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  “Tell Brock I said hi and to forget about our plans tomorrow,” she offered sweetly. “He’s going to want to totally be there for you.”

  Their plans?

  I will not ask what plans, I will not ask what plans. I repeated the mantra in my mind.

  Forget what I said about Fuchsia not being all bad. I take it back. She was quite obviously a completely heinous person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

  With one more silent promise not to ask what she was talking about, I made myself laugh in response to her words.

  “That?” I asked, pretending I’d been well clued into whatever plans she supposedly had with Brock. “Fuchsia, sweetheart, I don’t even think he was serious about that.” I paused and then extended my own sweet offer. “I’ll ask him if you really want me to.”

  “No.” Her answer came immediately, and I let out the breath I’d been holding.

  I still had it.

  “Oh! There goes my other line,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Gotta go. Thanks for the call, babes. It means a lot.”

  “Anything for you, Li,” Fuchsia said. “Love-ya-bye.”

  I translated “love-ya-bye” to mean “die, bitch,” but hey, at least she’d called, and I knew better than to expect anything else. Being popular isn’t about being liked. It’s about not being ignored.

  Moving quickly, I hung up the phone and immediately hit number one on my speed dial. As long as I could get ahold of Brock first, I was golden. No pun intended.

  “Hello?”

  For some reason, now that I had him on the phone, I was having technical difficulties deciding what to say.

  “Hello? Uhhhh…”

  Brock was the only guy I knew who could make an “uhhhh” sexy.

  “Uhhhh to you, too,” I said in my own sexy voice, going completely on autopilot.

  “Oh. Hey, Lilah.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I wrote another haiku,” he said. “Wanna hear it?”

  “Actually, Brock,” I said, not exactly in the mood for a good haikuing, “I was just calling because I found the perfect place for us to have a little alone time.” Content that I’d distracted him from poorly written poetry, I continued. “It’s dimly lit, there’s no one there, and our parents totally won’t object.”

  That got his attention. “Ohhhhh,” he said, and I could practically see the grin spreading on his face. “Lilah.”

  When he said my name, it sounded exactly the way it should have on his lips: Lilah, one name, like Cher, Madonna, or J.Lo. Though, in retrospect, J.Lo might have been two names….

  “So are you up for it?” I asked him, keeping my fingers crossed.

  “Definitely.”

  “Perfect,” I said. “Meet me at the library in ten.”

  “The library?”

  I hit End in the middle of his question. If he thought there was even a remote chance of a library make-out session, Brock would be there. Much like his haikus, his thought process was rather single-minded.

  I stuffed my phone in my purse, threw my purse over my shoulder, and opened my window. It was times like these that I wished we actually had a trellis like teenagers on television always did. Instead, I had to contort my body to reach the closest tree branch. In a move that would have been a lot easier if my mom had actually been home often enough that I’d had to sneak out on a regular basis growing up, I climbed halfway down the tree and then jumped. My strappy pink heels wobbled as I landed, but didn’t give out.

  At the exact moment that I was starting to feel proud of myself for managing a well-executed sneak-out, a cheerful voice spoke up behind me.

  “I can’t believe we’re sneaking out. Is this cool or what?”

  I silently counted to three before turning around to stare straight into the widest, most earnest truth-seeing blue eyes on the planet.

  “Lexie.”

  If she noticed that I sounded less than thrilled to see her, she didn’t let on.

  “Lissy said you wanted to be alone,” Lexie said, “and, obviously, I could see that you didn’t.” She shook her head. “I mean, it’s not even about the way the air got all fuzzy. It just felt wrong, and besides, everyone knows you wouldn’t want to be alone right now.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder gently.

  A woman with dark hair, red lips, and a very pregnant stomach.

  I let the image wash over me, took it in, and then shrugged it off.

  “So where are we going?” Lexie asked.

  “We,” I said, stressing the word, “aren’t going anywhere.”

  Lexie shook her head impishly. “Lilah,” she said seriously, “that’s just not true.”

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again. It was useless. I couldn’t yell at her. I couldn’t sarcastically ask if it was past her bedtime. I couldn’t even tell her to go home and bug her actual older sister.

  All I could do was answer her. “We’re going to the library.”

  Lexie waited patiently for me to elaborate.

  “I need to look something up.”

  “What something?” she asked softly, her dancing eyes ruining her attempt at sounding casual.

  “There’s a slight chance,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that telling her was a mistake, “that Mystery Boy killed someone. Or several someones.”

  Five voices echoed in my head.

  “You should have left Helen alone.”

  Who was Helen? Without saying another word, I started walking. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

  Lexie matched my pace and, as always, she said the first thing that came into her mind. “Lilah?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If there’s a slight chance Mystery Boy killed someone, what’s the chance that he’s going to kill somebody else?”

  Looking at her, I could tell she wanted an exact percentage, like 84.2 or 11.6, but I didn’t answer. At this point, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.

  10

  Kiss

  A kiss is never just a kiss.

  “Wow. You have broad shoulders. Do you play football?” Lexie didn’t give Brock a chance to answer. “I bet you play football,” she continued, and then, with a hugely conspicuous wink in my direction, she nodded to confirm her words. “He plays football.”

  Brock stared at Lexie, trying to wrap his mind around her mile-a-minute chatter and the fact that for some bizarre reason, I’d brought an eighth grader with me on our library “date.” Somehow, when I’d asked him to come, I hadn’t pictured him actually being there in the middle of everything. How was I going to do the research thing with Brock literally breathing (and, knowing him, wanting to do who knows what else) down my neck?

  “You’re Molly’s brother, right?” Lexie continued, blissfully unaware that Brock was in a state of chatter-induced shock. “Molly’s great.”

  “Uhhhh…thanks.”

  Lexie looked intently at Brock for a moment, and then she turned back to me. “I’m going to go work on the thing,” she said. Lexie was more or less incapable of lying, a side effect of True Vision that made her the most unstealthy person ever to exist in the history of the world. Sometimes I wondered how she made it through her all-truth, all-the-time existence. It was a miracle that she didn’t have some kind of complex.

  “You two have fun,” Lexie instructed me seriously. With that, she was off to do something “good and researchy” with her Sight, and I was alone with Brock.

  “She wanted to come,” I said, playing with the tips of my hair.

  Brock, still a little shell-shocked, just nodded. I leaned my head toward him, and he snapped out of it, the edges of his lips curling upward into a slow smile. “Missed you today,” he said, leaning forward to pull me into a kiss.

  “I’m not dead, Princess.”

  Mystery Boy’s words echoed in my mind, and as Brock’s mouth covered mine, my lips tingled with the memory of the ghost’s kiss. I closed my eyes and my mind against any and all retrovisions in the near vicinity and tr
ied my best to lose myself in my oh-so-hot boyfriend’s embrace. That endeavor lasted approximately three minutes, at which time I felt his tongue in the back of my throat.

  Carefully, I pulled myself back. Once upon a time, kissing Brock had been a dream. Now even the possibility of a Hollywood heel-popping moment was pretty much out of the question. Either his tongue had tripled in size, he’d totally lost his mojo, or I’d somehow lost mine. Sadly, given recent events, I couldn’t rule out the last explanation.

  “You okay, baby?” he asked, brushing the hair out of my face.

  I looked down. We’d been together so long that sometimes I forgot to expect him to ask things like that. Brock was all smiles and goofing off and declarations of my hotness. A serious moment like this one was rare.

  “I’m okay,” I said, and the response surprised me. Lilah Covington was never okay. She was fabulous, she was amazing, she was incredible, but she was never just okay. Guys like Brock didn’t date okay.

  “You seem…” Brock trailed off.

  “Different.” I finished the sentence for him. Somehow, it was less painful than letting him finish it himself.

  Brock stared at me for a long moment, no doubt internally debating whether or not this was the kind of situation an impromptu haiku could fix. “We could talk,” he offered finally, his face contorted with the massive effort it took to make such an offer.

  “That’s okay,” I said. Okay again? I thought. Could I get any more boring?

  To make up for it, I dragged my finger lightly down his chest. “I just…” I gave him a long pause of my own and kissed his neck. “…miss you,” I finished finally, and as the words left my mouth, I realized they weren’t true. I hadn’t missed him. We’d spent most of our high school existence as a couple, and now I didn’t even miss him when he wasn’t there. Being together was the status quo, a social necessity.

  Was it pathetic that I missed missing him?

  “Did Fuchsia tell you something?” Brock asked suddenly, his eyes intense. “Because you know I wouldn’t do that to you, baby.”

  Those weren’t exactly the kind of words that inspired confidence. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask what exactly it was that he wouldn’t do to me, but I wasn’t about to give him two lines to read between. The less he knew about what I knew, the better.

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, forcing confusion to appear in my voice as pure, unadulterated bitchiness.

  “Lilah, I swear, it was nothing. She just needed some help putting together this bookshelf thing yesterday, and my shoulder started cramping, so she sort of rubbed it for me, and…” He was starting to look kind of frantic. “I swear, she kissed me, not the other way around.”

  I knew just by the way he held his head that he’d kissed her back. That was why Fuchsia suddenly had the guts to play Brock-games with me. She’d kissed him, he’d kissed her back, and now she actually thought she could get him.

  My mind whirled. My best friend and my boyfriend had kissed, and for that, I thought, they must die. The fact that I could almost still feel Ghost Boy’s breath on my face was completely irrelevant, as was the fact that I was stuck with Fuchsia and Brock whether I wanted them or not.

  “Of course she kissed you,” I said evenly. “You’d never kiss her.” I looked him straight in the eye and wondered if he heard the unspoken threat: You’d never kiss her because if you did, I would ruin you. Not that it would be easy. Brock was more or less numero uno, the quarterback, every girl’s fantasy, but if he thought he could play me and live to tell the tale, he was out of his gorgeous jock mind.

  “God, I love you, Lilah.” He let out the breath he’d been holding and pulled me against him. I let myself bury my head in his chest. It hadn’t hurt until the moment he’d said he loved me. Before then, I’d just been angry on the inside and icy on the surface. But now…

  It was the first time he’d said he loved me. Ever. I could feel my shields crumbling around me, could feel the almost comforting anger melting into something much, much scarier.

  He wasn’t supposed to be able to hurt me.

  I wasn’t supposed to let myself hurt.

  And, if I hurt, I wasn’t supposed to show it.

  I forced myself to rationalize it all away. He’d just said he loved me, hadn’t he? He’d chosen me, not Fuchsia. He’d asked me if I was okay and wanted to know the answer. He was Golden and hot and mine, and if he screwed around on me again, I would find a way to bury him. What more did I want?

  “That’s beautiful, Princess, really, but there’s something I think you should know….”

  The voice caught me off guard. What was with this ghost and showing up at the worst possible times? He was like the Ghost of Christmas Ruin-My-Life.

  I turned my head away from him, reorienting myself on my boyfriend’s chest. Brock’s arm crept around my back, and for a moment, he just held me.

  I hurt.

  “Like I said before, very sweet, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot less sweet when you’re holding a corpse.” His voice was low, his demeanor annoyingly casual.

  “What are you talking about?” I hissed. It was weird—even though I knew no one else could hear him and that everyone could hear me, I couldn’t refrain from responding. Even stranger, doing so felt good.

  Ghost Boy shrugged. “I’ve been doing this awhile,” he said, leaning back and letting his dark hair fall out of his face. “In the beginning, I couldn’t tell who it was going to be, but trust me, by number four I was a pro, Princess, and like I said before, you’re looking at him.”

  “Looking at who?” I snapped. “And stop calling me Princess.”

  “Uhhhhhh…Lilah?” Brock’s hesitant voice reminded me of the fact that my head was resting on his chest, his arms still wrapped around my body.

  “I’m fine,” I said, answering his unasked question, and I groaned internally. First I was okay, now I was fine. Not to mention the fact that I was talking to thin air. I was never going to be able to live this down.

  “I’m telling you, Princess,” Ghost Boy said, already flickering out of my vision and back into the past where he belonged. “He’s the one.”

  Somehow, I doubted that Ghost Boy was talking about a romantic “the one.” At this point, if Brock was my one, then I was totally and completely screwed. I could survive his overzealous tongue and the horrible poetry and the fact that he’d kissed my best friend for now, but surviving for life? That was another story.

  This wasn’t life. This was high school.

  “Do you want me to…” This time there was a long pause, no “uhhh.” “Do you want me to go, Li?”

  I weighed my emotions.

  Yes, I want you to go to hell.

  Yes, so long as you don’t “go” near Fuchsia.

  No, you may suck as a boyfriend, but you’re a pretty great pillow.

  I didn’t say any of that out loud. Instead, I peeled myself away from the warmth of his chest. “I should probably check on Lexie,” I said. As far as strategy went, it wasn’t my best moment, but hey, I’d just learned that my best friend’s lips had been attached to my boyfriend’s—the boyfriend, I might add, who I’d just learned was “the one,” whatever that was supposed to mean.

  “You’re not going to…you know…see anyone else, are you, Lilah?”

  Yes, I wanted to say, I’m going to immediately go out and lose it to your best friend. So much for all that time you’ve invested.

  When I looked up, half ready to tell him that just to measure his response, I took in the way his eyes crinkled around the edges, the way they always did when he was nervous before a big game.

  “No,” I said softly. “Of course not.”

  He leaned down and kissed the top of my head, and that small show of affection was like a knife to my gut. By the transitive property, it was Fuchsia kissing the top of my head…or Brock kissing the top of Ghost Boy’s, depending on how you looked at it.

  I took a deep breath. In my world, control
was everything; losing control meant losing it all, and I wasn’t about to risk losing anything, especially not Brock, to Fuchsia.

  “Bye, Li,” Brock said, falling back on the rhyme I’d always thought was cute coming from him.

  The second he was gone, I let out the breath I’d been holding. I hadn’t cracked. I hadn’t lost it. I hadn’t lost him.

  “Guess what.”

  I jumped at the sound of Lexie’s voice.

  “What?” Talking to Lexie, I could feel the tension draining slowly out of my body.

  “There’s something in this library that will help us,” she said. “And I think it’s purple.”

  Purple?

  “How’s it going to help us?” I asked. “Is it a book?”

  Lexie shrugged. “You tell me,” she said, “and I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

  I bit back a sigh. She was just trying to help. She couldn’t help it. She was Lexie.

  “What’s her name?”

  I knew the kind of vision it was going to be before I took in the words, before I heard the voice or saw the voice’s owner. It was the kind of vision that wasn’t separated from the real world by static or air, the kind that I saw in my mind and out of it, even as I kept Lexie in sight.

  “I can’t see her,” a slightly smaller voice complained. “Mother, tell Bree to move.”

  The older girl didn’t deign to acknowledge her sister’s request, but she inched over so they could both see the baby in their mother’s arms. “What’s her name?” she asked again.

  The younger girl stared at the baby so hard she almost didn’t hear her mother’s answer.

  “Meara.”

  Unlike the rest of the world, Lexie didn’t insist on repeating my name over and over again while I was caught up in a vision. Instead, she watched me with some kind of scholarly fascination and held her questions until I was coherent enough to answer them.

  “What did you see?” she asked when I came out of it.

  I lied to her face, even knowing she could see it as a lie as clearly as I’d seen the two little girls. “Nothing.” Until I met Lexie, I hadn’t fully realized how much I needed to be able to lie.