“I was afraid you weren’t going to pick up,” Emma said. There was an undertone to her voice. She had something to tell me. Something bad.
“Yeah, sorry. Just a minute.” I gestured to Passion, letting her know I was going to take the call into the bathroom for some privacy. As I pulled the door shut, I saw her returning to the closet to try on yet another shirt.
I sat down on the toilet seat in the dark and braced myself for the news that the evil doctor had woken from his coma. Maybe this would light a fire under people’s butts to realize I really had seen Mike Palmer. “Okay, go ahead. What’s up?” I asked, trying to sound casual even while my insides wound themselves into a knot.
“It’s your mom, Liv. She left Greenfield yesterday. We don’t know where she went. She wouldn’t even tell my mom. But she was in bad shape. I can tell my parents are really worried, even though they’re trying not to show it.”
“She left?” I asked. “What about her practice and her clients? What about her comatose boyfriend?”
“He’s still in a coma. And she closed her practice.”
“She closed her practice?” Fuck. That was bad. My mom hadn’t even closed her practice when my dad was dying. “Are you sure she doesn’t know where I am?” I drilled Emma.
“Well, I didn’t tell her,” Emma said defensively. “I don’t even know where you are.”
“I know. Sorry. This just doesn’t sound like my mom.”
“She’s changed, Liv, since you left. She’s been through a lot.”
“And I haven’t?” I asked, my hackles up instantly. If my mother was some kind of changed, broken woman, was that my fault? Yes, I’d left, but I hadn’t really had a choice, and if she would have believed me at all or been willing to help me, things might have been different. She’d made her decisions. And I’d made mine.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Emma said. “You’ve been through a lot too. We’re just worried. Do you have any idea where she might have gone?”
“I don’t know. My grandma’s, maybe? She lives in Orlando near Disney World. They don’t get along, but we went there once when I was a kid and stayed for a while.” My mom and I had stayed with my grandma for about a month when I was four, after my parents had a very big fight. I had not enjoyed that trip at all. My grandma was a cranky, bitter old widow who had bad-mouthed my dad, called me chubby, and treated my mother like a child. The only good part about the trip had been the frequent visits to Disney World.
Eventually, my mother had a much bigger fight with my grandma than she’d ever had with my dad, and we returned to Greenfield. And it was after that trip that my mom went back to school and got her PHD in psychology, probably because she’d finally realized my grandma was crazy and she needed to figure out why. We hadn’t visited Grandma since, but it was one of the few places my mom might go.
The other possibility was my Uncle Bert, who was an architect and lived in New York—the state, not the city. They’d been close as kids, but since he’d moved to the East Coast they’d drifted apart.
“Do you know your grandma’s number?” Emma asked. “I could have my mom try to call, or you could.”
“No, I don’t have her number. I’m sure my mom will be fine. She probably just needed to get away.”
“Okay,” Emma said, sounding unsure, like she was more worried about my mother than I was. And I was worried about her. But I had a lot of other shit to worry about, and there was nothing I could do about her leaving. Besides, at least she’d left that CAMFer psycho’s bedside, and wouldn’t be in Greenfield if any more of them showed up.
“What about Passion’s family?” I asked Emma. “Are they looking for her?”
“No. They’re still sticking to that story about her being at some Christian rehab camp.”
Unbelievable. No wonder Passion had needed therapy. She was missing and her parents didn’t give a rat’s ass.
“And there’s been no sign of Mike Palmer,” Emma added, “but the rumor going around is he retired and went to live on some ranch in New Mexico.”
No, Mike Palmer wasn’t in New Mexico. I was sure of that.
“Everything else is the same old boring Greenfield,” Emma grumbled. “There’s been no sign of the CAMFers. I almost wish I’d gone with you guys.”
“I wish you had too,” I said, missing her. Missing home, and my dad, and even my mom so hard for a minute that it lodged in my throat and hurt my chest.
“Well, I know you can’t tell me much. But you’re okay, right?”
“Yeah, I’m good. We’re getting a break from the tents for a few days and staying in a real house.”
“Oh, good,” Emma said.
I could tell she wanted to ask more, and I wished I could tell her about the mansion, and Indy, and The Hold, but I couldn’t.
“How are you and Marcus?” she asked. It was a loaded question. One I wanted to spend hours answering. But Nose had warned me about talking too long. The longer Emma and I spoke the more easily the call could be traced, and having that in the back of your mind didn’t exactly make for chatty conversations.
“We’re fine. Yeah, good. But I should probably go. Thanks for calling, Em, and for telling me about my mom.”
“Sure, okay.” I could hear the worry in her voice. “I’ll send you a text setting up the next call. Be safe, Liv.”
“I will. I love you, Emma.”
“I love you too.”
I hung up the phone and I sat in the dark bathroom. Emma and Greenfield and my mom—it didn’t feel like that world even existed anymore. It was fiction, like a bunch of characters in a story I’d read once.
I’d barely even thought about my dad in the last few weeks. In Greenfield, everything had reminded me of him, every day, a thousand times a day. But since I’d left, everything had been new, without any mark of him on it, except for The Other Olivia. Thank God I had that, but still, the further I traveled away from home and the more I experienced, the harder it was to remember him. And if I lost those memories, what did I have left? A singed painting. Even as I sat there, I tried to call up his face in my mind, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t see my dad’s face.
“Olivia,” Passion’s voice came through the door. “I really need to pee.”
“Sorry,” I said, getting up and opening the door.
Passion and I went to bed late that night, but I was awake even later, thinking of my dad, trying to call forth his face. And then it came to me, right before I drifted off to sleep.
But it finally came.
13
FIRST DAY AT EDGEMONT HIGH
Edgemont High was not only one of the wealthiest public high schools in Indianapolis; it was one of the wealthiest in the country. It had two different campuses, one for lower classmen, and one for upper classmen. The “New Student Welcome Packet” Marcus had handed me that morning had a double-sided, multi-folded map of the Senior Campus.
Passion and I had come from a high school of 116 students. Edgemont High had a larger population than the entire town of Greenfield. Add to that the fact that we’d been camping and hiding in the woods for a couple of weeks, and it probably wasn’t a huge surprise that as soon as Passion and I stepped into the Edgemont High School Senior Complex, we freaked.
We clung to each other just inside the door as bodies rushed past us, bumping us, invading our personal space, oblivious to us.
Someone slammed into me from behind, crushing my designer back pack into my shoulder blades, and almost knocking me to the floor.
“Stop blocking the fucking doorway,” a stocky, dark-haired girl said, and then she was gone, swallowed by the masses.
When I straightened up, I could feel the coolness of the dog tags brush against my skin under my shirt. They might keep me safe from CAMFers, but they wouldn’t do anything to protect Passion and me from an entire campus of hostile rich kids. At least we could be fairly confident none of them were armed. Every public school over a certain size was required to have weapons scanners b
uilt into all its entry points. We’d probably been scanned as soon as we stepped through the door, which was precisely why we’d left our guns at home.
Someone else almost ran into Passion, so we shuffled to one side, arm in arm, trying to skirt the edges of the mob—but that put us in front of the lockers.
“Get out of the way.”
“Hey, I need in there.”
“What’s your problem?” a tall hipster guy asked, staring at my gloved hands. “You do know that Michael Jackson is dead, right?”
We moved again, out into the center of the hallway, and were quickly swept along.
A bell rang right over our heads and the frantic mayhem, if possible, increased.
I’d had enough. I planted my feet firmly on the floor, held onto Passion with one hand, and grabbed at the arm of a passing student with the other.
“Where are we?” I asked the tall geeky-looking guy I’d pulled out of the stream of teenage humanity flowing past us.
He looked down at the school map I was holding, jabbed at it with his finger, and said, “Right here.” And then he was gone, pulled back into the torrent rushing down the hallway.
“Great,” I growled under my breath, turning to Passion. Marcus had supposedly dropped us off at the school entrance nearest the office, but it had only taken five minutes for us to get hopelessly and completely lost. According to Geek Guy, we weren’t even in the right hallway.
“Let’s wait for the second bell,” Passion said. “It’s our first day. We can be late.”
“Good idea,” I said, noticing a small alcove with drinking fountains not too far from where we stood. I nodded toward it. “Let’s see if we can make it over there.”
With Passion in the lead, we pushed our way through the moving crowd, looks of momentary annoyance flashing past us like the fast-forward of a first-day-of-school nightmare.
We made it to the drinking fountains, and I took a drink. Who knew when we might find water again in this labyrinth someone had disguised as a high school.
Passion took a drink too, as I watched the students rush by, marveling at their diversity, and yet their oneness. Every one of them knew where they were going, and why, and seemed to belong. Except for us. We dressed the part, but we were pretty poor imposters.
The bell rang again, its trill echoing around us. Suddenly the flow of students in the hallway drained away, leaving behind only a few stragglers rushing madly past, a couple of dropped flyers for some upcoming event swirling in their wake.
I looked up and down the hall and saw the last classroom doors slam shut.
“All clear,” I said to Passion, looking at the map of the school again. “I think if we take a right up here, and then a left, we’ll be heading in the direction of the office.”
“Lead the way,” Passion said.
We passed several classrooms and a large double doorway marked Auxiliary Gym Two. Holy shit. This school was so big they had two extra gyms?
Just as we rounded the first corner, we began to hear a strange sound, like motorized bees, buzzing down the hallway toward us.
I stopped, looking at Passion, and she looked at me.
A herd of teenagers on Segways came barreling around the corner and we stood, immobilized with surprise.
We didn’t even have time to move aside before the leader of the pack was on us. Samantha James, tall, willowy, beautiful and with a presence that commanded your attention, pulled her Segway up right in front of us and stepped off of it.
“You must be the new girls,” she said, tucking her hair behind her PSS ear and staring at Passion while completely ignoring me. “Welcome to Edgemont High.”
Passion and I had rehearsed this first encounter, but we’d never expected it to come so soon. What were the chances that in a high school as big as Edgemont we’d run into Samantha in the first ten minutes? They were slim to none. Which probably meant Marcus had been completely wrong and The Hold had been expecting us.
Anyway, even if that was true, I had to play it cool. I had to act like I didn’t know they knew. And hopefully Passion would remember what we’d talked about concerning Samantha’s PSS.
“Wow, your ear, it’s beautiful,” Passion said, exactly like we’d practiced. “Is that PSS? I’ve never seen it before.”
“Yes,” Samantha said, looking Passion up and down, a puzzled but intent expression on her face.
The students behind Samantha, two guys and three girls, dismounted their Segways, but they didn’t come forward, or smile, or even really look at us. They just stood there watching Samantha stare at Passion, as if waiting for some cue. What was this? The Edgemont welcome committee? If so, they definitely needed to brush up on their hospitality.
“I’m Mirabelle,” Passion said, holding up the conversational end of our plan much better than I was. “And this is my cousin, Anne. And yeah, it’s our first day. We were trying to find the office to get our schedules.”
Samantha didn’t even glance my way or indicate she’d heard the introduction. She was still staring at Passion, her eyes traveling up and down the poor girl’s body, practically undressing her. There was a look of such intensity on Samantha’s face, I felt myself blush just being a witness to it. And that look certainly wasn’t lost on Passion who began to turn several distinct shades of pink as well.
“So, it’s this way, right?” I said, gesturing down the hall, limp map in my hand, trying to break the spell of that look.
Finally, Samantha James glanced at me with a quick flick of her eyes, a two second evaluation followed by immediate, unmitigated dismissal.
“I can take you to the office,” she said, directing her words at Passion. “I’m Samantha, by the way. Samantha James.”
Ouch. I mean I was used to being overlooked by the male half of the population. Adding the other half to that equation wasn’t too big of a blow to my ego. But still, acknowledging my existence would have been nice.
“These are my friends,” Samantha said, waving at the group behind her. “This is Renzo,” she said, indicating the tall, dark, handsome guy wearing a black leather jacket and sunglasses who’d stepped up next to her. “And this is Dimitri,” she said, gesturing at a thick-necked, blond jock-type. “And this is Eva, Lily, and Juliana,” she said, introducing the three girls, all gorgeous, but with smiles that never quite reached their eyes.
The whole gang stepped forward and said hi to us both, but I thought I saw a flash of jealousy on both Dimitri’s and Lily’s faces as they appraised Passion. What had we stepped into? I wasn’t sure it served our purpose to have Passion intrude on what seemed to already be a rather complicated love triangle. Then again, it might be exactly the thing we needed to break Samantha away from it all. Or I could be completely off base. My social radar was notoriously awful.
“Hi, everyone,” Passion said, shyly. “What’s with the Segways?”
“Dimitri is the president of the Physics Club,” Samantha explained, “and we have the science fair coming up. We’re trying to get the turning-radius perfectly calibrated for the obstacle course.”
So, he was a jock-type with brains. “You’re racing Segways for the science fair?” I choked out, thinking of the three failed volcanoes I’d entered in the Greenfield science fair three years in a row.
“Technically, the obstacle course is just to raise funds,” Dimitri said proudly. “The parents love to bet on it. But the real project is the Segways themselves. We build them from scratch.”
I didn’t even know what to say to that.
The classroom door nearest us swung open, and a guy came out holding a pass in his hand, probably on his way to the bathroom.
“Hey,” Samantha said, grabbing him by the arm and propelling him onto her Segway. “Take this back to the physics lab,” she ordered. “Follow Dimitri. He’ll show you what to do. The rest of you head back, and I’ll meet you in the practice room next period. I’m going to help Mirabelle and her cousin get to the office.”
“No, really,” Pas
sion said. “Just point the way. We’ll be fine.”
What was she doing? We were supposed to be making friends with Samantha, not blowing her off.
“It’s no problem,” Samantha said, turning to Passion with a radiant smile. Her friends and the bathroom boy were already mounting their Segways and rolling away.
“Well, thanks,” Passion said, looking at me, a question in her eyes as we both followed Samantha down the hallway.
Even as we walked, it was clear I was the third wheel, and it was starting to kind of freak me out. Every angle of Samantha’s body was turned toward Passion, tuned to Passion, focused on Passion, as she chatted away, telling her about the school, the teachers, the classrooms we were passing, and how much she would love Edgemont.
Passion didn’t say much. She didn’t really have to. But I might as well have not existed, except, I think, if I hadn’t been there, Samantha might have grabbed Passion’s hand and tried to run out of the school with her much like Marcus had tried to do with me. It was one of the most awkward walks down a school hallway I’d ever made, and I’d made some awkward ones.
When we got to the office, Samantha sweet-talked the sour-faced secretary immediately.
“Karen, these are all wrong,” she said, looking over our class schedules. “Both of them should be in morning physics lab, second period music symposium, and they should have fourth period lunch hour with me. I’ll take them around to all the right classes today, but make sure this gets changed in the system before tomorrow.” She handed the paperwork back to Karen as if the woman was her personal secretary.
I expected Karen to object. I expected her to say, “Who the hell do you think you are, little missy?” but she didn’t even bat an eye. And that’s when I knew that Passion and I were in deep trouble. No school secretary I’d met in my life would take orders from a student like that. Samantha had just rearranged our entire class schedule—probably to match hers perfectly—something Marcus had avoided doing when enrolling us because it would have looked way too suspicious.
At that moment, I knew what it must feel like when the predator turns around and suddenly discovers that it has become the prey. One thing still made absolutely no sense, though. If The Hold had known we were coming, if Shotgun had warned them to watch for a boy with a PSS chest and a girl with a ghost hand, why was Samantha James focused on Passion Wainwright and completely ignoring me? Maybe her attraction to Passion was overriding her orders and their plan. Whatever the case, we could probably make it work for us. But I still didn’t like the way Samantha had taken charge, like we were just two more tiny cogs in her giant high school machine.
Ghost Hold (The PSS Chronicles, Book Two) Page 9