“Yeah, right.”
“Then let my moms talk to them. My weeknight curfew is eleven.”
“Well, you’re a guy, and you’ve lived here all your life.”
“This blows.”
“Yeah,” she agreed, pasting a suitably bummed expression on her face.
In truth, she doesn’t have a curfew, and she’d never asked her parents about walking later in the evening. She’d welcomed an excuse not to spend quite so much time with Lennon, especially after dark.
She starts down the stairs, and Dad calls from below, “Get your sister, whoever you are!”
“It’s me, as usual, Dad. The obedient one who comes when she’s summoned!”
“Thank you, obedient one. Please wrangle your disobedient sister.”
She backtracks to Piper’s closed door. “Hey, it’s time to eat, now!”
All is silent behind the door.
“Piper!” She knocks.
Still nothing.
Unsettling images storm her brain—the wild-eyed man in the street, the watcher on the roof, Lisa’s warning about danger. She turns the knob slowly, bracing herself for . . .
Anything but the sight of her sister sitting cross-legged on the floor with a glass pipe in her mouth, earbuds in her ears, and a cloud of pungent smoke wafting around her.
“Hey! Don’t just barge in here!” She pulls out one earbud, and loud music spills from it.
“I knocked. What are you doing?”
“Smoking some excellent weed. Want a hit?”
“No.”
“Like you don’t do it yourself.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh, please. Don’t act all innocent and prissy. I smelled it when I came home the other night, and I saw it in your room.”
“That wasn’t weed, it was a cigarette.”
Piper rolls her eyes, pupils dilated and her expression lazily amused. “That was one funky cigarette, then, all crumbled and sitting in a bowl.”
Oh. That night. Saturday, when Mom and Dad went out, and Stacey had the house to herself.
But she’s not about to tell her sister that what she’d seen wasn’t a cigarette or weed. “You’re not supposed to be in my room, Piper.”
“What a coincidence. You’re not supposed to be in mine.”
“Whatever. It’s time for dinner.”
She turns and heads downstairs, deliberately leaving the bedroom door ajar. Her sister slams it after her with a curse.
“I’ll tell Dad you’re not coming,” she calls over her shoulder.
She descends the stairs, glancing at the Williams family portrait.
On Saturday evening, she’d stood here holding a bowl of burning sage leaves and addressed the dead girl directly.
“You need to go. Please. You don’t belong here anymore.”
She’d gone through the house saying it over and over, to Gertrude Williams and her parents, to the Toska family. Even to the cannonball enshrined in the hallway, in case it was attracting the spirit of a dead Revolutionary War soldier.
As she performed the ritual, she wasn’t convinced of paranormal dark energy, and she’d perceived no immediate difference afterward.
Ever since, though, things have been better. She hasn’t spotted the watcher since that day on the subway, so maybe he really was a ghost, and she’d banished him.
Overhead, she hears Piper’s door creak open.
Her sister appears at the top of the stairs, spots her, and mutters, “Loser.”
That hurts.
It shouldn’t. She should be used to it. When they weren’t being indifferent to each other, they’d bickered their way through the last few years back at home in California. But here, it’s been different. Moving away from everything and everyone familiar had forged a bond she hadn’t even realized was there.
She remembers how frightened Piper had been the night they’d found out about the murders. Stacey, too, had been scared, but she’d reassured her sister, as if she knew anything about anything.
Piper thought she did.
Stacey reads everything . . . she loves true crime, she hears her saying—bragging, almost—to Courtney and Lennon.
She looks up at her sister now and receives a steely glare in return.
“Don’t worry,” Stacey whispers. “I’m not telling them.”
Piper’s blond eyebrows rise but she says nothing, following Stacey down the stairs and into the kitchen.
Dad is at the counter, the sleeves of his dress shirt rolled up as he tosses a salad.
Mom is taking something out of the oven. “Hurry and set the table, please, guys. This is ready.”
“Good, I’m starved!” Piper reverts to her usual sunny self as she opens a cabinet and takes out a stack of plates. “It smells great!”
“What is it?” Stacey asks.
“Herb roasted chicken and potatoes . . . sort of.”
“Sort of?” they echo in unison.
Piper giggles and says, “Jinx,” just like when they were little.
Stacey’s grin fades when Mom goes on, “I never make herb chicken without sage, but something got into the garden and chomped the entire plant. Just that one. It’s the craziest thing.”
Stacey takes her time counting four knives and four forks from the silverware drawer, wondering if her mother’s comment is a pointed message that she knows exactly what happened to the sage.
Had she sniffed it in the air somehow? Not likely. Saturday evening had been warm and breezy, with all the windows open, and Mom and Dad got home hours later.
Maybe Lennon had mentioned Lisa’s suggestion to his moms, and they’d told hers? But Stacey hadn’t even told him she’d actually gone through with it, even though she met him right afterward for the open mic night.
Anyway, he’s adamant now that Lisa is a fraud. His about-face seems to have nothing to do with what she’d said about warding off dark energy and everything to do with the warnings about someone close to her.
“I feel like she was telling you not to trust me,” he told Stacey.
“Why? It could be anyone. It’s probably everyone.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just . . . you know. Everyone has secrets.”
“I don’t. Not from you.”
She forced a smile. “Well, great. Then it’s everyone but you.”
“Do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Do you have secrets from me?”
“No,” she lied.
Dad and Piper do most of the talking over dinner. That’s not unusual.
Mom pokes at her food, lost in thought. Stacey wonders whether she’s thinking about the sage, but doubts it. Her mother is often preoccupied lately. So, to be fair, is she.
“How about you, Stacey?”
“What?” She looks up to see her father, fork poised, wearing an expectant look.
“Do you have a ton of homework to do tonight, too?”
“Oh . . . not really. I’m just working on my college essay.”
“I thought you finished that a while ago.”
The one she’d written in California now feels trite and obsolete. She’s doing a new one using the same topic, “overcoming obstacles.”
Far more difficult, daunting obstacles.
She shrugs. “If I’m applying to an Ivy League school, it needs to be perfect.”
Mom looks up from her plate. “There’s no such thing as perfection, Stacey. Don’t make yourself crazy.”
Seriously? This, from a picture-perfect, surgically altered woman?