Platinum (10 page)

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.

“It’s no fun when we both know you’re lying anyway,” Lexie said, but she shrugged it off. “Lissy never wants to talk about what she sees, either.”

“So we’re looking for something purple?” I asked, quickly changing the subject lest she compare me to Lissy again. I ran my fingertips along the edge of the closest shelf. “And to think that I’d thought we were here to look at newspap—”

The buzz started in my hand and worked its way up my arm and into my body, a flush of energy that forced my arm hairs onto their ends. My muscles tensed, and my hand contorted itself into a claw, death-gripping the bookcase the way Fuchsia held her daddy’s credit card.

The pressure in my arm was unbearable, and as it pushed its way through my body, up my spine, and toward my neck, I could feel myself on the verge of being engulfed whole. The force threw back my head and blocked out the sounds of the world around me.

A stocky boy slamming an undersized nerd into a purple shelf.

A girl with platinum blond hair, high in a ponytail, watching silently.

A boy with black hair and mean eyes.

Blond-haired girl staring on.

A guy with sandy blond hair, his arm around a cheerleader.

A ring on her finger, hair high in a ponytail, she watches.

Dark brown hair, with green eyes, and an accent, and then another boy with broad shoulders and a lazy, charming grin.

Blond hair, always blond, watching, waiting, twirling the ring on her finger.

Brock. Ghost Boy. Brock. Flying fists, red, red blood, and a blond girl watching it all.

As the vision faded from my mind’s eye, the tension drained from my body. “You know,” I told Lexie, shaking out my poor cramping hand. “When your demon spawn grandmother told me this could happen when I touched things, she didn’t say it would hurt.”

“Did you just call Grams a demon spawn?”

I massaged my hand and ignored the question. Okay, so maybe demon spawn was a slight exaggeration, but I’d had a horrible day. It wasn’t like I’d said she was ugly and wore hideous muumuus all the time and shouldn’t have been allowed to reproduce. In a way, “demon spawn” was almost a compliment.

Okay, so it totally wasn’t, but my hand
hurt.

For practically the first time since I’d met her, Lexie was silent, and I wondered whether it was with awe or because I’d actually managed to do the impossible: hurt the feelings of the kid who saw good in everything and everyone. Next I was planning on destroying Christmas and barbecuing the Easter bunny.

“Lexie, I didn’t mean to…”

Lexie giggled. “Demon spawn?” she squeaked.

Meekly, I shrugged, and Lexie managed to get ahold of herself enough to ask me the question I was beginning to expect her to ask every time I had a retrovision of any kind.

“Sooo,” she said, drawing out the word and trying to sound casual. “What did you see?”

11

It

The It Factor:

If you have to ask, you’ll never know.

And if you don’t think you have it,
then you’re right.

“So, there are a bunch of guys,” Lexie recapped, her nose crinkled in concentration. “And they’re all really cute.”

My hand still aching, I tried to speed her thought process up a little. “And there was a girl…”

“Only one girl, and all those guys?” Lexie said, sighing at the very thought of it.

I tossed my hair over my shoulder and out of my face. “Don’t get any ideas,” I told her, overcome with the feeling that Lexie shouldn’t date until she was thirty.

Lexie grinned again, but then got back down to business. “And the first guy was beating up on some poor little dork?”

I nodded.

“Are you sure they weren’t just play-fighting?” she asked hopefully.

I shook my head. “Trust me, Lex, the little guy was a total No—a dork.” I corrected myself at the last minute. “Non” sounded so harsh if you really thought about it. “The other guy was most definitely beating him up.”

I could tell by the look on Lexie’s face what she thought about that, and honestly, I agreed. As flattering as it could hypothetically be to have guys fighting over you, it was completely asinine when one of those guys had a six-pack and the other one didn’t have much of a pack at all.

“And then Brock was there,” Lexie continued.

I nodded.

“And Ghost Boy.”

I looked down at my fingernails. The polish on my right hand had chipped when I’d gone into violent-vision mode. “That about sums it up,” I said.

Lexie opened her mouth and then shut it again. “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe something’s missing. Maybe you’re forgetting something important. It’s kind of hard to tell. The air’s not fuzzy, not exactly, but it’s not—”