Even though I should’ve been used to it by now, it still felt weird to walk down the halls while everyone stared at Lena. She would always be the most beautiful girl in school, no matter what color her eyes were, and everyone here knew it, too. She was that girl—the one who had her own kind of power, supernatural or not. And there was a look a guy couldn’t help but give that girl, no matter what she’d done or how much of a freak she would always be.
It was the same look the guys were giving her now.
Calm down, Lover Boy.
Lena bumped her shoulder against mine.
I forgot what this walk was like. After Lena’s sixteenth birthday, I lost more and more of her every day. By the end of the school year, she was so distant I could barely find her in the halls. It was only a few months ago. But now that we were here again, I remembered.
I don’t like the way they’re looking at you.
What way?
I stopped walking and touched the side of Lena’s face, below the crescent-shaped birthmark on her cheekbone. A shiver shot through both of us, and I leaned down to find her mouth.
This way.
She pulled back, smiling, and dragged me down the hall.
I get the picture. But I think you’re way off. Look.
Emory Watkins and the other guys from the basketball team were staring past us as we walked by his locker. He nodded at me.
I hate to break it to you, Ethan, but they’re not looking at me.
I heard Link’s voice. “Hey, girls. We shootin’ hoops this afternoon or what?” He bumped fists with Emory and kept walking. But they weren’t looking at him either.
Ridley was a step behind the rest of us, letting her long pink nails trail along the locker doors. When she got to Emory’s, she let the door close beneath her fingers.
“Hey, girls.” The way Ridley rolled out the words, she still sounded like a Siren.
Emory stammered, and Ridley let her finger trail across his chest as she walked past. In that skirt, she was showing more leg than should have been legal. The entire team turned to watch her go.
“Who’s your friend?” Emory was talking to Link, but he didn’t take his eyes off Ridley. He’d seen her before—at the Stop & Steal when I first met her, and at the winter formal, when she trashed the gym—but he was looking for an introduction, up close and personal.
“Who wants to know?” Rid blew a bubble, letting it pop.
Link looked at her sideways and grabbed Ridley’s hand. “Nobody.”
The hallway divided in front of them as an ex-Siren and a quarter Incubus conquered Jackson High. I wondered what Amma would have to say about that.
Sweet baby in a manger. Heaven help us all.
“Are you kidding? I’m supposed to keep my things in this filthy tin coffin?” Ridley stared into her locker like she thought something was going to pop out of it.
“Rid, you’ve been to school before, and you had a locker,” Lena said patiently.
Ridley flipped her pink and blond hair. “I must’ve blocked all that out. Post-traumatic stress.”
Lena handed Ridley the combination lock. “You don’t have to use it. But you can put your books inside so you don’t have to carry them around all day.”
“Books?” Ridley looked disgusted. “Carry?”
Lena sighed. “You’ll get them today, in your classes. And, yes, you have to carry them. You should know how this works.”
Ridley adjusted her shirt to expose a little more shoulder. “I was a Siren the last time I was in school. I didn’t actually go to any of my classes, and I certainly didn’t carry anything.”
Link clapped his hand down on her shoulder. “Come on. We have homeroom together. I’ll show you how it’s done, Link-style.”
“Yeah?” Ridley sounded skeptical. “How is that any better?”
“Well, for starters, it doesn’t involve any books….” Link seemed more than happy to walk her to class. He wanted to keep an eye on her.
“Ridley, wait! You need this.” Lena waved a binder in the air.
Ridley slipped her arm through Link’s and ignored her. “Relax, Cuz. I’ll use Hot Rod’s.”
I slammed the locker shut. “Your gramma is an optimist.”
“You think?”
Like everyone else, I watched Link and Rid disappear down the hall. “I give this whole little experiment three days, max.”
“Three days? You’re the optimist.” Lena sighed, and we started up the stairs to English.
The air conditioning was running full blast, a pathetic mechanical hum echoing through the halls. But the outdated system didn’t stand a chance against this heat wave. It was even hotter upstairs in the administration building than it was outside in the parking lot.
As we walked into English class, I stopped for a minute under the fluorescent light, the one that had burned out when Lena and I had collided on the way into this room the first day I saw her. I stared up at the cardboard squares in the ceiling.
You know, if you look really close, you can still see the burn mark around the new light.
How romantic. The scene of our first disaster. Lena followed my eyes up to the ceiling. I think I see it.
I let my eyes linger on the squares speckled with perforated dots. How many times had I sat in class staring up at those dots, trying to stay awake or counting them to pass time? Counting minutes left in a class period, periods left in the day—days into weeks, weeks into months, until I got out of Gatlin?
Lena walked by Mrs. English, who was buried in first day of school papers at her desk, and slid into her old seat on the infamous Good-Eye Side.
I started to follow her, but I sensed someone behind me. It was that feeling you get when you’re in line and the person after you is standing way too close. I turned around, but no one was there.
Lena was already writing in her notebook when I sat down at the desk next to hers. I wondered if she was writing one of her poems. I was about to sneak a look when I heard it. The voice was faint, and it wasn’t Lena’s. It was a low whisper, coming from over my shoulder.
I turned around. The seat behind me was empty.
Did you say something, L?
Lena looked up from the notebook, surprised.
What?
Were you Kelting? I thought I heard something.
She shook her head.
No. Are you okay?
I nodded, opening my binder. I heard the voice again. This time I recognized the words. The letters appeared on the page, in my handwriting.
I’M WAITING.
I slammed it shut, clenching my hands to stop them from shaking.
Lena looked up at me.
Are you sure you’re okay?
I’m fine.
I didn’t look up once for the rest of the period. I didn’t look up while I failed the quiz on The Crucible. Not when Lena participated, straight-faced, in a class discussion about the Salem witch trials. Or when Emily Asher made a less than clever comparison between dear, departed Macon Ravenwood and the possessed townsfolk in the play, and a ceiling tile suddenly came loose and smacked her on the head.
I didn’t look up again until the bell rang.
Mrs. English was staring at me, her expression so unnerving and blank that for a second I thought both her eyes could have been glass.
I tried to tell myself that it was the first day of school, which could make anyone crazy. That she’d probably just had a bad cup of coffee.
But this was Gatlin, so there was a pretty good chance I was wrong.
Once English was over, Lena and I didn’t have any other classes together until after lunch. I was in Trig and Lena was in Calculus. Link—and now Ridley—had been bumped down to Consumer Math, the class the teachers enrolled you in when they finally admitted you weren’t going to make it past Algebra II. Everyone called it Burger Math because all you learned was how to make change. Link’s whole schedule read like the teachers had decided he was going to be working at the BP station with Ed after graduation. His schedule was basically one big study hall. I had Bio; he had Rocks for Jocks. I had World History; he had CSS—Cultures of Southern States, or “Checking Out Savannah Snow,” as he called it. Compared to Link, I looked like a rocket scientist. He didn’t seem to care—or if he did, there were too many girls following him around for him to notice.
To be honest, it didn’t matter, because all I wanted to do was get lost in the familiar blur of the first day of school so I could forget about the crazy message in my binder.
I guess there’s nothing like a crappy summer filled with near-death experiences to make the first day of school seem great in comparison. Until I got to the cafeteria, where it was sloppy joe day. Of course it was. Nothing said first day of school like sloppy joes.
I found Lena and Ridley easily enough. They were sitting alone at one of the orange lunch tables, with a steady stream of guys circling like vultures. Everyone had heard about Ridley by now, and all the guys wanted to check her out.
“Where’s Link?”
Ridley tilted her head toward the back of the lunchroom, where Link was moving from table to table like he was the MVP at the state championship or something. I noticed her tray, full of chocolate pudding, red Jell-O cubes, and slices of dry-looking angel food cake. “Hungry, Rid?”
“What can I say, Boyfriend? Girl’s got a sweet tooth.” She picked up a bowl of pudding and dug in.
“Don’t tease her. She’s having a bad day,” Lena said.
“Really? That’s a shocker.” I bit into my first deflated sloppy joe. “What happened?”
Lena glanced back at one of the tables. “That happened.”
Link had one foot up on the plastic bench, and he was leaning over the table, talking to the cheer squad. His attention focused on one cheer captain in particular.
“Aw, that’s nothing. Just Link being Link. You don’t have anything to worry about, Rid.”
“Like I’m worried,” she snapped. “I could care less what he does.” But I looked down at her tray, and four of the pudding bowls were already empty. “I’m not coming back tomorrow, anyway. This whole school thing is moronic. You move around from room to room like herds or flocks or—”
“Schools?” I couldn’t resist.
“That’s what I’m talking about.” Ridley rolled her eyes, annoyed that I couldn’t keep up.
“I was talking about fish. A group of fish is called a school. If you went to school you’d know that.” I ducked to avoid her spoon.
“That isn’t the point.” Lena shot me a warning look.
“The point is, you’re sort of a solo act,” I said, trying to sound sympathetic. Ridley went back to her pudding with a serious level of sugar dedication I respected. She didn’t take her eyes off Link.
“Actually trying to make someone like you is totally demeaning. It’s pathetic. It’s…”
“Mortal?”
“Exactly.” She shuddered, moving on to the Jell-O.
A few minutes later, Link worked his way over to our table. He dropped down next to Ridley, and the side of the table where Lena and I were sitting lifted right off the ground. At 6′2″, I was one of the tallest guys at Jackson, but I only had an inch or so on Link now.