as if in thought. “The backseat’s pretty comfortable, even with that little rip on the passenger side.”
Pain shot through my jaw, and I realized I was grinding my teeth.
“Say hi to Nash for me,” she purred, one hand wrapped around my door. Then her expression morphed from vicious vixen to Good Samaritan, in the space of a single second. “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings here, Kaylee, but I think you should know the truth.” Her pale green eyes went wide in faux innocence. “He’s using you to get to me.”
My temper flared and I slammed the door. Sophie yelped and jerked her hand out of the way just in time to avoid four broken fingers. My fist clenched my uniform shirt, and I tossed it over the dancer’s-butt dent she’d left in my comforter.
She’s wrong. But I studied my reflection anyway, trying to see myself as everyone else did. As Nash did. No, I didn’t have Sophie’s lean dancer’s build, or Emma’s abundant curves, but I wasn’t hideous. Still, Nash could do much better than not-hideous.
Was that why he hadn’t kissed me? Was I a convenience between girlfriends? Or a pity date? Some kind of social outreach program for kindhearted jocks?
No. He wouldn’t spend so much time talking to someone he had no real interest in, even if he was looking for a casual hookup. There were easier scores elsewhere.
But I could use a qualified second opinion. Phone in hand, I plopped down on the bed and held my breath while I typed, hoping Emma’s mom had given her back her phone.
No such luck. Two very long minutes after I sent the text message—Can u talk?—the reply came.
She is still grounded. Talk to Emma at work.
She should never have taught her mother to text. I told her no good could come of that.
Em and I were scheduled for the same shift, so that afternoon I filled her in on my date with Nash as we sold tickets to the latest computer-animated cartoon and the inevitable romantic comedy. On our dinner break, we sat in one corner of the snack bar, sharing a soft pretzel and cheese fries while I told her about Heidi Anderson—what she hadn’t heard from her sister—where no one could overhear.
Emma was fascinated by the accuracy of my prediction, and she agreed with Nash that I should tell my aunt and uncle, though her motive had more to do with shooting them a big I-told-you-so than with helping me figure out what to do with my morbid talent.
But again, I declined the advice. I had no interest in any future meetings with Dr. Nelson—he of the medical restraints and the zombie pills. In fact, I was clinging to the hope that the next prediction—if there was another—would be months, or even years down the road. After all, there had been nearly nine months between the past two.
The last part of my shift dragged on at half the normal speed because less than fifteen minutes in, the manager moved Emma to the snack bar, leaving me alone in the ticket booth with an A&M computer science major whose undershirt—which he lifted his uniform to show me—read: My other shirt is a storm trooper uniform.
When the day was finally over, I clocked out and waited for Emma in the employee snack room. As I was zipping my jacket, Emma pushed through the door and stood with her body holding it open, a dark frown shadowing her entire face.
“What’s wrong?” My hand hovered over the hook where her jacket still hung.
“Come on. You have to hear this.” She pushed the door open wider and stood to the side, so I could pass through. But I hesitated. Her news obviously wasn’t good, and I was all full up on creepy and depressing for the moment. “Seriously. This is weird.”
I sighed, then shoved my hands into my jacket pockets and followed her over eight feet of sticky linoleum tile and across the theater lobby toward the snack counter.
Jimmy Barnes was busy with a customer, but once he saw Emma waiting to talk to him, he rushed through the order so quickly he almost forgot to squirt butter on the popcorn. He had a bit of a crush on Emma.
He wasn’t the only one.
“Back already?” Jimmy nodded at me, then leaned with both plump arms on the glass countertop, staring at Em as if the meaning of life lay buried in her eyes. His fingers were stained yellow with butter-flavored oil and he smelled like popcorn and the root beer he’d dribbled down the front of his black apron.
“Can you tell Kaylee what Mike said?”
Jimmy’s goofy, puppy-love smile faded, and he stood, angling his body to face us both. “Creepiest thing I ever heard.” He reached below the counter to grab a plastic-wrapped stack of sixteen-ounce paper cups, and began refilling the dispenser as he spoke.
“You know Mike Powell, right?” he asked.
“Yeah.” I glanced at Emma with both brows raised in question, but she only nodded toward Jimmy, silently telling me to pay attention.
Jimmy pressed on an inverted stack of cups, which sank into a hole in the countertop to make room for more. “Mike took a shift at the snack bar at the Arlington branch today, filling in for some guy who got fired for spittin’ in someone’s Coke.”
“Hey, can I get some popcorn over here?”
I looked up to see a middle-aged man waiting in front of the cash register, flanked by a little girl with her thumb in her mouth and an older boy with his gaze—and his thumbs—glued to a PSP.
“Will that be a jumbo, sir?” Jimmy held up one just-a-minute finger for us and veered toward the closest of several popcorn machines while I dug my phone from my pocket to check the time. It was after nine and I was starving. And not exactly eager for whatever weird, creepy story Jimmy had to tell.
When the customers left with a cardboard tray full of junk food and soda, Jimmy turned back to us. “Anyway, Mike called about half an hour ago, totally freaked out. He said some girl died right in front of his register this afternoon. Just fell over dead, still holding her popcorn.”
Shock pinged through me, chilling me from the inside out. I glanced at Emma, and she gave me a single grim nod. As I turned back to Jimmy, a dark unease unfurled deep inside me, spiraling up my spine like tendrils of ice. “You’re serious?”
“Totally.” He twisted the end of the plastic sleeve around the remaining cups. “Mike said the whole thing was unreal. The ambulance took her away in a freakin’ body bag, and the manager closed the place down and handed out vouchers to all the customers. And the cops kept asking Mike questions, trying to figure out what happened.”
Emma watched me for my reaction, but I could only stare, my hands gripping the edge of the counter, unable to force my scattered thoughts into any logical order. The similarity to Heidi Anderson was obvious, but I had no concrete reason to connect the two deaths.
“Do they know how she died?” I asked finally, grasping at the first coherent thought to form.
Jimmy shrugged. “Mike said she was fine one minute, and flat on her back the next. No coughing, no choking, no grabbing her heart or her head.”
A vague, heavy dread was building inside me, a slow simmer of foreboding, compared to the rapid boil of panic I’d felt when I saw Heidi’s shadow-shroud. The deaths were connected. They had to be.
Emma
