My sigh is covered by the tinkling of the piano tucked into the back corner of the stage. I can see the black-and-orange Giants hat bobbing over the keys as Riley plunks out a vague accompaniment to “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows.”
I shouldn’t be surprised that she knows how to play it. When we first met, she would constantly complain about her piano lessons. Mrs. Greenway thought that playing an instrument would help Riley make friends. It didn’t work. As Riley pointed out many times, piano was a solitary instrument. Besides, once she was finally allowed to quit lessons, Riley and I could just hang out after school. Friendship achieved.
The song finishes with a clink of high notes and a whispery vibrato from Dayton. She opens her eyes and looks down at her hands. With a guilty jolt, I realize that she wasn’t closing her eyes because she was enjoying herself so much but because she hadn’t wanted to look at her own dead body. She sends a glance over her shoulder at Riley.
“Thanks,” she says.
Riley stands up and shrugs instead of saying, “You’re welcome.” She sees me and June watching from the aisle and leans her back against the piano, folding her arms across her chest. “I knew you had to be close. It got easier to play once my left wrist unbroke itself.”
I can’t tell if she wants me to be apologetic or not, so I choose not. I didn’t kill her. I just brought her back. And I’m not sorry for it. We all have to make do with this fucked-up spell. If I can spend alone time with June Phelan-Park, then Riley can deal with her own broken bits when I’m not around.
June climbs the stairs onto the stage, glaring daggers at Dayton. “We looked everywhere for you. You can’t just run off, Dayton. It’s rude.”
“You ran off,” Riley says. “To threaten your friends.”
“Not my friends,” June snaps. “Not anymore. I don’t forgive. I’m a Taurus.”
Dayton wrings her hands against her stomach. Her nails are torn to shreds. The black jeans she stole from Walmart are slightly too big and bunch around her knees. “I’m sorry. I was watching the show choir warm up, and I realized that I’ll never get to sing with them again.”
“That’s not a huge tragedy, right?” I ask, coming farther down the aisle to lean on the lip of the stage. I crane my neck to look up at the girls. “They kind of suck. Trust me, I’ve listened to them perform that depressing song three times in the last week, and it was shitty every time. You sounded really good.”
Dayton sends me a grateful smile, but I can tell she doesn’t mean it. Her eyes are sadder than I’ve ever seen them. “But that’s the problem. I never got to be a soloist. All the show choir competitions are in spring when I have swim team. The director was afraid that I’d miss too many shows for swim meets. Which isn’t even true.” She sits down hard on the stage and puts her face in her hands. Her thin shoulders shiver. When she speaks again, her voice is mousy and wet. “And now I’m dead, and I’ll never get to solo. I’ll never sing in public or swim or do anything ever again. I’m a dead loser with nothing to look forward to. Coming back feels terrible.”
I don’t know if she means coming back to Fairmont or coming back to life.
TWELVE
THE DAY AFTER the Celebration of Life, I tiptoe up the rickety stairs to the porch of Yarrow House, my arms laden with bags of McDonalds, a tray of sodas, and a duffel bag full of supplies. Unable to knock, I kick the kitchen door twice. There’s a shuffling of feet, something crashing to the floor, and a muffled curse before the door swings open. June snatches the food and the sodas without saying hello. Ice clicks against the paper cups as she spins away.
“Lunch is here,” she calls to the others.
“You’re welcome,” I say to her as I toe the door closed behind me.
The kitchen has been ransacked. The shelves where Riley once meticulously cataloged all our magic supplies are now a mess of tangled herbs and loose stones toppled into one another.
All the candles that we’d been saving to use in spells are lit around the dark living room—on top of stacks of books and wedged onto the wilted mantelpiece and on chunks of broken bricks that must have been collected outside from the crumbling chimney. Unfortunately, none of the candles are scented—the essential oils can counteract spell ingredients—so there’s nothing to cover up the house’s ever-present perfume of mildew and mouse fur.
The flames send flickering shadows against the boards on the windows. The girls lounge on the sagging, dirty floor under the sagging, dirty ceiling. A white cat weaves around the room, its sharp ears twitching at sounds too quiet for me to hear.
“Is that Binx?” I ask Riley.
She doesn’t look up from rummaging inside one of the fast food bags, hunting for her nuggets. “Dayton’s scared of mice, so I went home and grabbed him. He’s a good hunter.”
“Yeah,” June says, sitting down in front of the fireplace with a large order of fries. “Except Dayton is also scared of dead mice.”
Dayton makes a yelp of indignation into a Filet-O-Fish. “They’re gross!”
I open the duffel bag and pull out the blankets and sheets I pillaged from my linen closet. I sit down on top of the pile and accept a bag of food from Riley. “Won’t your parents wonder where he is?”
“That’s the whole point of having an outdoor cat,” she says. She makes a line of sauce containers in front of her. The plastic cuts clean lines in the dust. “They come and go. He’ll be here for a couple of days. By the time my parents worry that he’s not eating the food they put out, he’ll be back.”
I can’t argue with that. I bite into my double cheeseburger, effectively spoiling my dinner. Which is in less than an hour. I’ll have to be home to help set the table the second the sun sets, not that I can see the sun from Yarrow. With the blacked-out windows, time sort of stops in Yarrow House. It’s unsettling, but I suck it up since the girls have to endure it.
“So, I’ve been thinking about why someone would want to kill you guys,” I say, hiding the food in my mouth behind a flimsy napkin. “I think it might have something to do with the Rausch Scholarship. You were all top contenders for it this year.”
June rolls her eyes. “I was the top contender. My essay was about how important my work on the charter school board was.” She arcs a hand through the air, imagining a headline. “‘Guiding the Flow of Communication’ by June Phelan-Park. I was so gonna win.”
“Mine was about staying positive in the face of adversity,” Dayton chirps. “My whole family went on a mission trip last summer. It was life-changing.”
“It was in San Diego,” June says. “You could find poorer people if you’d stayed in Cross Creek.”
“Joke’s on you,” Dayton says. “We were helping farm animals. I brushed an alpaca.”
Riley cuts her eyes at me. “What does this have to do with us being murdered?”
“It’s kind of the only thing you guys have in common,” I say. “And, for whatever reason, basically everyone at Fairmont wants to win the Rausch.”
“We want the party, duh,” Dayton says. “It’s like your own private prom.”
“Xander’s scholarship gala was so awesome,” June says. She shakes out a ketchup packet between her thumb and forefinger and tears off the edge with her teeth. “It was even better than prom. Someone snuck in a flask of vodka—”
“I did,” Riley interrupts.
“You did?” I ask. “You never told me that.”
Riley swings her head to look at me. “I didn’t want you to be jealous. It was when I was dating Myles.” She seems cautiously hopeful that she’s remembered something from her continued blackout period. “When was that?”
“The end of May.”
Her face falls, and she turns back to her line of nugget sauces. “Anyway, Myles found a handle of Seagram’s—”
I gag. “You drank found vodka? Why would I be jealous of found vodka?”
“Because,” Riley says heavily, “it was at the Rausch dinner with popular people.”
“And I’d be hella jealous of you getting drunk with who? The Future Zombies of America here?”