Fallen 01 – Fallen – Kate, Lauren

IN THE BEGINNING
HELSTON,
ENGLAND

SEPTEMBER 1854
Around
midnight, her eyes at last took shape. The look in them was feline, half
determined and half tentative—all trouble. Yes, they were just right, those
eyes. Rising up to her fine, elegant brow, inches from the dark cascade of her
hair.

He held the paper at arm’s length to assess his progress. It was hard, working
without her in front of him, but then, he never could sketch in her presence.
Since he had arrived from London—no, since he had first seen her—he’d had to be
careful always to keep her at a distance.

Every day now she approached him, and every day was more difficult than the one
before. It was why he was leaving in the morning—for India, for the Americas,
he didn’t know or care. Wherever he ended up, it would be easier than being
here.

He leaned over the drawing again, sighing as he used his thumb to perfect the
smudged charcoal pout of her full bottom lip. This lifeless paper, cruel
imposter, was the only way to take her with him.

Then, straightening up in the leather library chair, he felt it. That brush of
warmth on the back of his neck.
Her.
Her mere proximity gave him the most peculiar sensation, like the kind of
heat sent out when a log shatters to ash in a fire. He knew without turning
around: She was there. He covered her likeness on the bound papers in his lap,
but he could not escape her.

His eyes fell on the ivory-upholstered settee across the parlor, where only
hours earlier she’d turned up unexpectedly, later than the rest of her party,
in a rose silk gown, to applaud the eldest daughter of their host after a fine
turn at the harpsichord. He glanced across the room, out the window to the
veranda, where the day before she’d crept up on him, a fistful of wild white peonies in her hand. She
still thought the pull she felt toward him was innocent, that their frequent
rendezvous in the gazebo were merely … happy coincidences. To be so naive! He would never
tell her otherwise—the secret was his to bear.

He stood and turned, the sketches left behind on the leather chair. And there
she was, pressed against the ruby velvet curtain in her plain white dressing
gown. Her black hair had fallen from its braid. The look on her face was the
same as the one he’d sketched so many times. There was the fire, rising in her
cheeks. Was she angry? Embarrassed? He longed to know, but could not allow
himself to ask.

“What are you doing here?” He could hear the snarl in his voice, and regretted
its sharpness, knowing she would never understand.
“I—I couldn’t sleep,” she stammered, moving toward the fire
and his chair. “I saw the light in your room and then”—she paused, looking down
at her hands—”your trunk outside the door. Are you going somewhere?”
“I was going to tell you—” He broke off. He shouldn’t
lie. He had never intended to let her know his plans. Telling her would only
make things worse. Already, he had let things go too far, hoping this time
would be different.

She drew nearer, and her eyes fell on his sketchbook. “You were drawing me?”

Her startled tone reminded him how great the gap was in their understanding.
Even after all the time they’d spent together these past few weeks, she had not
yet begun to glimpse the truth that lay behind their attraction.

This was good—or at least, it was for the better. For the past several days,
since he’d made the choice to leave, he’d been struggling to pull away from
her. The effort took so much out of him that, as soon as he was alone, he had
to give in to his pent-up desire to draw her. He had filled up his book with
pages of her arched neck, her marble collarbone, the black abyss of her hair.

Now, he looked back at the sketch, not ashamed at being caught drawing her, but
worse. A cold chill spread through him as he realized that her discovery—the
exposure of his feelings—would destroy her. He should have been more careful.
It always began like this.

“Warm milk with a spoonful of treacle,” he murmured, his back still to her.
Then he added sadly, “It helps you sleep.”

“How did you know? Why, that’s exactly what my mother used to—”
“I know,” he said, turning to face her. The astonishment
in her voice did not surprise him, yet he could not explain to her how he knew,
or tell her how many times he had administered this very drink to her in the
past when the shadows came, how he had held her until she fell asleep.

He felt her touch as though it were burning through his shirt, her hand laid
gently on his shoulder, causing him to gasp. They had not yet touched in this
life, and the first contact always left him breathless.

“Answer me,” she whispered. “Are you leaving?”

“Yes.”

“Then take me with you,” she blurted out. Right on cue, he watched her suck in
her breath, wishing to take back her plea. He could see the progression of her
emotions settle in the crease between her eyes: She would feel impetuous, then
bewildered, then ashamed by her own forwardness. She always did this, and too
many times before, he had made the mistake of comforting her at this exact
moment.

“No,” he whispered, remembering … always remembering… “I sail tomorrow. If you care
for me at all, you won’t say another word.”
“If I care for you,” she repeated, almost as if she were
speaking to herself. “I—I love—”
“Don’t.”

“I have to
say it. I—I love you, I’m quite sure, and if you leave—”

“If I leave, I save your life.” He spoke slowly, trying to reach a part
of her that might remember. Was it there at all, buried somewhere? “Some things
are more important than love. You won’t understand, but you have to trust me.”


Her eyes drilled into him. She stepped back and crossed her arms over her
chest. This was his fault, too—he always brought out her contemptuous side when
he spoke down to her.

“You mean to say there are things more important than this?” she challenged,
taking his hands and drawing them to her heart.

Oh, to be her and not know what was coming! Or at least to be stronger than he
was and be able to stop her. If he didn’t stop her, she would never learn, and
the past would only repeat itself, torturing them both again and again.

The familiar warmth of her skin under his hands made him tilt his head back and
moan. He was trying to ignore how close she was, how well he knew the feel of
her lips on his, how bitter he felt that all of this had to end. But her
fingers traced his so lightly. He could feel her heart racing through her thin
cotton gown.

She was right. There was nothing more than this. There never was. He was about
to give in and take her in his arms when he caught the look in her eyes. As if
she’d seen a ghost.

She was the one to pull away, a hand to her forehead.
“I’m having the strangest sensation,” she whispered.

No—was it already too late?

Her eyes narrowed into the shape in his sketch and she came back to him, her
hands on his chest, her lips parted expectantly. “Tell me I’m mad, but I swear
I’ve been right here before…”

So it was too late. He looked up, shivering, and could feel the dark
descending. He took one last chance to seize her, to hold her as tightly as
he’d been yearning to for weeks.

As soon as her lips melted into his, both of them were powerless. The
honeysuckle taste of her mouth made him dizzy. The closer she pressed against
him, the more his stomach churned with the thrill and the agony of it all. Her
tongue traced his, and the fire between them burned brighter, hotter, more
powerful with every new touch, every new exploration. Yet none of it was new.

The room quaked. An aura around them started to glow.

She noticed nothing, was aware of nothing, understood nothing besides their
kiss.

He alone knew what was about to happen, what dark companions were prepared to
fall on their reunion. Even though he was unable to alter the course of their
lives yet again, he knew.

The shadows swirled directly overhead, so close, he might have touched them. So
close, he wondered whether she could hear what they were whispering. He watched
as the cloud passed over her face. For a moment he saw a spark of recognition
growing in her eyes.

Then there was nothing, nothing at all.

ONE

PERFECT STRANGERS
Luce barged into the fluorescent-lit lobby of the
Sword Cross School ten minutes later than she should have. A
barrel-chested attendant with ruddy cheeks and a clipboard clamped under an
iron bicep was already giving orders—which meant Luce was already behind.

“So remember, it’s meds, beds, and reds,” the
attendant barked at a cluster of three other students all standing with their
backs to Luce. “Remember the basics and no one gets hurt.”

Luce hurried to slip in behind the group. She was still trying to figure out
whether she’d filled out the giant stack of paperwork correctly, whether this
shaven-headed guide standing before them was a man or a woman, whether there
was anyone to help her with this enormous duffel bag, whether her parents were
going to get rid of her beloved Plymouth Fury the minute they arrived home from
dropping her off here. They’d been threatening to sell the car all summer, and
now they had a reason even Luce couldn’t argue with: No one was allowed to have
a car at Luce’s new school. Her new reform
school, to be precise.

She was still getting used to the term.

“Could you, uh, could you repeat that?” she asked the attendant, “What was it,
meds—?”

“Well, look what the storm blew in,” the attendant said loudly, then continued,
enunciating slowly: “Meds. If you’re one of the medicated students, this is where
you go to keep yourself doped up, sane, breathing, whatever.” Woman, Luce decided, studying the attendant. No man would be
catty enough to say all that in such a saccharine tone of voice.
“Got it.” Luce felt her stomach heave. “Meds.”

She’d been off meds for years now. After the accident
this past summer, Dr. Sanford, her specialist in Hopkinton—and the reason her
parents had sent her to boarding school all the way in New Hampshire—had wanted
to consider medicating her again. Though she’d finally convinced him of her
quasi-stability, it had taken an extra month of analysis on her part just to
stay off those awful antipsychotics.

Which was why she was enrolling in her senior year at Sword Cross a full
month after the academic year had begun. Being a new student was bad enough,
and Luce had been really nervous about having to jump into classes where
everyone else was already settled. But from the looks of this tour, she wasn’t
the only new kid arriving today.

She sneaked a peek at the three other students standing in a half circle around
her. At her last school, Dover Prep, the campus tour on the first day was where
she’d met her best friend, Callie. On a campus where all the other students had
practically been weaned together, it would have been enough that Luce and
Callie were the only non-legacy kids. But it didn’t take long for the two girls
to realize they also had the exact same obsession with the exact same old
movies—especially where Albert Finney was concerned. After their discovery
freshman year while watching Two for the Road that neither one of them could make a bag of popcorn
without setting off the fire alarm, Callie and Luce hadn’t left each other’s
sides. Until … until they’d had to.

At Luce’s sides today were two boys and a girl. The girl seemed easy enough to
figure out, blond and Neutrogena-commercial pretty, with pastel pink manicured
nails that matched her plastic binder.
“I’m Gabbe,” she drawled, flashing Luce a big smile that
disappeared as quickly as it had surfaced, before Luce could even offer her own
name. The girl’s waning interest reminded her more of a southern version of the
girls at Dover than someone she’d expect at Sword Cross. Luce couldn’t
decide whether this was comforting or not, any more than she could imagine what
a girl who looked like this would be doing at reform school.

To Luce’s right was a guy with short brown hair, brown eyes, and a smattering
of freckles across his nose. But the way he wouldn’t even meet her eyes, just
kept picking at a hangnail on his thumb, gave Luce the impression that, like
her, he was probably still stunned and embarrassed to find himself here.

The guy to her left, on the other hand, fit Luce’s image of this place a little
bit too perfectly. He was tall and thin, with a Di bag slung over his shoulder,
shaggy black hair, and large, deep-set green eyes. His lips were full and a
natural rose color most girls would kill for. At the back of his neck, a black
tattoo in the shape of a sunburst seemed almost to glow on his light skin,
rising up from the edge of his black T-shirt.

Unlike the other two, when this guy turned to meet her gaze, he held it and
didn’t let go. His mouth was set in a straight line, but his eyes were warm and
alive. He gazed at her, standing as still as a sculpture, which made Luce feel
rooted to her spot, too. She sucked in her breath. Those eyes were intense, and
alluring, and, well, a little bit disarming.

With some loud throat-clearing noises, the attendant interrupted the boy’s
trancelike stare. Luce blushed and pretended to be very busy scratching her
head.

“Those of you who’ve learned the ropes are free to go after you dump your
hazards.” The attendant gestured at a large cardboard box under a sign that
said in big black letters PROHIBITED MATERIALS, “And when I say free, Todd”—she clamped a hand down on the freckled kid’s
shoulder, making him jump—”I mean gymnasium-bound to meet your preassigned
student guides. You”—she pointed at Luce—”dump your hazards and stay with me.”

The four of them shuffled toward the box and Luce watched, baffled, as the
other students began to empty their pockets. The girl pulled out a three-inch
pink Swiss Army knife. The green-eyed guy reluctantly dumped a can of spray
paint and a box cutter. Even the hapless Todd let loose several books of
matches and a small container of lighter fluid. Luce felt almost stupid that
she wasn’t concealing a hazard of her own—but when she saw the other kids reach
into their pockets and chuck their cell phones into the box, she gulped.

Leaning forward to read the PROHIBITED MATERIALS sign a little more closely,
she saw that cell phones, pagers, and all two-way radio devices were strictly
forbidden. It was bad enough that she couldn’t have her car! Luce clamped a
sweaty hand around the cell phone in her pocket, her only connection to the
outside world. When the attendant saw the look on her face, Luce received a few
quick slaps on the cheek. “Don’t swoon on me, kid, they don’t pay me enough to
resuscitate. Besides, you get one phone call once a week in the main lobby.”

One phone call … once a week? But—

She looked down at her phone one last time and saw that she’d received two new
text messages. It didn’t seem possible that these would be her two last text messages. The

first one was from Callie.
Call immediately! Will be waiting by the phone all nite so be ready to dish.
And remember the mantra I assigned you. You’ll survive! BYW, for what it’s
worth, I think everyone’s totally forgotten about …
In typical Callie fashion, she’d gone on so long that Luce’s crap cell
phone cut the message off four lines in. In a way, Luce was almost relieved.
She didn’t want to read about how everyone from her old school had already
forgotten what had happened to her, what she’d done to land herself in this place.

She sighed and scrolled down to her second message. It was from her mom, who’d
only just gotten the hang of texting a few weeks ago, and who surely had not
known about this one-call-once-a-week thing or she would never have abandoned
her daughter here. Right?
Kiddo, we are always thinking of you. Be good and try
to eat enough protein. We’ll talk when we can. Love, MD
With a
sigh, Luce realized her parents must have known. How else to explain their
drawn faces when she’d waved goodbye at the school gates this morning, duffel
bag in hand? At breakfast, she’d tried to joke about finally losing that
appalling New England accent she’d picked up at Dover, but her parents hadn’t
even cracked a smile. She’d thought they were still mad at her. They never did
the whole raising-their-voice thing, which meant that when Luce really messed
up, they just gave her the old silent treatment. Now she understood this
morning’s strange demeanor: Her parents were already mourning the loss of
contact with their only daughter.

“We’re still waiting on one person,” the attendant sang. “I wonder who it is.”
Luce’s attention snapped back to the Hazard Box, which was now brimming with
contraband she didn’t even recognize. She could feel the dark-haired boy’s
green eyes staring at her. She looked up and noticed that everyone was staring.
Her turn. She closed her eyes and slowly opened her fingers, letting her phone
slip from her grasp and land with a sad thunk on top of the heap. The sound of being all alone.

Todd and the fembot Gabbe headed for the door without so much as a look in
Luce’s direction, but the third boy turned to the attendant.
“I can fill her in,” he said, nodding at Luce.

“Not part of our deal,” the attendant replied automatically, as if she’d been
expecting this dialogue. “You’re a new student again—that means new-student
restrictions. Back to square one. You don’t like it, you should have thought
twice before breaking parole.”

The boy stood motionless, expressionless, as the attendant tugged Luce—who’d
stiffened at the word “parole”—toward the end of a yellowed hall.

“Moving on,” she said, as if nothing had just happened. “Beds.” She pointed out
the west-facing window to a distant cinder-block building. Luce could see Gabbe
and Todd shuffling slowly toward them, with the third boy walking slowly, as if
catching up to them were the last thing on his list of things to do.

The dorm was formidable and square, a solid gray block of a building whose
thick double doors gave away nothing about the possibility of life inside them.
A large stone plaque stood planted in the middle of the dead lawn, and Luce
remembered from the Web site the words PAULINE DORMITORY chiseled into it. It
looked even uglier in the hazy morning sun than it had looked in the flat
black-and-white photograph.

Even from this distance, Luce could see black mold covering the face of the
dorm. All the windows were obstructed by rows of thick steel bars. She
squinted. Was that barbed wire topping the fence around the building?

The attendant looked down at a chart, flipping through Luce’s file. “Room
sixty-three. Throw your bag in my office with the rest of them for now. You can
unpack this afternoon.”

Luce dragged her red duffel bag toward three other nondescript black trunks.
Then she reached reflexively for her cell phone, where she usually keyed in
things she needed to remember. But as her hand searched her empty pocket, she
sighed and committed the room number to memory instead.

She still didn’t see why she couldn’t just stay with her parents; their house
in Thunderbolt was less than a half hour from Sword Cross. It had felt so
good to be back home in Savannah, where, as her mom always said, even the wind
blew lazily. Georgia’s softer, slower pace suited Luce way more than New
England ever had.

But Sword Cross didn’t feel like Savannah. It hardly felt like anywhere
at all, except the lifeless, colorless place where the court had mandated she
board. She’d overheard her dad on the phone with the headmaster the other day,
nodding in his befuddled biology-professor way and saying, “Yes, yes, maybe it
would be best for her to be supervised all the time. No, no, we wouldn’t want
to interfere with your system.”

Clearly her father had not seen the conditions of his only daughter’s
supervision. This place looked like a maximum-security prison.

“And what about, what did you say—the reds?” Luce asked the attendant, ready to
be released from the tour.

“Reds,” the attendant said, pointing toward a small wired device hanging from
the ceiling: a lens with a flashing red light. Luce hadn’t seen it before, but
as soon as the attendant pointed the first one out, she realized they were
everywhere.

“Cameras?”

“Very good,” the attendant said, voice dripping condescension. “We make them
obvious in order to remind you. All the time, everywhere, we’re watching you.
So don’t screw up—that is, if you can help yourself.”

Every time someone talked to Luce like she was a total psychopath, she came
that much closer to believing it was true.

All summer, the memories had haunted her, in her dreams and in the rare moments
her parents left her alone. Something had happened in that cabin, and
everyone (including Luce) was dying to know exactly what. The police, the
judge, the social worker had all tried to pry the truth out of her, but she was
as clueless about it all as they were. She and Trevor had been joking around
the whole evening, chasing each other down to the row of cabins on the lake,
away from the rest of the party. She’d tried to explain that it had been one of
the best nights of her life, until it turned into the worst.

She’d spent so much time replaying that night in her head, hearing Trevor’s
laugh, feeling his hands close around her waist, and trying to reconcile her
gut instinct that she really was innocent.

But now, every rule and regulation at Sword Cross seemed to work against
that notion, seemed to suggest that she was, in fact dangerous and needed to be
controlled.

Luce felt a firm hand on her shoulder.

“Look,” the attendant said. “If it makes you feel any better, you’re far from
the worst case here.”

It was the first humane gesture the attendant had made toward Luce, and she
believed that it was intended to make her feel better. But. She’d been
sent here because of the suspicious death of the guy she’d been crazy about,
and still she was “far from the worst case here”? Luce wondered what
else exactly they were dealing with at Sword Cross.

“Okay, orientation’s over,” the attendant said. “You’re on your own now. Here’s
a map if you need to find anything else.” She gave Luce a photocopy of a crude
hand-drawn map, then glanced at her watch. “You’ve got an hour before your
first class, but my soaps come on in five, so”—she waved her hand at Luce—”make
yourself scarce. And don’t forget,” she said, pointing up at the cameras one
last time. “The reds are watching you.”

Before Luce could reply, a skinny, dark-haired girl appeared in front of her,
wagging her long fingers in Luce’s face.

“Ooooooh,” the girl taunted in a ghost-story-telling voice, dancing around Luce
in a circle. “The reds are watching youuuu.”

“Get out of here, Arriane, before I have you lobotomized,” the attendant said,
though it was clear from her first brief but genuine smile that she had some
coarse affection for the crazy girl.

It was also clear that Arriane did not reciprocate the
love. She mimed a jerking-off motion at the attendant, then stared at Luce,
daring her to be offended.

“And just for that,” the attendant said, jotting a furious note in her book,
“you’ve earned yourself the task of showing Little Miss Sunshine around today.”


She pointed at Luce, who looked anything but sunny in her black jeans, black
boots, and black top. Under the “Dress Code” section, the Sword Cross Web
site had cheerily maintained that as long as the students were on good
behavior, they were free to dress as they pleased, with just two small
stipulations: style must be modest and color must be black. Some freedom.

The too-big mock turtleneck Luce’s mom had forced on her this morning did
nothing for her curves, and even her best feature was gone: Her thick black hair,
which used to hang down to her waist, had been almost completely shorn off. The
cabin fire had left her scalp singed and her hairline patchy, so after the
long, silent ride home from Dover, Mom had planted Luce in the bathtub, brought
out Dad’s electric razor, and wordlessly shaved her head. Over the summer, her
hair had grown out a little, just enough so that her once- enviable waves now
hovered in awkward twists just below her ears.

Arriane sized her up, tapping one finger against her pale lips. “Perfect,” she
said, stepping forward to loop her arm through Luce’s. “I was just thinking I
could really use a new slave.”

The door to the lobby swung open and in walked the tall kid with green eyes. He
shook his head and said to Luce, “This place isn’t afraid to do a strip search.
So if you’re packing any other hazards”—he
raised an
eyebrow and dumped a handful of unrecognizables in the box—”save yourself the
trouble.”

Behind Luce, Arriane laughed under her breath. The boy’s head shot up, and when
his eyes registered Arriane, he opened his mouth, then closed it, like he was
unsure how to proceed.

“Arriane,” he said evenly.

“Cam,” she returned.

“You know him?” Luce whispered, wondering whether there were the same kinds of
cliques in reform schools as there were in prep schools like Dover.

“Don’t remind me,” Arriane said, dragging Luce out the door into the gray and
swampy morning.

The back of the main building let out onto a chipped sidewalk bordering a messy
field. The grass was so overgrown, it looked more like a vacant lot than a
school commons, but a faded scoreboard and a small stack of wooden bleachers
argued otherwise.

Beyond the commons lay four severe-looking buildings: the cinder-block
dormitory on the far left, a huge old ugly church on the far right, and two
other expansive structures in between that Luce imagined were the classrooms.

This was it. Her whole world was reduced to the sorry sight before her eyes.

Arriane immediately veered right off the path and led Luce to the field,
sitting her down on top of one of the waterlogged wooden bleachers.

The corresponding setup at Dover had screamed Ivy League jock-in-training, so
Luce had always avoided hanging out there. But this empty field, with its
rusted, warped goals, told a very different story. One that wasn’t as easy for
Luce to figure out. Three turkey vultures swooped overhead, and a dismal wind
whipped through the bare branches of the oak trees. Luce ducked her chin down
into her mock turtleneck.
“Soooo,” Arriane said. “Now you’ve met Randy.”

“I thought his name was Cam.”

“We’re not talking about him,” Arriane said quickly. “I mean she-man in there.”
Arriane jerked her head toward the office where they’d left the attendant in
front of the TV. “Whaddya think—dude or chick?”

“Uh, chick?” Luce said tentatively. “Is this a test?”

Arriane cracked a smile. “The first of many. And you passed. At least, I think
you passed. The gender of most of the faculty here is an ongoing, schoolwide
debate. Don’t worry, you’ll get into it.”

Luce thought Arriane was making a joke—in which case, cool. But this was all
such a huge change from Dover. At her old school, the green-tie-wearing,
pomaded future senators had practically oozed through the halls in the genteel
hush that money seemed to lay over everything.

More often than not, the other Dover kids gave Luce a
don’t-smudge-the-white-walls-with-your-fingerprints side ways glance. She tried
to imagine Arriane there: lazing on the bleachers, making a loud, crude joke in
her peppery voice. Luce tried to imagine what Callie might think of Arriane.
There’d been no one like her at Dover.

“Okay, spill it,” Arriane ordered. Plopping down on the top bleacher and
motioning for Luce to join her, she said, “What’d ya do to get in here?”

Arriane’s tone was playful, but suddenly Luce had to sit down. It was
ridiculous, but she’d half expected to get through her first day of school
without the past creeping up and robbing her of her thin façade of calm. Of
course people here were going to want to know.

She could feel the blood thrumming at her temples. It happened whenever she
tried to think back—really think back—to that night. She’d never stop feeling
guilty about what had happened to Trevor, but she also tried really hard not to
get mired down in the shadows, which by now were the only things she could
remember about the accident. Those dark, indefinable things that she could
never tell anyone about.

Scratch that—she’d started to tell Trevor about the peculiar presence she’d felt
that night, about the twisting shapes hanging over their heads, threatening to
mar their perfect evening. Of course, by then it was already too late. Trevor
was gone, his body burned beyond recognition, and Luce was … was she … guilty?

No one knew about the murky shapes she sometimes saw in the darkness. They’d
always come to her. They’d come and gone for so long that Luce couldn’t even
remember the first time she’d seen them. But she could remember the first time
she realized that the shadows didn’t come for everyone—or actually, anyone but her. When she was seven, her family had been on vacation
in Hilton Head and her parents had taken her on a boat trip. It was just about
sunset when the shadows started rolling in over the water, and she’d turned to
her father and said, “What do you do when they come, Dad? Why aren’t you afraid
of the monsters?”

There were no monsters, her parents assured her, but Luce’s repeated insistence
on the presence of something wobbly and dark had gotten her several appointments
with the family eye doctor, and then glasses, and then appointments with the
ear doctor after she made the mistake of describing the hoarse whooshing noise
that the shadows sometimes made—and then therapy, and then more therapy, and
finally the prescription for anti-psychotic medication.

But nothing ever made them go away.

By the time she was fourteen, Luce refused to take her meds. That was when they
found Dr. Sanford, and the Dover School nearby. They flew to New Hampshire, and
her father drove their rental car up a long, curved driveway to a hilltop
mansion called Shady Hollows. They planted Luce in front of a man in a lab coat
and asked her if she still saw her “visions.” Her parents’ palms were sweating
as they gripped her hands, brows furrowed with the fear that there was
something terribly wrong with their daughter.

No one came out and said that if she didn’t tell Dr. Sanford what they all
wanted her to say, she might be seeing a whole lot more of Shady Hollows. When
she lied and acted normal, she was allowed to enroll at Dover, and only had to
visit Dr. Sanford twice a month.

Luce had been permitted to stop taking the horrible pills as soon as she
started pretending she didn’t see the shadows anymore. But she still had no
control over when they might appear. All she knew was that the mental catalog
of places where they’d come for her in the past—dense forests, murky
waters—became the places she avoided at all costs. All she knew was that when
the shadows came, they were usually accompanied by a cold chill under her skin,
a sickening feeling unlike anything else.

Luce straddled one of the bleachers and gripped her temples between her thumbs
and middle fingers. If she was going to make it through today, she had to push
her past to the recesses of her mind. She couldn’t stand probing the memory of
that night by herself, so there was no way she could air all the gruesome
details to some weird, maniacal stranger.

Instead of answering, she watched Arriane, who was lying back on the bleachers,
sporting a pair of enormous black sunglasses that covered the better part of
her face. It was hard to tell, but she must have been staring at Luce, too,
because after a second, she shot up from the bleachers and grinned.

“Cut my hair like yours,” she said.

“What?” Luce gasped. “Your hair is beautiful.”

It was true: Arriane had the long, thick locks that Luce so desperately missed.
Her loose black curls sparkled in the sunlight, giving off just a tinge of red.
Luce tucked her hair behind her ears, even though it still wasn’t long enough
to do anything but flop back down in front of them.

“Beautiful schmootiful,” Arriane said. “Yours is sexy, edgy. And I want it.”

“Oh, um, okay,” Luce said. Was that a compliment? She didn’t know if she was
supposed to be flattered or unnerved by the way Arriane assumed she could have
whatever she wanted, even if what she wanted belonged to someone else. “Where
are we going to get—”

“Ta-da!” Arriane reached into her bag and pulled out the pink Swiss Army knife
Gabbe had tossed into the Hazard Box. “What?” she said, seeing Luce’s reaction.
“I always bring my sticky fingers on new-student drop-off days. The idea alone
gets me through the dog days of Sword Cross internment … er … summer camp.”

“You spent the whole summer … here?” Luce winced.

“Ha! Spoken like a true newbie. You’re probably expecting a spring break.” She
tossed Luce the Swiss Army knife. “We don’t get to leave this hellhole. Ever.
Now cut.”

“What about the reds?” Luce asked, glancing around with the knife in her hand.
There were bound to be cameras somewhere out here.

Arriane shook her head. “I refuse to associate with pansies. Can you handle it
or not?”

Luce nodded.

“And don’t tell me you’ve never cut hair before.” Arriane grabbed
the Swiss Army knife back from Luce, pulled out the scissor tool, and handed it
back. “Not another word until you tell me how fantastic I look.”

In the “salon” of her parents’ bathtub, Luce’s mother had tugged the remains of
her long hair into a messy pony-tail before lopping the whole thing off. Luce
was sure there had to be a more strategic method of cutting hair, but as a
lifelong haircut avoider, the chopped-off pony was about all she knew. She
gathered Arriane’s hair in her hands, wrapped an elastic band from her wrist
around it, held the small scissors firmly, and began to hack.

The ponytail fell to her feet and Arriane gasped and whipped around. She picked
it up and held it to the sun. Luce’s heart constricted at the sight. She still
agonized over her own lost hair, and all the other losses it symbolized. But
Arriane just let a thin smile spread across her lips. She ran her fingers
through the ponytail once, then dropped it into her bag.

“Awesome,” she said. “Keep going.”

“Arriane,” Luce whispered before she could stop herself. “Your neck. It’s all—”


“Scarred?” Arriane finished. “You can say it.”

The skin on Arriane’s neck, from the back of her left ear all the way down to
her collarbone, was jagged and marbled and shiny. Luce’s mind went to Trevor—to
those awful pictures. Even her own parents wouldn’t look at her after they saw
them. She was having a hard time looking at Arriane now.

Arriane grabbed Luce’s hand and pressed it to the skin. It was hot and cold at
the same time. It was smooth and rough.
“I’m not afraid of it,” Arriane said. “Are you?”

“No,” Luce said, though she wished Arriane would take her hand away so Luce
could take hers away, too. Her stomach churned as she wondered whether this was
how Trevor’s skin would have felt.

“Are you afraid of who you really are, Luce?”

“No,” Luce said again quickly. It must be so obvious that she was lying. She
closed her eyes. All she wanted from Sword Cross was a fresh start, a
place where people didn’t look at her the way Arriane was looking at her right
now. At the school’s gates that morning, when her father had whispered the
Price family motto in her ear—”Prices never crash”—it had felt possible, but
already Luce felt so run down and exposed. She tugged her hand away. “So how’d
it happen?” she asked, looking down.

“Remember how I didn’t press you when you clammed up about what you did to get
here?” Arriane asked, raising her eyebrows.

Luce nodded.

Arriane gestured to the scissors. “Touch it up in the back, okay? Make me look
real pretty. Make me look like you.”

Even with the same exact cut, Arriane would still only look like a very
undernourished version of Luce. While Luce attempted to even out the first
haircut she’d ever given, Arriane delved into the complexities of life at Sword
Cross.

“That cell block over there is Augustine. It’s where we have our so-called
Social events on Wednesday nights. And all of our classes,” she said, pointing
at a building the color of yellowed teeth, two buildings to the right of the
dorm. It looked like it had been designed by the same sadist who’d done
Pauline. It was dismally square, dismally fortresslike, fortified by the same
barbed wire and barred windows. An unnatural-looking gray mist cloaked the
walls like moss, making it impossible to see whether anyone was over there.

“Fair warning,” Arriane continued. “You’re going to hate the classes here. You
wouldn’t be human if you didn’t.”

“Why? What’s so bad about them?” Luce asked. Maybe Arriane just didn’t like
school in general. With her black nail polish, black eyeliner, and the black
bag that only seemed big enough to hold her new Swiss Army knife, she didn’t
exactly look bookish.

“The classes here are soulless,” Arriane said. “Worse, they’ll strip you of
your soul. Of the eighty kids in this place, I’d say we’ve only got about three
remaining souls.” She glanced up. “Unspoken for, anyway …“
That
didn’t sound promising, but Luce was hung up on another part of Arriane’s
answer. “Wait, there are only eighty kids in this whole school?” The summer
before she went to Dover, Luce had pored over the thick Prospective Students
handbook, memorizing all the statistics. But everything she’d learned so far
about Sword Cross had surprised her, making her realize that she was
coming into reform school completely unprepared.

Arriane nodded, making Luce accidentally snip off a chunk of hair she’d meant
to leave. Whoops. Hopefully Arriane wouldn’t notice—or maybe she’d just think
it was edgy.

“Eight classes, ten kids a pop. You get to know everybody’s crap pret-ty
quickly,” Arriane said. “And vice versa.”
“I guess so,” Luce agreed, biting her lip. Arriane was
joking, but Luce wondered whether she’d be sitting here with that cool smirk in
her pastel blue eyes if she knew the exact nature of Luce’s backstory. The
longer Luce could keep her past under wraps, the better off she’d be.

“And you’ll want to steer clear of the hard cases.”

“Hard cases?”

“The kids with the wristband tracking devices,” Arriane said. “About a third of
the student body.”

“And they’re the ones who—”

“You don’t want to mess with. Trust me.”

“Well, what’d they do?” Luce asked.

As much as Luce wanted to keep her own story a secret, she didn’t like the way
Arriane was treating her like some sort of ingénue. Whatever those kids had
done couldn’t be much worse than what everyone told her she had done. Or could
it? After all, she knew next to nothing about these people and this place. The
possibilities stirred up a cold gray fear in the pit of her stomach.

“Oh, you know,” Arriane drawled. “Aided and abetted terrorist acts. Chopped up
their parents and roasted them on a spit.” She turned around to wink at Luce.

“Shut up,” Luce said.

“I’m serious. Those psychos are under much tighter restrictions than the rest
of the screwups here. We call them the shackled.”
Luce
laughed at Arriane’s dramatic tone.

“Your haircut’s done,” she said, running her hands
through Arriane’s hair to fluff it up a little. It actually looked really cool.


“Sweet,” Arriane said. She turned to face Luce. When she ran her fingers
through her hair, the sleeves of her black sweater fell back on her forearms
and Luce caught a glimpse of a black wristband, dotted with rows of silver
studs, and, on the other wrist, another band that looked more … mechanical. Arriane caught her looking and raised her
eyebrows devilishly.

“Told ya,” she said. “Total effing psychos.” She grinned. “Come on, I’ll give
you the rest of the tour.”

Luce didn’t have much choice. She scrambled down the bleachers after Arriane,
ducking when one of the turkey vultures swooped dangerously low. Arriane, who
didn’t seem to notice, pointed at a lichen-swathed church at the far right of
the commons.

“Over here, you’ll find our state-of-the-art gymnasium,” she said, assuming a
nasal tour guide tone of voice. “Yes, yes, to the untrained eye it looks like a
church. It used to be. We’re kind of in an architectural hand-me-down Hell here
at Sword Cross. A few years ago, some calisthenic-crazed shrink showed up
ranting about overmedicated teens ruining society. He donated a shit- ton of
money so they’d convert it into a gym. Now the powers that be think we can work
out our ‘frustrations’ in a ‘more natural and productive way.’”

Luce groaned. She had always loathed gym class.

“Girl after my very own heart,” Arriane commiserated, “Coach Diante is ee-vil.”


As Luce jogged to keep up, she took in the rest of the grounds. The Dover quad
had been so well kept, all manicured and dotted with evenly spaced, carefully
pruned trees. Sword Cross looked like it had been plopped down and
abandoned in the middle of a swamp. Weeping willows dangled to the ground,
kudzu grew along the walls in sheets, and every third step they took squished.

And it wasn’t just the way the place looked. Every humid breath Luce took stuck
in her lungs. Just breathing at Sword Cross made her feel like she was
sinking into quicksand.

“Apparently the architects got in a huge standoff over how to retrofit the
style of the old military academy buildings. The upshot is we ended up with
half penitentiary, half medieval torture zone. And no gardener,” Arriane said,
kicking some slime off her combat boots. “Gross. Oh, and there’s the cemetery.”


Luce followed Arriane’s pointing finger to the far left side of the quad, just
past the dormitory. An even thicker cloak of mist hung over the walled-off
portion of land. It was bordered on three sides by a thick forest of oaks. She
couldn’t see into the cemetery, which seemed almost to sink below the surface
of the ground, but she could smell the rot and hear the chorus of cicadas
buzzing in the trees. For a second, she thought she saw the dark swish of the
shadows—but she blinked and they were gone.

“That’s a cemetery?”

“Yep. This
used to be a military academy, way back in the Civil War days. So that’s where
they buried all their dead. It’s creepy as all get-out. And lawd,” Arriane said, piling on a fake southern accent, “it
stinks to high
Heaven.” Then
she winked at Luce. “We hang out there a lot.”

Luce looked at Arriane to see if she was kidding. Arriane just shrugged.

“Okay, it was only once. And it was only after a really big pharmapalooza.”

Now, that was a word Luce recognized.

“Aha!” Arriane laughed. “I just saw a light go on up there. So somebody is home. Well, Luce, my dear, you may have gone to
boarding school parties, but you’ve never seen a throw-down like reform school
kids do it.”

“What’s the difference?” Luce asked, trying to skirt the fact that she’d never
actually been to a big party at Dover.

“You’ll see.” Arriane paused and turned to Luce. “You’ll come over tonight and
hang out, okay?” She surprised Luce by taking her hand. “Promise?”

“But I thought you said I should stay away from the hard cases,” Luce joked.

“Rule number two—don’t listen to me!” Arriane laughed, shaking her head. “I’m
certifiably insane!”

She started jogging again and Luce trailed after her.

“Wait, what was rule number one?”

“Keep up!”

As they
came around the corner of the cinder-block classrooms, Arriane skidded to a
halt. “Affect cool,” she said.

“Cool,” Luce repeated.

All the other students seemed to be clustered around the kudzu-strangled trees
outside Augustine. No one looked exactly happy to be hanging out, but no one
looked ready to go inside yet, either.

There hadn’t been much of a dress code at Dover, so Luce wasn’t used to the
uniformity it gave a student body. Then again, even though every kid here was
wearing the same black jeans, black mock-turtleneck T-shirt, and black sweater
tied over the shoulders or around the waist, there were still substantial
differences in the way they pulled it off.

A group of tattooed girls standing in a crossed-armed circle wore bangle
bracelets up to their elbows. The black bandanas in their hair reminded Luce of
a film she’d once seen about motorcycle-gang girls. She’d rented it because
she’d thought: What could
be cooler than an all-girls motorcycle gang? Now Luce’s eyes locked with those of one of the girls
across the lawn. The sideways squint of the girl’s darkly lined cat-eyes made
Luce quickly shift the direction of her gaze.

A guy and a girl who were holding hands had sewn sequins in the shape of skulls
and crossbones on the back of their black sweaters. Every few seconds, one of
them would pull the other in for a kiss on the temple, on the earlobe, on the
eye. When they looped their arms around each other, Luce could see that each
wore the blinking wristband tracking device. They looked a little rough, but it
was obvious how much in love they were. Every time she saw their tongue rings
flashing, Luce felt a lonely pinch inside her chest.

Behind the lovers, a cluster of blond boys stood pressed against the wall. Each
of them wore his sweater, despite the heat. And they all had on white oxford
shirts underneath, the collars starched straight up. Their black pants hit the
vamps of their polished dress shoes perfectly. Of all the students on the quad,
these boys seemed to Luce to be the closest thing to Doverites. But a closer
look quickly set them apart from boys she used to know. Boys like Trevor.

Just standing in a group, these guys radiated a specific kind of toughness. It
was right there in the look in their eyes. It was hard to explain, but it
suddenly struck Luce that just like her, everyone at this school had a past.
Everyone here probably had secrets they wouldn’t want to share. But she
couldn’t figure out whether this realization made her feel more or less
isolated.

Arriane noticed Luce’s eyes running over the rest of the kids.

“We all do what we can to make it through the day,” she said, shrugging. “But
in case you hadn’t observed the low-hanging vultures, this place pretty much
reeks of death.” She took a seat on a bench under a weeping willow and patted
the spot next to her for Luce.

Luce wiped away a mound of wet, decaying leaves, but just before she sat down,
she noticed another dress code violation.

A very attractive dress code violation.

He wore a bright red scarf around his neck. It was far from cold outside, but
he had on a black leather motorcycle jacket over his black sweater, too. Maybe
it was because his was the only spot of color on the quad, but he was all that
Luce could look at. In fact, everything else so paled in comparison that, for
one long moment, Luce forgot where she was.

She took in his deep golden hair and matching tan. His high cheekbones, the dark
sunglasses that covered his eyes, the soft shape of his lips. In all the movies
Luce had seen, and in all the books she’d read, the love interest was
mind-blowingly good-looking—except for that one little flaw. The chipped tooth,
the charming cowlick, the beauty mark on his left cheek. She knew why—if the
hero was too unblemished, he’d risk being unapproachable. But
approachable or not, Luce had always had a weakness for the sublimely gorgeous.
Like this guy.

He leaned up against the building with his arms crossed lightly over his chest.
And for a split second, Luce saw a flashing image of herself folded into those
arms. She shook her head, but the vision stayed so clear that she almost took
off toward him.

No. That was crazy. Right? Even at a school full of crazies, Luce was well
aware that this instinct was insane. She didn’t even know him.

He was talking to a shorter kid with dreads and a toothy smile. Both of them
were laughing hard and genuinely—in a way that made Luce strangely jealous. She
tried to think back and remember how long it had been since she’d laughed,
really laughed, like that.

“That’s Daniel Grigori,” Arriane said, leaning in and reading her mind. “I can
tell he’s attracted somebody’s attention.”

“Understatement,” Luce agreed, embarrassed when she realized how she must have
looked to Arriane.

“Yeah, well, if you like that sort of thing.”

“What’s not to like?” Luce said, unable to stop the words from tumbling out.

“His friend there is Roland,” Arriane said, nodding in the dreadlocked kid’s
direction. “He’s cool. The kind of guy who can get his hands on things, ya
know?” Not really, Luce thought, biting her lip. “What kinds of things?”


Arriane shrugged, using her poached Swiss Army knife to saw off a fraying
strand from a rip in her black jeans. “Just things. Ask-and-you-shall-receive
kind of stuff.” “What about Daniel?” Luce asked. “What’s his story?”

“Oh, she doesn’t give up.” Arriane laughed, then cleared her throat. “No one
really knows,” she said. “He holds pretty tight to his mystery man persona.
Could just be your typical reform school asshole.”
“I’m no stranger to assholes,” Luce said, though as soon as
the words came out, she wished she could take them back. After what had
happened to Trevor—whatever had happened—she was the last person who
should be making character judgments. But more than that, the rare time she
made even the smallest reference to that night, the shifting black canopy of
the shadows came back to her, almost like she was right back at the lake.

She glanced again at Daniel. He took his glasses off and slid them inside his
jacket, then turned to look at her.

His gaze caught hers, and Luce watched as his eyes widened and then quickly
narrowed in what looked like surprise. But no—it was more than that. When Daniel’s
eyes held hers, her breath caught in her throat. She recognized him from
somewhere.

But she would have remembered meeting someone like him. She would have
remembered feeling as absolutely shaken up as she did right now.

She realized they were still locking eyes when Daniel flashed her a smile. A jet
of warmth shot through her and she had to grip the bench for support. She felt
her lips pull up in a smile back at him, but then he raised his hand in the
air.

And flipped her off.

Luce gasped and dropped her eyes.

“What?” Arriane asked, oblivious to what had just gone down. “Never mind,” she
said. “We don’t have time. I sense the bell.”

The bell rang as if on cue, and the whole student body started the slow shuffle
into the building. Arriane was tugging on Luce’s hand and spouting off
directions about where to meet her next and when. But Luce was still reeling
from being flipped the bird by such a perfect stranger. Her momentary delirium
over Daniel had vanished, and now the only thing she wanted to know was: What was that guy’s problem?

Just before she ducked into her first class, she dared to glance back. His face
was blank, but there was no mistaking it—he was watching her go.

TWO
FIT TO BE TIED
Luce had a
piece of paper with her schedule printed on it, a half-empty notebook she’d
started to fill at Dover in her Advanced European History class last year, two
number two pencils, her favorite eraser, and the sudden bad feeling that
Arriane might have been right about the classes at Sword Cross.

The teacher had yet to materialize, the flimsy desks were arranged in haphazard
rows, and the supply closet was barricaded with stacks of dusty boxes piled in front
of it.

What was worse, none of the other kids seemed to notice the disarray. In fact,
none of the other kids seemed to notice that they were in a classroom at all.
They all stood clustered near the windows, taking one last drag of a cigarette
here, repositioning the extra-large safety pins on their T-shirts there. Only
Todd was seated at an actual desk, carving something intricate onto its surface
with his pen. But the other new students seemed to have already found their
places among the crowd. Cam had the preppy Dover-looking guys in a tight cluster
around him. They must have been friends when he was enrolled at Sword
Cross the first time. Gabbe was shaking hands with the tongue-pierced girl
who’d been making out with the tongue-pierced guy outside. Luce felt stupidly
envious that she wasn’t daring enough to do anything but take a seat closer to
the unthreatening Todd.

Arriane flitted about the others, whispering things Luce couldn’t make out like
some sort of goth princess. When she passed Cam, he tousled her newly chopped
hair.

“Nice mop, Arriane,” He smirked, tugging on a strand at the back of her neck.
“My compliments to your stylist.”

Arriane swatted him away. “Hands off, Cam. Which is to say: In your dreams.”
She jerked her head in Luce’s direction. “And you can give your compliments to
my new pet, right over there.”

Cam’s emerald eyes sparkled at Luce, who stiffened. “I believe I will,” he
said, and started walking toward her.

He smiled at Luce, who was sitting with her ankles crossed under her chair and
her hands folded neatly on her heavily graffitied desk.

“Us new kids have to stick together,” he said. “Know
what I mean?”

“But I thought you’d been here before.”

“Don’t believe everything Arriane says.” He glanced back at Arriane, who was
standing at the window, eyeing them suspiciously.

“Oh no, she didn’t say anything about you,” Luce said quickly, trying to
remember whether or not that was actually true. It was clear Cam and Arriane
didn’t like each other, and even though Luce was grateful to Arriane for taking
her around this morning, she wasn’t ready to pick any sides yet.
“I remember when I was a new kid here … the first time.” He laughed to himself. “My band had
just broken up and I was lost. I didn’t know anyone. I could have used someone
without”—he glanced at Arriane—”an agenda to show me the ropes.”

“What, and you have no agenda?” Luce said, surprised to hear a flirting lilt in
her voice.

An easy smile spread across Cam’s face. He raised one eyebrow at her. “And to
think I didn’t want to come back here.”

Luce blushed. She didn’t usually get involved with rocker guys—but then again,
none of them had ever pulled the desk next to her even closer, plopped down
beside her, and stared at her with eyes quite so green. Cam reached into his
pocket and pulled out a green guitar pick with the number 44 printed on it.

“This is my room number. Come by anytime.”

The guitar pick wasn’t far from the color of Cam’s eyes, and Luce wondered how
and when he’d had these printed up, but before she could answer—and who knew what she would have answered—Arriane clamped a hard hand
down on Cam’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, did I not make myself clear? I’ve already
called dibs on this one.”

Cam snorted. He looked straight at Luce as he said, “See, I thought there was
still such a thing as free will. Maybe your pet has a path of her own in mind.”

Luce opened her mouth to claim that of course she had a path, it was just her
first day here and she was still figuring out the ropes. But by the time she
was able to get the words straight in her head, the minute-warning bell rang,
and the little gathering over Luce’s desk dissolved.

The other kids filed into desks around her, and soon it stopped being so
noteworthy that Luce was sitting prim and proper at her desk, keeping her eye
on the door. Keeping a lookout for Daniel.

Out of the corner of her eye, she could feel Cam sneaking peeks at her. She
felt flattered—and nervous, then frustrated with herself. Daniel? Cam? She’d
been at this school for what, forty-five minutes?—and her mind was already
juggling two different guys. The whole reason she was at this school at all was
because the last time she’d been interested in a guy, things had gone horribly,
horribly wrong. She should not be allowing herself to get all smitten (twice!) on her
very first day of school.

She looked over at Cam, who winked at her again, then brushed his dark hair
away from his eyes. Staggering good looks aside—yeah, right—he really did seem
like a useful person to know. Like her, he was still adjusting to the setting,
but had clearly been around the Sword Cross block a few times before. And
he was nice to her. She thought about the green guitar pick with his room
number, hoping he didn’t give those out freely. They could be … friends. Maybe that was all she needed. Maybe then she
would stop feeling quite so obviously out of place at Sword Cross.

Maybe then she’d be able to forgive the fact that the only window in the
classroom was the size of a business envelope, caked with lime, and looked out
on a massive mausoleum in the cemetery.

Maybe then she’d be able to forget the nose-tickling odor of peroxide emanating
from the bleached-blond punk chick sitting in front of her.

Maybe then she could actually pay attention to the stern, mustached teacher who
marched into the room, commanded the class to shapeupandsitdown, and firmly closed the door.

The smallest tweak of disappointment tugged at her heart. It took her a moment
to trace where it had come from. Until the teacher shut the door, she’d been
holding out a little hope that Daniel would be in her first class, too.

What did she have next hour, French? She looked down at her schedule to check
what room it was in. Just then, a paper airplane skidded across her schedule,
overshot her desk,
and landed on the floor by her bag. She checked to see who’d noticed, but the
teacher was busy tearing through a piece of chalk as he wrote something on the
board.

Luce glanced nervously to her left. When Cam looked over at her, he gave her a
wink and a flirty little wave that caused her whole body to tense up. But he
didn’t seem to have seen or been responsible for the paper airplane.

“Psssst,” came the quiet whisper behind him. It was Arriane, who motioned with
her chin for Luce to pick up the paper plane. Luce bent down to reach for it
and saw her name written in small black letters on the wing. Her first note!
Already looking for the exit?

Not a good sign.

We’re in this hellhole until lunch.
That had to be a joke. Luce double-checked her schedule and realized
with horror that all three of her morning classes were in this very same room
1—and all three would be taught by the very same Mr. Cole.

He’d detached himself from the blackboard and was sleepily threading his way
through the room. There was no introduction for the new kids—and Luce couldn’t
decide whether she was glad about that or not. Mr. Cole merely slapped syllabi
down on each of the four new students’ desks. When the stapled packet landed in
front of Luce, she leaned forward eagerly to take a look. History of the
World, it read. Circumventing the Doom of Mankind. Hmmm, history had
always been her strongest subject, but circumventing doom?

A closer look at the syllabus was all it took for Luce to see that Arriane had
been right about being in a hellhole: an impossible reading load, TEST in big,
bold letters every third class period, and a thirty-page paper
on—seriously?—the failed tyrant of your choice. Thick black parentheses had
been drawn in black Sharpie around the assignments Luce had missed during the
first few weeks. In the margins, Mr. Cole had written See me for Makeup
Research Assignment. If there was a more effective way of soul-sucking,
Luce would be scared to find out.

At least she had Arriane sitting back there in the next row. Luce was glad the
precedent had already been set for SOS note-passing. She and Callie used to
text each other on the sly, but to make it here, Luce was definitely going to
need to learn to fold a paper airplane. She tore a sheet from her notebook and
tried to use Arriane’s as a model.

After a few origami-challenged minutes, another plane landed on her desk. She
glanced back at Arriane, who shook her head and gave her a
you-have-so-much-to-learn roll of the eyes.

Luce shrugged an apology and swiveled back around to open the second note:
Oh, and until you’re confident about your aim, you might not want to fly any
Daniel-related messages my way. Dude behind you is famous on the football field
for his interceptions.
Good to know. She hadn’t even seen Daniel’s friend Roland come in behind
her. Now she turned very slightly in her seat until she glimpsed his dreadlocks
out of the corner of her eye. She dared a glance down at the open notebook on
his desk and caught his full name. Roland Sparks.

“No note-passing,” Mr. Cole said sternly, causing Luce to whip her head back to
attention. “No plagiarizing, and no looking at one another’s papers. I didn’t
put myself through graduate school only to receive your divided attention.”

Luce nodded in unison with the other dazed kids just as a third paper plane glided
to a stop in the middle of her desk.

Only 172 minutes to go!

A hundred
and seventy-three torturous minutes later, Arriane was leading Luce to the
cafeteria. “What’d ya think?” she asked.

“You were right,” Luce said numbly, still recovering from how painfully bleak
her first three hours of class had been. “Why would anyone teach such a
depressing subject?”

“Aw, Cole’ll ease up soon. He puts on his no-guff face every time there’s a new
student. Anyway,” Arriane said, poking Luce, “it could be worse. You could have
gotten stuck with Ms. Tross.”

Luce glanced down at her schedule. “I have her for biology in the afternoon
block,” she said with a sinking feeling in her gut.

As Arriane sputtered out a laugh, Luce felt a bump on her shoulder. It was Cam,
passing them in the hall on his way to lunch. Luce would have gone sprawling if
not for his hand reaching back to steady her.

“Easy there.” He shot her a quick smile, and she wondered if he had bumped her
intentionally. But he didn’t seem that juvenile. Luce glanced at Arriane to see
whether she’d noticed anything. Arriane raised her eyebrows, almost inviting
Luce to speak, but neither one of them said a thing.

When they crossed the dusty interior windows separating bleak hall from bleaker
cafeteria, Arriane took hold of Luce’s elbow.

“Avoid the chicken-fried steak at all costs,” she coached as they followed the
crowd into the din of the lunchroom. “The pizza’s fine, the chili’s okay, and
actually the borscht ain’t bad. Do you like meat loaf?”
“I’m a vegetarian,” Luce said. She was glancing around the
tables, looking for two people in particular. Daniel and Cam. She’d just feel
more at ease if she knew where they were so she could go about having her lunch
pretending that she didn’t see either one of them. But so far, no sightings

“Vegetarian, huh?” Arriane pursed her lips. “Hippie parents or your own meager
attempt at rebellion?”

“Uh, neither, I just don’t—”

“Like meat?” Arriane steered Luce’s shoulders ninety degrees so that she was
looking directly at Daniel, sitting at a table across the room. Luce let out a
long exhale. There he was. “Now, does that go for all meat?” Arriane
sang loudly. “Like you wouldn’t sink your teeth into him?”
Luce slugged Arriane and dragged her toward the lunch line. Arriane was
cracking up, but Luce knew she was blushing badly, which would be
excruciatingly obvious in this fluorescent lighting.

“Shut up, he totally heard you,” she whispered.

Part of Luce felt glad to be joking about boys with a friend. Assuming Arriane
was her friend.

She still felt unglued by what had happened this morning when she’d seen
Daniel. That pull toward him—she still didn’t understand where it came from,
and yet here it was again. She made herself tear her eyes away from his blond
hair, from the smooth line of his jaw. She refused to be caught staring. She
did not want to give him any reason to flip her off a second time.

“Whatever,” Arriane scoffed. “He’s so focused on that hamburger, he wouldn’t
hear the call of Satan.” She gestured at Daniel, who did look intensely focused
on chewing his burger. Scratch that, he looked like someone pretending to
be intensely focused on chewing his hamburger.

Luce glanced across the table at Daniel’s friend
Roland. He was looking straight at her. When he caught her eye, he waggled his
eyebrows in a way that Luce couldn’t make sense of but that still creeped her
out a little.

Luce turned back to Arriane. “Why is everyone at this school so weird?”
“I’m going to choose not to take offense at that,” Arriane
said, picking up a plastic tray and handing one to Luce. “And I’m going to move
on to explaining the fine art of selecting a cafeteria seat. You see, you never
want to sit anywhere near the—Luce, look out!”

All Luce did was take one step backward, but as soon as she did, she felt the
rough shove of two hands on her shoulders. Immediately, she knew she was going
down. She reached out in front of her for support, but all her hands found was
someone else’s full lunch tray. The whole thing tumbled down right along with
her. She landed with a thud on the cafeteria floor, a full cup of borscht in
her face.

When she’d wiped enough mushy beets out of her eyes to see, Luce looked up. The
angriest pixie she’d ever seen was standing over her. The girl had spiky
bleached hair, at least ten piercings on her face, and a death glare. She bared
her teeth at Luce and hissed, “If the sight of you hadn’t just ruined my
appetite, I’d make you buy me another lunch.”

Luce stammered an apology. She tried to get up, but the girl clamped the heel
of her black stiletto boot down on Luce’s foot. Pain shot up her leg, and she
had to bite her lip so she wouldn’t cry out.

“Why don’t I just take a rain check,” the girl said.

“That’s enough, Molly,” Arriane said coolly. She reached down to help Luce to
her feet.

Luce winced. The stiletto was definitely going to leave a bruise.

Molly squared her hips to face Arriane, and Luce got the feeling this was not
the first time they’d locked horns.

“Fast friends with the newbie, I see,” Molly growled. “This is very bad
behavior, A. Aren’t you supposed to be on probation?”

Luce swallowed. Arriane hadn’t mentioned anything about probation, and it
didn’t make sense that that would prohibit her from making new friends. But the
word was enough to make Arriane clench her fist and throw a fat punch that
landed on Molly’s right eye.

Molly reeled backward, but it was Arriane who caught Luce’s attention. She’d
begun convulsing, her arms thrown up and jerking in the air.

It was the wristband, Luce realized with horror. It was sending some sort of
shock through Arriane’s body. Unbelievable. This was cruel and unusual
punishment, for sure. Luce’s stomach churned as she watched her friend’s entire
body quake. She reached out to catch Arriane just as she sank to the floor.

“Arriane,” Luce whispered. “Are you okay?”

“Terrific.” Arriane’s dark eyes flickered open, then shut.

Luce gasped. Then one of Arriane’s eyes popped back open. “Scared ya, did I?
Aw, that’s sweet. Don’t worry, the shocks won’t kill me,” she whispered. “They
only make me stronger. Anyway, it was worth it to give that cow a black eye, ya
know?”

“All right, break it up. Break it up,” a husky voice boomed behind them.

Randy stood in the doorway, red-faced and breathing hard. It was a little too
late to break anything up, Luce thought, but then Molly was lurching toward
them, her stiletto heels clicking on the linoleum. This girl was shameless. Was
she really going to kick the crap out of Arriane with Randy standing right
there?

Luckily, Randy’s burly arms closed around her first. Molly tried to kick her
way out and started screaming.

“Somebody better start talking,” Randy barked, squeezing Molly until she went
limp. “On second thought, all three of you report for detention tomorrow
morning. Cemetery. Crack of dawn!” Randy looked at Molly. “Have you chilled yet?”


Molly nodded stiffly, and Randy released her. She crouched down to where
Arriane still lay in Luce’s lap, her arms crossed over her chest. At first Luce
thought Arriane was sulking, like an angry dog with a shock collar, but then
Luce felt a small jolt from Arriane’s body and realized that the girl was still
at the mercy of the wristband.

“Come on,” Randy said, more softly. “Let’s go turn you
off.”

She extended her hand to Arriane and helped heave up her tiny, shaking body,
turning back only once at the doorway to repeat her orders for Luce and Molly.

“Crack of dawn!”

“Looking forward to it,” Molly said sweetly, reaching down to pick up the plate
of meat loaf that had slipped from her tray.

She dangled it over Luce’s head for a second, then turned the plate upside down
and mashed the food into her hair. Luce could hear the squish of her own
mortification as all of Sword Cross got its viewing of the
meat-loaf-coated new girl.

“Priceless,” Molly said, pulling out the tiniest silver camera from the back
pocket of her black jeans. “Say … meat loaf,” she sang, snapping a few close-up shots.
“These will be great on my blog.”

“Nice hat,” someone jeered from the other side of the cafeteria. Then, with
trepidation, Luce turned her eyes to Daniel, praying that somehow he had missed
this whole scene. But no. He was shaking his head. He looked annoyed.

Until that moment, Luce had thought she had a chance at standing up and just
shaking off the incident—literally. But seeing Daniel’s reaction—well, it
finally made her crack.

She would not cry in front of any of these horrible people. She
swallowed hard, got to her feet, and took off. She rushed toward the nearest
door, eager to feel some cool air on her face.

Instead, the southern September humidity cloaked her, choking her, as soon as
she got outside. The sky was that no-color color, a grayish brown so
oppressively bland it was difficult even to find the sun. Luce slowed down, but
got as far as the edge of the parking lot before she came to a complete stop.

She longed to see her battered old car there, to sink into the fraying cloth
seat, rev the engine, crank up the stereo, and peel the hell out of this place.
But as she stood on the hot black pavement, reality set in: She was stuck here,
and a pair of towering metal gates separated her from the world outside Sword
Cross. Besides, even if she’d had a way out … where was she going to go?

The sick feeling in her gut told her all she needed to know. She was already at
the last stop, and things were looking pretty grim.

It was as depressing as it was true: Sword Cross was all she had.

She dropped her face into her hands, knowing she had to go back. But when she
lifted her head, the residue on her palm reminded her that she was still coated
in Molly’s meat loaf. Ugh. First stop, the nearest bathroom.

Back inside, Luce ducked into the girls’ room just as the door was swinging
open. Gabbe, who appeared even more blond and flawless now that Luce looked
like she’d just gone Dumpster diving, squeezed past.

“Whoops, ‘scuse me, honey,” she said. Her southern-accented voice was sweet,
but her face crumpled up at the sight of Luce. “Oh God, you look terrible. What
happened?” What happened? As if the whole school didn’t already know. This girl
was probably playing dumb so Luce would relive the whole mortifying scene.

“Wait five minutes,” Luce replied, with more of an edge in her voice than she
meant. “I’m sure gossip spreads like the plague around here.”

“You want to borrow my foundation?” Gabbe asked, holding up a pastel blue
cosmetics case. “You haven’t seen yourself yet, but you’re going to—”

“Thanks, but no.” Luce cut her off, pushing into the bathroom. Without looking
at herself in the mirror, she turned on the faucet. She splashed cold water on
her face and finally let it all out. Tears streaming, she pumped the soap
dispenser and tried to use some of the cheap pink powdered hand soap to scrub
off the meat loaf. But there was still the matter of her hair. And her clothes
had definitely looked and smelled better. Not that she needed to worry about
making a good first impression anymore.

The bathroom door cracked open and Luce scrambled against the wall like a
trapped animal. When a stranger walked in, Luce stiffened and waited for the
worst.

The girl had a squat build, accentuated by an abnormal amount of layered
clothing. Her wide face was surrounded by curly brown hair, and her bright
purple glasses wobbled when she sniffed. She looked fairly unassuming, but
then, looks could be deceiving. Both her hands were tucked behind her back in a
way that, after the day Luce had had, she just couldn’t trust.

“You know, you’re not supposed to be in here without a pass,” the girl said.
Her even tone seemed to mean business.
“I know.” The look in the girl’s eyes confirmed Luce’s
suspicion that it was absolutely impossible to catch a break at this place. She
started to sigh in surrender. “I just—”
“I’m kidding.” The girl laughed, rolling her eyes and
relaxing her posture. “I snagged some shampoo from the locker room for you,”
she said, bringing her hands around to display two innocent-looking plastic
bottles of shampoo and conditioner. “Come on,” she said, pulling over a beat-up
folding chair. “Let’s get you cleaned up. Sit here.”

A half-whimpering, half-laughing noise she’d never made before escaped from
Luce’s lips. It sounded, she guessed, like relief. The girl was actually being
nice to her—not just reform school nice, but regular-person nice! For no
apparent reason. The shock of it was almost too great for Luce to stand.
“Thanks?” Luce managed to say, still feeling a little bit guarded.

“Oh, and you probably need a change of clothes,” the girl said, looking down at
her black sweater and pulling it over her head to expose an identical black
sweater underneath.

When she saw the surprised look on Luce’s face, she said, “What? I have a
hostile immune system. I have to wear a lot of layers.”

“Oh, well, will you be okay without this one?” Luce made herself ask, even
though she would have done just about anything right then to get out of the
meat cloak she was wearing.

“Of course,” the girl said, waving her off, “I’ve got three more on under this.
And a couple more in my locker. Be my guest. It pains me to see a vegetarian
covered in meat. I’m very empathetic.”

Luce wondered how this stranger knew about her dietary preferences, but more
than that, she had to ask: “Um, why are you being so nice?”

The girl laughed, sighed, then shook her head. “Not everyone at Sword
Cross is a whore or a jock.”

“Huh?” Luce said.

“Sword Cross … Whores and Jocks. Lame nickname in town for this
school. Obviously there aren’t really any jocks here. I won’t oppress your ears
with some of the cruder nicknames they’ve come up with.”

Luce laughed.

“All I meant was, not everyone here is a complete jerk.”

“Just the majority?” Luce asked, hating it that she already sounded so
negative. But it had been such a long morning, and she’d already been through
so much, and maybe this girl wouldn’t judge her for being a little bit gruff.

To her surprise, the girl smiled. “Exactly. And they sure give the rest of us a
bad name,” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Pennyweather Van Syckle-Lockwood. You
can call me Penn.”

“Got it,” Luce said, still too frazzled to realize that, in a former life, she
might have stifled a laugh at this girl’s moniker. It sounded like she’d hopped
straight off the pages of a Dickens novel. Then again, there was something
trustworthy about a girl with a name like that who could manage to introduce
herself with a straight face. “I’m Lucinda Price.”

“And everybody calls you Luce,” Penn said. “And you transferred from Dover Prep
in New Hampshire.”

“How’d you know that?” Luce asked slowly.

“Lucky guess?” Penn shrugged. “I’m kidding, I read your file, duh. It’s a
hobby.”

Luce stared at her blankly. Maybe she’d been too hasty with that trustworthy
judgment. How could Penn have access to her file?

Penn took over running the water. When it got warm, she motioned for Luce to
lower her head into the sink.

“See, the thing is,” she explained, “I’m not actually crazy.” She pulled Luce
up by her wet head. “No offense.” Then lowered her back down. “I’m the only kid
at this school without
a court mandate. And you might not think it, but being legally sane has its
advantages. For example, I’m also the only kid they trust to be an office aide.
Which is dumb on their part. I have access to a lot of confidential shit.”

“But if you don’t have to be here—”

“When your father’s the groundskeeper of the school, they kind of have to let
you go for free. So Penn trailed off.

Penn’s father was the groundskeeper? From the looks of the place, it hadn’t
crossed Luce’s mind that they even had a groundskeeper.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Penn said, helping Luce
shampoo the last of the gravy from her hair. “That the grounds aren’t exactly
well kept?”

“No,” Luce lied. She was eager to stay on this girl’s good side and wanted to
put out the be-my-friend vibe way more than she wanted to seem like she
actually cared about how often someone mowed the lawn at Sword Cross. “It’s,
um, really nice.”

“Dad died two years ago,” Penn said quietly. “They got as far as sticking me
with decaying old Headmaster Udell as my legal guardian, but, uh, they never
really got around to hiring a replacement for Dad.”

“I’m sorry,” Luce said, lowering her voice, too. So someone else here knew what
it was like to go through a major loss.

“It’s okay,” Penn said, squirting conditioner into her palm. “It’s actually a
really good school. I like it here a lot.”

Now Luce’s head shot up, sending a spray of water across the bathroom. “You
sure you’re not crazy?” she teased.

“I’m kidding. I hate it here. It totally sucks.”

“But you can’t bring yourself to leave,” Luce said, tilting her head, curious.

Penn bit her lip. “I know it’s morbid, but even if I weren’t stuck with Udell,
I couldn’t. My dad’s here.” She gestured toward the cemetery, invisible from
here. “He’s all I’ve got.”

“Then I guess you’ve got more than some other people at this school,” Luce
said, thinking of Arriane. Her mind rolled back to the way Arriane had gripped
her hand on the quad today, the eager look in her blue eyes when she made Luce
promise she’d swing by her dorm room tonight.

“She’s gonna be okay,” Penn said. “It wouldn’t be Monday if Arriane didn’t get
carted off to the nurse after a fit.”

“But it wasn’t a fit,” Luce said. “It was that wristband. I saw it. It was
shocking her.”

“We have a very broad definition of what makes for a ‘fit’ here at Sword
Cross. Your new enemy, Molly? She’s thrown some legendary fits. They keep
saying they’re going to change her meds. Hopefully you’ll have the pleasure of
witnessing at least one good freak-out before they do.”

Penn’s intel was pretty remarkable. It crossed Luce’s mind to ask her what the
story was with Daniel, but the complicated intensity of her interest in him was
probably best kept to a need-to-know basis. At least until she figured it out
herself.

She felt Penn’s hands wringing the water from her hair.

“That’s the last of it,” Penn said. “I think you’re finally meat-free.”

Luce looked in the mirror and ran her hands through her hair. Penn was right.
Except for the emotional scarring and the pain in her right foot, there was no
evidence of her cafeteria brawl with Molly.
“I’m just glad you have short hair,” Penn said. “If it were
still as long as it was in the picture in your file, this would have been a
much lengthier operation.”

Luce gawked at her. “I’m going to have to keep an eye on you, aren’t I?”

Penn looped her arm through Luce’s and steered her out of the bathroom. “Just stay
on my good side and no one gets hurt.”

Luce shot Penn a worried look, but Penn’s face gave nothing away. “You’re
kidding, right?” Luce asked.

Penn smiled, suddenly cheery. “Come on, we gotta get to class. Aren’t you glad
we’re in the same afternoon block?”

Luce
laughed. “When are you going to stop knowing everything about me?”

“Not in the foreseeable future,” Penn said, tugging her down the hall and back
toward the cinder-block classrooms. “You’ll learn to love it soon, I promise.
I’m a very powerful friend to have.”

THREE
DRAWING DARK
Luce
meandered down the dank dormitory hallway toward her room, dragging her red
Camp Gurid duffel bag with the broken strap in her wake, The walls here were
the color of a dusty blackboard—and the whole place was strangely quiet, save
for the dull hum of the yellow fluorescent lamps hanging from the water-stained
drop-panel ceilings.

Mostly, Luce was surprised to see so many shut doors. Back at Dover, she’d
always wished for more privacy, a break from the hallwide dorm parties that
sprang up at all hours. You couldn’t walk to your room without tripping over a
powwow of girls sitting cross-legged in matching jeans, or a lip-locked couple
pressed against the wall.

But at Sword Cross … well, either everyone was already getting started on
their thirty-page term papers … or else the socializing here was of a much more
behind-closed- doors variety.

Speaking of which, the closed doors themselves were a sight to be seen. If the
students at Sword Cross got resourceful with their dress code violations,
they were downright ingenious when it came to personalizing their spaces.
Already Luce had walked by one door frame with a beaded curtain, and another
with a motion-detecting welcome mat that encouraged her to “move the hell on”
when she passed it.

She came to a stop in front of the only blank door in the building. Room 63.
Home bitter home. She fumbled for her key in the front pocket of her backpack,
took a deep breath, and opened the door to her cell.

Except it wasn’t terrible. Or maybe it wasn’t as terrible as she’d been
expecting. There was a decent-sized window that slid open to let in some less
stifling night air. And past the steel bars, the view of the moonlit commons
was actually sort of interesting, if she didn’t think too hard about the
graveyard that lay beyond it. She had a closet and a little sink, a desk to do
her work at—come to think of it, the saddest-looking thing in the room was the
glimpse Luce caught of herself in the full-length mirror behind the door.

She quickly looked away, knowing all too well what
she’d find in the reflection. Her face looking pinched and tired. Her hazel
eyes flecked with stress. Her hair like her family’s hysterical toy poodle’s
fur after a rainstorm. Penn’s sweater fit her like a burlap sack. She was
shivering. Her afternoon classes had been no better than the morning’s, due
mainly to the fact that her biggest fear had come to fruition: The whole school
had already started calling her Meat Loaf. And unfortunately, much like its
namesake, the moniker seemed like it was going to stick.

She wanted to unpack, to turn generic room 63 into her own place, where she
could go when she needed to escape and feel okay. But she only got as far as
unzipping her bag before she collapsed on the bare bed in defeat. She felt so
far away from home. It only took twenty-two minutes by car to get from the
loose-hinged whitewashed back door of her house to the rusty wrought iron
entrance gates of Sword Cross, but it might as well have been twenty-two
years.

For the first half of the silent drive with her parents this morning, the
neighborhoods had all looked pretty much the same: sleepy southern middle-class
suburbia. But then the road had gone over the causeway toward the shore, and the
terrain had grown more and more marshy. A swell of mangrove trees marked the
entrance into the wetlands, but soon even those dwindled out. The last ten
miles of road to Sword Cross were dismal. Grayish brown, featureless,
forsaken. Back home in Thunderbolt, people around town always joked about the
strangely memorable moldering stench out here: You knew you were in the marshes
when your car started to reek of pluff mud.

Even though Luce had grown up in Thunderbolt, she really wasn’t that familiar
with the far eastern part of the county. As a kid, she’d always just assumed
that was because there wasn’t any reason to come over here—all the stores,
schools, and everyone her family knew were on the west side. The east side was
just less developed. That was all.

She missed her parents, who’d stuck a Post-it on the T-shirt at the top of her
bag—we love you! Prices never
crash! She
missed her bedroom, which looked out on her dad’s tomato vines. She missed
Callie, who most certainly had sent her at least ten never-to-be-seen text
messages already. She missed Trevor

Or, well, that wasn’t exactly it. What she missed was the way life had felt
when she’d first started talking to Trevor. When she had someone to think about
if she couldn’t sleep at night, someone’s name to doodle dorkily inside her
notebooks. The truth was, Luce and Trevor never really had the chance to get to
know each other all that well. The only memento she had was the picture Callie
had snapped covertly, from across the football field between two of his squat
sets, when he and Luce had talked for fifteen seconds about his squat sets. And
the only date she’d ever gone on with him hadn’t even been a real date—just a
stolen hour when he’d pulled her away from the rest of the party. An hour she’d
regret for the rest of her life.

It had started out innocently enough, just two people going for a walk down by
the lake, but it wasn’t long before Luce started to feel the shadows lurking
overhead. Then Trevor’s lips touched hers, and the heat coursed through her
body, and his eyes turned white with terror … and seconds later, life as she’d known it had gone up
in a blaze.

Luce rolled over and buried her face in the crook of an arm. She’d spent months
mourning Trevor’s death, and now, lying in this strange room, with the metal
bars digging into her skin through the thin mattress, she felt the selfish
futility of it all. She hadn’t known Trevor any more than she knew … well, Cam.

A knock on her door made Luce shoot up from the bed. How would anyone know to
find her here? She tiptoed to the door and pulled it open. Then she stuck her
head into the very empty hallway. She hadn’t even heard footsteps outside, and
there was no sign of anyone having just knocked.

Except the paper airplane pinned with a brass tack to the center of the
corkboard next to her door. Luce smiled to see her name written in black marker
along the wing, but when she unfolded the note, all that was written inside was
a black arrow pointing straight down the hall.

Arriane had invited her over tonight, but that was before the
incident with Molly in the cafeteria. Looking down the empty hallway, Luce
wondered about following the cryptic arrow. Then she glanced back at her giant
duffel bag, her pity party waiting to be unpacked. She shrugged, pulled her
door shut, put her room key in her pocket, and started walking.

She stopped in front of a door on the other side of the hall to check out an
oversized poster of Sonny Terry, a blind musician who she knew from her
father’s scratchy record collection was an incredible blues harmonica player.
She leaned forward to read the name on the corkboard and realized with a start
that she was standing in front of Roland Sparks’s room. Immediately,
annoyingly, there was that little part of her brain that started calculating
the odds that Roland might be hanging out with Daniel, with only a thin door
separating them from Luce.

A mechanical buzzing sound made Luce jump. She looked
straight into a surveillance camera drilled into the wall over Roland’s door. The
reds. Zooming in on her every move. She shrank away, embarrassed for reasons no
camera would be able to discern. Anyway, she’d come here to see Arriane—whose
room, she realized, just happened to be directly across the hall from Roland.

In front of Arriane’s room, Luce felt a little stab of tenderness. The entire
door was covered with bumper stickers—some printed, others obviously homemade.
There were so many that they overlapped, each slogan half covering and often
contradicting the one before it. Luce laughed under her breath as she imagined
Arriane collecting the bumper stickers indiscriminately (MEAN PEOPLE RULE … MY DAUGHTER IS AN F STUDENT AT SWORD CROSS … VOTE NO ON PROP 666), then slapping them with a
haphazard—but committed—focus onto her turf.

Luce could have kept herself entertained for an hour reading Arriane’s door,
but soon she started to feel self-conscious about standing in front of a dorm
room she was only half certain she’d actually been invited to. Then she saw the
second paper airplane. She pulled it down from the corkboard and unfolded the
message:
My Darling Luce,

If you actually showed up to hang out tonight, props! We’ll get along juuust
fine.

If you bailed on me, then get your claws off my private note, ROLAND! How many
times do I have to tell you? Jeez.

Anyhow: I know I said to swing by tonight, but I had to dash straight from
RR in the nurse’s station (the silver fining of my Taser treatment today)
to a makeup biology review with the Albatross, Which is to say—rain check?

Yours psychotically,

A
Luce stood
with the note in her hands, unsure about what to do next. She was relieved to
read that Arriane was being taken care of, but she still wished she could see
the girl in person. She wanted to hear the nonchalance in Arriane’s voice for
herself, so that she’d know how to feel about what had happened in the
cafeteria today. But standing there in the hallway, Luce was ever more
uncertain how to process the day’s events. A quiet panic filled her when it
finally registered that she was alone, after dark, at Sword Cross.

Behind her, a door cracked open. A sliver of white light opened up on the floor
beneath her feet. Luce heard music being played inside a room.

“Whatcha doin’?” It was Roland, standing in his doorway in a torn white T-shirt
and jeans. His dreads were gathered in a yellow rubber band on top of his head
and he held a harmonica up next to his lips.
“I came to see Arriane,” Luce said, trying to keep
herself from looking past him to see if anyone else was in the room. “We were
supposed to—”

“Nobody’s home,” he said, cryptically. Luce didn’t know if he meant Arriane, or
the rest of the kids in the dorm, or what. He played a few bars on the
harmonica, keeping his eyes on her the whole time. Then he held open the door a
little bit wider and raised his eyebrows. She couldn’t tell whether or not he
was inviting her to come in.

“Well, I was just swinging by on my way to the library,” she lied quickly,
turning back the way she’d come. “There’s a book I need to check out.”

“Luce,” Roland called.

She turned around. They hadn’t officially met yet, and she hadn’t expected him
to know her name. His eyes flashed a smile at her and he used the harmonica to
point in the opposite direction. “Library’s that way,” he said. He crossed his
arms over his chest. “Be sure to check out the special collections in the east
wing. They’re really something.”

“Thanks,” Luce said, feeling truly grateful as she
changed course. Roland seemed so real right then, waving and playing a few
parting slides on the harmonica as she left. Maybe he’d only made her nervous
earlier because she thought of him as Daniel’s friend. For all she knew, Roland
could be a really nice person. Her mood lifted as she walked down the hallway.
First Arriane’s note had been snappy and sarcastic, then she’d had a
non-awkward encounter with Roland Sparks; plus she really did want to check out the library. Things were looking up.


Near the end of the hall, where the dorm elbowed off toward the library wing,
Luce passed the only cracked-open door on the floor. There was no decorative
flair on this door, but someone had painted it all black. As she got closer,
Luce could hear angry heavy metal music playing inside. She didn’t even have to
pause to read the name on the door. It was Molly’s.

Luce quickened her steps, suddenly aware of every clop of her black riding
boots on the linoleum. She didn’t realize she’d been holding her breath until
she pushed through the wood-grained library doors and exhaled.

A warm feeling came over Luce as she looked around the library. She’d always
loved the faintly sweet musty way that only a roomful of books smelled. She
took comfort in the soft occasional sound of turning pages. The library at
Dover had always been her escape, and Luce felt almost overwhelmed with relief
as she realized that this one might offer her the same sense of sanctuary. She
could hardly believe that this place belonged to Sword Cross. It was almost
… it was actually … inviting.

The walls were a deep mahogany and the ceilings were high. A fireplace with a
brick hearth lay along one wall. There were long wooden tables lit by
old-fashioned green lamps, and aisles of books that went on farther than she
could see. The sound of her boots was hushed by a thick Persian carpet as Luce
wandered past the entryway.

A few students were studying, none that Luce knew by name, but even the more
punky-looking kids seemed less threatening with their heads bent over books.
She neared the main circulation desk, which was a great round station at the
center of the room. It was strewn with stacks of papers and books and had a
homey academic messiness that reminded Luce of her parents’ house. The books
were piled so high that Luce almost didn’t see the librarian seated behind
them. She was rooting through some paperwork with the energy of someone panning
for gold. Her head popped up as Luce approached.

“Hello!” The woman smiled—she actually smiled—at Luce. Her hair was not gray but silver, with a kind of
brilliance that sparkled even in the soft library light. Her face looked old
and young at the same time. She had pale, almost incandescent skin, bright
black eyes, and a tiny, pointed nose. When she spoke to Luce, she pushed up the
sleeves of her white cashmere sweater, exposing stacks and stacks of pearl
bracelets decorating both of her wrists. “Can I help you find something?” she
asked in a happy whisper.

Luce felt instantly at ease with this woman, and glanced down at the nameplate
on her desk. Sophia Bliss. She wished she did have a library request. This
woman was the first authority figure she’d seen all day whose help she would
actually have wanted to seek out. But she was just here wandering around … and then she remembered what Roland Sparks had said.
“I’m new here,” she explained. “Lucinda Price. Could you
tell me where the east wing is?”

The woman gave Luce a you-look-like-the-reading-sort smile that Luce had been
getting from librarians all her life. “Right that way,” she said, pointing
toward a row of tall windows on the other side of the room. “I’m Miss Sophia,
and if my roster’s correct, you’re in my religion seminar on Tuesdays and
Thursdays. Oh, we’re going to have some fun!” She winked. “In the meantime, if
you need anything else, I’m here. A pleasure to meet you, Luce.”

Luce smiled her thanks, told Miss Sophia happily that she’d see her tomorrow in
class, and started toward the windows. It was only after she’d left the
librarian that she wondered about the strange, intimate way the woman had
called her by her nickname.

She’d just cleared the main study area and was passing through the tall,
elegant book stacks when something dark and macabre passed over her head. She
glanced up.
No. Not
here. Please. Let me just have this one place.
When the
shadows came and went, Luce was never sure exactly where they ended up—or how
long they would be gone.

She couldn’t figure out what was happening now. Something was different. She
was terrified, yes, but she didn’t feel cold. In fact, she felt a little bit
flushed. The library was warm, but it wasn’t that warm. And then her eyes fell on Daniel.

He was facing the window, his back to her, leaning over a podium that said
SPECIAL COLLECTIONS in white letters. The sleeves of his worn leather jacket
were pushed up around his elbows, and his blond hair glowed under the lights.
His shoulders were hunched over, and yet again, Luce had an instinct to fold
herself into them. She shook it from her head and stood on tiptoe to get a
better look at him. From here, she couldn’t be certain, but he looked like he
was drawing something.

As she watched the slight movement of his body as he sketched, Luce’s insides
felt like they were burning, like she’d swallowed something hot. She couldn’t
figure out why, against all reason, she had this wild premonition that Daniel
was drawing her.

She shouldn’t go to him. After all, she didn’t even know him, had
never actually spoken to him. Their only communication so far had included one
middle finger and a couple of dirty looks. Yet for some reason, it felt very
important to her that she find out what was on that sketchpad.

Then it hit her. The dream she’d had the night before. The briefest flash of it
came back to her all of a sudden. In the dream, it had been late at night—damp
and chilly, and she’d been dressed in something long and flowing. She leaned up
against a curtained window in an unfamiliar room. The only other person there
was a man … or a boy—she never got to see his face. He was
sketching her likeness on a thick pad of paper. Her hair. Her neck. The precise
outline of her profile. She stood behind him, too afraid to let him know she
was watching, too intrigued to turn away.

Luce jerked forward as she felt something pinch the back of her shoulder, then
float over her head. The shadow had resurfaced. It was black and as thick as a
curtain.

The pounding of her heart grew so loud that it filled her ears, blocking out
the dark rustle of the shadow, blocking out the sound of her footsteps. Daniel
glanced up from his work and seemed to raise his eyes to exactly where the
shadow hovered, but he didn’t start the way she had.

Of course, he couldn’t see them. His focus settled calmly outside the window.

The heat inside her grew stronger. She was close enough now that she felt like
he must be able to feel it coming off her skin.

As quietly as she could, Luce tried to peer over his shoulder at his sketchpad.
For just a second, her mind saw the curve of her own bare neck sketched in
pencil on the page. But then she blinked, and when her eyes settled back on the
paper, she had to swallow hard.

It was a landscape. Daniel was drawing the view of the cemetery out the window
in almost perfect detail. Luce had never seen anything that made her quite so
sad.

She didn’t know why. It was crazy—even for her—to have expected her bizarre
intuition to come true. There was no reason for Daniel to draw her. She knew
that. Just like she knew he’d had no reason to flip her off this morning. But
he had.

“What are you doing over here?” he asked. He’d closed his sketchbook and was
looking at her solemnly. His full lips were set in a straight line and his gray
eyes looked dull. He didn’t look angry, for a change; he looked exhausted.

“I came to check out a book from Special Collections,” she said in a wobbly
voice. But as she looked around, she quickly realized her mistake, Special
Collections wasn’t a section of books—it was an open area in the library for an
art display about the Civil War. She and Daniel were standing in a tiny gallery
of bronze busts of war heroes, glass cases filled with old promissory notes and
Confederate maps. It was the only section of the library where there wasn’t a
single book to check out.

“Good luck with that,” Daniel said, opening up his sketchbook again, as if to
say, preemptively, goodbye.
Luce was
tongue-tied and embarrassed and what she would have liked to do was escape. But
then, there were the shadows, still lurking nearby, and for some reason Luce
felt better about them when she was next to Daniel. It made no sense—like there
was anything he could do to protect her from them.

She was stuck, rooted to her spot. He glanced up at her and sighed.

“Let me ask you, do you like being sneaked up on?”

Luce thought about the shadows and what they were doing to her right now.
Without thinking, she shook her head roughly.

“Okay, that makes two of us.” He cleared his throat and stared at her, driving
home the point that she was the intruder.

Maybe she could explain that she was feeling a little
light-headed and just needed to sit down for a minute. She started to say,
“Look, can I—”
But Daniel
picked up his sketchbook and got to his feet. “I came here to get away,” he
said, cutting her off. “If you’re not going to leave, I will.”

He shoved his sketchbook into his backpack. When he pushed past, his shoulder
brushed hers. Even as brief as the touch was, even through their layers of
clothes, Luce felt a shock of static.

For a second, Daniel stood still, too. They turned their heads to look back at
each other, and Luce opened her mouth. But before she could speak, Daniel had
turned on his heel and was walking quickly toward the door. Luce watched as the
shadows crept over his head, swirled in a circle, then rushed out the window
into the night.

FOUR
GRAVEYARD SHIFT
Ahhh,
Tuesday. Waffle day. For as long as Luce could remember, summer Tuesdays
meant fresh coffee, brimming bowls of raspberries and whipped cream, and an
unending stack of crispy golden brown waffles. Even this summer, when her
parents started acting a little scared of her, waffle day was one thing she
could count on. She could roll over in bed on a Tuesday morning, and before she
was aware of anything else, she knew instinctively what day it was.

Luce sniffed, slowly coming to her senses, then sniffed again with a little
more gusto. No, there was no buttermilk batter, nothing but the vinegary smell
of peeling paint. She rubbed the sleep away and took in her cramped dorm room.
It looked like the “before” shot on a home renovation show. The long nightmare
that had been Monday came back to her:

the surrender of her cell phone, the meat loaf incident and Molly’s flashing
eyes in the lunchroom, Daniel brushing her off in the library. What it was that
made him so spiteful, Luce didn’t have a clue.

She sat up to look out the window. It was still dark; the sun hadn’t even
peeked over the horizon yet. She never woke up this early. If pressed, she
didn’t actually think she could remember ever having seen the sunrise.
Truthfully, something about sunrise-watching as an activity had always made her
nervous. It was the waiting moments, the just-
before-the-sun-snapped-over-the-horizon moments, sitting in the darkness
looking out across a tree line. Prime shadow time.

Luce sighed an audibly homesick, lonely sigh, which made her even more homesick
and lonely. What was she going to do with herself for the three hours between
the crack of dawn and her first class? Crack of dawn—why did the words ring in her ears? Oh. Crap. She was
supposed to be at detention.

She scrambled out of bed, tripping over her still-packed duffel bag, and yanked
another boring black sweater from the top of a stack of boring black sweaters.
She tugged on yesterday’s black jeans, winced as she caught a glimpse of her
disastrous bed head, and tried to run her fingers through her hair as she
dashed out the door.

She was out of breath when she reached the waist-high,
intricately sculpted wrought iron gates of the cemetery. She was choking on the
overwhelming smell of skunk cabbage and feeling far too alone with her
thoughts. Where was everyone else? Was their definition of “crack of dawn”
different from hers? She glanced down at her watch. It was already six-fifteen.


All they’d told her was to meet at the cemetery, and Luce was pretty sure this
was the only entrance. She stood at the threshold, where the gritty asphalt of
the parking lot gave way to a mangled lot full of weeds. She spotted a lone
dandelion, and it crossed her mind that a younger Luce would have pounced on it
and then made a wish and blown. But this Luce’s wishes felt too heavy for
something so light.

The delicate gates were all that divided the cemetery from the parking lot.
Pretty remarkable for a school with so much barbed wire everywhere else. Luce
ran her hand along the gates, tracing the ornate floral pattern with her
fingers. The gates must have dated back to the Civil War days Arriane was
talking about, back when the cemetery was used to bury fallen soldiers. When
the school attached to it was not a home for wayward psychos. When the whole
place was a lot less overgrown and shadowy.

It was strange—the rest of the campus was as flat as a sheet of paper, but
somehow, the cemetery had a concave, bowl-like shape. From here, she could see
the slope of the whole vast thing before her. Row after row of simple
headstones lined the slopes like spectators at an arena.

But toward the middle, at the lowest point of the cemetery, the path through
the grounds twisted into a maze of larger carved tombs, marble statues, and
mausoleums. Probably for Confederate officers, or just the soldiers who came
from money. They looked like they’d be beautiful up close. But from here, the
sheer weight of them seemed to drag the cemetery down, almost like the whole
place was being swallowed into a drain.

Footsteps behind her. Luce whirled around to see a stumpy, black-clad figure
emerge from behind a tree. Penn! She had to resist the urge to throw her arms
around the girl. Luce had never been so glad to see anyone—though it was hard
to believe Penn ever got detentions.

“Aren’t you late?” Penn asked, stopping a few feet in front of Luce and giving
her an amused you-poor-newbie shake of the head.

“I’ve been here for ten minutes,” Luce said. “Aren’t you the one who’s
late?”

Penn smirked. “No way, I’m just an early riser. I never get detention.” She
shrugged and pushed her purple glasses up on her nose. “But you do, along with
five other unfortunate souls, who are probably getting angrier by the minute
waiting for you down at the monolith.” She stood on tiptoe and pointed behind
Luce, toward the largest stone structure, which rose up from the middle of the
deepest part of the cemetery. If Luce squinted, she could just make out a group
of black figures clustered around its base.

“They just said meet at the cemetery,” Luce said, already feeling defeated. “No
one told me where to go.”

“Well, I’m telling you: monolith. Now get down there,” Penn said. “You’re not
going to make many friends by cutting into their morning any more than you
already have.”

Luce gulped. Part of her wanted to ask Penn to show her the way. From up here,
it looked like a labyrinth, and Luce did not want to get lost in the cemetery.
Suddenly, she got that nervous, far-away-from-home feeling, and she knew it was
only going to get worse in there. She cracked her knuckles, stalling.

“Luce?” Penn said, giving her shoulders a bit of a shove. “You’re still
standing here.”

Luce tried to give Penn a brave thank-you smile, but had to settle for an
awkward facial twitch. Then she hurried down the slope into the heart of the
cemetery.

The sun still hadn’t risen, but it was getting closer, and these last few
predawn moments were always the ones that creeped her out the most. She tore
past the rows of plain headstones. At one point they must have been upright,
but by now they were so old that most of them tipped over to one side or the
other, giving the whole place the look of a set of morbid dominoes.

She slopped in her black Converse sneakers through puddles of mud, crunched
over dead leaves. By the time she cleared the section of simple plots and made
it to the more ornate tombs, the ground had more or less flattened out, and she
was totally lost. She stopped running, tried to catch her breath. Voices. If
she calmed down, she could hear voices.

“Five more minutes, then I’m out,” a guy said.

“Too bad your opinion has no value, Mr. Sparks.” An ornery voice, one Luce
recognized from her classes yesterday. Ms. Tross—the Albatross. After the meat
loaf incident,

Luce had shown up late to her class and hadn’t exactly
made the most favorable impression on the dour, spherical science teacher.

“Unless anyone wants to lose his or her social privileges this week”—groans
from among the tombs—”we will all wait patiently, as if we had nothing better
to do, until Miss Price decides to grace us with her presence.”
“I’m here,” Luce gasped, finally rounding a giant statue of
a cherub.

Ms. Tross stood with her hands on her hips, wearing a variation of yesterday’s
loose black muumuu. Her thin mouse-brown hair was plastered to her scalp and
her dull brown eyes showed only annoyance at Luce’s arrival. Biology had always
been tough for Luce, and so far, she wasn’t doing her grade in Ms. Tross’s class
any favors.

Behind the Albatross were Arriane, Molly, and Roland, scattered around a circle
of plinths that all faced a large central statue of an angel. Compared to the
rest of the statues, this one seemed newer, whiter, grander. And leaning up
against the angel’s sculpted thigh—she almost hadn’t noticed—was Daniel.

He was wearing the busted black leather jacket and the bright red scarf she’d
fixated on yesterday. Luce took in his messy blond hair, which looked like it
hadn’t yet been smoothed down after sleep … which made her think about what Daniel might look like
when he was sleeping … which made her blush so intensely that by the time her
eyes made their way down from his hairline to his eyes, she was thoroughly
humiliated.

By then he was glaring at her.

“I’m sorry,” she blurted out, “I didn’t know where we were supposed to meet. I
swear—”

“Save it,” Ms. Tross said, dragging a finger across her throat. “You’ve wasted
enough of everyone’s time. Now, I’m sure you all remember whatever despicable indiscretion
you committed to find yourself here. You can think about that for the next two
hours while you work. Pair up. You know the drill.” She glanced at Luce and let
out her breath. “Okay, who wants a protégée?”

To Luce’s horror, all of the other students looked at their feet. But then,
after a torturous minute, a fifth student stepped into view around the corner
of the mausoleum.
“I do.”
Cam. His
black V-neck T-shirt fit close around his broad shoulders. He stood almost a
foot taller than Roland, who moved aside as Cam pushed past and walked toward
Luce. His eyes were glued to her as he strode forward, moving smoothly and
confidently, as at ease in his reform school garb as Luce was ill at ease. Part
of her wanted to avert her eyes, because it was embarrassing the way Cam was
staring at her in front of everyone. But for some reason, she was mesmerized.
She couldn’t break his gaze—until Arriane stepped between them.

“Dibs,” she said. “I called dibs.”

“No you didn’t,” Cam said.

“Yes I did, you just didn’t hear me from your weird perch back there.” The
words rushed out of Arriane. “I want her,”
“I—” Cam started to respond.

Arriane cocked her head expectantly. Luce swallowed. Was he going to come out
and say he wanted her, too? Couldn’t they just forget about it?
Serve detention in a group of three?

Cam patted Luce’s arm. “I’ll catch up with you after, okay?” he said to her,
like it was a promise she’d asked him to keep.

The other kids hopped off tombs they’d been sitting on and trooped toward a
shed. Luce followed, clinging to Arriane, who wordlessly handed her a rake.

“So. Do you want the avenging angel, or the fleshy embracing lovers?”

There was no mention of yesterday’s events, or of Arriane’s note, and Luce
somehow didn’t feel she should bring anything up with Arriane now. Instead, she
glanced overhead to find herself flanked by two giant statues. The one closer
to her looked like a Rodin. A nude man and woman stood tangled in an embrace.
She’d studied French sculpture back at Dover, and always thought Rodins were
the most romantic pieces. But now it was hard to look at the embracing lovers
without thinking of Daniel. Daniel. Who hated her. If she needed any further proof of that
after he’d basically bolted from the library last night, all she had to do was
think back to the fresh glare she’d gotten from him this morning.

“Where’s the avenging angel?” she asked Arriane with a sigh.

“Good choice. Over here.” Arriane led Luce to a massive marble sculpture of an
angel saving the ground from the strike of a thunderbolt. It might have been an
interesting piece, back in the day when it was first carved. But now it just
looked old and dirty, covered in mud and green moss.
“I don’t get it,” Luce said. “What do we do?”

“Scrub-a-dub-dub,” Arriane said, almost singing. “I like to pretend I’m giving them a little bath.” With that, she scrambled
up the giant angel, swinging her legs over the statue’s thunderbolt-thwarting
arm, as if the whole thing were a sturdy old oak tree for her to climb.

Terrified of looking like she was asking for more trouble from Ms. Tross, Luce
starting working her rake across the base of the statue. She tried to clear
away what seemed like an endless pile of damp leaves.

Three minutes later, her arms were killing
her. She
definitely hadn’t dressed for this kind of muddy manual labor. Luce had never
been sent to detention at Dover, but from what she’d overheard, it consisted of
filling a piece of paper with “I will not plagiarize off the Internet” a few
hundred times.

This was brutal. Especially when all she’d really done was accidentally bump
into Molly in the lunchroom. She was trying not to make snap judgments here,
but clearing mud from the graves of people who’d been dead over a century? Luce
totally hated her life right now.

Then a tease of sunlight finally filtered through the trees, and suddenly there
was color in the graveyard. Luce felt instantly lighter. She could see more
than ten feet in front of her. She could see Daniel … working side by side with Molly.

Luce’s heart sank. The airy feeling disappeared.

She looked at Arriane, who shot her a this-blows sympathy glance but kept
working.

“Hey,” Luce whispered loudly.

Arriane put a finger to her lips but motioned for Luce to climb up next to her.


With much less grace and agility, Luce grabbed the statue’s arm and swung
herself up onto the plinth. Once she was fairly certain that she wasn’t going
to tumble to the ground, she whispered, “So … Daniel’s friends with Molly?”

Arriane snorted. “No way, they totally hate each other,” she said quickly, then
paused. “Why d’you ask?”

Luce pointed at the two of them, doing no work whatsoever to clear brush from
their tomb. They were standing close to each other, leaning on their rakes and
having a conversation that Luce desperately wished she could hear. “They look
like friends to me.”

“It’s detention,” Arriane said flatly. “You have to pair up. Do you think
Roland and Chester the Molester are friends?” She pointed at Roland and Cam.
They seemed to be arguing about the best way to divvy up their work on the
lovers’ statue. “Detention buddies does not equal real-life buddies.”

Arriane looked back at Luce, who could feel her face falling, despite her best
efforts to appear unfazed.

“Look, Luce, I didn’t mean …“ She trailed off. “Okay, aside from the fact that you
made me waste a good twenty minutes of my morning, I have no problem with you.
In fact, I think you’re sort of interesting. Kinda fresh. That said, I don’t
know what you were expecting in terms of mushy-gushy friendship here at Sword
Cross. But let me be the first to tell you, it just ain’t that easy.
People are here because they’ve got baggage. I’m talking curbside-check-in,
pay-the-fine-’cause-it’s-over-fifty-pounds kind of baggage. Get it?”

Luce shrugged, feeling embarrassed. “It was just a question.”

Arriane snickered. “Are you always so defensive? What the hell did you do to
get in here, anyway?”

Luce didn’t feel like talking about it. Maybe Arriane was right, she’d be better
off not trying to make friends. She hopped down and went back to attacking the
moss at the base of the statue.

Unfortunately, Arriane was intrigued. She hopped down,
too, and brought her rake down on top of Luce’s to pin it in place.

“Ooh, tell me tell me tell me,” she taunted.

Arriane’s face was so close to Luce’s. It reminded Luce of yesterday, crouching
over Arriane after she’d convulsed. They’d had a moment, hadn’t they? And part
of Luce badly wanted to be able to talk to someone. It had been such a long,
stifling summer with her parents. She sighed, resting her forehead on the
handle of her rake.

A salty, nervous taste filled her mouth, but she couldn’t swallow it away. The
last time she’d gone into these details, it had been because of a court order.
She would just as soon have forgotten them, but the longer Arriane stared her
down, the clearer the words grew, and the closer they came to the tip of her
tongue.

“I was with a friend one night,” she started to explain, taking a long, deep
breath. “And something terrible happened.” She closed her eyes, praying that
the scene wouldn’t play out in a burst under the red-black of her eyelids.
“There was a fire. I made it out … and he didn’t.”

Arriane yawned, much less horrified by the story than Luce was.

“Anyway,” Luce went on, “afterwards, I couldn’t remember the details, how it
happened. What I could remember—what I told the judge, anyway—I guess they
thought I was crazy.” She tried to smile, but it felt forced.

To Luce’s surprise, Arriane squeezed her shoulder. And for a second, her face
looked really sincere. Then it changed back into its smirk.

“We’re all so misunderstood, aren’t we?” She poked Luce in the gut with her
finger. “You know, Roland and I were just talking about how we don’t have any
pyromaniac friends. And everyone knows you need a good pyro to pull off any
reform school prank worth the effort.” She was scheming already. “Roland
thought maybe that other new kid, Todd, but I’d rather cast my lot with you. We
should all collaborate sometime.”

Luce swallowed hard. She wasn’t a pyro. But she was done talking about her
past; she didn’t even feel like defending herself.

“Ooh, wait until Roland hears,” Arriane said, throwing down her rake. “You’re
like our dream come true.”

Luce opened her mouth to protest, but Arriane had already taken off. Perfect, Luce thought, listening to the sound of Arriane’s
shoes squishing through the mud. Now it was only a matter of minutes before
word traveled around the cemetery to Daniel.

Alone again, she looked up at the statue. Even though she’d already cleared a
huge pile of moss and mulch, the angel looked dirtier than ever. The whole
project felt so pointless. She doubted anyone ever came to visit this place
anyway. She also doubted that any of the other detainees were still working.

Her eye just happened to fall on Daniel, who was working. He was very diligently using a wire brush to
scrub some mold off the bronze inscription on a tomb. He’d even pushed up the
sleeves of his sweater, and Luce could see his muscles straining as he went at
it. She sighed, and—she couldn’t help it—leaned her elbow against the stone
angel to watch him.
He’s always been such a hard worker.
Luce
quickly shook her head. Where had that come from? She had no idea what it
meant. And yet, she’d been the one who’d thought it. It was the kind of phrase
that sometimes formed in her mind just before she drifted into sleep. Senseless
babble she could never assign to anything outside her dreams. But here she was,
wide-awake.

She needed to get a handle on this Daniel thing. She’d known him for one day,
and already, she could feel herself slipping into a very strange and unfamiliar
place.

“Probably best to stay away from him,” a cold voice behind her said.

Luce whipped around to find Molly, in the same pose she’d found her in
yesterday: hands on her hips, pierced nostrils flaring. Penn had told her that
Sword Cross’s surprising ruling that allowed facial piercings came from
the headmaster’s own reluctance to remove the diamond stud in his ear.

“Who?” she asked Molly, knowing she sounded stupid.

Molly rolled her eyes. “Just trust me when I tell you that falling for Daniel
would be a very, very bad idea.”

Before Luce could answer, Molly was gone. But Daniel—it was almost as if he’d
heard his name—was looking straight at her. Then walking straight at her.

She knew the sun had gone behind a cloud. If she could
break his stare, she could look up and see it for herself. But she couldn’t
look up, she couldn’t look away, and for some reason, she had to squint to see
him. Almost like Daniel was creating his own light, like he was blinding her. A
hollow ringing noise filled up her ears, and her knees began to tremble.

She wanted to pick up her rake and pretend she didn’t see him coming. But it
was too late to play it cool.

“What’d she say to you?” he asked.

“Um,” she hedged, racking her brain for a sensible lie. Finding nothing. She
cracked her knuckles.

Daniel cupped his hand over hers. “I hate it when you do that.”

Luce jerked away instinctively. His hand on hers had been so fleeting, yet she
felt her face flush. He meant it was a pet peeve of his, that knuckle cracking
from anyone would bother him, right? Because to say that he hated it
when she did that implied that he’d seen her do it before. And he
couldn’t have. He barely knew her.

Then why did this feel like a fight they’d had before?

“Molly told me to stay away from you,” she said finally.

Daniel tilted his head from side to side, seeming to consider this. “She’s
probably right.”

Luce shivered. A shadow drifted over them, darkening the angel’s face just long
enough for Luce to worry. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe, praying
Daniel couldn’t tell anything was strange.

But the panic was rising inside her. She wanted to run. She couldn’t run. What
if she got lost in the cemetery?

Daniel followed her gaze toward the sky. “What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“So are you going to do it?” he asked, crossing his arms over his chest, a
dare.

“What?” she said. Pun?
Daniel took a step toward her. He was now less than a foot away. She held
her breath. She kept her body completely still. She waited.

“Are you going to stay away from me?”

It almost sounded like he was flirting.

But Luce was completely out of sorts. Her brow was damp with sweat, and she
squeezed her temples between two fingers, trying to regain possession of her
body, trying to take it back from his control. She was totally unprepared to
flirt back. That was, if what he was doing was actually flirting.

She took a step back. “I guess so.”

“Didn’t hear you,” he whispered, cocking an eyebrow and taking another step
closer.

Luce backed up again, farther this time. She practically slammed into the base
of the statue, and could feel the gritty stone foot of the angel scraping her
back. A second, darker, colder shadow whooshed over them. She could have sworn
Daniel shivered along with her.

And then the deep groan of something heavy startled them both. Luce gasped as
the top of the marble statue teetered over them, like a tree branch swaying in
the breeze. For a second, it seemed to hover in the air.

Luce and Daniel stood staring at the angel. Both of them knew it was on its way
down. The angel’s head bowed slowly toward them, like it was praying—and then
the whole statue picked up speed as it started hurtling down. Luce felt
Daniel’s hand wrap around her waist instantly, tightly, like he knew exactly
where she began and where she ended. His other hand covered her head and forced
her down just as the statue toppled over them. Right where they’d been
standing. It landed with a massive crash—headfirst in the mud, with its feet
still resting on the plinth, leaving a little triangle underneath, where Daniel
and Luce crouched.

They were panting, nose to nose, Daniel’s eyes scared.
Between their bodies and the statue, there were only a few inches of space.

“Luce?” he whispered.

All she could do was nod.

His eyes narrowed. “What did you see?”

Then a hand appeared and Luce felt herself being pulled out of the space under
the statue. There was a scraping against her back and then a waft of air. She
saw the flicker of daylight again. The detention crew stood gaping, except for
Ms. Tross, who was glaring, and Cam, who helped Luce to her feet.

“Are you okay?” Cam asked, running his eyes over her for scrapes and bruises and
brushing some dirt from her shoulder. “I saw the statue coming down and I ran
over to try and stop it, but it was already … You must have been so terrified.”

Luce didn’t respond. Terrified was only part of how she’d felt.

Daniel, already on his feet, didn’t even turn around to see whether she was
okay or not. He just walked away.

Luce’s jaw dropped as she watched him go, as she watched everyone else seem not
to care that he had bailed.

“What did you do?” Ms. Tross asked.
“I don’t know. One minute, we were standing there”—Luce
glanced at Ms. Tross—”um, working. The next thing I knew, the statue just fell
over.”

The Albatross bent down to examine the shattered angel. Its head had cracked
straight down the middle. She started muttering something about forces of
nature and old stones.

FIVE

THE INNER CIRCLE
“Don’t
ever scare me like that again!” Callie reprimanded Luce on Wednesday evening.

It was just before sundown and Luce was folded into the Sword Cross phone
cubby, a tiny beige confine in the middle of the front office area. It was far
from private, but at least no one else was loafing around. Her arms were still
sore from the graveyard shift at yesterday’s detention, her pride still wounded
from Daniel’s fleeing the second they’d been pulled out from under the statue.
But for fifteen minutes, Luce was trying hard to push all that out of her mind,
to soak up every blissfully frantic word her best friend could spit out in the
allotted time. It felt so good to hear Callie’s high-pitched voice, Luce almost
didn’t care that she was being yelled at.

“We promised we wouldn’t go an hour without speaking,” Callie continued
accusingly. “I thought someone had eaten you alive! Or that maybe they stuck
you in solitary in one of those straitjackets where you have to chew through
your sleeve to scratch your face. For all I knew, you could have descended into
the ninth circle of—”

“Okay, Mom,” Luce said, laughing and settling into her role as Callie’s
breathing instructor. “Relax.” For a split second, she felt guilty that she
hadn’t used her one phone call to dial up her real mom. But she knew Callie
would wig out if she ever discovered Luce hadn’t seized her very first
opportunity to get in touch. And in a weird way, it was always soothing to hear
Callie’s hysterical voice. It was one of the many reasons the two were such a
good fit: Her best friend’s over-the-top paranoia actually had a calming effect
on Luce. She could just picture Callie in her dorm room at Dover, pacing her
bright orange area rug, with Oxy smeared over her t-zone and pedicure foam
separating her still-wet fuchsia toenails.

“Don’t Mom me!” Callie huffed. “Start talking. What are the other kids
like? Are they all scary and popping diuretics like in the movies? What about
your classes? How’s the food?”

Through the phone, Luce could hear Roman Holiday playing
in the background on Callie’s tiny TV. Luce’s favorite scene had always been
the one where Audrey Hepburn woke in Gregory Peck’s room, still convinced the
night before had all been a dream. Luce closed her eyes and tried to picture
the shot in her mind. Mimicking Audrey’s drowsy whisper, she quoted the line
she knew Callie would recognize: “There was a man, he was so mean to me.
It was wonderful.”
“Okay, Princess, it’s your life I want to hear about,” Callie
teased.

Unfortunately, there was nothing about Sword Cross that Luce would even
consider describing as wonderful. Thinking about Daniel for, oh, the eightieth
time that day, she realized that the only parallel between her life and Roman
Holiday was that she and Audrey both had a guy who was aggressively rude
and uninterested in them. Luce rested her head against the beige linoleum of
the cubby walls. Someone had carved the words BIDING MY TIME. Under normal
circumstances, this would be when Luce would spill everything about Daniel to
Callie.

Except, for some reason, she didn’t.

Whatever she might want to say about Daniel wouldn’t be based on anything that
had actually happened between them. And Callie was big on guys making an effort
to show they were worthy of you. She’d want to hear things like how many times
he’d held open a door for Luce, or whether he’d noticed how good her French
accent was. Callie didn’t think there was anything wrong with guys writing the
kind of sappy love poems Luce could never take seriously. Luce would
come up severely short on things to say about Daniel. In fact, Callie’d be much
more interested in hearing about someone like Cam.

“Well, there is this guy here,” Luce whispered into the phone.

“I knew it!” Callie squealed. “Name.”

Daniel. Daniel. Luce cleared her throat. “Cam.”

“Direct, uncomplicated. I can dig it. Start from the beginning.”

“Well, nothing’s really happened yet.”

“He thinks you’re gorgeous, blah blah blah. I told you the cropped cut made you
look like Audrey. Get to the good stuff.”

“Well—” Luce broke off. The sound of footsteps in the lobby silenced her. She
leaned out the side of the cubby and craned her neck to see who was
interrupting the best fifteen minutes she’d had in three whole days.

Cam was walking toward her.

Speak of the devil. She swallowed the horrifically lame words on the tip of her
tongue: He gave me his guitar pick. She still had it tucked in her
pocket.

Cam’s demeanor was casual, as if by some stroke of luck he hadn’t heard what
she’d been saying. He seemed to be the only kid at Sword Cross who didn’t
change out of his school uniform the minute classes were over. But the
black-on-black look worked for him, just as much as it worked to make Luce look
like a grocery store checkout girl.

Cam was twirling a golden pocket watch that swung from a long chain looped
around his index finger. Luce followed its bright arc for a moment, almost
mesmerized, until Cam clapped the face of the watch to a stop in his fist. He
looked down at it, then up at her.

“Sorry.” His lips pursed in confusion. “I thought I signed up for the seven
o’clock phone call.” He shrugged. “But I must have written it down wrong.”

Luce’s heart sank when she glanced at her own watch. She and Callie had barely
said fifteen words to each other—how could her fifteen minutes already be up?

“Luce? Hello?” Callie sounded impatient on the other end of the phone. “You’re
being weird. Is there something you’re not telling me? Have you replaced me
already with some reform school cutter? What about the boy?”

“Shhh,” Luce hissed into the phone. “Cam, wait,” she called, holding the phone
away from her mouth. He was already halfway out the door. “Just a second, I
was”—she swallowed—”I was just getting off.”

Cam slipped the pocket watch into the front of his black blazer and doubled
back toward Luce. He raised his eyebrows and laughed when he heard Callie’s
voice growing louder from the earpiece. “Don’t you dare hang up on me,”
Callie protested. “You’ve told me nothing. Nothing!”
“I don’t want to piss anyone off,” Cam joked, gesturing
at the barking telephone. “Take my slot, you can get me back another time.”

“No,” Luce said quickly. As badly as she wanted to keep talking to Callie, she
imagined Cam probably felt the same way about whomever he’d come here to call.
And unlike a lot of the people at this school, Cam had been nothing but nice to
her. She didn’t want to make him give up his turn at the telephone, especially
now, when she’d be way too nervous to gossip with Callie about him.

“Callie,” she said, sighing into the phone. “I gotta go. I’ll call again as
soon as—” But by then there was just the vague buzz of a dial tone in her ear.
The phone itself had been rigged to cap each call at fifteen minutes. Now she
saw the tiny timer blinking 0:00 on its base. They hadn’t even gotten to say
goodbye and now she’d have to wait another whole week to call. Time stretched
out in Luce’s mind like an endless gulf.

“BFF?” Cam asked, leaning up against the cubby next to Luce. His dark eyebrows
were still arched. “I’ve got three younger sisters, I can practically smell the
best-friend vibe through the phone.” He bent forward as if he was going to
sniff Luce, which made her chuckle … and then freeze. His unexpected closeness had made her
heart pick up.

“Let me guess.” Cam straightened back up and lifted his chin. “She wanted to
know all about the reform school bad boys?”

“No!” Luce shook her head to deny vehemently that guys were on her mind at all … until she realized Cam was only kidding. She blushed
and took a stab at joking back. “I mean, I told her there’s not a single good
one here.”

Cam blinked. “Precisely what makes it so exciting. Don’t you think?” He had a
way of standing very still, which made Luce stand very still, which made the
ticking sound of the pocket watch inside his blazer seem louder than it
possibly could have been.

Frozen next to Cam, Luce suddenly shivered as something black swooped into the
hall. The shadow seemed to hopscotch across the panels in the ceiling in a very
deliberate way, blacking out one and then the next and then the next. Damn. It
was never good to be alone with someone—especially someone as focused on her as
Cam was at the moment—when the shadows arrived. She could feel herself
twitching, trying to appear calm as the darkness swirled around the ceiling fan
in a dance. That alone she could have endured. Maybe. But the shadow was also making
the worst of its terrible noises, a sound like the one Luce had heard when
she’d watched a baby owl fall from its palmetto tree and choke to death. She
wished Cam would just stop looking at her. She wished something would happen to
divert his attention. She wished—

Daniel Grigori would walk in.

And then he did. Saved by the gorgeous boy wearing holey jeans and a holier
white T-shirt. He didn’t look much like salvation—slouched over his heavy stack
of library books, gray bags under his gray eyes. Daniel actually looked kind of
wrecked. His blond hair drooped over his eyes, and when they settled on Luce
and Cam, Luce watched them narrow. She was so busy fretting over what she’d
done to annoy Daniel this time, she almost didn’t realize the momentous thing
that happened: The second before the lobby door closed behind him, the shadow
slipped through it and into the night. It was like someone had taken a vacuum
and cleared out all the grit from the hall.

Daniel just nodded in their direction and didn’t slow down as he passed.

When Luce looked at Cam, he was watching Daniel. He turned to Luce and said,
more loudly than he needed to, “I almost forgot to tell you. Having a little
party in my room tonight after Social. I’d love for you to come.”

Daniel was still within earshot. Luce had no idea what this Social thing was,
but she was supposed to meet Penn beforehand. They were supposed to walk over
together.

Her eyes were fixed on the back of Daniel’s head, and she knew she needed to
answer Cam about his party, and it really shouldn’t be so hard, but when Daniel
turned around and looked back at her with eyes she swore were mournful, the
phone behind her started ringing, and Cam reached for it and said, “I’ve got to
take this, Luce. You’ll be there?”

Almost imperceptibly, Daniel nodded.

“Yes,” Luce told Cam. “Yes.”

“I still don’t see why we have to run,” Luce was panting
twenty minutes later. She was trying to keep up with Penn as they scrambled
back across the commons toward the auditorium for the mysterious Wednesday
Night Social, which Penn still hadn’t explained. Luce had barely enough to time
to make it upstairs to her room, to slick on lip gloss and her better jeans
just in case it was that kind of social. She was still trying to slow her
breath down from her run-in with Cam and Daniel when Penn barged into her room to drag her back
out the door.

“People who are chronically tardy never understand the many ways in which they
screw up the schedules of people who are punctual and normal,” Penn told Luce as they splashed through a particularly
soggy portion of the lawn.

“Ha!” A laugh erupted behind them.

Luce looked back and felt her face light up when she saw Arriane’s pale, skinny
frame jogging to catch up with them. “Which quack said you were normal, Penn?”
Arriane nudged Luce and pointed down. “Watch out for the quicksand!”

Luce sloshed to a halt just before she’d have landed in a scarily muddy patch
on the lawn. “Somebody please tell me where we’re going!”

“Wednesday night,” Penn said flatly. “Social Night.”

“Like … a dance or something?” Luce asked, visions of Daniel
and Cam already moving across the dance floor of her mind.

Arriane hooted. “A dance with death by boredom. The term ‘social’ is typical
Sword Cross doublespeak. See, they’re required to schedule social events
for us, but they are also terrified of scheduling social events for us. Sticky
predicky.”

“So instead,” Penn added, “they have these really awful events like movie
nights followed by lectures about the movie, or—God, do you remember last
semester?”

“There was that whole symposium on taxidermy?”

“So, so creepy.” Penn shook her head.

“Tonight, my dear,” Arriane drawled, “we get off easy. All we have to do is
snore through one of the three movies on rotation in the Sword Cross
video library. Which one do you think it’ll be tonight, Pennyloafer? Starman? Joe Versus the Volcano? Or Weekend at Bernie’s?”
“It’s Starman. “Penn groaned.

Arriane shot Luce a baffled look. “She knows everything.”
“Hold on,”
Luce said, tiptoeing around the quicksand and lowering her voice to a whisper
as they approached the front office of the school. “If you’ve all seen these
movies so many times, why the rush to get here?”

Penn pulled open the heavy metal doors to the “auditorium,” which, Luce realized,
was a euphemism for a regular old room with low, drop-paneled ceilings and
chairs arranged to face a blank white wall.

“Don’t want to get stuck in the hot seat next to Mr. Cole,” Arriane explained,
pointing at the teacher. His nose was buried deep inside a thick book, and he
was surrounded by the few remaining empty chairs in the room.

As the three girls stepped through the metal detector at the door, Penn said,
“Whoever sits there has to help pass out his weekly ‘mental health’ surveys.”

“Which wouldn’t be so bad—” Arriane chimed in.

“—if you didn’t have to stay late to analyze the findings,” Penn finished.

“Thereby missing,” Arriane said with a grin, steering Luce toward the second
row as she whispered, “the after-party.”

Finally they’d gotten down to the heart of the matter.
Luce chuckled.
“I heard about that,” she said, feeling slightly with it
for a change. “It’s in Cam’s room, right?”

Arriane looked at Luce for a second and ran her tongue across her teeth. Then
she looked past, almost through, Luce. “Hey, Todd,” she called, waving with
just the tips of her fingers. She pushed Luce into one seat, claimed the safe
spot next to her (still two seats down from Mr. Cole), and patted the hot seat.
“Come sit with us, T-man!”

Todd, who’d been shifting his weight in the doorway, looked immensely relieved
to be given the directive, any directive. He started toward them, swallowing.
No sooner had he fumbled into the seat than Mr. Cole looked up from his book,
cleaned his glasses on his handkerchief, and said, “Todd, I’m glad you’re here.
I’m wondering if you can help me with a small favor after the film. You see,
the Venn diagram is a very useful tool for …“
“Mean!”
Penn popped her face up between Arriane and Luce.

Arriane shrugged and produced a giant bag of popcorn from her carpetbag. “I can
only look after so many new students,” she said, tossing a buttery kernel at
Luce. “Lucky you.”

As the lights in the room dimmed, Luce looked around until her eyes landed on
Cam. She thought about her abbreviated dish session on the phone with Callie,
and how her friend always said that watching a movie with a guy was the best
way to get to know things about him, things that might not come out in a
conversation. Looking at Cam, Luce thought she knew what Callie meant: There
would be something sort of thrilling about glancing out of the corner of her
eye to see what jokes Cam thought were funny, to join his laughter with her
own.

When his eyes met hers, Luce felt an embarrassed instinct to look away. But
then, before she could, Cam’s face lit up in a broad smile. It made her feel
remarkably unabashed about being caught staring. When he put his hand up in a
wave, Luce couldn’t help thinking about how the exact opposite had happened the
few times Daniel had caught her looking at him.

Daniel rolled in with Roland, late enough that Randy had already taken a head
count, late enough that the only remaining seats were on the floor at the front
of the room. He passed through the beam of light from the projector and Luce noticed
for the first time a silver chain around his neck, and some sort of medallion
tucked inside his T-shirt. Then he dipped completely out of her view. She
couldn’t even see his profile.

As it turned out, Starman wasn’t very funny, but the other students’ constant
Jeff Bridges impersonations were. It was hard for Luce to stay focused on the
plot. Plus, she was getting that uncomfortable icy feeling at the back of her
neck. Something was about to happen.

When the shadows came this time, Luce was expecting them. Then she started to
think about it and counted a tally on her fingers. The shadows had been popping
up at an increasingly alarming rate, and Luce couldn’t figure out whether she
was just nervous at Sword Cross … or whether it meant something else. They’d never been
this bad before…

They oozed overhead in the auditorium, then slithered along the sides of the
movie screen, and finally traced the lines of the floorboards like spilled ink.
Luce gripped the bottom of her chair and felt an ache of fear swell through her
legs and arms. She tightened all the muscles in her body, but she couldn’t keep
from trembling. A squeeze on her left knee made her look over at Arriane.

“You okay?” Arriane mouthed.

Luce nodded and hugged her shoulders, pretending she was merely cold. She
wished she was, but this particular chill had nothing to do with Sword
Cross’s overzealous air conditioner.

She could feel the shadows tugging at her feet under her chair. They stayed
like that, deadweight for the whole movie, and every minute dragged on like an
eternity.

An hour later, Arriane pressed her eye up against the
peephole of Cam’s bronze-painted dorm room door. “Yoo-hoo,” she sang, giggling.
“The festivities are here!’

She produced a hot-pink feather boa from the same magic carpetbag the bag of
popcorn had come from. “Give me a boost,” she said to Luce, dangling her foot
in the air.

Luce hooked her fingers together and positioned them under Arriane’s black
boot. She watched as Arriane pushed off the ground and used the boa to cover
the face of the hallway surveillance camera while she reached around the back
of the device and switched it off.

“That’s not suspicious or anything,” Penn said.

“Does your allegiance lie with the after-party?” Arriane shot back. “Or the red
party?”
“I’m just saying there are smarter ways.” Penn snorted as
Arriane hopped down. Arriane slung the boa over Luce’s shoulders, and Luce
laughed and started to shimmy to the Motown song they could hear through the
door. But when Luce offered the boa to Penn for a turn, she was surprised to
see her still looking nervous. Penn was biting her nails and sweating at the
brow. Penn wore six sweaters in the swampy southern September heat—she was
never hot.

“What’s wrong?” Luce whispered, leaning in.

Penn picked at the hem of her sleeve and shrugged. She looked like she was just
about to answer when the door behind them opened up. A whoosh of cigarette
smoke, blasting music, and suddenly Cam’s open arms greeted them.

“You made it,” he said, smiling at Luce. Even in the dim light, his lips had a
berry-stained glow. When he folded her in for a hug, she felt tiny and safe. It
lasted only a second; then he turned to nod hello at the other two girls, and
Luce felt a little proud to have been the one who got the hug.

Behind Cam, the small, dark room was crammed with people. Roland was in one
corner, at the turntable, holding up records to a black light. The couple Luce
had seen on the quad a few days before cozied up against the window. The preppy
boys with the white oxford shirts were all huddled up together, occasionally
checking out the girls. Arriane wasted no time shooting across the room toward
Cam’s desk, which looked like it was doubling as a bar. Almost immediately, she
had a champagne bottle between her legs and was laughing as she tried to pry
off the cork.

Luce was baffled. She hadn’t even known how to get booze at Dover, where the
outside world had been a lot less off-limits. Cam had been back at Sword
Cross for only a few days, but already, he seemed to know how to smuggle
everything he needed to throw a Dionysian soirée the entire school showed up
to. And somehow everyone else inside thought this was normal.

Still standing at the threshold, she heard the pop, then the cheers from the
rest of the crowd, then Arriane’s voice calling out: “Lucindaaa, get in here.
I’m about to make a toast.”

Luce could feel the party’s magnetism, but Penn looked much less ready to
budge.

“You go ahead,” she said, waving a hand at Luce.

“What’s wrong? You don’t want to go in?” The truth was, Luce was a little
nervous herself. She had no idea what might go down at these things, and since
she still wasn’t sure how reliable Arriane was, it would definitely make her
feel better to have Penn at her side.

But Penn frowned. “I’m … I’m out of my element. I do libraries … workshops on how to use PowerPoint. You want a file
hacked into, I’m your girl. But this—” She stood on tiptoes and peered into the
room. “I don’t know. People in there just think I’m some kind of know-it-all.”

Luce attempted her best give-me-a-break frown. “And they think I’m a
slab of meat loaf, and we think they’re all totally bananas.” She laughed. “Can’t we all just
get along?” Slowly Penn curled her lip, then took the feather boa and draped it
around her shoulders. “Oh, all right,” she said, clomping inside ahead of Luce.

Luce blinked as her eyes adjusted. A cacophony filled
the room, but she could hear Arriane’s laughing voice. Cam shut the door behind
her and tugged Luce’s hand so she’d hang back, away from the heart of the
party.
“I’m really glad you came,” he said, putting his hand on
the small of her back and bending his head so she could hear him in the loud
room. Those lips looked almost tasty, especially when they said things like “I
jumped up every time someone knocked, hoping it’d be you.”

Whatever had drawn Cam to her so quickly, Luce didn’t want to do anything to
mess it up. He was popular and unexpectedly thoughtful, and his attention made
her feel more than flattered. It made her feel more comfortable in this strange
new place. She knew if she tried to respond to his compliment, she’d stumble
over the words. So she just laughed, which made him laugh, and then he pulled
her in for another hug.

Suddenly there was no place to put her own hands but around his neck. She felt
a little light-headed as Cam squeezed her, lifting her feet slightly off the
ground.

When he put her back down, Luce turned to the rest of the party, and the first
thing she saw was Daniel. But she didn’t think he liked Cam. Still, he was
sitting cross-legged on the bed, his white T-shirt glowing violet in the black
light. As soon as her eyes found him, it was hard to look anywhere else. Which
didn’t make sense, because a gorgeous and friendly guy was standing right
behind her, asking her what she’d like to drink. The other gorgeous, infinitely
less friendly guy sitting across from her should not be the one she couldn’t
stop looking at. And he was staring at her. So intently, with a cryptic, squinting look in his eyes
that Luce thought she’d never decode, even if she saw it a thousand times.

All she knew was the effect it had on her. Everyone else in the room went out
of focus and she melted. She could have stared back all night if it hadn’t been
for Arriane, who had climbed on top of the desk and called out to Luce, her
glass raised in the air.

“To Luce,” she toasted, giving Luce a saintly smile. “Who was obviously zoning
and missed my entire welcome speech and who will never know how utterly fabulous it was— wasn’t it fabulous,
Ro?” she leaned down to ask Roland, who patted her ankle affirmatively.

Cam slipped a plastic cup of champagne into Luce’s hand. She blushed and tried
to laugh it off as the whole rest of the party echoed, “To Luce! To Meat Loaf!”


At her side, Molly slithered up and whispered a shorter version in her ear: “To
Luce, who will never
know.”

A few days before, Luce would have flinched away. Tonight, she simply rolled
her eyes, then turned her back on Molly. The girl had never said a word that
didn’t leave Luce feeling bitten, but showing it seemed only to egg her on. So
Luce just hunkered down to share the desk chair with Penn, who handed her a
rope of black licorice.

“Can you believe it? I think I’m actually having fun,” Penn said, chewing
happily.

Luce bit down on the licorice and took a tiny sip of the fizzy champagne. Not a
very palatable combination. Kind of like her and Molly. “So is Molly that evil
to everyone, or am I a special case?”

For a second Penn looked like she was going to give a different answer, but
then she patted Luce on the back. “Just her usual charming demeanor, my dear.”

Luce looked around the room at all the free-flowing champagne, at Cam’s fancy
vintage turntable, at the disco ball spinning over their heads, casting stars
on everyone’s faces.

“Where do they get all this stuff?” she wondered aloud.

“People say Roland can smuggle anything into Sword Cross,” Penn said
matter-of-factly. “Not that I’ve ever asked him.”

Maybe this was what Arriane meant when she said Roland knew how to get things.
The only off-limits item Luce could imagine wanting badly enough to ask about
was a cell phone. But then … Cam had said not to listen to Arriane about the inner
workings of the school. Which would have been fine, except so much of his party
seemed to be courtesy of Roland. The more she tried to untangle her questions,
the less things added up. She should probably stick to being just “in” enough
to get invited to the parties.

“Okay, all you rejects,” Roland said loudly to get everyone’s attention. The
record player had quieted down to the static between songs. “We’re going to
start the open-mike portion of the night, and I’m taking requests for karaoke.”


“Daniel Grigori!” Arriane hooted through her hands.