“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 w
hether 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.