Platinum (6 page)

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 day 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.

“It’s totally got to be a dare or something. I mean, puh-lease.” If anything, Fuchsia’s voice was getting louder. “Lilah? Are you even listening to me?”

“It’s got to be a dare or something,” I repeated, keeping one eye on Lexie and groaning at the fascination more than evident on her face.

“I mean, don’t you think? If Parker’s with Plaid Girl, it’s got to be a dare, right, and how pathetic is that? Someone should buy that girl a clue.”

I refrained from suggesting that Fuchsia invest in a few clues herself. Parker was known for playing the field. That was part of the reason he wasn’t top-three material. For all we knew, he was diseased. With one guilty look at Lexie, I said as much out loud, and Fuchsia latched on to my words like they were gospel.

“I bet he gave her something,” she said, even though, as far as I could tell from what I’d actually heard her say, she’d seen Plaid Girl and Parker together for less than five minutes. “Or maybe
she
gave
him
something,” Fuchsia corrected herself, rewriting my words to fit her needs. “That’s soooo…”

“Soooo what?” I asked.

“Call on the other line.” She was practically salivating to spread the Plaid Girl Is Diseased rumor. “Gotta go. Love-ya-bye!”

I hung up the phone and turned to Lexie, who seemed relatively unfazed. She was whispering to herself under her breath, staring at her hands as she spoke. “Well,” she announced cheerfully a moment later, “you don’t see dead people, or at least, that’s not your Sight, not exactly.”

“Good to know,” I said, visions of
The Sixth Sense
flying through my head.

“And FYI, Plaid Girl doesn’t have any diseases,” Lexie added earnestly.

I stared at her, horrified.

“What?” she asked innocently. “I got bored.”

“Corrupting the young and impressionable, Princess?”

This time, I managed not to scream as he whispered words into the back of my neck. Instead, I twisted around. “Listen, Ghost Boy,” I said.

“Ghost Boy?” Lexie asked, her eyes lighting up. “Where?”

“She’s a cute kid,”
Ghost Boy said, jerking his head in Lexie’s direction.
“Sure you want to drag her into this?”

“Into what?” I asked.

Ghost Boy leaned forward.
“I could tell you,”
he said,
“but watching you figure it out is half the fun.”

“Figure
what
out?” He didn’t answer, and if I hadn’t been overcome by the mental image of him bruised and shirtless, I might have threatened to forget about the whole thing.

“What do you want?” I gave him my best “you’re beneath me” look, to which he remained annoyingly immune. “Aren’t dead people supposed to want something?” I asked impatiently. The sooner I could figure out what I had to do to get rid of him, the sooner I could go back to life as it should be.

“I’m not dead, Princess.”
He leaned back in the seat, measuring my reaction.

“If I say you’re dead, you’re dead,” I said flatly. “And stop calling me Princess.”

He paused just long enough that I thought I might have won.
“I’m not dead.”

“And that would make you a ghost because why?” I wasn’t sure I wanted an answer to that. “Speaking of ghosts, don’t you have something else to do? Someone to haunt, or some lights to flicker or something?”

He didn’t take the hint, and he didn’t bother to reply. Instead, he leaned forward and put his hand under my chin. I was about to jerk back when, in a single motion, he touched his lips lightly to mine and disappeared.

“Wow, you’re really red,” Lexie said. “What did he say to you this time?”

My lips tingled where he’d touched them, and my face burned with fury, embarrassment, and the fact that, for a dead guy, he wasn’t a bad kisser. I opened the car door and got out. Anything to get away from those particular thoughts.

“If he was like that when he was alive, no wonder he’s dead,” I muttered. “I would have killed him myself.”

“Ummm…Lilah?” Lexie appeared beside me, interrupting my thoughts.

“Lex, I’m tired, can we call a time-out on talking about this whole me-having-ghost-Sight thing?”

“Li—”

I cut her off. “Please?”

Lexie swallowed hard. “Okay,” she said, “but when you turn around, don’t say I didn’t try to warn you.”

When I realized that we were standing in Lexie’s driveway, I made a conscious decision not to turn around, but it didn’t save me from the absolute horrors that were already headed my way.

Lexie smiled weakly at the person standing behind me. “Hi, Grams.”

7

Power

Getting the upper hand is easy.
Keeping it is hard.

Grams, aka Caroline Nowly, aka the town eccentric, wasn’t exactly my favorite person. In fact, she didn’t even make the top twenty, which was a pretty weak showing considering that I couldn’t even think of twenty people in this town that I
actually
liked. Not that I hated her. It was more like…

She freaked me out.

“Lilah, my star, this is absolutely wonderful news.”

My star? This was exactly the kind of crazy-old-lady talk that made me wonder why “Grams” wasn’t in a nice little home on the other side of the state where she couldn’t possibly harm any innocent bystanders by giving them stupid nicknames or trying to regale them with cryptic messages about the Sight. As far as I had been able to tell in the months my mom and Corey had been dating, those were the only two things Lexie’s grandmother was capable of doing.