School Spirits

chapter 13

“I don’t think Everton really loves her.”

“Of course he does,” I told Torin around a mouthful of SpaghettiOs. “I mean, he gave up his dream of sailing across the world so that he could take her to prom. That has to mean something.”

It was Friday night, and Torin and I were sitting in my room—well, I was. He was chilling in the mirror as usual, waiting for Mom to get home. When I’d come in from school, there’d been a note saying she’d be back later and I should fend for myself as far as dinner went. Hence the SpaghettiOs.

“No, I’ve known rogues like this Everton. He merely wants Leslie because he cannot have her. Once she succumbs to his charms, he’ll tire of her.”

I pointed my spoon at the screen, where Everton and Leslie were currently locked in a pretty passionate embrace. “Think she’s already succumbed.”

“Bah,” Torin said with a wave of his hand. “Mark my words, he’ll discard her before this disk is completed.”

I just shrugged, more interested in watching Everton and Leslie kiss than listening to Torin. I wondered if I’d ever have the chance to kiss someone. Didn’t seem likely with all the monster hunting and family angst, but still. Kissing looked…nice.

“We could try that, next time I visit your dreams,” Torin suddenly said, and my SpaghettiOs sloshed over the side of the bowl.

“What?”

Torin nodded toward the television. “Kissing. You’ve never done it, I’m quite good at it…seems like we should at least make an attempt.”

Glaring at him, I scrubbed at the spot on my T-shirt. “I don’t want to kiss you.”

Raising his eyebrows, Torin leaned forward. “Do you not? Why?”

I sat my bowl on the desk, no longer interested in eating. “First of all, you’re an evil warlock trapped in a mirror, and secondly, it would be…weird.”

He shrugged. “Not unless you wanted it to be.”

I had no idea what that even meant, so I just turned back to the TV. “I’ve known you my whole life,” I told him, keeping my eyes on Everton and Leslie. “You basically used to babysit me when Mom and Finn were out on missions. So kissage is out of the question.”

I expected him to tease me about that, but instead he waved it away. “Very well. Just thought I’d offer.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” I muttered, my face flaming. Now Everton and Leslie were arguing, but I’d missed what they were fighting about, and truth be told, I couldn’t pay much attention anyway. I’d meant what I’d said about kissing Torin being weird. But then wouldn’t it be weird with any boy I kissed?

I snuck a look at Torin out of the corner of my eye. Practice kissing in a dream wouldn’t be like real kissing, after all. And—

No. No, no, no. That was a stupendously dumb idea. Torin was four hundred years older than me, and dangerous and trapped in a freaking mirror. My life had always been odd, but I wasn’t about to let it get that odd.

I reached up and hit stop on the DVD player. “Okay, that’s enough Ivy Springs for today.”

Torin made a sound of protest. “But Leslie was just accusing him of fancying that other girl, Lila! And I was so sure Everton was moments away from throwing her over at last!”

“We’ll watch more tomorrow,” I promised him. “Now, you—”

I was interrupted by an insistent buzzing coming from somewhere in my backpack.

“What on earth is that?” Torin asked, and suddenly I remembered: my cell phone.

I scrambled to get it out of my bag. “Mom?”

There was a pause and then, “Um, no? Is this…is this Izzy?”

It was a boy. What boy would be—and then I remembered my second day of school, giving Adam this number. “Adam! Uh. Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Oh, this is scintillating,” Torin muttered, and I threw him a look over my shoulder.

“So,” Adam said, “I was calling because there’s a basketball game tonight, and I thought you might want to, uh, come with me.”

When I didn’t say anything immediately, he rushed on. “I know it’s really last minute, but it starts in like an hour, and we can just meet there if you want, or I can pick you up, or…whatever.”

I glanced down at my SpaghettiO-stained T-shirt, my mind racing. A boy, coming to my house. To pick me up and take me somewhere. That was totally a date.

And I wasn’t sure I was ready for that yet.

“I’ll meet you there,” I told him. Hopefully Mom would be home soon, and if not, well, I could walk. After I changed into something not smeared with tomato sauce, obviously.

“Great!” he said, a little too loud.

“Yeah!” I exclaimed back, trying to match his enthusiasm. In the mirror, Torin didn’t roll his eyes so much as his whole body.

“So an hour, at the school. I’ll meet you there.”

“Right,” I agreed, hoping we could be done with this soon. My hands were starting to sweat. How come no one on Ivy Springs ever had these awkward phone moments? Leslie had probably never had sweaty palms in her life, not even when Everton called to tell her he was breaking up with her so that she could go to art school in Italy.

Finally Adam said, “See you then,” and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Okay. Um…bye.”

“Bye.”

That done, I tossed my phone on the bed and turned my attention to my closet.

“Whatever shall you wear?” Torin observed, propping his chin in his hand. “Let’s see, there’s the black T-shirt with black jeans. Or perhaps, if you’re going for elegance over function, you could wear the black T-shirt with black jeans. Ooh!” He sat up, widening his eyes. “Do you know what would be particularly fetching? The black—”

“T-shirt with black jeans,” I finished for him. “Hilarious.”

But looking at my closet, he did have a point. Other than that pink hoodie, my closet was a sea of sameness. A sea of black. And I didn’t have the faintest idea what girls wore to basketball games.

Gripping the closet door with one hand, I leaned in and fished out a T-shirt. “You are being stupid,” I muttered under my breath. “You have a ghost to hunt, and you are panicking over clothes.”

Even though I hadn’t been talking to Torin—and he knew it—he acted as though I had been. “But these things are all related, yes? The ghost and fitting in with these pathetic children. You are not fretting about clothing. You’re merely trying to best maintain your cover.”

Torin could be hugely annoying and a major pain in the butt, but every once and a while he said things I really needed to hear. So I threw him a very small smile before tossing a towel over my mirror.

“You know I wouldn’t look,” he said. “I am quite offended right now!”

Once I was in a clean shirt, I reached up to touch my hair. It was still back in the tight braid I wore every day, and for a second I thought about leaving it like that. But no, I needed to look a little different than I did at school, right?

So I unraveled the braid, combing it out with my fingers, until my hair fell in waves around my shoulders. That fixed, I grabbed a tube of lip balm out of my bag and coated my lips. I didn’t own any makeup, and I knew Mom didn’t have any either, so it was the best I could do.

Finally, I took the towel off the mirror to look at myself. Torin was still there, and I scowled, trying to see around him. “Lovely, Isolde,” he told me, and I had to admit, I looked… Okay, maybe I was no Leslie, but my hair actually looked…pretty all down around my face like that.

Still, my hands itched to braid it again. Brannicks never wore their hair down, because it only got in the way of staking vamps or shooting shifters or taking out witches.

I heard the front door open. “Iz?” Mom called. I gave myself one last look before grabbing my jacket and heading downstairs.

Mom’s hands were full of books, old ones that were flaking little bits of leather binding everywhere and filling the room with the smell of musty paper. “Everything I could get from the university library on—Oh.”

She paused in the doorway. “That’s a new look.”

“There’s this boy,” I blurted out. “Adam. And he, uh, asked me to go meet him at the school for a basketball game, and I was thinking you could drive me there. If that’s all right. It’s part of my cover.”

Mom blinked a couple of times before shifting her stack of books to her other hip. “Like a date?”

“Like a mission,” I corrected, and I thought the corner of her mouth tilted up a little bit.

“Okay, then. Just let me…um, put this stuff away.”

I walked over to help her, scooping up a few of the books. As I followed her to the guest room, I glanced at the spines. Two of them appeared to be about hauntings, but one had a title so faded I couldn’t even read it. “What’s the deal with all the books?” I still had no idea what Mom was up to while I was busy at school all day, although she’d mentioned driving to the university in the next town over to get some “materials.”

Sighing, Mom shouldered the door open. “Research.” From the tone of her voice, I knew that’s all I was going to get.

Once again, a twist of guilt and anger coiled in my stomach. Did the research have something to do with Finn? If it did, I didn’t understand why Mom was being so secretive about it.

“Izzy?” Mom said, and I realized she’d asked me a question.

“Sorry.” I laid my books down on the bed next to Mom’s half of the stack.

“I was just asking if you’ve found out anything at school yet.”

“Yeah, actually,” I told her, tucking my hair behind my ears. “For one thing, I’m pretty sure who the ghost is.” I filled her in on Mary Evans and what I’d learned from PMS. When I was done, Mom raised her eyebrows. “Sounds pretty typical.”

“That’s what I was thinking.” I perched on the edge of the bed. “Some stories become legends for a reason, I guess.”

Mom nodded. “And how was the ghost hunter club? The usual?”

“Yeah. EMP detectors they ordered off of TV, files of local legends. That kind of thing. And they want to do a séance at some point, so I need to come up with a way of stopping that.”

Sighing, Mom glanced down at one of her books, the one called Ghosts and Hauntings. “Make sure you do. Last time I dealt with one of those civilian ghost hunter groups, they did a séance. Ended up opening a portal to the Unseelie court instead, and brought through some seriously nasty faeries. I don’t want to clean that up again.”

I didn’t know if she meant clean up in the “closing the portal, banishing the faeries” way, or if it was more a “and then I mopped the humans’ blood off the wall” kind of thing.

I decided maybe it was better just to wonder.

“Anyway,” I said, fiddling with the ends of my hair, “it seems pretty cut-and-dried. The frog and Barbie thing is odd, but—”

Mom held up a hand. “The what?”

Oh, right, I’d forgotten to tell Mom about Romy’s theory that Mary was somehow warning her victims. As briefly as I could, I filled her in.

When I was done, Mom was frowning. “That is odd,” she said. “But it doesn’t really matter. If this Mary Evans is the ghost you’re after, get rid of her.”

“Planning on it,” I told her. “But you have to do a banishing on the last day of the month, right? That’s still a couple of weeks away.”

Mom made a noncommittal sound in reply, and I thought of what Torin had said. Was coming here really about protecting the students of Mary Evans High? Or was it Mom’s attempt at letting me have a taste of normal life?

“So this Adam,” Mom said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Is this part of the job, or is it—”

“Part of the job, for sure,” I said quickly, and for some reason, Dex’s face suddenly appeared in my mind. How would I feel if it were him I was meeting tonight? Just the thought sent my heart racing in a way that wasn’t totally unpleasant.

Mom peered at me. “You’re blushing.”

I just stopped myself from covering my cheeks with my hands. “What? No, I’m not. I’m just…it’s kind of hot in here.”

But Mom was not so easily fooled. “Iz, I know we haven’t talked much about boys.”

“And we don’t need to,” I hurried on. “Dex is just a friend.”

I didn’t realize my mistake until Mom frowned at me. “I thought you said his name was Adam.”

“It is,” I said, turning away and heading for the door. “Dex is just this other boy. He’s in that ghost hunter thing, and you had mentioned that, so it was on my mind. We should go if—”

Mom stood up. “Two boys?” she asked, and I wasn’t sure if she was horrified or impressed.

“Friends,” I said again. “Nothing else. And didn’t you say it was important to blend in? Going on a…er, going to a basketball game is totally blending in.”

I could tell Mom was struggling between the Brannick part of her that wanted to believe I was doing all of this for the mission—which I so was—and the Mom part that suddenly realized she had a teenage daughter. A teenage daughter who was hanging around teenage boys.

She reached out, and I think she was going to lay a hand on my shoulder or something, but in the end, she just let her arm drop to her side. “Izzy, I’m glad you’re so dedicated to this, but…you have to remember that these kids you’re spending time with are just part of a job. You can enjoy spending time with them, but in the end, there isn’t any room for them in your life permanently.”

I should have just nodded, but instead I said, “But you have friends. Or connections, or whatever. People like Maya. Like whoever found you this house.”

Mom frowned slightly. “Those aren’t my friends, Izzy, and they’re not…civilians. They’re people who are already wrapped up in this life. People who know about Prodigium and what we do. It’s different.”

“I understand that,” I replied, but Mom just ducked her head to look into my eyes. “Do you? Do you really?”

I thought of Dex again, and the way it had been kind of…nice sitting with Romy in English class.

But I looked at Mom and said, “Absolutely. A job. Means to an end, all of that. On it.”

Mom held my gaze for another beat before sighing. “Okay,” she said at last. “Then let me grab my car keys and we’ll get you to this game.”