Stop being such a girl. How like Paul to think being called a girl was an insult.
“You’re engaged?” Becca seemed super interested. “Can I see your ring?”
I held out my left hand and waggled my ring at her without really thinking about it. I was too busy debating what to text back to Paul.
The last time I’d been foolish enough to agree to meet Paul Slater somewhere alone, I’d ended up with a nasty scrape across my back that had been extremely difficult to explain to my mother (she’d been the one who’d had to slather on the antibacterial cream, since I hadn’t been able to reach it, and of course I’d had to hide it entirely from Jesse).
There had to be another way.
But short of killing Paul myself to keep him from knocking my old house down, I couldn’t think of one.
“Why’s your diamond so small? I can barely see it.”
I jerked my hand out from under Becca’s nose. I’d forgotten she was there. “What do you mean?” I demanded defensively. “It’s not small. It’s perfectly normal sized. This ring is vintage. It’s been in my boyfriend’s family for years.” Two hundred, actually, but she didn’t seem like the kind of person who’d be impressed by that, or how Jesse had managed to hang on to it for so long, especially after having been murdered over it, sort of. Not that I was going to tell her that.
“Everyone knows that anything less than five carats means the guy isn’t really invested in the relationship,” she said.
“That’s ridiculous. Who told you that, your boyfriend?” I narrowed my eyes at the phone in her lap. “Who were you texting just now?”
“No one.” A pink flush suffused her cheeks.
“Oh, sure, no one, I can tell. What’s Mr. No One’s name?”
Her blush deepened. “Seriously, no one. I was playing a video game.” She flashed me a look at the front of her screen to prove it. Ghost Mediator.
I frowned. “Really?”
“Sorry. I know we’re not supposed to play games in school, but it’s totally addictive.”
“I don’t care if you play games. I think it’s cool that you’re a gamer. I just don’t understand why you like that game. It’s really stupid.”
“Ghost Mediator isn’t stupid. It’s really cool. Have you ever played it?” For the first time, her eyes showed some life in them. “See, what you do is, you have to kill all these ghosts in order to get out of the haunted mansion and into the nightclub, but first you have to be able to tell which ones are normal people and which ones are the ghosts, and if you accidentally kill a normal person, you go down a level, into the cemetery of doom, so then there are even more ghosts—”
“You can’t kill a ghost,” I said, feeling my blood pressure rising. “They’re already dead. That game is inherently flawed. Ghosts are the souls of deceased people who need help moving on to their next plane of existence. They shouldn’t be killed, they should be pitied, and whoever invented Ghost Mediator needs to be stopped—”
“Oh, my God.” She blinked at me. “Calm down. It’s just a game.”
She was right. What was wrong with me? I’d missed a perfect opportunity to ask her about Lucia, and instead used it to vent about my hatred for a stupid franchise—
“And my stepmom is the one who told me the five-carats thing,” Becca added. “That’s how I knew it. I don’t have a boyfriend. I don’t even like anyone.”
“Right,” I said. “Sorry.” I needed to get a grip. “But your stepmother is wrong. The size of the diamond doesn’t matter; it’s the ring itself that’s the symbol of the guy’s commitment to—you know what? It’s as stupid as the game, actually. The whole thing is a dumb, antiquated practice that I don’t even believe in. I’m only doing it because my boyfriend is really old-fashioned. Otherwise, we’d just be living together. So back to what we were talking about earlier. You said something about there having been an accident?”
Becca wasn’t going for it.
“My stepmother said no way would she have married my dad if he hadn’t committed to at least five carats.”
Who the hell was this girl’s stepmother, anyway?
It’s kind of ironic that at that exact moment the door to the administrative office was thrown open, and a tall, attractive blond woman strode in. She was wearing dark Chanel sunglasses that she lifted to glance in dismay from the mess on the floor to the mess in the chair seated beside me.
I, however, was what she seemed to deem the biggest mess of all.
“Suze Simon?” she said in distaste.
“Kelly Prescott?” I could hardly believe my eyes. “What are you doing here?”
Becca sighed. “That’s my stepmom.”
seis
“Kelly Prescott married Lance Arthur Walters, of Wal-Con Aeronautics, last summer,” CeeCee said, licking a bit of foam off the top of her chai latte. “Hey, wasn’t Debbie a bridesmaid in that wedding, or something? I thought you got invited.”
“Yeah,” I said, still feeling a little numb from my shock back at the school. “I blew it off.”