Nina avoided my eyes and I pulled my hands from hers, tucking mine under my legs.
“I’m saying that your job is to investigate a coven at the high school. That’s what you should be doing, not trying to find this girl. You’re putting too much pressure on yourself, Soph. And also, you were passed out. In the bathroom. You hit your head. Don’t you think it’s a lot more likely that the voices came from you wanting so badly to help this girl, rather than from bathroom-tile-penetrating witchcraft?”
The funny thing was, it wasn’t.
Chapter Eight
ChaCha was snoring away, making those little dream-doggy running motions with her tiny legs while I stared at the ceiling. Headlights from three stories down streaked across my ceiling and every time I tried to pull my eyes shut, they popped back open again, the voices in my head chattering, needling, telling me I was missing something. By 3:45 AM I gave up, clicked on my bedside light, and buried myself in my closet.
I found it behind an avalanche of polyester pants and Nina-vetoed hoodies, shoved in the farthest corner of my closet: a cardboard box, packing tape still pristine, the word SOPHIE printed across it. I sucked in my breath as bat wings flopped in my gut, then I pulled the tape off in one swift motion.
In the same instant, Nina was in my room, a quarter inch from me, staring down. No matter how many times it happened, I could never get over the vampire super-speed, super-stealth thing.
“God, Nina, you scared the crap out of me.” She flapped at the air, rolling her coal-black eyes. “I know, I know, I should get a bell. Just wanted to make sure you had your clothes on.” She grinned, all Crest-white fangs. I rolled my eyes and she plopped her bony butt right down beside me on the floor, the chill from her skin sending goose bumps over my flesh.
“What are we doing?” she wanted to know.
“I’m checking something out and you’re scaring the bejesus out of me.”
“Oh, Soph, you’re such a pansy.” She pushed herself onto her knees; then her whole top half disappeared into the newly opened box.
“Well,” she said from its depths, “I can see why you wanted to keep this particular expedition to yourself.” She flopped back out, each hand clutching a framed picture of the Backstreet Boys in various just-dangerous-enough poses.
I yanked the frames from her grip. “It was a long, long time ago.” I shoved the photos behind me, surreptitiously using the sleeve of my pajamas to wipe a leftover Bonne Bell Lip Smackers kiss from the glass. “Move.”
“Oh my gosh. Did you wear this? Sexy!” Nina had a piece of my Mercy uniform in each fist. I ignored her and dug in the box myself, while she yanked on my old skirt and blouse, rolling the skirt to porn-star heights and tying the blouse over her smooth, perfect midsection. I glanced up.
“Yep, that’s exactly how I wore it, too.”
Finally, after pawing through a hideously thoughtful senior photo and seventeen wistfully dog-eared prom dress ads, I found what I was looking for. Nina’s eyes went wide, the glee shooting from her mouth all the way up to her ears.
“Yearbooks!” She yanked one from me, sat down again and started thumbing through it. “You never showed me these before!”
I opened the top one left on my stack and sighed as seventeen-year-old me stared out from the pages, my hair a frizzy, barely-in-the-frame mess, my black eyes pleading for death. Or, possibly, that was just my interpretation.
“Self-preservation,” I said without looking up.
“Aw, Sophie! You were adorable!” Nina cooed, holding the page with my junior-year photo up against her cheek. “Bless your heart!”
I narrowed my eyes. “Bless your heart is what people say to sugarcoat something ugly.”
“Bless your heart,” Nina said again.
“I hate you.”
“I hate this beehive! Didn’t anyone let this Heddy creature know the sixties ended a hundred and fifty years before this picture was taken?”
I smiled. “That lady is still at the school. I ran into her again. Sans beehive.”
“Well, I suppose I should forgive a woman who dedicated fifty years of her life to high school girls.”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ve been out of school barely ten years.” Give or take.
Nina ignored me. “Who’s Gretchen Von Dow?”
She turned the yearbook around, her finger pressed against the smiling, half-page photo of a very blond, very pretty student.
“Why does it say ‘we’ll miss you, Gretchen!’? She die or something?”
I bit my bottom lip. “I don’t think so. She was a foreign exchange student.” I took the yearbook from Nina and pointed to the smaller text. “See? ‘Gretchen is a foreign exchange student from Hamburg, Germany, who shared her many traditions and sparkling smile with us for the past two years. She is now back home, but will never be forgotten! From the members of the Lock and Key Club.’”