Death, Doom and Detention

* * *

Of all the teachers in all the schools in all the world, Ms. Mullins was my absolute favorite, and Brooke and I had her first hour. It made my mornings not quite so loathsome, knowing I’d get to see her. I wasn’t sure why, what it was about her that set her so far apart. She was a tiny woman with dark hair and sparkling eyes who looked at life like there was more to it than just memorizing the cell structure of an earthworm. We had to know that stuff too, of course, but she also taught us to see science in everyday things. Like survival of the fittest and natural selection. Which, sadly, made any attraction Jared might have for me even more questionable.

“Hey, Ms. Mullins,” I said to her when Cameron dropped us off. He’d seemed reluctant to leave us, but what could he do? Hovering in the hall was not an option. He’d simply have to go to class and learn stuff like the rest of us.

Ms. Mullins looked up from her desk and drew her brows together. “You’re on time.”

I grinned and headed to my seat.

“But it’s a Monday.”

I tried to feign offense. “I’ve been on time lots of Mondays.” When her mouth thinned in doubt, I added, “Well, I’ve thought about being on time lots of Mondays.”

Truth be told, I probably had fewer late passes than any other student in school. I was boring. Predictable. And the new guy had fuzzy edges. What was going on?

The morning progressed with me trying not to touch other students—lest I be bombarded with unwanted visions—and Brooke coming up with a thousand different scenarios as to why the new guy had fuzzy edges. She conjured everything from a rare tropical disease to a zombie attack in the forest the night of the party, thus the horrid smell.

Unfortunately, in the classes we didn’t have together, I had to stew in my own musings about what was going on. They were worse than Brooke’s. I quickly realized, however, I had nowhere near her creative insight. The only thing I could come up with was that maybe the new kid had bronchitis, because a zombie attack seemed a tad unrealistic. Then again, so did the demon possession of yours truly.

By the time we got to PE, Brooke had decided the new guy was a warlock, a witch turned evil and cast out by his Wiccan clan, thus the fuzzy edges. She’d devised a plan to get him to do a spell on Tabitha. Something bad, like have all her hair fall out or paint her fingernails black so she looked goth. I had managed to avoid Tabitha all morning, and oddly enough, she did the same to me. No prodding. No teasing. The reprieve was rather refreshing.

Brooke was busy detailing her vision while I brushed my teeth in the locker room after class. I’d had an unfortunate incident with black licorice. How could anything taste that bad? Thank goodness I’d stashed a toothbrush in my PE locker. While Brooke explained the ritual where Tab would likely endure any number of painful and degenerative effects, Ashlee and Sydnee Southern walked in.

Ever since we’d broken into their house a few months ago to evict an evil spirit who was haunting them—completely trashing their father’s gazillion-dollar mansion and reducing a stunning grand piano to kindling in the process—we tried to steer clear of the Southern Belles. So far, we’d been doing a bang-up job of it. We never really talked to them anyway. Why start now?

But they seemed more than determined to strike up a conversation. I caught on to that fact when they cornered us and said, “We want to talk to you.”

“O-okay,” I said, needing badly to rinse toothpaste out of my mouth. But I didn’t want to be rude. Or give them an excuse to slam my head into the sink like people did in the movies.

Brooklyn stepped beside me—strength in numbers—and crossed her arms over her chest. Sadly, the Southern twins were about a foot taller than us. And they were very flexible. I appreciated Brooke’s bravado, but if push came to shove, we would not be the ones doing the shoving. We might get in a gentle nudge here and there.

“You left this at our house.” Ashlee, or quite possibly Sydnee, produced a gold pendant of a mother and father with a child in their arms.

I gasped and snatched it out of her hand, eyeing it lovingly. I turned it over and read the word Forever on the back. It was the necklace Glitch gave me on the tenth anniversary of my parents’ disappearance. The one I hadn’t seen since … the night we broke into their house. Realization dawned. There was only one place they could have found it. In their own living room.

Playing it cool, I examined it, cleared my throat, then passed it back to them. It was evidence of our wrongdoing. “That’s not mine.”

Sydnee stepped closer. Or possibly Ashlee. They really needed name tags.

“We know what you did.”

I looked at the notebook in her hands, the one with the name Ashlee on it, and took it from there. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Ashlee.”

“And even if she did,” Brooke said, planting her fists on her hips, “which she doesn’t, because why would she since there’s no way she possibly could, that’s no reason to get all up in her face.”

Not one of her better comebacks, but it worked. They both relaxed and Sydnee offered me the necklace again.

“We appreciate what you did for us.”

I took a mental step back. That wasn’t the reaction I was expecting. Taking the necklace warily, I cradled the cool metal in my hand, then glanced back with my brows furrowed in confusion.

“The ghost,” Ashlee clarified. “We know what you did for us, and we appreciate it.”