“Mila?” Dayton’s voice squeaks from somewhere near the exercise-equipment aisle. “Come back please!”
I rush forward, as eager to be less sick as they are to be less dead-looking. June scrambles to keep up with me. I can hear her counting down under her breath between pants. Riley and Dayton are corpsified again, although it doesn’t seem to hinder their running ability at all. Which is another knock against the zombie theory. Their opaque eyes, on the other hand, are maximum zombie. They bounce back to normal faster this time, but it takes until I’m directly in front of them to stick.
“A hundred steps,” June says definitively. “That’s how far we can go from our witch before we start getting disgusting again.”
“I have a name,” I say.
“A magical choke chain,” Riley mutters, biting the inside of her cheek. “Fuck a duck.”
“At least a hundred steps is easy to remember,” June says.
“Yeah, thank God,” Riley sneers. “How else would we remember except for actually turning back into fucking corpses?”
“We really can’t see our families again,” Dayton says softly. “Unless Mila comes with us.”
June sniffs. “Like a spinster aunt in a Victorian novel.”
“Hey,” I bite off.
“What’s the point of a spell that won’t let you leave your witch?” Dayton asks. “Wouldn’t people want to go back to living their lives?”
“No,” Riley says, lifting her chin. I know that face. There’s determination in the set of her jaw. “You come back to kill the fucker who offed you.”
TEN
COMING BACK TO school feels different this time. Instead of being jittery and jumping at every shadow, my shoulders are squared with purpose. I’m confident that someone in these halls killed Riley, June, and Dayton. And that nagging voice—a cross between my mom and Dr. Miller—that says I’m crazy is gone. I’m not crazy. I brought back the dead, and I have the power to get justice for them.
Caleb Treadwell is absent from chem, saving me the trouble of having to pretend to apologize for knocking him over last week. With the whole counter to myself, I decide to ignore Mr. Cavanagh’s lecture and open my notebook to the last page. I start a Venn diagram of the three not-so-dead girls. All three were juniors, but that’s where the comparisons end. June and Dayton were in a totally different social hemisphere than Riley, only ever occasionally crossing paths through Xander.
I gnaw on the end of my pencil. Xander was at June’s wake when Riley died. I wonder if the Nouns were there, too. June and Dayton were Nouns themselves, but they were Proper Nouns and, thus, in a higher social sphere. The lower-caste Nouns are most of the Fairmont Academy speech and debate team, but thanks to some crossover with the honor society—and some strategic dating—they have a prime real estate lunch table. Their desperation to be top-tier popular makes them all the most vicious. The Nouns are bootlickers, brownnosers, and—when the situation warrants—shameless tattletales. Could they be killers, too?
June said she wouldn’t have been surprised if Sky Moony or Dawn Mathy had killed her. Although her “Dawn copied my bangs” theory doesn’t explain killing Riley or Dayton.
But maybe it wasn’t a personal killing at all. Maybe it was tactical. The only thing that all of Fairmont Academy cares about is the Rausch Scholarship. It’s not even that much money—the alumni association scrapes together a couple grand for the scholarship itself and then drops three times as much on the awards gala. But it’s prestigious, and prestige goes a long way in Cross Creek.
June said herself that she and Dayton wouldn’t have killed themselves because they hadn’t been to the Rausch awards gala yet this year. She assumed that both of them would be invited. Before two weeks ago, everyone knew that our class’s scholarship was June’s for the taking.
But Riley was right behind her in grade point average. Then Dayton, who, despite being dumb as an empty sack, always managed to be on the honor roll and in a thousand clubs.
Would someone really kill for the honor of a big party and a page in the yearbook?
I look around at my classmates. There’s Cain Gonzales, the only other junior Latinx at Fairmont, who spends 80 percent of his day screaming, “I don’t know anyone named Abel!” And then there’s Dawn, who might want to be the breakout star of the Nouns instead of always being lumped in with Sky, Angel, and Diamond.
But mostly I see people whose names I don’t know. Anonymous faces—like mine—who don’t fit into any clique or club even after three years at this school. Winning the Rausch Scholarship could make senior year different for someone on the fringes of Fairmont Academy. People would eat lunch with them and say hello in the halls. I think plenty of people would kill for a more pleasant high school experience.
Which means the real question here isn’t who would kill for the notoriety of the Rausch Scholarship—but who wouldn’t?
* * *
My internal undead-girl alarm goes off at the same time as the sixth-period bell. It feels the same as it did in Walmart—an instant of my entire body feeling like a ripped-open scab, followed by cold sweat that leaves me reaching shakily for the Pepto in my backpack. The girls are nearby. Where they are, exactly, isn’t immediately clear, thanks to the student body dutifully filing into the courtyard behind the cafeteria.
Aniyah Dorsey has trapped Principal Chu near the back entrance to the cafeteria. She’s holding an iPhone threateningly toward the older woman’s mouth. Does she know that she looks like a cartoon of a reporter right now?
“Ms. Chu,” she’s saying as I move past them, “how would you respond to people who say that on-campus memorials, especially mandatory ones like this, sensationalize and even promote teen suicide?”
The principal’s face dents into a deep glower. “Who says that?”
Aniyah doesn’t blink. “The Society for the Prevention of Teen Suicide.”
“Oh.” Ms. Chu’s face falls. “No comment, Aniyah. Please just enjoy the free period.”
Aniyah catches sight of me. Her face brightens—not the reaction I usually elicit. “Mila! Can I talk to you about your reaction to today’s event—”
I breeze by her. “Nope. Busy.”
The dark green metal picnic tables where the cool kids usually eat lunch are covered in white display boards and butcher paper signs with clumps of students sitting beside them, staring hungrily at the gathering crowd, trying to trick someone into eye contact. A banner has been hung across the cafeteria’s back wall that reads: Fairmont Academy Celebration of Life! There’s an empty podium underneath with a microphone being set up.
At first glance, it looks like we’ve all accidentally wandered into an outdoor science fair. Or a prolife rally. But, in order to avoid being stepped on by a passing horde of girls in matching fleece vests, I pass too close to one of the picnic tables and realize it’s a bake sale. There are plates of lumpy homemade cookies and obviously store-bought pies being sliced to slivers. I hate to admit it, but I kind of get why Aniyah wanted to quote me on how I would react to this. I could probably write most of her article with swearing alone.
This is massively and breathtakingly fucked up. In sixteen years, I have never seen anything try so hard and fail so spectacularly in equal measure.
“Cookies are a dollar!” chirps the girl nearest the cash box. I think I recognize her as one of the show-choir goons. She has the glassy-eyed perma-smile of someone desperate for attention. Although I guess she could also be one of the theater kids.
I arch an eyebrow at her. She must not know me either if she’s peddling at me.
“I have to pay to celebrate life?” I ask, inclining my head to the giant sign looming over us.