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“Hey, babes,” Fuchsia called out. I turned around. I was only “babes” when she was ready to forget about guys long enough to be a real friend or when she was getting ready to start messing with me. It was a real toss-up.

“We’re going to the mall. Wanna come with?”

And apparently it was the second option. Fuchsia was all smiles and kindness, but she knew exactly what my answer was going to be before I gave it. I’d picked up on that particular trick in middle school when she’d taken to inviting me to her house when she
knew
I had a dentist appointment. That way she got bonus points in the friend tally for asking me, but didn’t have to settle for being the second-prettiest girl there.

“Trace and I were going to go on Saturday,” I said. “Right, Tracy?”

Tracy was, to put it nicely, a teeny tiny bit needy. There was no way she was going to turn down a mall invite, especially if it meant that she got to pretend that I’d asked her before I’d asked Fuchsia.

“Right,” Tracy said.

“Since when?” Fuchsia demanded. She knew my tricks almost as well as I knew hers.

“We’ve been planning it for a while.” Tracy answered Fuchsia’s question, relishing the moment way more than she would have on a day when Fuchsia hadn’t hit on Tate. “You can come if you…you know…want to.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.

“Oh.” Fuchsia practically sniffed the word, and I felt a small twinge of guilt. Fuchsia and I played mind games with each other. It was what we did. That didn’t mean I had to like it.

“Maybe we could all go next week,” I offered. “If Saturday doesn’t work for you, Fuchsia.” It was as much of a peace branch as she was going to get after the day I’d had.

Tracy stiffened. She didn’t forgive quite as easily as I did, and she didn’t like me offering to change our fictional plans to accommodate someone who’d spent all of chorus ogling her ex.

“I gotta go,” I said, walking between the two of them on my way out. “Trace, figure out what works for you guys and then give me a call?”

Tracy smiled, her muscles relaxing now that I’d at least pretended to put her in charge. “Sureness.”

“Laters,” I called over my shoulder.

There was a simple reason that I couldn’t jet off to the mall, and that reason should have been waiting for me in front of the school, as per our carpool agreement that morning. Needless to say, she wasn’t.

When my mom had up and bought me a car two weeks earlier, I’d been delighted. Bumming rides in Brock’s SUV and Fuchsia’s blue convertible had worked well enough, but having a car of my own took away some of Fuchsia’s leverage and was, as Brock had so eloquently put it, “hot.” I wasn’t stupid enough to think that my mom’s sudden generosity had nothing to do with the fact that she and Corey Nowly were getting serious, but I wasn’t completely opposed to parental bribery.

Having my own car, unfortunately, had definite drawbacks, such as my mom’s tendency toward volunteering me to sporadically chauffeur a certain sophomore and her little sister home from school. Thus, instead of cruising to the mall with Fuchsia and Tracy, I was forced to work on a little dilemma I liked to call “Where is Lissy, and why isn’t she waiting for me in front of the school?”

A cursory check of the hallway revealed that she wasn’t at her locker. Class had been out for a full ten minutes, so I didn’t think there was much of a chance that she was still in a classroom. Since Emory High wasn’t exactly the Colosseum of high schools, that only left a few possibilities: the cafeteria, the bathroom, the library, and the gym. The one and only time I’d ever seen Lissy involved in athletic activity involved her being hit in the head with a football, so I ruled out the gym. The cafeteria was the closest (and therefore the least likely to cause me to be seen wandering around the school looking for someone I wasn’t even supposed to like), so I decided to try my luck there.

Luck, as it turned out, was on my side. I opened the cafeteria door, and there was Lissy, sitting on top of a table and listening intently as Audra talked, either oblivious of or neutral to the fact that she’d inconvenienced me at all.

“Yes, he’s kind of scraggly, and I will admit, his ‘I’m a tortured teen’ routine takes some getting used to,” Audra was saying, “but he’s also obviously into you. And, God knows why, since he’s such a surly piece of work, but you seem to like him, too. So what’s the deal?”

Lissy blew a frizzy wisp of hair out of her face. “The deal is that we’re just friends. The deal is that I’m not sure how I feel about him, and I’m not about to date someone just because my Sight says I should.” She paused. “And he’s not that surly.”

“Lissy, Dylan’s been my best friend since we were twelve. Trust me on this one. He’s surly.”

“Eavesdropping, Princess?”

I jumped at the sound of Mystery Boy’s voice. I’d hoped never to see him again, and yet here he was. This cafeteria was so totally cursed.

“No,” I said, keeping my voice low enough that Audra and Lissy, who were still engaged in their own little debate, couldn’t hear me. “And don’t call me Princess.”

Mystery Boy paid absolutely no attention to me, keeping his eyes on Audra and Lissy.
“It’s the age-old story,”
he said.
“Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. Girl is somehow convinced that she couldn’t possibly like boy. Boy suffers endless torment waiting for girl to come to her senses.”

Great. Now my hallucination (I was back to that story, and I was sticking to it) was going all philosophical on me.

He turned back to me and shook his head.
“You can’t fight destiny, Princess,”
he said.
“You might want to tell that to your little friend.”

“She’s not my…” Before I could get the words out of my mouth, he’d disappeared, and Lissy and Audra had discovered that they weren’t alone.

And then, in the next instant, they were, because my mind, my body, every fiber of my Queen Bee being was taken over by some sort of vision I couldn’t begin to understand.

Air crackling and the colors of the room blurring into nothingness.

A girl with platinum blond hair, a soft smile on her face, and a metal ring on her finger. A dark-haired guy with his shirt off, muscles shining with sweat. Bruises.

“You ready for this, boy?” I didn’t see the voice’s owner, but could hear the emphasis on the last syllable, could see bruised muscles tensing in response.

“I don’t want to fight you.” The shirtless guy was obviously lying, his body rebelling against misplaced restraint.

“Then maybe you should have left Helen alone.” Five voices spoke the same words in different rhythms, each seemingly unaware of the others, and the blond-haired girl stood there, twirling her ring.

Air crackling, blurring, and hardening into colors that weren’t there. Purple. Blue. Pink, melting away to golden white.

Nothing.

“Lilah?” Lissy spoke my name hesitantly. “Are you okay?”

Answer: no, definitely not, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.

What was happening to me? What I’d just seen—it looked real, felt real, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. The details were burned into my mind—a shirtless guy who looked all too much like my very own mystery boy; a girl with platinum blond hair.

“Lilah?” Lissy’s voice was smaller this time.

“I’m fine.”

I wasn’t fine. I needed help, but I wouldn’t, couldn’t ask for it again.

“You ready?” I asked, but I didn’t bother to wait for an answer. I’d passed up a trip to the mall, hunted all over the school, and endured another brutal round of what I refused to describe as visions. If Lissy still wanted a ride home, she could darn well follow me.

I made it out of the school in record time. I clicked the keyless entry button on my key ring, threw open the door to my car, situated myself in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and shifted into reverse before Lissy managed to scramble inside. “Thanks for waiting,” she said dryly.

“Thanks for coming,” I returned, mirroring her tone exactly.

Lissy’s eyes opened wide, and she nodded almost imperceptibly. Then she blinked several times, obviously seeing something in me that couldn’t be seen with the naked, nonmystical eye.

“Don’t start,” I told her when she opened her mouth. The last thing I needed after my Mystery Boy–filled day was an aura checkup. I desperately missed the days when Lissy’s power had been a secret and I’d thought she just had an unfortunate twitching problem.

“Seriously, Lilah, are you okay?” Lissy was nothing if not persistent. “Because you don’t really look okay….”

I flipped on my turn signal. “Fine,” I said.

“Are you…sure?”

“Positive. Are
you
okay?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “Because you’re looking kind of…” I trailed off, casting a mock-sympathetic look at her frizzing hair. “…frazzled.”

“I’m fine,” she said, looking out the window instead of at me, and then, as I’d known she would, she grew quiet. Her hair actually wasn’t anything some gel and a thorough reading of
Cosmo
wouldn’t fix, but I couldn’t afford for her to be asking what-happened-back-there kinds of questions when we picked Lexie up from the middle school. Luckily, playing the frizz card worked, and the two of us rode in a silence that only broke when Lexie James blew into the car, a broad smile on her pixie face.

“You wouldn’t believe what happened today,” she said, and just listening to her say it, I was overcome with the feeling that I couldn’t possibly believe what had happened today. Part of me even wanted to hear what had happened, and it had been years since anything related to middle school had even remotely interested me. I hadn’t even been interested in the middle school when I’d gone there myself.

“I was showing Molly how to smile with only half of her mouth, and…”

I never got to hear what unbelievable thing had resulted from the half-mouth smile lessons, because about that time, Lexie picked up on the way I was death-gripping the steering wheel and the fact that Lissy couldn’t keep from glancing over at what I presumed was a very revealing mass of moving light around my head.

“Are you okay, Lilah?” Lexie asked, her story immediately forgotten. “Because you look—”

I didn’t let her finish the sentence. “Just driving,” I said, blurting out the first true thing that came to mind.

“But that doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” Lexie said simply. For someone three years younger than me, she was a little too with it for her own good. Or, for that matter, mine.

Why, oh why, did I have to carpool with the James family? Trekking all over the school to find Lissy was bad enough, but trying to keep a secret from a thirteen-year-old Truth Seer was a million times worse, especially when that Truth Seer happened to live for finding a way to use her power to (and I quote) “do something really good and Sighty with it.”

“You look like something’s the matter,” Lexie said, wrinkling her brow at me. “Something
is
the matter,” she continued, her eyes lighting up as she assessed the truth of her own words. She still got a kick out of using her Sight. According to what she’d told me when she’d very earnestly spilled her heart and all the family secrets, she’d been a late mystical bloomer, and her biggest fear in life had been that she’d be the only female in the history of her family to be Blind. Now that she had True Vision (“the ability to see truth as a visual property”—she’d recited the definition so many times that everyone in the superpower loop knew it by heart), Lexie was determined to use her Sight every chance she got.

It was almost cute in a way that, at that moment, wasn’t cute at all.

“I really don’t want to talk about it,” I told her, knowing that she’d see I was telling the truth: I really
didn’t
want to talk about it.

“You two never want to talk about anything real with me,” Lexie complained from the backseat, her eyes morose and her voice censuring.

“Hey,” Lissy said, “leave me out of this.”

“Is it dangerous?” Lexie asked, completely ignoring her sister. I had to admire her ability to do so without really meaning to. “People are always trying to keep me out of danger.”

Fresh dirt on an open grave.

“It’s not dangerous,” I snapped, pushing the image out of my mind and concentrating on the road.

“Say that again,” Lexie instructed, wrinkling her forehead, completely unaffected by my snapping. Lissy, on the other hand, was glaring at me like I’d tried to permanently disfigure her little sister.

“Say what again?” I asked.

“That thing about the danger.”

Only two more miles to go. How in the world was I going to make it two more miles?

“It’s not dangerous,” I repeated, hoping against hope that what I was saying was true. Mystery Boy hadn’t
looked
dangerous, except in a sexy James Dean kind of way. “Though it might be lethal to my social life,” I added.

In the rearview mirror, I could see Lexie chewing on her bottom lip in deep concentration.

“I don’t know about the social life part,” she admitted candidly, “but it
might
be dangerous. I bet you need our help. Does it have something to do with that singing Siren girl?”

“No,” I said. One more mile. If I could keep her from asking the right questions for one more mile, I would be safe.

“Lex, it’s probably just ordinary school stuff.” Lissy, who’d suffered more than one Lexie inquisition since her little sister had “found” her Sight, came to my rescue. “There’s nothing supernatural about it. If she doesn’t want to share, maybe you should leave her alone.”

I was momentarily grateful for Lissy’s leave-her-alone policy until I realized what she’d just said.

“There’s nothing supernatural about it,” Lexie repeated. “Nothing supernatur…yes, there is!” Her eyes got as wide as saucers, and she stuck her tongue out at Lissy in what I had to admit was a very flattering (and probably overpracticed) way. “There
is
something supernatural about it,” she said triumphantly.

Lissy turned to look at me. “Does this have something to do with what just happened in the cafeteria?”

I pulled into their driveway. “Okay, ride ends here,” I said, deliberately not answering Lissy’s question. “Thanks for your time. Have a nice day.”