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Such was my life in between rounds of “What Would You Choose?”

“What did you hear?” I asked Tracy, throwing her a much-needed bone. Fuchsia shot me an annoyed look, and I stared her down. Clearly, she’d forgotten who she was dealing with here. This wasn’t the first grade, and I wasn’t asking to sit at her table.

She was sitting at mine.

“Was it the thing about Jackson?” I added, making my eyes impossibly wide and innocent.

Wait for it…wait for it…

Fuchsia leaned forward. “Jackson?” she asked, in what I’m sure she thought was a very subtle way.

Nothing about Fuchsia Reynolds was actually subtle, least of all the well-known fact that she was pretty desperate for a top-three boyfriend, though technically, that particular fact
wasn’t
well known except to those of us who had poured her into her bed after Parker’s party. Or at least that particular midnight confession wasn’t well known
yet.
With Fuchsia, it was best to always hold some crucial piece of information in reserve. “Blackmail” is such an ugly word. I vastly prefer the term “leverage.” And if that offends your moral sensibilities, I would suggest that
you
try keeping Fuchsia Reynolds in check for a week, and then we’ll talk.

“I still haven’t told you what I heard,” Tracy whined.

I turned my attention to her and thoroughly pretended that I’d never mentioned the utterly fictional “thing about Jackson,” relatively sure that Fuchsia would sheath her claws in hopes that I’d offer up some juicy details about her current crush. See? No need to bring up the party, no emotional blackmail, and I’d still managed to keep the peace. Yay for me. I totally deserved a cookie.

Tracy, looking as proud as a kindergartner giving her first show-and-tell, tossed her dyed blond hair over one shoulder and began to dispense the gossip she’d been trying to tell us for the past three minutes. “I heard that our favorite desperate Non may finally be making a move on her shaggy little would-be boytoy.”

I bit back a sigh and stared down into my milkshake. The words “favorite” (meaning highly favored or most liked) and “Non” (meaning a social nonentity, a loser, and three-quarters of the student population at Emory High) should never have even been used in the same sentence. At Emory, you couldn’t afford to have a favorite Non, because paying too much attention to the unpopular had a way of making you look pathetic, a la Tracy, who still hadn’t gotten over the fact that the new girl from California was (a) new, (b) a girl, and (c) from California. Unfortunately, when she’d first arrived, Lissy James had also been (d) attracted to Tracy’s then-steady boyfriend, Tate, and (e) socially impaired and utterly incapable of following even the most explicit instructions.

Double unfortunately, she was also (f ) the daughter of the sister of the man who was dating my mother. What did that make her to me?

Nothing. Or at least, that’s what I kept telling myself, despite the fact that there was something about Lissy James that put me in “friends protect friends” mode, even though the two of us were anything but. When Lissy had first moved to town, I’d tried to show her the ropes, but eventually I was forced to the conclusion that some people just don’t get it even if you hold the metaphorical ropes up to their faces and point vigorously. With Lissy, I’d done everything short of pretending to climb the ropes myself, mime style.

“Can we change the subject?” I asked, half wishing I was heartless enough to have let Fuchsia play mind games with Tracy to her heart’s content. “Your Lissy obsession is way past tired, Trace.” I kept my eyes on her until she looked away, silent.

Normally, I had a little more finesse than this, but when it came to all things related to Lissy James, the James family, or the night they’d somehow decided to let me in on the king-sized family secret, I had a tendency to lose my touch.

The Sight: a suite of mystical abilities to see what others could not…

Thinking about it had me glancing over at the other side of the cafeteria and wincing inwardly. I’d introduced her to my friends, my
boyfriend,
and the primo Goldens, the hottest of the hot, and socially challenged Lissy had practically voluntarily Non-ed herself. Now she was sitting with Nons, eating with Nons, and—if Tracy’s gossip was to be believed—on the verge of dating a Non. I didn’t understand it. Once upon a time, I’d offered her the world, and Lissy had chosen them over me. In all honesty, that still felt less than fabulous on my end.

Luckily, however, I wasn’t in the business of being honest with anyone, least of all myself.

As if she sensed me looking at her, Lissy glanced up, meeting my gaze. Her eyes flitted up and down my body. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought she was checking me out, which goes to show just how much she really needed my help, even if she didn’t want it. At Emory High, potential boyfriends were no guarantee against lesbian rumors. Luckily for Lissy, being under my protection
was,
and even if I hadn’t been strangely and masochistically driven to curb any and all Lissy-centric rumors, I still wouldn’t have been able to deny the fact that I knew the truth in all its twisted, freaky glory.

Lissy wasn’t checking
me
out. She was checking out my aura.

“It’s not like her uncle and your mom are even married.” Tracy’s pouting snapped me back to reality. “What do you care if we talk about her?”

That was a very good question, and one for which I had absolutely no answer. Lissy had made her decision—why couldn’t I just let her live with the consequences? She didn’t even like me. There was no reason for me to go out on a social limb on her behalf, and the fact that I continually found myself doing it—in direct violation of every rule I’d ever made for myself—was more than a little disturbing.

Knowing better than to let my thoughts show on my face, I shrugged and answered Tracy’s question as cavalierly as I could. “I don’t care if you talk about her,” I said, the lie slipping easily off my tongue, “but since she could probably talk about you…” I let the threat hang in the air. Tracy had the memory of an amnesiac goldfish, and she needed to be reminded at least once a day that Lissy James wasn’t the only one with a mystical secret.

Properly chastised, Tracy shut her mouth and ceased Lissy-bashing. Fuchsia looked up from her nails, suddenly interested in the conversation, and across the room, Lissy turned back to the friends she’d chosen over me.

“Do you know something I don’t?” Fuchsia asked, her eyes narrowing almost imperceptibly.

Other than everything? I thought.

“Come on—secrets are no fun, Li,” Fuchsia chanted in a singsong voice. “Especially when they’re Tray-Cee’s.”

“Hey!”

I ignored Tracy’s outraged squeak. If Fuchsia thought she was going to get any information out of me that I didn’t want to give, she was even more intellectually delayed than I’d thought. At Emory High, secrets were like currency. You traded them, bartered for them, bought silence with them. But when the secret in question centered on the fact that one of your best friends was a modern-day Siren who could bewitch guys with her singing voice? Those were the kind of secrets you just kept.

Still, I had to tell Fuchsia something. She was my best friend. My second-in-command. My biggest threat.

“Tracy tried to hook up with Tate right after the breakup, and he declined,” I said, thinking on my feet and giving Fuchsia the gossip she was lusting after. “Lissy overheard us talking about it in the bathroom.” The first part was true; the second part was not.

Tracy let out a horrified gasp, but I shut her up with one cautionary look. The easiest way to keep one secret was to let another piece of information slip, and the last thing either of us needed was for Fuchsia, whose mouth was roughly the size of Montana, to figure out that it had taken more than boob, nose, and dye jobs for Tracy to land her ex-boyfriend (the second-hottest guy at our school) in the first place. If secrets were currency in the high school world, boys were more or less Gold cards. No pun intended.

I didn’t even want to know what would happen if it got out that Tracy could seduce guys with her singing voice. Knowing Tracy, once her cover was blown, she’d probably hedge her bets and seduce the entire senior class, and I think we all know who’d end up cleaning up after that fiasco. Was it too much to ask for things to just return to normal?

Until a few weeks into the start of my junior year, life at Emory had been predictable: the Goldens threw the best parties, hooked up exclusively with each other, and kept the Nons in their places: figuratively under our feet and literally out of our way. Harsh? Yes, but this was high school, and I knew better than anyone: life
was
harsh.

Enter Lissy James. Within twenty-four hours of moving to town, she’d unknowingly hit on Brock (off-limits)
and
Tate (also off-limits), made friends with some of the biggest Nons in the class below me, puked in front of the entire student body, and failed to thank me even once for stopping the rumors that she was a pathetic boyfriend-stealing bulimic.

Instead, Lissy and her so-called Sight had turned my nice, normal life upside down. It had started with her little sister letting me in on the ginormous big-sis-has-mystical-powers secret, and it had ended with the three of us and Lissy’s Nontourage saving Tracy from Mr. Kissler, a power-grubbing math teacher who’d tried to kill her to steal her Siren (aka singing seductress) voice.

Even thinking about it made my head hurt.

In the weeks since our little adventure, Lissy, Tracy, and I had developed an understood agreement: Lissy kept her mouth shut about Tracy’s power, Tracy didn’t tell anyone about the freakiness she’d seen when we’d rescued her, and I did my best to ignore the strange daydreams I’d been having ever since.

I took another sip of my shake and forced my mind and my eyes back to the present.

“Wow.”

Ack! I thought as the word left my mouth. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Girls who were dating the most popular, best-looking guy in the entire school weren’t allowed to “wow” over other males, especially in the presence of my overzealous best friends, Fuchsia “I Want What You Have” Reynolds and Tracy “If I Can’t Have Tate Then I Want What Fuchsia Wants” Hillard.

“Wow what?” Fuchsia and Tracy asked in one voice.

I improvised and scrambled for a distracter. “Wow,” I said, zeroing in on a nearby pair of pants and saying a silent apology to their owner. “I didn’t know they made plaid the color of vomit.”

As I’d known it would, my comment sent them off on another tangent about the day’s worst fashion faux pas, and I had a chance to examine the real cause of my wow. He was standing on the other side of the room, leaning against the doorframe. Dark hair just long enough to cover what I felt sure were equally dark eyes fell in his face. He was tanned, ripped, and wore a thin white T-shirt and a pair of dark blue jeans so tight they must have gone out of style before I was born.

As if he could read my thoughts, the mystery boy looked up. His hair fell out of his eyes, which lingered on mine for just a moment before he shook his head and laughed without smiling at all.

“Who’s the new boy?” I found myself asking.

“New boy?” Fuchsia and Tracy spoke at once, and almost instantly, they whirled around and followed my gaze.

The boy in question frowned, first at them and then at me, before turning his back on us.

“What new boy?” Fuchsia asked. “Where?”

“Never mind,” I said, strangely bothered by the fact that he’d turned away. “He looks like a skeez.”

At my words, the boy turned back around, and from the way he was looking at me, I found myself wondering if there was something wrong with my face. Or my hair.

“Who looks like a skeez?” Fuchsia asked impatiently.

“The guy in the doorway,” I said.

For a long moment, Fuchsia said nothing, her eyes measuring the expression on my face, which I kept carefully blank. I knew better than to let people see more than I wanted them to.

“Lilah,” Tracy said slowly, looking from me to the door and back again. “There is no boy in the doorway.”

“Of course there…” As the words left my mouth, the boy turned his back on us again, and without moving, he disappeared. One second he was there; the next he was gone, and Tracy and Fuchsia were staring at me like I’d told them I’d decided to go Goth.

Luckily, my damage-control instinct kicked in.

“Oh,” I said, playing the whole thing off like a joke. “My mistake. That’s not a new boy. That’s just Lissy’s little friend.”

Taking one look at the Non girl on the other side of the caf, my friends dissolved into laughter.

“For a second there,” Fuchsia said, “I thought you were going crazy.”

Hoped
I was going crazy, I corrected her silently. I also silently apologized to Lissy’s friend Audra. My newfound tendency toward daydreaming had me doing a lot more “Hey! Look over there!” maneuvers than usual, and even though Audra hadn’t heard me and probably wouldn’t have cared if she had, I couldn’t help but feel squicky about the below-the-beltness of it all.

But, I reminded myself, desperate times called for desperate measures, and I was nothing if not a survivor.

Having successfully averted a potential mini-crisis, I couldn’t help but look back at the doorway. The air blurred like static on a television, and there the boy was again, glowering in my direction.

Tearing my eyes from his, I brought my milkshake to my mouth. When I looked back up, he was gone, and for a split second, a shattered image filled my mind.

Three girls holding hands.

These hallucinations/daydreams/whatever were really starting to bother me, and it was getting harder and harder to pretend they weren’t happening. I so couldn’t afford to lose my mind right now—Fuchsia would throw a popularity coup faster than I could say “if you had to choose,” and I absolutely could not let that happen.

With a failed effort at a deep, cleansing breath, I stood up.

“Where are you going?” Fuchsia asked.

I turned back and pinned her to the chair with a well-executed shrug. “You’ll see.”