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“Welcome to my afterlife. Where’s your first class?”
Emma studied her new schedule as we ambled aimlessly down the hall, and I tried to ignore the stares focused on us—no, focused on me. I didn’t figure out what the whispers were all about until some idiot underestimated his volume.
“I can’t believe she came to school today. Her best friend’s been in the ground less than twenty-four hours, and she doesn’t even look upset.”
Oh. They’d expected me to still be mourning Emma, which had never occurred to me because Emma was standing right next to me. It had been much easier to pretend to grieve during the week and a half before she’d come back to school, when we were still waiting for the police to release her body so we could bury her. Without her next to me, I’d had no trouble remembering that she was supposed to be dead.
“Two-oh-four.” Em looked up from her schedule and frowned. “I’m headed upstairs. See you at lunch?”
“Yeah.” At least that much hadn’t changed.
First period math was weird without Emma. The stares continued all the way through class, and I actually had to do math during the last five minutes of class, when we were supposed to be starting our homework, since I had no one to whisper with.
But there were plenty of people whispering about me.
I was the center of attention when I’d secretly died, yet somehow I was still the center of attention now that Em had secretly lived. I couldn’t win for losing.
“Hey, Kaylee.” Chelsea Simms sat next to me—uninvited—at my empty lunch table in the quad, and I silently cursed myself for showing up early.
“Hey.” I had no third period class, so I usually spent the hour there, knowing that if Tod had a break at work, that’s where he’d look for me.
Chelsea pulled a notebook from her bag. “Do you mind if I ask you a few things about Emma? I’m working on a memorial article for the school paper.”
Oh, yeah. Journalism was also third period. Just my luck.
“Sure.”
She frowned, studying my expression. “If this is a bad time, I can…?”
“No, go ahead. I don’t mind talking about Em. Feels like I’m keeping her memory alive.” How’s that for quotable?
“Great. Em was a junior, right?” Chelsea said, and I nodded. “And she had two sisters?” Another nod, and I noticed that though her notebook was open, she wasn’t taking notes. Whatever she really wanted to ask obviously required courage she hadn’t yet worked up.
“And…was she a good student?”
I turned to face her directly, looking right into her eyes. “Chelsea, just ask whatever you really want to know. Otherwise, this sounds like it’ll take all day.”
She blinked, surprised, then nodded. “Okay.” She sat straighter and actually picked up her pen, ready to write. “Do you really think it’s a coincidence that Emma Marshall and her boyfriend died on the same day? Just one day after Brant Williams died in his car, here on campus?”
I swallowed, trying to hide my own surprise. Obviously our classmates were just as suspicious as the police had been, but I hadn’t expected anyone to actually ask that question. And I certainly hadn’t expected anyone to expect me to have an answer.
“Do I think it’s a coincidence?” I bought time to think by repeating the question. “I don’t know what it is. I don’t see how it could be more than that. They died at different times, in different places, in different ways.” Sort of. Neither Brant nor Jayson had any obvious cause of death, so the coroner had labeled them both with the generic “heart failure.” Which wasn’t exactly common in teenagers.
“Were you there when Emma died?” Chelsea asked, her gaze glued to me. Watching closely for my reaction.
“Yeah. A bunch of us were. We took the day off for my birthday.” The tears in my eyes were real—I was lying, but the truth was no less traumatic. “We were just goofing off on the swings. At the lake. But Em went too high.” I sniffled. “She was showing off. Then she let go and just…She just fell out of the swing. She landed on her back, but she must have hit her head first, and…”
I stopped there, with another sob. A real one. Picturing Em’s actual death helped. Seeing Belphegore’s hand on her neck. Hearing the gruesome crack. Seeing Emma crumple to the ground.
In my memory, it all happened in some kind of horrible slow motion. That was the only way I’d gotten through the police interview, and I’d seen no sign that they doubted any of my story.
Their suspicion had come later, when they started calculating the death toll.
“It must have been horrible,” Chelsea said, and I realized that my tears were like a shield between us. A line of defense she wouldn’t cross. At least, not now. Not at sixteen. Though I had no doubt she’d someday dial up the pressure on some poor lying politician, unfazed by tears.
“It was.”
“Okay. Thanks.” She stood, stuffing her notebook and pen into the front pocket of her scuffed denim backpack. “Kaylee, I just want you to know that…we stopped the presses on the yearbooks. They’d already started printing them, but when we told them about Brant, and Jayson, and Emma, they agreed to reprint at no additional charge. So…the yearbooks will be late, but she’ll have a memorial page. They all will.”
“Thank you. That means a lot.” I hadn’t even known Chelsea was on the yearbook staff.
The lunch bell rang as she walked away, looking more frustrated and confused than she had before she sat down. I knew exactly how that felt.
Two minutes later, Sophie appeared in front of me and slapped a newspaper down on the picnic table. “Have you seen the headline? I would have missed it if my dad didn’t still read the news in print.”
Luca set his tray down and sat across from me, but Sophie was obviously too riled up to relax. She hadn’t bought a lunch, either.
“Headline?” I glanced at the paper and had to read it upside down. “‘Eastlake High Named Most Dangerous School of Its Size in the Country.’”
Sophie nodded, eyes wide, brows furrowed.
“Wow.”
“Look at the picture,” Luca said, his burger halfway to his mouth. So I looked.
Beneath the headline was a black-and-white shot of…us. Me, Nash, Sabine, and Emma, in Lydia’s body. It was taken at her funeral. The caption read, “Teens Mourn Yet another Lost Classmate.”
I mentally crossed my fingers and hoped that Lydia’s parents wouldn’t see that photo.
“Do you see that?” Sophie demanded, like I was refusing to look. “We’re the most dangerous school in the country.”
“Of our size,” Luca added, looking up at her. “Don’t you want something to eat?”
“How could I possibly digest anything with that staring back at me?” She waved one hand at the paper still lying on the table.
“What’s wrong?” Nash asked as he and Sabine settled onto the bench next to Luca.
“What’s wrong? We’ve just surpassed inner-city alternative schools all over the country as the most dangerous school in the U.S.”
“Of our size,” Luca added again. “I’m sure there are way more dangerous schools out there with several thousand students.”
Nash laughed, and Sophie turned on him. “This isn’t funny! All the other schools on this list are plagued by gang violence and organized crime.” She lowered her voice and leaned over the table. “We’re the only one overrun with demons.”
“How do you know?” Sabine plucked a fry from Nash’s tray.
“What?” My cousin finally sank onto the bench.
“How do you know those other schools aren’t also infested by hellions? I mean, the paper doesn’t say that’s what’s wrong with our school, does it?” she asked, and Sophie shook her head reluctantly. “Then it may not say what’s really wrong with those schools, either. For all we know, their ‘gang violence’ could really be roving bands of gremlins, shaking down students for their lunch money and handheld technology.”
“When something’s funny, you should let yourself laugh,” Nash added. “Otherwise, you’ll just stay mad or scared, and those little frown lines in your forehead will become permanent.”
Sophie’s eyes widened, and Sabine laughed out loud.
“Hey, Sophie!” Someone called from across the quad, and we all looked up to see Jennifer Lamb crossing the grass toward us, holding a chemistry textbook. “Can you give this to your cousin? She left it in class.”
“My cousin?” Sophie stood to take the book and glanced at me in confusion, but before I could tell her it wasn’t my book, Jennifer elaborated.
“Emily, right? She’s my new lab partner. Is she always so…grumpy?”
Sophie’s hand clenched around the thick textbook. “She’s Kaylee’s cousin. On a completely different side of the family.”
Jennifer frowned. “But her last name is Cavanaugh.”
Sophie turned to glare at me. “Great. You made her my cousin, too.”
I tried to hide a laugh while Jennifer backed away from us in confusion.
Emma finally showed up nearly halfway into the lunch period, about thirty seconds before I would have gone to look for her. “Today sucks!” She dropped her bag on the table, and Luca had to snatch his tray out of the way before his burger got smashed. “My new math teacher made me take some kind of placement test, which made me late for English, so now my English teacher hates me. My new lab partner is an idiot, and I spent half of lunch looking for my damn chemistry book. And I hate cafeteria hamburgers.” She collapsed onto the bench in a huff and leaned forward to put her forehead on the table.
We stared at her in surprise. I think we all expected her to sit up with a smile and jokingly demand a do-over day. When that didn’t happen, I put one hand on her shoulder. “Em.”
“What?” She didn’t even look up.
Nash took her text from Sophie. “Your idiot lab partner brought your chemistry book.”
Em sat up and snatched the book from him. “She probably stole it. Sabotage. I had no idea we went to school with so many stuck-up little bitches.”
A sick feeling swelled in the pit of my stomach. Something was wrong. Something beyond the obvious.
Sophie’s brows rose. “As one of those stuck-up bitches, I have to say, I’m a little offended.”
“Sometimes the truth hurts.”
I gaped at Em. She was going through something really difficult—we all knew that—but she was still Emma. She was still loyal to her friends and relatively calm, unless she was defending one of them, and generally a pleasant person to be around.
“Em, is something wrong?”
She turned on me, anger flashing in her eyes. “Weren’t you paying attention? Everything is wrong. I’m too short to see the whiteboard from the back of the class, and no one’s even said ‘hi’ to me all day. And it’s your fault, Kaylee. You stuck me in this stupid twig body, and no one notices twigs. When was the last time you saw a guy hit on a girl shaped like a chopstick?” She frowned, then rolled her eyes. “I guess I’m asking the wrong person, huh? Obviously the Hudsons like girls who look like little boys. That androgynous thing might work for you, but for me, it’s a definite step down.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. I couldn’t think past my shock and the sting of her words. I’d never seen her so angry.
And I was not androgynous!
“Sabine?” Nash looked as confused as the rest of us. “Are you doing this?” He couldn’t be more specific without risking clueing Sophie in on the fact that Sabine was intentionally manipulating fears. Again.
“It’s not me.” The mara looked like she wanted to say more. “I can only mess with fear, and she doesn’t have any right now. None. This tastes like anger to me.”
“No fear?” I said, and Sabine shook her head.
No fear of not fitting in? Of standing out for all the wrong reasons? Of having bombed the math placement test? Of being sucked back into the Netherworld by the hellion who’d already killed her once? I’d never met anyone who had no fear.
“You bet your ass it’s anger.” Emma shoved her chemistry text into her bag. “What the hell do I have to be afraid of? I should be pissed off to be stuck in a second-rate body, in this stupid-ass school, without my own clothes, and my stuff, and my car. Whose brilliant idea was this, anyway? Yours?” The depth of anger in her gaze stunned me. And scared me a little. “Sounds like something you’d do. Another pathetic attempt to help that only makes shit worse.”
“Back off, Em.” Sabine stood, both palms planted firmly on the table. “This is the only warning you get. Kaylee may be skinny, and naive, and clueless more often than not, and borderline adulterous, but you’re lucky to have her as a friend. She saved your life.”
“Part of it, anyway,” Em mumbled. But she seemed a little calmer.
If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear Sabine just came to my defense. Sort of. “I’m not adulterous,” I said, for the record.
Sabine shrugged, still frowning at Em like she’d hardly heard me. “I said ‘borderline.’”
Nash put a hand on Sabine’s arm, and she sat. Reluctantly. Less than mollified by Em’s response. “Something’s wrong with her.”
“Yeah.” Emma huffed. “I just rattled off a whole list of what’s wrong with me.”
“Emotionally, she’s been kinda all over the place for the past two days,” I added, still reeling from her outburst.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Em demanded.
“You cried at the funeral.”
“Lots of people cry at funerals,” Luca pointed out, and when he said it aloud, it sounded perfectly reasonable. But it wasn’t reasonable, even if I couldn’t explain why.
“She was fine one minute, assessing the funeral she’d planned for herself. Then she was bawling and clinging to her mom.”
“Well, yeah. Her mom was crying.” Nash stuck a fry upright in a pool of ketchup, but it fell over. “Crying moms are contagious.”
But it was more than that…“Then, that afternoon, she got all angry and determined to dish out vengeance to Invidia, and that kind of came out of nowhere, too.…”
“That wasn’t out of nowhere,” Sabine said around a bite of her burger. She swallowed, then continued, “You were feeling the vengeance, too, Kay. We all were.”
Yeah. And Em caught it from us—like it was contagious.
“Wait, when was that?” Sophie said, and I realized I’d said too much.
“Stop talking about me like I’m not here!” Em stood and people at the next table turned to stare until she noticed and sat again, glowering at them from a distance.
“Sorry,” I whispered, leaning toward the center of the table. “This just doesn’t make any sense. We’ve been friends since we were kids, and for more than ten years, I’ve been the one bouncing from one emotional extreme to the other—”
“That’s true,” Sophie interjected. “Kaylee’s never been incredibly stable.”
“Thanks.” I scowled at her. “Now stop helping. My point is that Em’s always been my rock. Steady. Even. Nice.” I turned to her so she’d know I wasn’t trying to leave her out of a discussion about her. “You’ve never blamed me for anything. Even things I deserved the blame for. And these are the same cafeteria hamburgers we’ve been choking down for three years—why are you just now mad about that? And what on earth did Jennifer Lamb do to deserve being called an idiot?”
Em frowned, and her gaze fell. She was thinking. Really thinking. “She…Well, she bumped my elbow and made me spill water all over our lab table. But she did apologize. And clean it up.” Her frown deepened. “I do hate those burgers, though. And you…” Her eyes widened. “Oh, Kay, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean any of that. None of this is your fault. You did save my life, and I am lucky to have you as a friend. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I was just so mad.”
But that was only partially true. She’d meant everything she’d said. I could see that in her eyes. She did hate living in Lydia’s body, and on some level she did blame me for that. But the part that made the churning in my stomach ease a little was the fact that Emma—the Em I’d known most of my life—would never admit that. She would go to her grave trying to spare my feelings.
Whatever was wrong with her, it was wearing off.
