She swallowed and looked at his hands, thinking that maybe he had a contact case out and had changed his lenses. No case.
He wiggled his brows again, and when she realized she was staring at him, she yanked her suitcase free.
Shaking off the chill, she moved on to the row of seats she’d chosen as her own. Before she turned to sit down, she noticed another boy in the back. Sitting by himself, he had light brown hair, parted to the side and hanging just above his dark brows and green eyes. Normal green eyes, but the dusty blue t-shirt he wore made them more noticeable.
He nodded at her. Nothing too weird, thank God. At least there was one normal person on the bus besides her.
Sitting down, she gave blond guy another glance. But he wasn’t looking at her, so she couldn’t see if his eye color had gone weird again. But that’s when she noticed the girl with three different hair colors had something in her hands.
Kylie’s breath caught again. The girl had a toad. Not a frog—a frog she could have probably handled—but a toad. A huge honking toad. What kind of a girl dyed her hair three different colors and carried a toad with her to camp? God, maybe it was one of those drug toads, the ones people licked to get high. She’d heard about them on some stupid crime show on TV but had always thought they’d made it up. She didn’t know which was worse: licking a toad to get high or carrying a toad around just to be weird.
Pulling her suitcase up on the seat next to her just so no one would feel the need to join her, Kylie let out a deep sigh and looked out the window. The bus was moving, although Kylie still didn’t see how the bus driver managed to reach the gas pedals.
“Do you know what they call us?” The voice came from the seat where toad girl sat.
Kylie didn’t think she was talking to her, but she turned her head that way, anyway. Because the girl looked directly at her, Kylie figured she might be wrong.
“Who calls us?” Kylie asked, trying not to sound too friendly or too bitchy. The last thing she wanted was to piss these freaks off.
“The kids who go to the other camps. There’s like six camps in the three-mile radius in Fallen.” Using both hands she pulled her multi-colored hair back and held it there for a few seconds.
That’s when Kylie noticed the girl had lost her toad. And Kylie didn’t see a cage or anything where she could have tucked it away.
Great. She would probably have some freak’s humongous drug toad hopping into her lap before she knew it. Not that toads totally scared her or anything. She just didn’t want it jumping on her.
“They call us boneheads,” the girl said.
“Why?” Kylie pulled her feet up in the seat just in case a toad hopped by.
“The camp used to be called Bone Creek Camp,” the girl answered. “Because of the dinosaur bones found there.”
“Ha,” said the blond boy. “They also call us boners.”
A few laughs echoed from the other seats. “Why is that funny?” the girl wearing all black asked in a tone so deadly serious that Kylie shivered.
“You don’t know what a boner is?” Blond Boy asked. “If you’ll come sit beside me, I’ll show you.” When he turned around, Kylie got another look at his eyes. Holy mother of pearls. They were gold. A striking feline gold. Contacts, Kylie realized. He had to be wearing some kind of weird contacts that were doing that.
Goth girl stood up as if to join the blond guy.
“Don’t do it,” Toad Girl, without her toad, said and stood up. Moving out into the aisle, she whispered something in the Goth girl’s ear.
“Gross.” Goth Girl slammed back in her seat. Then she looked over at the blond boy, and pointed a black-painted fingernail at him. “You don’t want to piss me off. I eat things bigger than you in the dead of night.”
“Did someone say something about the dead of night?” a voice came from the back of the bus.
Kylie turned to see who’d spoken.
Another girl, one Kylie hadn’t known was there, popped up from the seat. She had jet black hair and wore sunglasses almost the same color as her hair. What made her look so abnormal was her complexion. Pasty. As in pasty white.
“Do you know why they renamed the camp Shadow Falls?” Toad Girl asked.
“No,” someone answered from the front of the bus.
“Because of the Native American legend that says at dusk, if you stand beneath the falls on the property, you can see the shadows of death angels dancing.”
Dancing death angels? What was wrong with these people?
Kylie swung around in her seat. Was this some nightmare? Maybe part of her night terrors? She pushed deeper in her cushioned seat and tried to focus on waking herself up from the dreams the way Dr. Day had shown her.