Darkness, which—based on the title alone—sounded like a good reason to dread senior English. I had plenty of darkness already without reading about someone else’s.
A glance at the clock over the whiteboard told me most of the period was over, and I now had an unexcused absence for English. So I decided to wait and talk to him after the bell. One minute before class ended, I blinked into the hall, checked for onlookers, then willed myself back into human sight. When the bell rang, I stood outside his class, and when Marco appeared, I fell into step beside him.
“Hey, Marco, can I talk to you for a second?”
He glanced at me in surprise. I couldn’t blame him. We’d never said more than three consecutive words to each other, and none of those had been since Nash and I had broken up, officially severing any connection I had to the baseball team.
Finally he shrugged. “If you can walk and talk at the same time. I can’t be late for statistics.”
“So, I kinda just wanted to check on you. I heard you were sick yesterday? Or hurt?”
Marco frowned and stopped in the middle of the hall, and the steady flow of traffic parted around us. “Look, I don’t care what you’re into, or how many starting players you have left on your list, but I’m not into that kind of thing. I have a girlfriend, and I like her, and I’m not gonna…”
My horrified expression must have made an impression. If not that, my sudden inability to form a coherent reply obviously did the trick.
“Wait, that’s just some stupid rumor, isn’t it? That you’re working your way through the baseball starting lineup?”
“Yes, it’s a rumor! I guess.” I hadn’t actually heard that one. “A totally fallacious and false rumor, that’s completely unfounded in truth!”
“Sorry. I would never have believed it, except I know you were with Nash. And there was that thing with Scott. And there was talk about Doug. And someone saw you dancing with Brant Williams. And that guy you made out with in the hall after school.” That was Tod. And the only part of what he’d heard that was true. “So it did kind of look like you were…interested.”
“Well, I’m not! There was never a thing with Scott or Doug. And I was never with Nash. Like that. Why, did he say we…?”
“No. Not to me, anyway. But we all just assumed, because you were with him for so long.”
“Well, unassume!”
“Done.” He smiled, and he looked friendly. Like he might not be such a bad guy. Which meant he definitely didn’t deserve to be possessed by a hellion or knocked out by my undead boyfriend. “So, you’re really just checking on me?” He started walking again, and I kept up.
“Yeah. I saw you in the nurse’s office, and you didn’t look so good.”
“That’s what I hear. I don’t know what happened. I dozed off in third period, and the next thing I know I’m lying on a table in the nurse’s office with a cold pack on my head and another one on my…lower. The nurse said she found me there, and no one even saw me go in.”
“So…you’re okay?”
“Except for the part where my dad wants me to see a shrink. He says blackouts are a sign of a more serious underlying problem.”
I gave him as confident and reassuring a smile as I could muster. “You’re not crazy. Just…don’t fall asleep in school anymore.”
“No shit. That all you wanted?” He stopped walking outside his next class, and I was dimly aware that mine was all the way across the building and up a floor.
“Yeah. Oh, wait.” I stepped closer and lowered my voice, uncomfortably aware that anyone who saw us would assume the rumors about me were true. One of the rumors, anyway. “I also wanted to ask you a question.” He nodded, so I continued, “I heard that back before he died, Doug gave you a sample of this stuff he had. The stuff in the balloon.”
“Frost?” he asked. When I nodded, his expression darkened and he motioned for me to follow him closer to the lockers, out of the main stream of traffic. “Stay away from that shit, Kaylee. They say it can’t be detected in a drug test, but everyone else I know who’s tried it is dead now. That can’t be a coincidence.”
“Everyone?” So, he didn’t know Nash had used, too?
“Yeah. There were some other guys who wanted to try it at Doug’s last party.” Right before he’d died. “But then Nash threatened to kick the shit out of the guy with the balloon bouquet if he didn’t get lost, and that night Doug died. I haven’t seen any balloons since. And the more time that passes, the happier I am about that. You shouldn’t—”
“I’m not,” I assured him. “I was just…curious. Thanks, Marco.”
I sped off into the thinning crowd before he could say anything else, and the one time I looked back, he was still staring after me, looking thoroughly confused.
7
“Are you girls ready?” Long blond curls fell over Harmony’s shoulder as she twisted in the driver’s seat to glance at Emma, then met my gaze in the rearview mirror.
“I will never be ready for this.” Em stared through the windshield at her house. Her former house. Which held her former room and all her former stuff. Even her former dog, Toto, who was still a dog but no longer hers. “Let’s get it over with.”
Harmony laid one hand on her arm. “We’re sure your mom’s still at work?”
“Yeah.” I leaned forward between the front seats. “I called to verify, and she said Traci would be here to let us in.”
“That’s her car.” Em pointed to the dusty Chevy parked in front of us in the driveway.
“Okay. I just need one of you to ask for a drink.” Harmony pulled the keys from the ignition and leaned to one side so she could slide them into her pocket, and again I was struck by how young she looked—thirty years old, at the most. You’d never know from looking at her that her sons were eighteen and twenty. Well, Tod would have been twenty, if he’d lived. “I’ll take care of the rest,” she continued. “If you’re sure you’re up to this.”
“No choice.” Em unbuckled her seat belt, and her hand trembled with the motion. “We can’t afford to put it off any longer.”
I unbuckled my own belt, one hand on the door handle. “If it’s too much for you—if she gets upset and you can’t control the syphoning—just let me know, and we’ll get you out of there.” She had been through so much already, and my heart ached at the thought of what lay ahead for her and for Traci. A decision no woman should ever have to make. A choice no human could ever anticipate.
Another devastating decision neither of them would be facing if they’d never met me.
I was a disease, infecting everyone I came into contact with, and the rot spread too fast to be contained. I went around with my scalpel, excising the infected bits of tissue—operating on lives and memories I didn’t have the right to slice up—but the only way to truly stop the infection was to cut off the
