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I still maintain that I did not miss those lips calling me Princess in that half flippant, half affectionate way of his, and I also absolutely was not considering taking their lip-y invitation.

“Not quite ready to play nice with Mommy yet, Princess?”
he asked me.

“Don’t call me Princess,” I hissed under my breath, and then, just to prove him wrong, I walked over to my bedroom door, flipped the lock, threw the door open, and stared at my mother.

The moment she saw me, she let out a long breath, and I tried not to feel guilty about the fact that she looked like she’d been hit by an emotional semitruck. What did she have to look all traumatized about? Her boyfriend had just proposed to her; mine had played a rousing game of tonsil hockey with my best friend. She was getting ready to start a new life with a new family she loved; I was, inch by inch, losing everything I’d worked for since I was nine years old.

I’d won enough to realize that in the great battle of Emily Covington versus Life, my mother was winning. My status, however, was somewhat questionable, and I hated losing.

“Hey, you,” my mom said softly. She’d greeted me the same way every day she’d come to pick me up from one of my many babysitters’ houses when I was little.

“Hey.” I begrudgingly returned the word. I couldn’t not. It was too deeply ingrained in me. For as long as I could remember (and I couldn’t help but remember, even though I knew it was a dangerous pastime these days), the two of us had made allowances for each other. So what if I had a little trouble remembering my curfew? So what if she’d spent most of my formative years in high school, college, and med school, respectively? So what if I only ate sugared cereal? So what if she refused to tell me a thing about my mystery father?

We’d always survived: Emily and Lilah against the world. Don’t get me wrong, there was nothing
Gilmore Girls
-y about having a mother who was a mere sixteen years older than me, but the two of us got by. She’d bought used textbooks so I could have new shoes, and I’d been the one to make her breakfast in bed (sugared cereal, of course) after she’d pulled three all-nighters in a row.

“That’s my girl.”

My throat closed up a little. For a moment, I thought Ghost Boy had spoken, but when I played the words back in my head, I realized they were my mom’s. One look over my shoulder told me that Ghost Boy, much like my dignity, was gone.

“Sweetheart—” my mom began, and I cut her off as gently as I could.

“Mom, I’m just really, really tired tonight,” I said. “I know you love Corey, and I want you to be happy.”

Years melted off her face as I spoke. Why was it that I could make girls my own age quake with fear without even meaning to, but couldn’t go to bed angry with my mother? Not even when she’d practically ruined my life by pulling a
Brady Bunch
-esque maneuver with a family I wanted to forget about altogether.

Okay, so maybe I didn’t want to forget about Lexie, but that was only because she was Lexie.

Meara.

I pushed the name and the feelings that came with it out of my mind. I’d been doing just fine ignoring my final lapse in the library, and now was not the time to give in to the familiarity that played in the back of my mind, the visions that wanted, begged to come every time I heard my own mind-voice speak the foreign name.

“Are you okay?” my mom asked me finally.

“I’ve been better,” I said honestly (maybe Lexie was rubbing off on me, or maybe I was just way too tired to care), “but I guess there are probably people out there who are worse.”

Pretty much our entire school thought my life rocked, and maybe, objectively, it did. I wasn’t even sure anymore, and there was a distinct chance that I’d always sucked at being objective.

“Brianna.”

I stared at my mother, sure I’d heard her wrong, only to discover that her lips weren’t moving. When they did move, she spoke a different name. My name. “Lilah.” She paused. “Thank you. I couldn’t do this if I didn’t think I had your support.”

So now she tells me that she couldn’t have done this to me without my permission, I thought. If I’d known that little fact, I might have held out longer.

“Mom, I’m just really tired.”

I figured that as long as I was sleeping, I didn’t have to worry about any of it: no engagement, no Sight, no ghosts.

But immediately after falling asleep, I discovered that I was wrong.

Fists and motion, motion and fists in a soundless room. The world was a blur of colors and sounds that should have been but weren’t. I opened my mouth to speak, but could not. There was movement all around me: frantic and controlled, deliberate and pained. Everything was moving too fast for me to see.

Hit. Hit. Flash. Hit. Tanned flesh, metal blade.

Three rings of color on a silver shield. The image appeared out of nowhere, and with it, the motion slowed until I could see the outline of a boy to my right. And a boy to my left. And two behind me. And one in front of me. And Brock.

Brock?

“You should have left her alone,” he growled, and somewhere behind him, I could make out the outline of a blond girl, watching it all.

Hit. Hit. Flash. Hit. Tanned flesh, metal blade. Red, red blood.

This time I could see the motion, could see the boys moving in and out of the space in front of me, disappearing and reappearing, fighting the same fight in different ways.

Red, red blood.

The colors on the shield throbbed, gently at first. I watched, my attention torn from the boys, from the motion that had been, from the blood, and from the shield itself. All I saw were the colors. Not red. Blue. Purple. Pink.

Three girls holding hands.

Blue. Purple. Pink.

The oldest, raven-haired, her face expressionless, gripping the others’ hands so tightly that the youngest squirmed.

Blue. Purple. Pink.

Each girl holding on to the others, forming a makeshift triangle with their pale, tensed bodies.

Blue. Purple. Pink.

Then they were gone, and the room was empty. No shield. No boys. It was a boyless, shieldless room, and I waited, trapped by the silence of it all.

“So you’ve come.”

The voice was inside of my head and outside of my head, and in the space of the otherwise silent room, it was everything. Soft, gentle, and commanding, it spoke to me.

“I’ve been waiting.”

I turned around, hoping to catch sight of the voice’s owner, but there was nothing. No one.

“It’s been many years, my daughter.”

Mother.

The word came to my mind before I could stop it, and as soon as it did, my lips freed themselves from the hold of the silence, and I spoke. “Who are you? What do you want with me? Show yourself. And hello! Not your daughter.”

There was an almost indiscernible pause, and then the voice spoke again. “Stubborn. Always stubborn.”

I snorted, and as I did, the room fell back into silence and the scene before me changed again.

A pale girl with slightly frizzy brown hair stared at a dark-haired woman, entranced by the words she spoke. I’d seen this before, but here, now, I couldn’t hear them. Why couldn’t I hear them? I moved to stand beside Lissy—the brown-haired girl—and suddenly, the dark-haired woman disappeared, and Lissy and I were standing in a burning room, the flames dancing all around us, the smell of smoke thick in the air.

Lissy was standing beside me, and another Lissy (God, there were two of them…what was the world coming to?) was in front of me, her transparent eyes searching mine the way her real ones did when she was being completely dense. Holding her gaze in mine, I nodded. Her hand reached toward me. Into me.

“Sorcha.”

Did I speak the name or did I hear it? With the flames flickering toward us and the echo of footsteps running down the hallway, I couldn’t tell.

Transparent Lissy sank back into her body, and for a moment, I could see streams of light in the air around her. Blue. Purple. Pink. A man’s screams. The energy rushing out of my body, and flames all around us. Blue. Purple. Pink.

And then there was nothing.

I woke up in a cold sweat, more confused than I’d been when I went to sleep, which was saying something considering that I hadn’t been able to wrap my mind completely around my life for approximately the last sixteen hours. I turned to look at my clock, and found myself staring into the darkest pair of eyes I’d ever seen.

I tried to scream, but I couldn’t. I was as frozen and voiceless as I’d been at the beginning of my dream.

He stood there, staring at me with those midnight irises of his, and it was only when my eyes adjusted to the dark and his blinked one, two, three times that I recognized him.

“What is your problem?” I demanded. Of course, now my voice was functional. This wasn’t some threatening dark-eyed phantom. This was Ghost Boy, the noncorporeal peeping Tom, which was a completely different story.

“My problem?”
he repeated, his voice quiet but not soft.

“In case you haven’t noticed, this is my bedroom,” I said. “In fact, this is my bed, and this is me in my bed.” I gestured toward my pajama-clad body and then whipped my hand up to point it directly at his nose. “And this is you in my room watching me sleep. I mean, can you even say creepy?”

“You called me here,”
he said, his voice even and his dark eyes amused.
“Not the other way around, Princess.”

I snorted.

“Are you okay?”

The question took me by surprise.

“You were calling out as you slept. Saying things.”
He looked down at the floor.
“Your heart was racing.”

“If you tell me you had your head on my chest listening to my heart…”

“Not hardly,”
he retorted.
“I hear you.”

I stared at him skeptically.

“Even when I’m there, in the middle of it all, I hear you.”

It was strangely hard to be mad at him when he was talking about listening to my heart beat. I smoothed the covers out around me and sighed. “Can’t you just tell me what you want?” I asked. “No more cryptic messages, no more ‘you figure it out,’ no more idiotic dreams.”

“You dreamed about me?”
he asked, a cocky smile spreading slowly over his face.

“No,” I replied immediately, but we both knew I was lying. Ghost Boy had been in my dream, fighting with Brock and the guys from my library visions. And now he was here, talking to me, listening to my heart beat.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

He stared at me for a long moment, the half grin still on his almost boyish face.

“What? You can see me in my pajamas, and I can’t even know your name?” I pressed.

He leaned forward, and as he pushed a single piece of hair out of my face, the edges of his body blurred, and I could see him fading back into the past.

“Cade.”
He paused, and I got the sense that he was struggling to hold on.
“Lilah, my name is Cade.”

For a moment longer, we stared at each other, his eyes flickering in and out of existence. Lilah and Cade. Cade and Lilah. No Princess, no Ghost Boy. Just us, and then, he was gone.

13

Payback

The Popular Girl’s Creed:

Payback’s a bitch and so am I.

When I woke up the next morning, life didn’t look quite so bad, not because it had actually gotten any better (the first thing I saw when I woke up was an image of a three-year-old me throwing up on my teddy bear), but because something about having learned Ghost Boy’s name made everything seem a little less hopeless. The day before, I’d been so tired—tired of dealing with Fuchsia and Tracy, tired of doing things I didn’t want to do, tired of watching my life spin slowly but surely out of control. Getting the Sight had just compounded all of that.

But now, I knew Cade’s name, and—God knows why—knowing it made me feel in control of my own Sight, and that made me feel ready to do what needed to be done to get the rest of my life back on track. I was going to take names, take charge, and put Fuchsia Reynolds firmly and irrevocably in check. And Emory High would be a better place for it by the time I was done.

Step one: ignore icky vomit vision. I’m proud to say I didn’t so much as twitch. The Sight could throw whatever it wanted at me today. I could handle it or, for that matter, not handle it as I chose, just like I’d chosen, for the moment, not to think about Cade or the way he’d said my name.

Step two: kick-ass outfit. I strolled over to my closet and reached past the show-some-leg skirts, past the lowrider, you-wish-you-had-these-abs-and-this-belly-button-ring pants, and straight to the back where I kept my emergency clothes: the ones that were the perfect fit, the perfect color, and a gallon of sex appeal all rolled into one. After I’d selected a killer outfit, I dug through my drawer for the underwear to match: a truly lethal water bra and a lacy black thong.

Something about wearing black underwear made me feel powerful.