Platinum (3 page)

Desperate times called for desperate measures.

3

Contagion

Loser is a contagious disease,
and there’s no such thing as natural immunity.

“Hey, loverboy. Get your girlfriend’s attention, would ya? She’s doing the whole zoning out thing again.”

As I approached Lissy’s table, Audra tossed a rolled-up napkin in the general direction of the guy Tracy had so eloquently referred to as Lissy’s “would-be boytoy.” Dodging the napkin, Dylan smirked at Audra and flicked a French fry expertly toward her face.

And these were the people Lissy chose to spend her time with.

“Don’t call me loverboy,” Dylan said, his too-long hair obscuring his face from my view. Not that I was looking.

By the time I actually reached the table, Lissy seemed to have zoned in enough to add her own complaint. “He’s
not
my boyfriend,” she said. “And I wasn’t zoned out.”

Likely story, I thought. On both counts. About that time, I remembered why I’d bothered to brave this side of the cafeteria to begin with. Hint: it had absolutely nothing to do with Lissy’s love life or her friends’ tendency toward impromptu food fights and only a little to do with the fact that my own friends were getting harder and harder to take.

“Lissy,” I said, announcing my presence. Audra immediately froze, halfway to chucking the fry back at Dylan, who, like Lissy, seemed completely unaffected by my sudden appearance in Nonville. “I need to talk to you.” I glanced away from her just in time to smile across the room at Brock and Tate as they entered the cafeteria, finished with their football meeting.

Brock smiled back, raking his eyes up and down my body and yelling out the words to his haiku.

“You what?” Lissy asked, like my request had been somehow less than explicit.

“I need to talk to you,” I repeated, never taking my eyes off Brock as he made a beeline for my table, and by the transitive property, for Fuchsia, Tracy, and what was left of my chocolate milkshake.

Lissy didn’t respond immediately, and after I mouthed a hello to Brock, I looked down at her and forced an icy smile onto my face. I didn’t want to be here, at her table, asking—okay, demanding—her help. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do, it wasn’t the coolest thing to do, and it wasn’t a Lilah thing to do. And yet, here I was.

Lissy glanced at me, frowned, and looked over at the table I’d just left. Then she looked back at me and blinked several times.

I refused to ask her what she was blinking at. When it came to what Lissy James saw with her magic aura-seeing eyes, I preferred to know as little as was humanly possible. “Can you just come to the ladies’?”

I turned away before she could respond. It was a trick I’d picked up from Fuchsia back in middle school. If you didn’t give people a chance to answer, they couldn’t say no.

“Ow-oooooowwww!” The half-grunt, half-yell clearly came from the Golden side of the cafeteria. Roughly translated, “ow-oooooowwww” was guy-speak for “so hot.” I knew without turning around as I walked, my skirt swishing around my thighs, that at least half the male population of the school was checking out my butt. In general, I took more or less the same philosophical stance toward such butt-staring as I did toward Brock’s haiku: it was better than being ignored.

“Could your skirt get any shorter?” Lissy huffed, and then she made a small eeping sound, like she hadn’t meant to huff anything out loud.

“Lissy,” I teased, relieved that she’d actually followed me, “don’t argue with success.”

I opened the door to the ladies’ room and waited until it was shut firmly behind us before turning to face her.

Lissy was pretty, probably prettier than she knew, though not as pretty as she could have been if she’d been the type to accept fashion advice from well-meaning upperclassmen named Lilah. Her hair was thick and a little bit wild, her eyelashes were long and dark, and the scowl on her lips was only somewhat unflattering.

Without thinking, I glanced at myself in the mirror. A little girl with dark hair, flawless skin, and sooty eyelashes stared back at me, her expression solemn.

Air crackling, trembling like the surface of rough water.

I blinked hard, and when I opened my eyes, the sooty eyelashes were my own, made thicker by long-lasting mascara and a steady hand with an eyelash curler, necessary adaptations for Goldenhood.

Despite what I’d seen in the mirror, I managed to tear my eyes away from my now-solid reflection and turned my attention back to Lissy. My hallucinations had started the day she’d pulled me into her world of weird, and as much as I didn’t want to admit it, I had a sinking suspicion that she was my best chance at making them stop.

“I can’t do this right now,” I told her, not knowing quite where to start.

“But you’re the one who brought me in here.” Lissy was clearly confused.

“Not the talking,” I clarified. “The other thing.” I didn’t believe for a second that Little Miss Aura Seer had no idea what was going on with me. If anything, her Sight gave her too much insight into things I preferred to keep private.

“Ummmm…what other thing?”

I hated it that she was playing dumb and doing it so well. This was my life we were talking about here.

“I want you to make it stop.” I spoke slowly and clearly with the hope that maybe, just this once, she’d understand. It was about time that someone did.

“Make what stop?”

I glanced at each of the four bathroom stalls, making sure they were empty. “You know what,” I said, my voice low. “I need you to stop the…” I wiggled my fingers in front of my eyes.

“Spirit fingers?”

I rolled my eyes. “No,” I said, forcing my voice to stay calm. “Not spirit fingers. The hallucinations.”

She bit her bottom lip and tilted her head to the side. “What hallucinations?”

I crossed my arms over my chest and hugged them to my body. Was she really going to make me spell this out for her?

“All I know,” Lissy said, looking down at her shoes and avoiding eye contact altogether, “is that in the past thirty seconds, you’ve gone from being lavender to violet to practically black, and your connections look like they’re doing the hokeypo—”

“That,”
I said. “Stop with the that.”

“The that?” she repeated. If the situation hadn’t been so dire, and if we’d been anything even close to friends, I might have giggled at the absolutely bewildered expression on her face. But the situation
was
dire, and we
weren’t
friends, so I didn’t even smile.

“Stop playing your freaky Sight games with me,” I blurted out. The last thing I’d wanted to do today was end up in the girls’ bathroom talking about the one thing I’d sworn never to mention again, and yet…

“Sight games?” Lissy asked.

The moment I realized that she wasn’t playing dumb was the exact same moment the bathroom door opened and Mountain Morrison walked in. Once upon a time, when we were seven, she’d had a real name—Mindy—but there was a distinct chance that I was the only one who remembered what her actual name was, and even I couldn’t pinpoint the exact day she’d stopped being Mindy and started being Mountain. In elementary school, I’d been a little more concerned about finding friends with stay-at-home moms than with chubby little Mindy, who did the after-school program I was forced into when I couldn’t find anywhere else to go.

“Sorry,” I told her. “Occupied.”

Mindy (who wasn’t nearly as big as she’d been when she’d earned aforementioned hideous nickname) turned in slow motion to look at the four obviously empty stalls. Clearly, she’d missed out on the girl-talk lessons when the rest of us had learned that “occupied” meant “private conversation in progress.”

“I think the second-floor bathroom is open,” I told her, careful to keep my voice absolutely devoid of any emotion that might cue her in to the fact that I was on the verge of a Class A freak-out.

Beside me, Lissy frowned.

I so did not have time for this. “Mindy,” I said softly. “Second. Floor. Bathroom.”

And just like that, she was gone, and Lissy was staring at me like I’d announced a secret love of kicking puppies.

I’d long since come to terms with the fact that I hadn’t gotten to where I was by being the world’s nicest person. The word “bitch” might not have been a total misnomer, and there were days when even I didn’t like me. Maybe I should have just let the poor girl use the bathroom, but come on! I was in crisis, and the second-floor bathroom was always open. And honestly, would it have killed Lissy to realize that I was probably the first person all year to call Mindy Morrison by her real name?

I stepped forward and flipped the lock on the bathroom door. The last thing I needed was another silent battle with Lissy over whether or not the toilets were open for business. I didn’t have to justify myself to her.

I just had to ask for her help.

“Listen,” I said bluntly. “I think I may be in trouble.” I bit my bottom lip and looked away. Admitting weakness was as good as asking someone to use it against you, and there was no way that those particular words should have come tumbling out of my mouth.

I waited, and Lissy said nothing. I’d actually asked for help (more or less), and her only response was some silent inner rant at the fact that I’d commandeered the bathroom for my own purposes. Asking another girl for help was
never
a good idea. I knew that. What was it about the James family that had me tossing all the rules out the window? What was I even doing, locked in a bathroom with the most recently Non-ed member of the sophomore class? I mean, there was such a thing as geek by association. And to top it off, I’d left Fuchsia alone with Tracy, the boys, a need to prove herself, and a skirt that was at least an inch shorter than mine.

“Well, excuse me,” I blurted out in response to Lissy’s accusing silence and “you kick puppies” facial expression. “I’m sorry if there are bigger things going on here than some massive Non’s tiny bladder.”

Somehow, that hadn’t sounded quite so horrible in my head. But before I could take it back and explain myself more calmly, Lissy turned, unlocked the door, and fled the bathroom. After everything I’d done for her, the one time I actually needed something she walked away without so much as a single word.

“This is my swing, and you can’t sit on it.”

The surface of the door quivered, and though I tried to fight it, I couldn’t help but step toward the scene I saw playing along its surface.

The little girl’s darkly lashed eyes clouded over as the blond child on the swing issued decrees like a playground princess.

“Only people who have purple shoes can use this swing.”

The dark-haired girl glanced down at her own white Keds. Her mother had promised they’d go shoe shopping right after Mommy’s next big test.

Her mother made a lot of promises.

“I can too play on that swing,” the dark-haired child said bravely. She glanced over at the other little girls in their group. “Can’t I?” She hadn’t meant it as a question, but they took it as one.

“No,” the girl on the swing said loudly. “You don’t have purple shoes, so you can’t play.”

The other two purple-shoed girls remained silent and looked away.

After a long moment, the dark-haired girl, a look of determination on her face, turned away from her silent playmates. “Fine,” she said. Head held high, she stalked over to the swing and gave the bossy little girl sitting there a good shove that sent her flying backward. The others stared at her, half in horror, half in awe.

“Your shoes aren’t purple,” the dark-haired girl explained daintily. “They’re blue.”

“Lilah?”

My head was so full of images and memories that it took me a few seconds to recognize my own name. I hadn’t thought about that day on the swing for years, and now I hadn’t just thought about it, hadn’t just remembered it.

I’d seen it.

“Are you okay, Li?”

Just like I’d seen the boy in the jeans.

“Earth to Lilah, do you read me?”

Just like I’d seen my four-year-old self staring back at me in the mirror and three girls with sad eyes holding hands over their mother’s grave.

“Lilah?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I just have some killer cramps.” It seemed like the logical lie. We were, after all, in the bathroom, and if there was one thing that other girls at least pretended sympathy toward, it was cramps.

“I’ve got some Advil,” Tracy offered. “You want?”

I nodded silently and forgave her for every headache she’d given me so far this lunch period. Tracy was a witch if you crossed her, and she wasn’t the brightest eyeliner in the set, but if you were friends, she would follow you to the bathroom to make sure you were okay. And to regloss her lips.

“Thanks, Trace,” I said as she handed me an Advil.

“No problem,” she replied, pulling some berry-flavored gloss out of her purse. “Fuchsia was about to make me puke,” she complained without preamble. “She’s so all over Tate it isn’t even funny.” Tracy was incredibly talented at talking while applying lip gloss. Without being asked to, she handed me the tube, and I leaned toward the mirror, my stomach still flipping itself inside out as I pushed down the mess of images swimming around in my mind and tried to cling to reality.