Platinum (9 page)

I only knew one person who said the word “so” with that many “o’s”: Fuchsia, which meant that she was (a) calling from my mom’s phone (unlikely), (b) blocking caller ID because she knew I wouldn’t want to talk to her, or (c)…

There was no C. I wasn’t
that
far off my game.

“Sorry about what?” I asked coolly.

“I heard about your mom,” Fuchsia said. Sometimes this town was way too small. “Can you even say traumatic? Doesn’t she know this kind of thing can scar you for life?”

“It’s not like she’s peeling the flesh from my bones,” I said dryly, and a second later, it occurred to me that, given my current situation, talking about any skin peeling that wasn’t spa-like in nature probably wasn’t the best idea. My visions were unpredictable, and the last thing I needed was a retrovision of some poor sap being tortured during the Spanish Inquisition, just because I’d accidentally tapped into something I had no desire to see. With a shudder, I elaborated on the sarcasm Fuchsia had wisely chosen to ignore. “She’s just getting married, Fuchsia,” I said, doing my best impression of someone who didn’t care. “Nothing scar-worthy.”

“So it’s true.” Fuchsia jumped immediately on the first half of my statement. “Your mom and that guy are getting married?”

“Yes,” I said. There was a long pause on the phone, which I finally filled by babbling. “It’s not like I want her to be alone forever.”

“Of course not,” Fuchsia agreed readily, “but still!”

“It’s not that big of a deal,” I asserted. Why should it have been a big deal? According to the town busybodies, my mom and Corey had been practically engaged for ages.

“I mean, I guess it makes sense,” Fuchsia said tentatively. “She is still really young and everything. I mean, she had you when she was how old? Sixteen? When you think about it, she’s not even as old as the people on
Sex and the City.
”

My mother and the word “sex” in the same sentence? Fuchsia was the one who was going to scar me for life.

“Do you think she and Corey will have a baby?” Fuchsia rushed on.

“Fuchsia,” I bit out.

“Yes?”

“Not helping.”

“Sorry,” she said, and for once, I really felt like she was. On days like today, it was easy to forget that Fuchsia had her good moments too, but she did. When we were twelve, she stayed up all night with me after our first scary-movie marathon because she knew I couldn’t sleep, and she would have been the first to go for the jugular of any other girl who’d hit on my boyfriend. She was a force to be reckoned with, and I had a long and drawn-out history of doing the reckoning, but at the end of the day, we were friends.

“I’m telling you, Li, I can be over there, stat, with ice cream.”

Considering that Fuchsia ate less than Tracy, who ate less than an undernourished gymnast, it was a very generous offer, but I wasn’t about to let her see me in emotional-breakdown mode. She may have been my friend, but she was still Fuchsia, and I hadn’t completely lost my mind.

“Thanks, babe, but I just really want…”

What did I want? The answer disturbed me.

“I have to go to the library.”

“The library?” Fuchsia asked, prickling at the fact that I’d turned down her offer. “Li, I knew you were upset, but I didn’t know you’d lost it. Just because your mom’s marrying into that family doesn’t mean you have to…you know…conform.”

“Conform?” I repeated dryly.

“More like
Nonform.
”

I snorted. “Conform” and “Nonform” didn’t even rhyme. Fuchsia totally sucked at making up new words. “For your information,” I told her, “I’m meeting Brock at the library. We’ve got a little study thing going on.”

That got a response out of her. “Why didn’t you say so?” she asked. “God, Li, you scared me.”

“You know me better than that,” I said, and it might have been the biggest lie I’d ever told. Fuchsia Reynolds didn’t know me at all.

“Tell Brock I said hi and to forget about our plans tomorrow,” she offered sweetly. “He’s going to want to totally be there for you.”

Their plans?

I will not ask what plans, I will not ask what plans. I repeated the mantra in my mind.

Forget what I said about Fuchsia not being all bad. I take it back. She was quite obviously a completely heinous person with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

With one more silent promise not to ask what she was talking about, I made myself laugh in response to her words.

“That?”
I asked, pretending I’d been well clued into whatever plans she supposedly had with Brock. “Fuchsia, sweetheart, I don’t even think he was serious about
that.
” I paused and then extended my own sweet offer. “I’ll ask him if you really want me to.”

“No.” Her answer came immediately, and I let out the breath I’d been holding.

I still had it.

“Oh! There goes my other line,” I said, lying through my teeth. “Gotta go. Thanks for the call, babes. It means a lot.”

“Anything for you, Li,” Fuchsia said. “Love-ya-bye.”

I translated “love-ya-bye” to mean “die, bitch,” but hey, at least she’d called, and I knew better than to expect anything else. Being popular isn’t about being liked. It’s about not being ignored.

Moving quickly, I hung up the phone and immediately hit number one on my speed dial. As long as I could get ahold of Brock first, I was golden. No pun intended.

“Hello?”

For some reason, now that I had him on the phone, I was having technical difficulties deciding what to say.

“Hello? Uhhhh…”

Brock was the only guy I knew who could make an “uhhhh” sexy.

“Uhhhh to you, too,” I said in my own sexy voice, going completely on autopilot.

“Oh. Hey, Lilah.” I could hear the smile in his voice. “I wrote another haiku,” he said. “Wanna hear it?”

“Actually, Brock,” I said, not exactly in the mood for a good haikuing, “I was just calling because I found the perfect place for us to have a little alone time.” Content that I’d distracted him from poorly written poetry, I continued. “It’s dimly lit, there’s no one there, and our parents totally won’t object.”

That got his attention. “Ohhhhh,” he said, and I could practically see the grin spreading on his face. “Lilah.”

When he said my name, it sounded exactly the way it should have on his lips: Lilah, one name, like Cher, Madonna, or J.Lo. Though, in retrospect, J.Lo might have been two names….

“So are you up for it?” I asked him, keeping my fingers crossed.

“Definitely.”

“Perfect,” I said. “Meet me at the library in ten.”

“The library?”

I hit End in the middle of his question. If he thought there was even a remote chance of a library make-out session, Brock would be there. Much like his haikus, his thought process was rather single-minded.

I stuffed my phone in my purse, threw my purse over my shoulder, and opened my window. It was times like these that I wished we actually had a trellis like teenagers on television always did. Instead, I had to contort my body to reach the closest tree branch. In a move that would have been a lot easier if my mom had actually been home often enough that I’d had to sneak out on a regular basis growing up, I climbed halfway down the tree and then jumped. My strappy pink heels wobbled as I landed, but didn’t give out.

At the exact moment that I was starting to feel proud of myself for managing a well-executed sneak-out, a cheerful voice spoke up behind me.

“I can’t believe we’re sneaking out. Is this cool or what?”

I silently counted to three before turning around to stare straight into the widest, most earnest truth-seeing blue eyes on the planet.

“Lexie.”

If she noticed that I sounded less than thrilled to see her, she didn’t let on.

“Lissy said you wanted to be alone,” Lexie said, “and, obviously, I could see that you didn’t.” She shook her head. “I mean, it’s not even about the way the air got all fuzzy. It just felt wrong, and besides, everyone knows you wouldn’t want to be alone right now.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder gently.

A woman with dark hair, red lips, and a very pregnant stomach.

I let the image wash over me, took it in, and then shrugged it off.

“So where are we going?” Lexie asked.

“We,”
I said, stressing the word, “aren’t going anywhere.”

Lexie shook her head impishly. “Lilah,” she said seriously, “that’s just not true.”

I opened my mouth and then closed it again. It was useless. I couldn’t yell at her. I couldn’t sarcastically ask if it was past her bedtime. I couldn’t even tell her to go home and bug her actual older sister.

All I could do was answer her. “We’re going to the library.”

Lexie waited patiently for me to elaborate.

“I need to look something up.”

“What something?” she asked softly, her dancing eyes ruining her attempt at sounding casual.

“There’s a
slight
chance,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that telling her was a mistake, “that Mystery Boy killed someone. Or several someones.”

Five voices echoed in my head.

“You should have left Helen alone.”

Who was Helen? Without saying another word, I started walking. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”

Lexie matched my pace and, as always, she said the first thing that came into her mind. “Lilah?”

“Yeah?”

“If there’s a slight chance Mystery Boy killed someone, what’s the chance that he’s going to kill somebody else?”

Looking at her, I could tell she wanted an exact percentage, like 84.2 or 11.6, but I didn’t answer. At this point, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.

10

Kiss

A kiss is never just a kiss.

“Wow. You have broad shoulders. Do you play football?” Lexie didn’t give Brock a chance to answer. “I bet you play football,” she continued, and then, with a hugely conspicuous wink in my direction, she nodded to confirm her words. “He plays football.”

Brock stared at Lexie, trying to wrap his mind around her mile-a-minute chatter and the fact that for some bizarre reason, I’d brought an eighth grader with me on our library “date.” Somehow, when I’d asked him to come, I hadn’t pictured him actually being there in the middle of everything. How was I going to do the research thing with Brock literally breathing (and, knowing him, wanting to do who knows what else) down my neck?

“You’re Molly’s brother, right?” Lexie continued, blissfully unaware that Brock was in a state of chatter-induced shock. “Molly’s great.”

“Uhhhh…thanks.”

Lexie looked intently at Brock for a moment, and then she turned back to me. “I’m going to go work on
the thing,
” she said. Lexie was more or less incapable of lying, a side effect of True Vision that made her the most unstealthy person ever to exist in the history of the world. Sometimes I wondered how she made it through her all-truth, all-the-time existence. It was a miracle that she didn’t have some kind of complex.

“You two have fun,” Lexie instructed me seriously. With that, she was off to do something “good and researchy” with her Sight, and I was alone with Brock.

“She wanted to come,” I said, playing with the tips of my hair.

Brock, still a little shell-shocked, just nodded. I leaned my head toward him, and he snapped out of it, the edges of his lips curling upward into a slow smile. “Missed you today,” he said, leaning forward to pull me into a kiss.

“I’m not dead, Princess.”

Mystery Boy’s words echoed in my mind, and as Brock’s mouth covered mine, my lips tingled with the memory of the ghost’s kiss. I closed my eyes and my mind against any and all retrovisions in the near vicinity and tried my best to lose myself in my oh-so-hot boyfriend’s embrace. That endeavor lasted approximately three minutes, at which time I felt his tongue in the back of
my
throat.

Carefully, I pulled myself back. Once upon a time, kissing Brock had been a dream. Now even the possibility of a Hollywood heel-popping moment was pretty much out of the question. Either his tongue had tripled in size, he’d totally lost his mojo, or I’d somehow lost mine. Sadly, given recent events, I couldn’t rule out the last explanation.

“You okay, baby?” he asked, brushing the hair out of my face.

I looked down. We’d been together so long that sometimes I forgot to expect him to ask things like that. Brock was all smiles and goofing off and declarations of my hotness. A serious moment like this one was rare.

“I’m okay,” I said, and the response surprised me. Lilah Covington was never okay. She was fabulous, she was amazing, she was incredible, but she was never just okay. Guys like Brock didn’t date okay.

“You seem…” Brock trailed off.

“Different.” I finished the sentence for him. Somehow, it was less painful than letting him finish it himself.

Brock stared at me for a long moment, no doubt internally debating whether or not this was the kind of situation an impromptu haiku could fix. “We could talk,” he offered finally, his face contorted with the massive effort it took to make such an offer.

“That’s okay,” I said. Okay again? I thought. Could I get any more boring?