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  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 da
y 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.