“So mote it be.” I throw the salt at the pot. The flames lick higher, almost touching the ceiling in a huge orange column, a hundred times wider and stronger than it was a second ago.
The girls jump. I do, too, when Riley looks at me through the flames. Her eyes are white. Then the giant flame shrinks as quickly as it started and burns down to embers. The only thing left in the pot is a smoking nub of tiger’s-eye stone. Riley blinks at me, and her eyes are hazel again.
Did I imagine they were otherwise?
There’s silence except for the susurration of the candles at the corners of the room eating through increments of wick.
“What happens now?” June asks nervously.
As cold as I was a minute ago, there’s sweat building at the nape of my neck now. “We hope that it did something.”
Dayton reaches into her pocket and lets a handful of confetti fly over our heads. “We did magic!”
“Fuck a duck, Dayton,” Riley says, plucking a piece of confetti off her own cheek. “Did you steal this much when you were alive?”
Dayton blinks at her. “Yeah. Duh. How did you get stuff?”
FIFTEEN
IN THE REVERB of the third-period bell, backpacks swish against bodies, feet pound against the cement, and classroom doors slam shut. In an instant, I am standing alone in the middle of the hallway behind the main office.
I follow the long line of cream-colored lockers down the wall, watching the numbers grow. All the hallways at Fairmont are like cement tunnels, making my footsteps echo. I catch myself tiptoeing and force my feet to act normal, my spine to straighten.
It’s hard not to look sneaky when you’re sneaking.
I’ve never really bothered with my locker. It’s all the way across campus, near the gym. If I get tired of carrying my books in my backpack, it’s easier to get them out of my car than to try to run from one end of Fairmont and back between periods.
But June’s locker is prime real estate—a stone’s throw from the student parking lot, halfway between the main building and the cafeteria. She stole it from a freshman the first week of school by putting her own combination lock on it and then convincing that kid he was crazy for thinking it was his to begin with.
I know this because she told the story in painstaking detail yesterday before I left Yarrow House. She was delighted with her own “ingenuity.” I told her it sounded sociopathic.
“You don’t have to pathologize everything, Camila.” She sighed at me heavily. “Now, do you want my combination or not?”
I check my phone for the number again. I could probably pathologize how impersonal it is. It’s nothing symbolic in June’s life, like a birthday or an anniversary. Just the number the lock came with.
This is as much a favor to June as it is a fact-finding mission. She convinced me to get hit with a tardy slip so that I could dig through her stuff for clues and also see if anyone left her any postmortem presents.
Dayton couldn’t remember her locker combination, and Riley never even bothered to keep a lock on hers since she never used it. So June is our only chance.
Luckily, June was also the most popular of the three of them. Not that I would ever give her the satisfaction of pointing that out.
Even before I’m in front of the locker, I can see paper sticking out of the vents cut into the door. I hold my breath and spin the lock to the appropriate, randomly assigned numbers. As the door swings open, I have to catch falling notebook paper that says, I hope you found peace in tearstained cursive. It’s from Angel. I wonder if it was written before or after June accosted her by the dumpsters.
In front of a neat line of textbooks, there’s a heap of Post-its and old Starbucks Treat Receipts and a tiny folded piece of lined paper. A mini-memorial.
I unfold one of the receipts. On the back, in block letters, it says, Why did you take Dayton with you, you selfish bitch?
Well. Not all memorials have to be complimentary, right?
With one last check over my shoulder, I scoop up all the notes and stuff them into my backpack. We can sort through them later to see if anyone left anything that will jog June’s memory about the last couple of weeks of her life. I shake out her textbooks to make sure there’s nothing hidden inside and grab a solitary spiral notebook.
I try not to look too guilty when I slip into chemistry. Mr. Cavanagh doesn’t even pause writing on the whiteboard. He just says, “Tardy.”
“Sorry,” I say, probably not sounding sorry at all.
I collapse onto my stool next to Caleb, who tsks his tongue and shakes his head like he’s disappointed in my lack of dedication to punctuality. His sandy hair is rumpled in a way that says “just woke up” rather than “trying to look like I just woke up.” The delicate sterling silver chain of June’s necklace barely peeks out from under the jacket he’s wearing.
I remember Dayton wondering what Caleb could have taken off her corpse. If he’s wearing June’s necklace, it would stand to reason that he’s got less visible trophies on him, too. Maybe not Dayton’s shoe, but he could have something recognizably Riley’s.
His pencil lead snaps, and he turns his back to me, hunching over to rummage through his backpack. All I can see inside are various notebooks—color coordinated, labeled in black marker—and a zippered pencil pouch. No earrings or baggies full of toenails or anything super weird. Maybe his backpack isn’t close enough for his liking. The necklace is on his person. The other stuff could be in his pockets or something.
“Hey,” I whisper as he straightens with a freshly sharpened pencil. “Do you have any gum?”
“Mila.” He draws the uh sound out in avuncular disapproval. He bares his teeth at me. “You can’t have gum on campus. You trying to get me detention? Cavanagh doesn’t care who my stepmom is.”
“Nope,” I say, making my eyes wide and innocent, Dayton-style. It probably doesn’t work on me, since Dayton doesn’t wear three layers of eyeliner. Nothing says fuck off like eyeliner as dark and heavy as my soul. “Just hoping to freshen my breath is all.”
He relaxes a fraction and reaches into the pocket of his sweats. Before I have a chance to get grossed out, he’s pulled out a slim tin of mints. He holds them out to me. As his thumb flicks open the lid, I notice that, inside his sleeve, his forearm is mottled red and shredding. Like a snake shedding its skin.
I smile as I set the mint between my teeth. That which rots you marks you, motherfucker.
* * *
Maybe I’m imagining it, but my stomach heaves as I walk into the parking lot after school. I stop and look around at the people swarming off campus, the line of parent-driven cars parked in the loading zone. I hold my keys a little tighter and move a little more stiffly, listening too closely to the crunch of wheels on pavement.
There’s no reason for my magic sensor to go off at school. My stomach does have other things to do—like process the cafeteria food I ate earlier or tell me when I’m about to look stupid in front of large groups of people.
“Mila, are you okay?”
Aniyah Dorsey stops beside me, her face scrunched in the sunlight. She squints at me from behind her glasses.
“You look sick,” she says. “Do you have, like, food poisoning or something? Is that why you were late to third period today?”
“What? Are you spying on me?” I snap.
She cocks her head at me. “Jesus. I’m trying to be nice.”
“People aren’t nice to me,” I say, walking away from her. I want to get to my car. I want to find the bottle of Pepto floating at the bottom of my backpack. I want to know that this feeling isn’t magic.
“But you’re such a peach!” Aniyah calls sarcastically to my back.