named immediately thereafter. Still, I couldn't shake the sense that someone, somewhere was watching.
Not quite trusting my senses, I spared a single glare for the gravel I'd tripped over, but didn't dwell on it or the imaginary heat of someone else's eyes on my body. Instead, I went back to looking for my keys and resolved to keep my paranoia to myself.
“Found them!” I punctuated my words by jingling the keys.
“If you'd carry that Kate Spade tote I got you, you wouldn't have to dig for them,” Delia scolded. “There's a side pocket, perfect for keys, compacts, and—”
I climbed into the driver's seat and didn't get to hear the rest of Delia's lecture, but whatever she said, it must have started with a c sound, because the first thing Annabelle said as she buckled herself into the backseat was, “Impressive alliteration.”
Delia unceremoniously claimed shotgun for herself and then turned to smile at A-belle. “I try.”
“Well, Queenie, got any alliterative ideas about what these necklaces do?” Zo asked. Of all my friends, Zo could be the most single-minded, which, given Delia's consistently one-track mind, was really saying something. Once Zo got the bit in her mouth on something, she didn't let go until the answer was found and the problem solved. Zo didn't like mysteries, which made me wonder why exactly she hadn't set her mind to solving the Big Problem (also known as “graduation,” “college,” and “future, the”).
“These pieces are simple, but definitely funkier than anything Morgan gave us before,” Delia mused. “Circular, which is totally classic, but the mirror adds a touch of self-reflection, for that postmodern you-are-what-you-wear kind of feel.”
“Forget I asked,” Zo said, having neglected to abide by her own cardinal rule: never get Delia started talking about clothes, pudding, or boys.
“The four necklaces are identical,” Annabelle added, curtailing Delia's dissertation on the stylistic attributes of our newest possessions. “Maybe they connect us to each other somehow?”
“Little round walkie-talkies?” Zo asked.
“Seriously, Zo, what is with you and walkie-talkies?” Delia rolled her eyes. “You're obsessed with them!”
Zo immediately shot back, “First of all, that was before we had cell phones, and second, we were seven.”
Annabelle—who had no idea what the two of them were referring to, since she'd been living abroad at the time—continued musing aloud about the possibilities the four of us were currently wearing around our necks. “I was thinking more along the lines of a psychic connection,” she said.
Been there. I broadcast the thought to all three of my friends. Done that.
“But they could connect us in some other way,” Delia said. “I mean, maybe they meld our emotions together or something. Or oooohhhhhh, maybe these things will let us go with Bailey to do her fancy Nexus whatsits.”
That was a thought. A surprisingly good one, actually.
Meeting the other Sidhe would be a lot less intimidating with my friends to back me up. What if these necklaces would bring their spirits to the Nexus along with mine? What if I didn't have to face the Reckoning alone?
What if splitting up didn't really have to mean splitting up?
The more I thought about the idea, the more I liked it, but at the same time, part of me couldn't imagine Morgan telling me I couldn't stop things from changing and then giving me a magic necklace that helped me keep the important things exactly the same. Maybe it was because she was an adult and I'd gotten into the habit of thinking of them as the enemy in the Bailey Versus the Future campaign, but …
I groaned—loudly and for a long time—as I remembered something that I'd managed to put out of my mind all morning.
“What?” the other three asked at o
nce.
“I have a meeting,” I said. “Right after lunch, with Mr. McMann.”
“Told you we should have stopped for milkshakes.” Zo reached over from the backseat to poke me triumphantly in the shoulder.
I half-expected Delia to repeat her request for me to ask Mr. McMann what his opinion was on layering my hair, but she proved to be otherwise occupied.
“Satin scoop-neck top, preferably in blue,” I heard her whisper. “Pink Juicy sweatpants. Tiffany earrings.”
“What are you doing?” I asked her, stopping at a red light that I would have run before I'd remembered my meeting.
“Nothing,” Delia said completely unconvincingly, and then she mumbled something else under her breath.
“What did you just say?” Zo asked.
Delia sighed. “BabyblueLouisVuittonearmuffs,” she said, rushing the words out so fast they blurred together.
“What?” Annabelle, Zo, and I repeated.
“I said ‘Baby blue Louis Vuitton earmuffs,’ ” Delia repeated, and I noticed that she was holding a straw wrapper in one hand and waving her other hand above it.
“Hate to break it to you, Dee,” Zo said, “but those aren't earmuffs.”
“Well, they aren't earmuffs yet” Delia admitted, “but you never know. I mean, they could be, if …”
“If these necklaces gave you guys back your powers,” I said, finally understanding why Delia had suddenly developed a tic that involved talking to the trash in my car. Sophomore year, her tattoo had given her the power to turn one object into another, just by concentrating on what she wanted it to be. Budding fashionista that she was, those three days had quite possibly been the best (and best-dressed) of Delia's life so far.
“It's not working,” Zo said. “Is it?”
The edges of my lips turned up at the wary tone in her voice. Transmogrification had allowed Delia to perform makeovers of fantastic proportions without so much as breaking a sweat. From Zo's perspective (and mine, for that matter), this wasn't necessarily a good thing.
“It's not working,” Delia confirmed with a melodramatic sigh. “But hey, a girl can dream.”
“Nightmare,” Zo coughed into her hands.
“Fashion disaster,” Delia coughed back.
“And proud of it.” Zo ditched the coughing and spoke the words plainly.
Annabelle ignored the familiar squabbling altogether, talking over them. “You know, we may want to look into the traditional role that jewelry plays in a variety of ancient cultures. Taking into consideration the fact that the tattoos had their basis in languages throughout the world, there's a chance that Morgan has again molded her gifts after something from this world and that the answer to all of our questions lies in history, archaeology, mythology, or …”
Annabelle stopped to take a breath, and I stared at her in the rearview mirror. Forget what I said about Zo being the most single-minded. When it came to questions and answers, Annabelle, who'd been raised in academia and was pretty much an expert herself, definitely had the rest of us beat.
“I know that look,” Zo said, switching her attention from Delia to A-belle. “That look means trouble.”
“Trouble?” Annabelle asked, her tone way, way too innocent.
“Trouble,” Zo confirmed. “I know the way your twisted little mind works.” Her words took on an accusatory tone. “Admit it, the second you get back to school, you're going to start making graphs.”
I had no idea what exactly Annabelle would graph, given that the grand total of what we knew right now was not much, but I was pretty sure that Zo was right. Annabelle had Graph Face, and that meant that whatever Morgan had set in motion by giving us these necklaces had well and truly begun.
After all, it wasn't an adventure until A-belle broke out the graphs.
“So, Bailey, have you given any more thought to your future?”
There was only one right answer to that question. It wasn't “Why, no, Mr. McMann, I haven't,” and it wasn't “In the future, I hope not to be killed by fairies.”
“Sort of,” I said. Since the right answer was “yes,” Mr. McMann gave me an encouraging smile, hoping to prod me into saying what he wanted to hear.
“I know I'm going to college.” That much really wasn't up for debate. School and I got along pretty well (excepting study hall), and I definitely wasn't ready to brave the real world yet. Besides which, I was somewhat attached to my life, and if I'd even thought the words no college in my mother's presence, she would have killed me.
“That's good, Bailey. Very good!” Mr. McMann was all about the positive encouragement. I wasn't entirely convinced that he actually knew anything about the college application process, but the man definitely knew upbeat like the back of his own disturbingly hairy hands.
“So have you thought any more about where you'd like to go?” Mr. McMann asked in the chummiest of voices. “With your scores, you'll have options.” To punctuate his point, he pumped his fist victoriously in the air.
From the way he was acting, you would have thought I was headed for valedictorian, but the guidance counselor and I both knew that I had pretty good scores and pretty good grades, just like I had pretty good hair (minus the color) and a pretty good body (minus the cleavage, or lack thereof). I was smart, but compared to other smart people, I was average. I wasn't unfortunate-looking, but when it came to looks, I fell closer to cute than pretty. I wasn't all that athletic, I didn't do student council, and though most of my teachers liked me well enough, I didn't inspire fist pumping in anybody but Mr. McMann, and five years from now, even he probably wouldn't remember me.
Still, I had options. Of course, it would have been easier if I didn't, because if you only have one choice, you can't possibly make the wrong one.
“Bailey?” Mr. McMann prompted, goofy smile still fixed to his face.
“I'm not sure,” I said. “I guess I wouldn't mind going to school close by.”
When I'd pictured college, I'd always pictured Delia, Zo, Annabelle, and me hanging out in dorm rooms and eating pizza at midnight. The realistic part of me knew that college wasn't one giant sleepover, but when I tried to imagine something else, all I could see in my mind's eye was a giant white screen, glaringly blank.
“I guess I wouldn't mind going farther away either.” A new city could be fun. Or, you know, terrifying.
“Well, that's certainly a start,” Mr. McMann said. I stared at him incredulously. I'd officially narrowed it down to colleges that were either close or farther away. If that was a start, then I didn't want to know what absolute stagnation looked like.
In abject fear of another fist pump, I continued talking. “I'm not really sure what I want to major in.”
“Nobody knows!” Mr. McMann was practically singing, but I didn't believe a word of his impromptu song. Delia wanted to major in business, with a minor in fashion design. Annabelle was going to double in classical languages and literature and archaeology. Zo, in the greatest irony of all time, was leaning toward nutrition.
Sure, Mr. M, I thought. Nobody knows. He made college sound like one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time.
“Would you rather go to a big college or a small college?” Mr. McMann asked in a tone that would have been more appropriate for saying “oohhhhh, ahhhhhh” than for the words he actually uttered.
“Medium-sized?”
“Now we're getting somewhere!”
Now I was just guessing.
We went back and forth like that for another ten minutes, and the entire time, I couldn't decide which freaked me out more, talking about my future with the one-man pep squad, or trying to prepare myself for whatever it was that had Morgan thinking that I'd need extra help. Absentmindedly, I played with the chain around my neck until my fingers came to the pendant. I toyed with it while Mr. McMann asked me how I felt about all-girls schools. I tried to phrase my answer diplomatically, and ran my thumb over the edges of the charm.
“I'm not sure about an all-girls sch—ye
eoowwww!”
Mr. McMann blinked several times, shocked at my outburst and momentarily speechless.
“Sorry,” I said. “My thumb.” It was bleeding, cut by the sharp edge of the pendant. I said a silent, sarcastic thanks to my Sidhe benefactress for giving me a necklace that could slice hairs and possibly cut through metal as well. It had sure done a number on my thumb.
“Oh,” Mr. McMann said, his voice working its way back to upbeat. “I have Band-Aids!”
I found it a little unsettling that he talked about Band-Aids with the same level of enthusiasm with which he considered my scholastic future. As he fished around in his desk for a bandage, I grabbed a tissue out of a nearby box and pressed it to my thumb. I took a few seconds to glare down at the pendant, and even from this angle, the reflection in the small, circular mirror caught my eye.
The first thing I noticed was the color, a brilliant blue-green.
Sidhe blue. Blood green.
The words were a memory, an echo of something I'd heard and seen before. I knew this color, knew it as well as I knew that tattoo on my lower back. This was the color of Sidhe blood, the ink with which the symbol of Life had been laid into my skin.
I angled my head to get a better look at the mirror around my neck, and the image became clearer: the tissue, the thumb, the blue-green color spreading out from the point of contact between the two.
My blood, I realized. It's blue-green.
“Ah. Here you go, Bailey,” Mr. McMann said, offering me a dinosaur Band-Aid. I didn't spend a single second thinking about the fact that a forty-year-old man who dressed like an upscale lumberjack had dinosaur Band-Aids in his desk. I was too busy trying to hide my thumb from his guidance counselor eyes. With my luck, he'd take one look and then attempt to convince me that blue-green blood made me some kind of “underrepresented minority” in the college application process.
“Bailey?”
Carefully, I took the Band-Aid with my left hand, keeping my right under the desk and out of his view.