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  “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 h
ers.

  “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?”