“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, bu
t 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.