Something broke inside of me.
I felt my whole face blanch, felt my chest tighten as my heart seized up. I gripped the fabric, holding it so hard that my nails bored into my palms.
“It’s—it was—a skirt. From a uniform. A uniform from here.” I licked my impossibly dry lips. “Will, someone was trying to burn this uniform.”
Will blinked at me, then disappeared back into the Dumpster.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m looking for whatever else remains of that uniform.” He paused his mad shuffle through the trash, but didn’t look at me. “Or whoever owns it.”
I gently laid the remains of the once grey tweed skirt aside, touching the fabric gently as though showing this inanimate object a moment of tenderness could soften the blow for its owner.
“Find anything yet?” I asked, once I got back in the Dumpster.
“No. I don’t know if that’s bad or good.” He stepped back. “This is where the fire was centered. See that?”
He pointed to a blackened circle, then toed the small mountain of grey-white ash in its center.
“I was here when I found the skirt,” I said, using my hands to dig through the spaghetti. The stench was overwhelming—burnt plastic and garbage—but I was so focused on finding the rest of the charred uniform—and hopefully not the girl who had worn it—that I didn’t care.
“Wait.” My hand closed around something soft and I pulled. A stretch of fabric that used to be white slid through the debris. I winced. “It’s a blouse. Part of it.”
Will leaned in. “It’s not burned.”
“No. It’s torn.” I rubbed my finger across the sodden, frayed edge of the shirt and pulled back when something sliced across my flesh. “Ow!”
“Something get you?” He took my hand in his and rubbed the tucked tail of his shirt over my thumb. “You’re bleeding. That’s not good.”
“What got me?”
Will took the fabric scrap from my hand, then produced a small, filthy pin attached at what looked to be the shirt’s collar. He rubbed the muck from the pin and I could see that it was made of a cheap gold fashioned into a tiny lock with a key inside.
I took the fabric and examined the pin. “It’s a Lock and Key pin. It’s a club on campus. Every member gets one of them.”
I laid the piece of fabric on the end of the Dumpster, smoothing it out and shining up the pin. It glinted in the sunlight and my heart ached. Lock and Key was a club you had to be admitted into— only students with the best grades and community service records were allowed and it looked great on Ivy League applications. When I was at Mercy, Lock and Key was basically a country club for the already perfect, a tiny golden promise to keep the classes pure.
“What’s this?” Will yanked something then stood upright, offering it to me. My heart thudded.
“It’s a girl’s shoe.”
His face was sallow, his eyes glassy and rimmed with red. “You found a sock earlier.”
Tears pricked behind my eyes, but I wouldn’t let them fall. “Keep searching.”
We worked in frenzied silence, tearing open bags and tossing aside contents, and when there was nothing left to go through, we climbed over the side of the Dumpster one last time. I laid the shoe next to the remains of the skirt and blouse.
“Well, there was no body in there, so I suppose that’s good.”
“And we don’t even know who this skirt belonged to. It could be anyone. We should still report it to the police, though. Call Alex?”
“Sure,” I said, trying my best to convince myself. “But the whole thing could be nothing at all. Just common . . . uniform . . . burning.”
Will’s eyes flashed. I appreciated him not trying to rush me to the obvious.
“I mean, this shoe could be—” I stopped, biting off my words, keeping them back with my gritted teeth. Though the sole was melted completely on one side, it was untouched on the other. Untouched by fire, at least.
“Alyssa,” I whispered. I fingered the name drawn in fat letters and decorated with ballpoint ink stars and hearts. “Someone was trying to get rid of evidence.”
Chapter Three
I was congratulating myself for nearly getting through my first day at Mercy while my last class of the day was filing in. I went to turn around and found myself nose to cosmetically perfected nose with Fallon.
I cleared my throat and gripped my briefcase so tightly that I could feel my fingernails digging little half-moons into my palms.
Think, Sophie, THINK!
My mind sprung into action and I pasted on a grin, then relived—in rapid succession—every humiliation I had ever suffered in these halls, at the hands of girls in identical skirts.
I felt myself start to tremble.
You’re the grown-up.
I quickly whipped up a memory of staking a big baddie vampire, of defeating a couple of crazed psychopaths, of having the super-popular-girl luck of seeing a fallen angel and a Guardian naked.
I was pretty kick-ass.