“It’s Kaylee,” I corrected.
“My mistake.” She scribbled through whatever she’d already written and started over. “And your mistake was the public display on school grounds. That’ll get you a detention apiece.”
I glanced at Nash to find him grinning at me, the browns and greens in his eyes swirling with mischief. I shrugged and went up on my toes again, speaking to Coach Tucker even as my lips met Nash’s. “Better make it two.”
It’s not like I’d be there to serve them.
8
“What are they for?” Emma whispered, staring at the detention slips I was now using to mark chapter fifteen in my algebra book.
“Public display.”
“Both of them?”
I’d made Nash and Sabine promise not to tell Emma that I was days from death, in spite of our new “full disclosure” policy, because it seemed cruel to make her anticipate what was coming for days in advance. That was hard enough for me and Nash—Sabine didn’t seem to be suffering—and I wouldn’t put my best friend through it, if I could possibly spare her. And I have to admit, it felt good to talk to someone who didn’t get sad and overprotective the minute I walked into the room. So she didn’t understand my new cavalier approach to the school’s code of conduct.
I shrugged, grinning from ear to ear. “I guess we didn’t look sorry enough after the first one.”
Emma gaped at me, and I almost laughed out loud. Knowing I was going to die changed everything. Consequences no longer mattered, so long as they didn’t hurt anyone else—and Nash’s detentions didn’t count. There was no way they’d make him serve them while he was mourning the death of his girlfriend.
I could do whatever I wanted. And that incredible liberty—the only thing even approaching a bright side to the terrifying reality of my own death—left me feeling light-headed. And maybe a bit reckless.
I could stay up till four in the morning and eat pizza and ice cream for every meal. I could stay out all night. I could get drunk. I could have sex. I could get a piercing or a tattoo. I could stand up in the middle of sixth period and tell Mrs. Brown that the past perfect conjugation of irregular French verbs would never come in handy for me at all, and yes I did know that for a fact!
Next week, no one would care whether I’d gained weight or fallen asleep in class, or skipped school entirely. What did it matter if I failed French, or my piercing got infected, or I got pregnant?
But thinking of pregnancy killed my rebellion buzz with a single, gruesome mental image of Danica Sussman bleeding on the floor. Which reminded me of Mr. Beck, and when I looked up, he was walking down the aisle toward me and Emma, a stack of graded quizzes in hand.
For a moment, I couldn’t breathe, afraid that he’d take one look at me and know exactly what I was thinking. That was entirely possible; we still didn’t know what he was. So when he put a quiz facedown on my desk, then moved on to the next student, I exhaled with relief.
Okay, I guess some consequences still matter…
I flipped the paper over. Eighty-two. Normally, that would bother me. I was pulling a high B in algebra II and I’d hoped to push that into the low A range by the end of the term, mostly because Nash’s grades—at least, pre-frost addiction—made me look bad. But now, a low B was the last thing on my mind.
Mr. Beck came back up the next row and put a paper facedown on Emma’s desk, but instead of moving on, he leaned over and whispered something to her. Something I couldn’t hear. Emma nodded. And when he walked away, she was grinning from ear to ear.
“What’d he say?” I asked, leaning across the aisle as he headed toward the whiteboard at the front of the room. Something had gone wrong on a cosmic level if Em had aced a quiz I’d barely pulled a B on.
She turned up one corner of her paper so I could see her grade. Fifty-four.
“Since when is an F a good thing?”
“He wants to talk to me after class,” she explained, eyes bright with excitement that gave me chills. Em had failed the quiz.
And caught Mr. Beck’s attention.
“What’d he say?” I fell into step with Emma as she left Mr.
Beck’s room several minutes after class, acutely aware that though she had a late pass, I did not. Then I remembered that didn’t matter. Next week, instead of serving detention, I’d be taking the great dirt nap.
“The usual. I’m a smart girl, but I’m not applying myself. Math is relevant to my future….”
She kept talking, but her answer faded into the ambient hallway chatter when a familiar set of dark eyes caught my attention, and goose bumps popped up all over my body. Thane stood across the hall, leaning against a bank of lockers in black jeans and a plain black T-shirt, still and silent against the rush of traffic and noise. He watched me, smiling intimately about the secret we shared. The future I would not have. The last moments of my life, which he would no doubt savor.
“Kaylee?” Emma elbowed me in the ribs. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” I made myself turn away from the reaper, confident no one else could see him. And absolutely certain that he was still watching me. “What were you saying?”
“Mr. Beck said that maybe I just need a little extra help to get all caught up.”
“That’s it?” If that was it, why was Em practically glowing, like she did at parties, when every head in the room turned to watch her dance?
Emma pushed open the door to the bathroom and I followed her inside as the second period late bell rang. “Yeah. He thinks I could bump my average up to a B with a little tutoring.”
“Who’s the tutor?” Please, please say it’s a senior with mad math skills…
“That’s the best part. He’s gonna tutor me himself. After school.” She grinned at me in the mirror, pulling a tube of lip gloss from her purse. “And I suspect it just might take me a while to pick up on the more complicated concepts.” Her eyes glittered with excitement, and my stomach churned. Something was wrong.
I leaned against the wall, clutching my books. Sabine was supposed to draw a foul, not Emma. Sabine could take care of herself, but Emma had no defensive abilities whatsoever, beyond a blinding distraction of cleavage, and she had no concept of how dangerous the world really was, even knowing that humans weren’t alone in it.
“Em, this is a bad idea,” I said, squatting to peek beneath the row of stalls to make sure we were alone. All good, unless someone at Eastlake had developed powers of invisibility. “Why don’t you just go hit on someone in honors calculus?”
“Because there’s no one hot in honors calculus,” she said without moving her lips, as she dabbed clear gloss on over her lipstick. Then she eyed me in the mirror, screwing the lid back on the tube. “What’s the big deal, Kay? It’s an hour after school, twice a week. In a classroom. If I have to learn function notation, shouldn’t I at least have something pretty to look at until my brain self-destructs?”
I dropped my backpack and leaned with both hands on the edge of the sink, staring at her reflection in disbelief. “Em, he could be dangerous. He’s not human!”
“Neither are you!”
“Yeah, and I’m dangerous! How many times have you almost died because of me?”
She dropped her gloss into her purse, then set her purse on the stack of books balanced on the edge of the next sink. “Why do you have to be the storm cloud, always raining on my parade? Why can’t you let me pretend—just this once—that someone smart, and hot, and thoroughly post-pubescent could possibly be interested in me?”
“Because you don’t need to pretend. He could totally be interested in you, and that’s the problem.”