Copyright © 2012 by Stacey Kade
All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011-5690.
ISBN 978-1-4231-7287-1
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Table of Contents
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To my editor, Christian Trimmer:
Thank you for giving me the chance to tell these stories and for helping me make them better than I ever dreamed they could be. I am so grateful to be one of your authors.
Malachi the Magnificent, Consultant to the Stars, had a storefront in a dingy, rundown strip mall between a sketchy-looking Laundromat and a closed-up nail salon with a big, bright orange health department sticker plastered on its door. It couldn’t have been less magnificent if he’d tried.
My heart sank. This was the guy we were going to for help on life-and-death matters?
I looked over at Will in the driver’s seat. “You’re kidding, right?”
“What’s wrong?” he asked, making the turn into the crumbling and pothole-filled lot, which was—surprise, surprise—basically empty, even on a warm and sunny Friday afternoon.
“Look at this place! It’s about six seconds from being raided by the police…or Health and Sanitation.” I shuddered.
At least Madame Selena had had her own building…about sixteen inches from the edge of the highway, but still. And she had a turban. Say what you will, but it certainly added an air of mystery to her, like what, exactly, she was hiding under it.
“Appearances can be deceiving.” Will looked over at me pointedly.
I shoved her… myfine brown hair away from my eyes and glared at him. “Oh, ha-ha. Very funny.”
I’d been stuck inside Lily Turner’s body for almost a month now. My well-intentioned attempt as a spirit to simply borrow her body for the purposes of communicating with the living had backfired in a huge way. And now I had to pretend to be Lily. Or try to, anyway.
I’m an expert at pretending. I spent a lot of years and even more effort convincing people that the perfectly put together and trouble-free Alona Dare they knew and seemingly loved was the real deal instead of a carefully crafted and maintained cover.
But being a whole other person—someone I’d never met—that was a stretch, even with my skills.
I’d read Lily’s diary (revoltingly full of naive gushing about Ben Rogers—barf ), reviewed the contents of her pathetic closet, and dug into the depths of her medicine cabinet (cheap makeup in the wrong color palette and one bottle of expired antibiotics—boring).
But none of that told me how to beher, especially around her family. And I was failing…miserably. I didn’t know Lily’s favorite color, that she was allergic to strawberries (found that one out the hard way), or that she hated that old Backstreet Boys song “Everybody,” which her younger brother, Tyler, played over and over again just to bug her. I’d just tuned it out and chalked it up as another example of Tyler’s bad taste, in music this time instead of fashion.
Trauma and brain injury could explain away a lot, but not enough. The Turners had given me space in the beginning to “adjust,” but now, unsurprisingly, Mrs. Turner was pressing for more time, more interaction…just more from me. And I couldn’t do it; I couldn’t be their Lily even if I wanted to…and in a funny-odd kind of way, I really did.
I didn’t blame the Turners, and I didn’t want to hurt them—they’d been so patient and nice to me—but I felt like I couldn’t breathe with all this pressure. Pressure not only to be Lily Turner but to be the correct Lily Turner, the one they all remembered.
And Will was no help. His experiences with Lily had been mostly at school. He didn’t know much of anything about her home life, at least not in enough detail to be useful.
Their friend Joonie might have had more info, given her former crush on Lily, and she’d even called from Boston a couple of times to check on “me” after hearing “I” had woken from the coma. But I’d kept the conversations short and as generically polite as possible, feigning memory loss. She sounded like she was actually doing all right living with her sister, and the last thing I wanted was to say or do anything that might cause her to worry and come rushing back here. Nota good idea, for a lot of reasons.
So, in short, this being-Lily thing was a mess. One I needed out of as soon as possible, but definitely before school started back up in a couple of weeks. That was the one thing that could make this situation worse—going back to school as Lily Turner. Or as a freaking junior.
But that was easier said than done. What I’d accomplished was rare—possessing a body for any length of time was virtually unheard-of. Getting me out would be one hell of a trick. Keeping Lily alive without me would be another. Her body was now, in theory, dependent on the energy my spirit provided. So, in short, even if we could find a way to get me out, I couldn’t leave unless we could find a way to save Lily, too—a way to bring her spirit back from the light or some kind of energy substitute or something.
Essentially, we were looking for a two-for-one miracle. But after only a few weeks, we’d exhausted most of our semibrilliant ideas and reached desperate-measures level. We’d take anything now, any clue to point us in the correct direction.
Hence, Malachi the allegedly Magnificent.
“What’s so special about this one again?” I asked as Will pulled into a parking space. “Aside from raising our chances of catching hepatitis, I mean.” I looked at the nail salon and shuddered again.
Malachi would be the third “psychic medium” (a.k.a. “big faker”) we’d seen in the last couple of weeks. And frankly, he didn’t seem any more promising than the others.
“He has a star by his name…I think,” Will said, cutting the engine.
“You think?” I demanded.
He shifted uneasily in his seat. “It’s not exactly clear, okay? I’m pretty sure it’s a star.”
“So, just to clarify, we’re here in janky-land because of a possible doodle?”
He looked at me, stung. “Hey, we’ve been over this. If you have any better ideas—”
“Just…let me see it again.” I waved my hand impatiently at him in a “gimme” gesture.
He glared at me but twisted to the side to reach into his back pocket, and I tried hard not to notice that doing so made his shirt pull tighter against his chest and brought him so much closer to me. Like, touching close.
Heat crawled up my neck into my face, and I looked away, hoping he wouldn’t notice. God. This body thing—technically, in this case, I suppose it was hisbody and my reaction to it—was killing me. Could I please be non-corporeal again? Now? I did not like this…flesh and blood intensity. It was all out-of-control feeling, and I did not DO out-of-control.
“Here.” He bumped my arm with the back of his hand, holding out a carefully folded rectangle of yellow paper.