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  “Baby, are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” I forced my voice to sound normal. She couldn’t see me, so I didn’t have to worry about the fact that underneath my perfect tan, I’d gone pale, or about the way my eyes were seconds away from watering.

  “Baby, can we talk?”

  I was always “baby” when she felt sorry for me. I hated it that somehow, I’d become a person to feel sorry for.

  “Mom, I’m fine, but I really don’t feel like talking right now.” My voice sounded calm and icy, even to my own ears, but wasn’t that just typical me? When the going gets tough, the tough get icy.

  “Lilah, baby—”

  “I have a call on my cell,” I interrupted her. “I can’t talk to you right now.” I dug around in my purse for my phone.

  If you made it true, it wasn’t a lie.

  Unfortunately, that’s when I remembered that good old Grams still had my phone in her wrinkled hands. Apparently, in addition to having a firm desire to drag me into Freaksville, my soon-to-be-stepgrandmother was also a total klepto.

  “Hey, Fuchsia,” I said brightly, pretending I had my cell with me and talking loudly enough to make sure my mother would overhear. “No,” I said, feigning shock. “No!” I paused. “Shut up! She didn’t!” One more long pause. “And what did he say?”

  Three minutes, six “shut up’s,” three “get out’s,” and one “I can’t believe her” later, my mom finally gave up, and I sighed quietly as I heard her walk slowly back down the steps. I couldn’t deal with her right now. I had more important things to think about, like…like…

  Like anything.

  I sucked in a jagged breath, wracking my mind for distractions. I really didn’t want to cry.

  “You’re tough,” a now-familiar voice admitted reluctantly.

  I lifted my head to meet his dark eyes. There was a scathing retort on the tip of my tongue, but I surprised myself by shaking my head. “You haven’t seen tough until you’ve seen two freshman girls fighting over the same senior guy,” I said, my voice sounding distant and wry. “That’s more than tough. That’s brutal.”

  “Brutal, huh?” For once, his voice was soft, and for the first time since we’d “met,” he wasn’t glaring or smirking in my general direction.

  I shook my head again, unsure whether I was shaking off his question or the tears I could feel in the corners of my eyes.

  Mystery Boy took a step closer to me. “Aren’t you going to tell me to leave you alone?”

  “Would you listen?” I asked pointedly.

  “No,” he replied.

  I shrugged. “Then what’s the point?”

  Who was I kidding? I wasn’t in control. The tears were coming, whether I wanted them or not, and for the first time in years, I just wasn’t up for a fight, with him or with anyone else. In fact, I was even glad that Caroline Nowly had my cell. This way, I didn’t have to think about dealing with the rest of my world.

  “This ain’t you, Princess.” His voice had a hard edge to it, but his face didn’t change. I could almost picture him as the carelessly impassioned lead singer of a rock band. “You don’t wonder about the point. You define the point, you finesse the point, you manipulate it to suit your own little devices, but you don’t wonder about it.”

  I had to remind myself that he wasn’t really there and that I didn’t need him. He wasn’t helping me with a problem. He was the problem.

  “Like you know me,” I said, staring him down. “Need I remind you that you’re dead? And even if you weren’t dead, I am so totally out of your league.”

  He smiled, and I gritted my teeth. Didn’t he know when he’d been dismissed?

  “I’m not dead”—his face was almost expressionless, but his voice was mocking—“not interested, and not really sure you’re worth helping in the first place.”

  “Helping?” I asked with a snort. “You call this helping?” He was a ghost, and I was…well, I was a retronitioner. Wasn’t I the one who was supposed to be helping him? As if he even deserved my help.

  “You can see me. You’re the first one who’s been able to.” He leaned back on my desk, his eyes on mine. “I’ve been stuck in the same place, the same time, for fifty years, and you’re the only one who’s ever seen me before the fact.”

  “I suppose you want me to ask ‘before what fact?’” I said, my voice bordering pleasantly on sarcasm.

  “Before someone dies.”

  “So you’re admitting you’re dead….”

  “Are you trying to be dumb?” he asked, raking his hand through his thick hair and turning away from me. “I said I’m not dead.” As he spoke, his shoulder muscles tensed, pulling at the tight white shirt he wore. “I don’t die. I never die. I just wake up day after day, doing the same thing, trapped in the same moment, but every once in a while, the other players change, and when they do, someone dies.”

  “How?”

  “How?” He shook his head and turned back to face me, his eyes piercing mine through the hair that fell into his face with the motion. “I kill them.”

  And then, just like that, he was gone.

  “Figures,” I muttered. “It’s just like him to show up, go all ‘people are going to die’ on me, and then leave.”

  What was I saying? My ghost had just told me that he killed people, and I was irritated that he’d left without saying goodbye? Clearly, my mother’s news on top of everything else had made me completely delusional.

  I took a deep breath and forced myself to strategize. Worst-case scenario, this Sight thing was here to stay. If I couldn’t make it go away, the only option was to figure out a way to use it that would help me, rather than force me to acquire a Lissy-esque twitching problem.

  At that exact moment, because fate hated me and had decided I deserved to suffer, someone knocked on my door.

  “Still don’t feel like talking!” I yelled, my voice painfully pleasant. “When I want to talk about it, trust me”—I spat out that last phrase—“you’ll know.”

  Logically, I knew that using my rarely harnessed but incredibly potent Threat Voice on my mother wasn’t a good idea, but since I was obviously delusional anyway, I cared about logic about as much as I cared about the chess team’s win-loss record or Lissy’s love life.

  “I have your phone.”

  Why was it that every time I thought about Lissy James, even for a second, she showed up?

  “Keep it,” I told her through the door. When she didn’t respond or show any signs of leaving, I forced myself to come up with something mean enough that once I said it, she’d leave me alone. “Shouldn’t you be off somewhere doing the whole ‘woe is me, do I like him or don’t I?’ thing over your surly little boytoy?”

  Why wasn’t she leaving? What part of “I don’t feel like talking” plus the absolute snarkiest comment I could manage didn’t she get?

  Lissy cleared her throat and spoke again. “So I guess you heard about…” Wisely, she didn’t finish the sentence. “Grams told me about your…” She trailed off again.

  The moment the air around me started to get fuzzy, a surefire sign that I was about to go into retronition over-drive, I stepped forward and opened the door. I still wasn’t entirely sure how the vision thing worked, but from what I’d gathered, memories were fair game, and the last thing I wanted was to see some highly revealing and inevitably poignant look at Lissy’s past. I was already a charter member of the Have Lissy’s Back club, and seeing a vision of little-kid Lissy might make it even harder for me to keep in mind that she had no one to blame for her social status but herself. And possibly Tracy.

  Come to think of it, Fuchsia hadn’t helped much either.

  “Phone.” I held out my hand. Lissy bit back a smile.

  “What?” I asked. Given the fact that she was wearing those shoes, I didn’t really think there was a reason in the world for her to be smiling at something I had said, especially when I hadn’t said anything funny at all.

  My tone wiped the smile off her face, and she shrugged. “You’ve been talking to Grams,” she said.

  “And?” I prompted, plucking my phone from her hands.

  “And now you’re talking in single-word commands.”

  “Very funny.” I stared at her, waiting for her to leave. She didn’t.

  “I know what it’s like not to want the Sight,” she blurted out.

  I didn’t want her to know what it was like. What went on inside my head was private. It was bad enough that she could see my aura. Having her empathize with what I was feeling made me feel naked, unprotected, and utterly alone.

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Things will be better once I come to accept it because I can’t make it go away, and if I just embrace who and what I am, we can all join hands, skip in a circle, and live happily ever after as a family of close-knit circus freaks.”

  My visual field blurred and I found myself looking at a four-year-old Lissy, her small face stricken.

  I hadn’t meant to make her look like that.

  “Sorry,” I told the little girl, and as soon as I did, real Lissy was back and her eyes were open wide. Clearly, Lissy had believed that the Lilah Covington apology was little more than a myth. It was nice to know she’d reached such firm conclusions about me in the few weeks we’d known each other.

  “Are you okay?” she asked me finally. “I mean, a lot has happened.” She frowned and glanced down at the floor. I think she might have understood how lame she sounded.

  “I’m fine,” I told her, forcing my face to convince her that it was true. I wasn’t going to let her see me cry, and standing there, listening to her for once in her life ask me how I was doing, all I could think about was how this day had gone from bad to worse to eighties-perm-level catastrophe.

  Lissy stared at me for a few seconds, her instinct to flee warring with whatever it was she saw in my aura.

  “Honestly,” I said, pushing her over the edge and giving her full permission to leave without feeling guilty, “I just want to be alone.”

  Lissy nodded and left, and even without the benefit of visions, I had a clear mental image of the way she’d looked walking away from me in the bathroom. Was it any wonder I hadn’t told her about Mystery Boy, the murdering allegedly-not-dead ghost?

  After she left, I couldn’t help but think that it was a good thing that it was Lissy and not Lexie who had come to bring me my phone. After all, Lexie was a Truth Seer, and if I’d told her that I really wanted to be alone, she would have known that it was a complete and total lie.

  9

  Evil

  Law of nature:

  Boys are dumb; girls are evil.

  Now that I had my phone back, I felt like I should call someone, but what was the point? What could I expect anyone to do about the fact that my vision (not to mention my life) had been hijacked by mystical Sight? Or about the part of my pathetic soap-opera-esque existence where my mother had gotten engaged to Corey “My Family Is Intent on Torturing You” Nowly?

  The truth was that this wasn’t exactly the kind of situation you could buy a Hallmark card for. It wasn’t something that could be fixed with a mani, a pedi, and some down-and-dirty girl-talk or by letting Brock massage my shoulders or jam his tongue down my throat the way he always did if we made out for more than three minutes at a time.

  “I’m not calling anyone because I don’t want to talk to anyone,” I said firmly. Even without Lexie standing there shaking her head morosely at me, I knew I was lying to myself. Once upon a time, I’d been good enough at it that I’d barely even noticed, but the last twenty-four hours had forced me to the realization that the identity I’d made for myself was coming dangerously close to cracking and falling away.

  The Lilah I’d made wouldn’t have been in this position, because she was the master of her own destiny.

  Fuchsia would have been too scared of that Lilah to even think about looking at Brock. In fact, that Lilah would have Non-ed any Golden girl who’d sat anywhere near Brock’s lap, and she would have blacklisted any Non who’d walked out on her. She wouldn’t have enjoyed doing it, but the Lilah I’d created when I was in the sixth grade would have done it all without a second thought, just to survive.

  What had happened to me?

  “’Twas my shield.” I heard the woman before I saw her, and even though I closed my eyes against the vision, the scene played out against the backdrop of my eyelids.

  “Your shield,” Lissy said, repeating the woman’s words. Lissy’s hair was calmer, darker, her skin glowing white, but even that unearthly shine paled in comparison to the woman next to her, who spoke again without even moving her red lips.

  “The sign of my heart. The heart of my line.”

  “The heart of my line.” I shook my head. Was there supposed to be any rhyme or reason to these visions? The ones about Mystery Boy I could understand, and the ones from my own past weren’t completely mystifying, but why was I seeing Lissy? Who was the woman she was talking to? Why couldn’t I convince myself that I really, truly did not care?

  I forced myself to turn the cell over in my hand and scrolled through the phone book, pausing every once in a while. Eighty-nine names later, I still hadn’t found anyone worth calling, so instead I took on the all-important task of staring at my shoes. They were nice shoes: strappy and pink and high-enough-heeled that I was almost tall. Tracy had bought the same pair in white after the pink ones had passed my fashion approval.

  As I kept my eyes on my shoes, my vision blurred, not because I was seeing something supernatural, but because I was staring at my feet so hard that I didn’t even blink.

  When life gives you lemons, stare at your shoes, I thought dully.

  My phone vibrated in my hands, and I wiped the water out of my eyes to get a good look at the caller ID: blocked.

  A blocked ID meant one of three things: (a) It was my mom, whose cell didn’t show up as having a number, (b) Someone was purposefully blocking their ID so I couldn’t screen their calls, or (c) Brock was calling from his landline. I weighed the options as the phone numbed my hand.

  “Hello.” I didn’t actually decide to answer. It just happened.

  “Babes, I am sooooooooo sorry.”

  I only knew one person who said the word “so” with that many “o’s”: Fuchsia, which meant that she was (a) calling from my mom’s phone (unlikely), (b) blocking caller ID because she knew I wouldn’t want to talk to her, or (c)…

  There was no C. I wasn’t that far off my game.

  “Sorry about what?” I asked coolly.

  “I heard about your mom,” Fuchsia said. Sometimes this town was way too small. “Can you even say traumatic? Doesn’t she know this kind of thing can scar you for life?”

  “It’s not like she’s peeling the flesh from my bones,” I said dryly, and a second later, it occurred to me that, given my current situation, talking about any skin peeling that wasn’t spa-like in nature probably wasn’t the best idea. My visions were unpredictable, and the last thing I needed was a retrovision of some poor sap being tortured during the Spanish Inquisition, just because I’d accidentally tapped into something I had no desire to see. With a shudder, I elaborated on the sarcasm Fuchsia had wisely chosen to ignore. “She’s just getting married, Fuchsia,” I said, doing my best impression of someone who didn’t care. “Nothing scar-worthy.”

  “So it’s true.” Fuchsia jumped immediately on the first half of my statement. “Your mom and that guy are getting married?”

  “Yes,” I said. There was a long pause on the phone, which I finally filled by babbling. “It’s not like I want her to be alone forever.”

  “Of course not,” Fuchsia agreed readily, “but still!”

  “It’s not that big of a deal,” I asserted. Why should it have been a big deal? According to the town busybodies, my mom and Corey had been practically engaged for ages.

  “I mean, I guess it makes sense,” Fuchsia said tentatively. “She is still really young and everything. I mean, she had you when she was how old? Sixteen? When you think about it, she’s not even as old as the people on Sex and the City.”

  My mother and the word “sex” in the same sentence? Fuchsia was the one who was going to scar me for life.

  “Do you think she and Corey will have a baby?” Fuchsia rushed on.

  “Fuchsia,” I bit out.

  “Yes?”

  “Not helping.”

  “Sorry,” she said, and for once, I really felt like she was. On days like today, it was easy to forget that Fuchsia had her good moments too, but she did. When we were twelve, she stayed up all night with me after our first scary-movie marathon because she knew I couldn’t sleep, and she would have been the first to go for the jugular of any other girl who’d hit on my boyfriend. She was a force to be reckoned with, and I had a long and drawn-out history of doing the reckoning, but at the end of the day, we were friends.

  “I’m telling you, Li, I can be over there, stat, with ice cream.”

  Considering that Fuchsia ate less than Tracy, who ate less than an undernourished gymnast, it was a very generous offer, but I wasn’t about to let her see me in emotional-breakdown mode. She may have been my friend, but she was still Fuchsia, and I hadn’t completely lost my mind.

  “Thanks, babe, but I just really want…”

  What did I want? The answer disturbed me.

  “I have to go to the library.”

  “The library?” Fuchsia asked, prickling at the fact that I’d turned down her offer. “Li, I knew you were upset, but I didn’t know you’d lost it. Just because your mom’s marrying into that family doesn’t mean you have to…you know…conform.”

  “Conform?” I repeated dryly.

  “More like Nonform.”

  I snorted. “Conform” and “Nonform” didn’t even rhyme. Fuchsia totally sucked at making up new words. “For your information,” I told her, “I’m meeting Brock at the library. We’ve got a little study thing going on.”

  That got a response out of her. “Why didn’t you say so?” she asked. “God, Li, you scared me.”

  “You know me better than that,” I said, and it might have been the biggest lie I’d ever told. Fuchsia Reynolds didn’t know me at all.