This was why it wasn't a good idea to use pyrokinesis in your bedroom.
I took a shower, and as my mom had predicted, I didn't have time to wash my hair. I was moving so quickly that I even forgot to take off Morgan's necklace, and I wondered briefly if this was taking what she'd said about always wearing it a little too far. After I'd lathered and rinsed, I turned off the shower and stepped out. I toweled off and then reached for my body splash, spraying a liberal amount on my hair, just in case.
Despite being in hurry mode, the second I stepped out of the shower, my eyes zeroed in on my reflection in the mirror, and I couldn't help but stare at it, looking for some hint of the person I'd been the night before. My hair was close to honey-colored, but in the most unremarkable way imaginable. In the Otherworld, it was both brown and blond at the same time, but here, it didn't quite manage either one, and sadly, my trip to the great beyond had done little to give it volume or bounce. My summer tan was already long gone, and even covered in steam, my body didn't let off any kind of glow.
She reeks of mortality. The words from the night before taunted me, and I wondered whose thoughts I'd inadvertently heard. I wanted to think it was the vampire twins, but I couldn't shake the feeling that it was Eze, that her stony smile didn't reach her eyes for a reason, and this was it. But even thinking that, part of me didn't want to wait until nightfall to go back. I wanted to be there, with the colors and the smells and the tastes and the wonderful, horrible feeling of being near others like me.
I didn't want to be standing in this world, naked and unsure of myself.
A sharp rap on the bathroom door startled me. At first, I thought it was my mom, but then the mystery person opened the door just far enough to thrust in a manicured hand holding my least favorite pair of jeans (they were too tight and made my legs itch) and a V-neck top. “Wear this, and hurry up. If we get to school early, I can bring you up to speed on Geek Watch.”
I knew that I had only a small window of opportunity before Delia charged into the bathroom and took over all aspects of my personal appearance, so I grabbed the clothes and changed into them as quickly as I could, hopeful that at least I'd be dressed by the time she started her full-out fashion onslaught.
I had the shirt halfway over my head when Delia got restless. The next thing I knew, she'd grabbed a brush and was twisting my hair into some kind of knot that nobody except for Delia and a handful of sailors knew how to tie.
“Your hair smells like Country Apple,” she said.
Astute, was Delia.
Either because I was lucky or as a matter of mercy, she didn't mention anything about the slightly unwashed nature of said hair, and by the time she was done, twenty-eight seconds later, I actually looked halfway decent. Not bothering with my makeup bag, Delia brought out her own trifecta and managed to make me over before I could utter even half of a refusal.
“Okay, let's go. Chop-chop. There are geeks to be watched and flirt strategies to be …” Delia searched for the right word. “Strategized.”
I followed her out of the bathroom, my mind elsewhere, running over hills and drinking the sweet, cool nectar I hadn't so much as brought to my lips the night before. I looked at my feet as the two of us walked down the hallway, my eyes drawn again and again to my own shadow. As I clunked my way down the stairs— sans any grace whatsoever—I suddenly realized that I hadn't seen a single shadow in the Otherworld. Stuck on that notion for absolutely no reason whatsoever, I zoned out and lost track of what Delia was saying right around the time we headed out the front door. Delia, however, was not a person to be ignored, and when I got to the car, she snapped me out of it, primarily due to the numerous pieces of poster board leaning against the car's side.
“What are those for?” I asked suspiciously. Delia plus arts and crafts meant trouble. There was an incident with poster board when we were eight from which the neighborhood had never quite recovered.
“Trust, Bailey,” Delia said. “That's all I'm asking.” And then, because she was on a roll, she smiled charmingly at me. “By the way, can I drive?”
I didn't even dignify that question with a response. Completely unfazed, Delia picked up the poster board and climbed into the passenger side. As I buckled my seat belt, I caught the barest glimpse of the top of one of the pieces of poster board.
GEEK WATCH 2009.
This was so not good.
“You can't look yet,” Delia told me, hugging the poster board to her chest. “I need to attach the pictures.”
“Pictures?”
Delia smiled. “On a totally unrelated note, I need you to get a picture of the guy from study hall, the one who recognized your tattoo. Just take one with your phone. The quality might not be great once we blow it up, but—”
“Blow it up?” I tried to get another look at the poster board. “You do realize you're crazy, right?”
“Which one of us hears voices?” Delia asked. “Oh. Right. That would be you.” She paused. “And speaking of, what happened last night with the Reckonmawhatsit you told us about at lunch?”
“Reckoning,” I corrected, then nibbled on my bottom lip. For reasons which I couldn't have explained, more words than just that refused to come out of my mouth. Maybe because there weren't any that would describe things quite right, or maybe because there were, but I wanted to keep them for myself.
“It was … interesting,” I said finally.
“Whoa, TMI.” Delia raised an eyebrow. “There is such a thing as oversharing, Bay.” And then, just in case I didn't catch it myself, she leaned a little closer and shared another tidbit with me in a conspiratorial whisper. “Sarcasm is the new perky.”
Delia was probably the only A-lister at our school who could actually manage both.
“I'll tell you more once the others are here,” I promised, knowing that this wasn't something I'd be able to keep from them forever. There was nothing I didn't share with my friends. My brain just wasn't wired for keeping secrets.
“Just tell me this much. Those others you met? The ones you were all nervous about yesterday?” Delia's voice dropped to a reverent whisper. “Were any of them hot?”
James. His name flashed immediately to mind, and I tried to remember what he looked like. Glowing skin, red-brown hair, blue, blue eyes. He was Sidhe, but something about him felt human. Hot wasn't the right word, and he wasn't even geek chic, but something about him stuck in my mind like toffee in freshly brushed teeth. There was just something about that boy … fairy … Greek god … whatever.
“Oooohhhhhh,” Delia said, interpreting my facial expression with the skill of a professional profiler. “One of them was kind of hot. Does that mean you're not still crushing on the guy from study hall?”
I really didn't know how she did it. I hadn't even seen her since physics class the day before, when I'd decided that I might have possibly been interested in That Guy, and yet somehow she'd picked up on it. Probably before I had.
“I'm debating,” I said, but even saying it made me feel a little bit silly, because I wasn't normally the kind of girl who had options in the crush department— especially not options who seemed like they were maybe kind of sort of interested back.
“No moping.” When I snapped out of my reverie, Delia was giving me a very stern look. Luckily, without Zo there, she didn't pursue it further. “Honestly, Bay, when are you going to realize that you are one hot mama?”
I parked the car and turned to look incredulously at Delia. “Did you just use the phrase one hot mama?”
Delia looked momentarily abashed. “Absolutely not.”
“Liar.”
Zo and Annabelle were already waiting for us in the parking lot. Both of them took in sharp breaths when they saw Delia's poster boards.
“This cannot end well,” Zo said.
Delia turned to Annabelle. “You're on my side, right, A-belle?”
Annabelle, having not been there for the poster-board incident when we were eight, wasn't quite sure what she was suppose
d to be taking sides about. “I am Switzerland,” she declared.
“What if I said there were graphs involved?” Delia knew exactly how to tempt Annabelle, who immediately turned to Zo and, with a completely straight expression on her face, said, “I'm on her side.”
“Blood is supposed to be thicker than water.” Zo grabbed her heart in mock betrayal.
“Yes, well, perhaps graphs are thicker than blood.”
Water. Blood.
The memories of the night before were there, just below the surface in my mind, and hearing the right words brought them out. My blood. The water they'd offered me to drink.
“Speaking of blood,” Zo said, sounding disturbingly cheerful, “I told A-belle about the slice and dice with your necklace yesterday.”
Before Delia could pick up on the fact that there was something about our accessories that everyone knew except her, I quickly filled in the gaps with trademark Bailey babble. “Yesterday, I cut my finger on my pendant—you should totally watch out because they're really sharp—and the pendant's mirror showed the reflection of the blood, only it was Sidhe blue. Blood green. The color of our tattoos.”
Luckily, Delia spoke fluent Bailey and didn't need a translator. “Gotcha.” Without pause, she turned to Annabelle. “Any theories?”
Annabelle, being Annabelle, obliged. “Bailey said it herself: blood green. Our tattoos were made out of Sidhe blood.”
Delia made a face.
“Bailey is part Sidhe, so even though she bleeds red in this world, it makes sense that the mirror might show her blood as a different color. Maybe the mirror shows things the way they really are. Or … ooooohhhhh! Maybe it makes the unseen seen, or reflects intangible mystical properties as easily processed visual stimuli.”
I was overcome with two feelings. The first was double sided: Annabelle was a genius and I was an idiot (why hadn't any of those explanations occurred to me?); the second was a pang at the way Annabelle said Sidhe. She pronounced it correctly, but the word just didn't sound the same on her lips. Whenever Adea or Valgius or any of the others said it, they said it like it was the single most important word, the defining aspect of their being. It was their everything.
To Annabelle, it was just another word.
“I'll see what I can look up on magicked mirrors,” Annabelle continued, thinking out loud. “There must be some way to distinguish between the different nuances of possibilities here. Anything else you want me to look up?”
Delia opened her mouth.
“Anything else that doesn't involve fashion or boys,” Annabelle clarified. Delia closed her mouth. A-belle's eyes fixed on mine, and I was reminded of the fact that even without powers, Annabelle was mighty perceptive. “Anything about last night?”
I looked at my watch. First period started in less than two minutes, so I didn't have time to go into any details about the night before. I could hoard the memories in my mind for a while longer, probably until lunch, but because this was A-belle and I knew that not only would she find what I asked her to, she'd actually enjoy finding it, I gave her what I could.
“Anything you can get on Greek mythology would be good. I need info on all of the major players.” If I could figure out who James was supposed to be …
“She's thinking about hot fairy guy,” Delia announced.
“Am not.”
“Are too!” All three of them spoke at once.
“He's not hot. He's just … James.”
Zo wrinkled her forehead. “Adea, Valgius, and James?”
Zo's words managed to break through a dam in my mind, and more information came pouring out of my mouth as we walked. “Then there were these two girls who were, like, all over him. They kept stroking his arms like this.” I demonstrated on Delia.
“Kinky.”
Zo, Delia, and I turned to stare at A-belle, who looked sufficiently horrified.
“Yesterday it was psychic boobies, and today it's kinky,” Zo commented. “You're kind of turning into a pervert, A-belle.”
The very idea was so patently ridiculous that I had to bite back a smile, which I only did for A-belle's sake, because her cheeks had turned bright, bright pink the second the word left her mouth.
Giving Zo a look that told her in no uncertain terms to stop teasing her cousin, I continued babbling. There were some things Delia and Zo just couldn't understand, and blushing was one of them. Of the four of us, Annabelle and I were probably the most alike, and babbling was my way of showing Shy Girl solidarity.
“And then there were these two girls named Axia and Lyria, and they're supposedly Artemis and Aphrodite, so anything you can find out about the two of them would be great. And Drogan is Hades, and his son is kind of full of himself, and Eze is totally Zeus.”
Not that Eze could be partially Zeus, but this fact seemed so noteworthy that I had to add the “totally” in there, just for good measure.
“You met Zeus,” Annabelle said, somewhat dazed.
“She has pink hair,” I replied solemnly.
“Pink hair?” Delia seemed to be torn between being horrified and intrigued.
“Zeus is a girl?” Zo was nothing if not skeptical, but Annabelle simply noted this information and tucked it away in her mental filing cabinet for future reference. “I'll see what I can dig up,” she said. “I'll also look up Morgan. She was Poseidon, right?”
I nodded, and thinking of Morgan made me bring my hand to my necklace, even though I knew just how hazardous for the thumbs that could be.
“Light pink or dark pink hair?” Delia was still fixated on this point.
“Light. It was more white than pink, but sometimes, if light caught it the right way, you could make out the second color.”
“Kind of unicorny?”
Sometimes Delia and I were on the exact same page as well.
“Yeah,” I said, a smile creeping over my lips. “Kind of unicorny.”
“We're going to be late for first period,” Annabelle announced, and we picked up the pace. Some people wore watches. I didn't need one. I had an Annabelle instead. “Anything else I should look into?” she asked me.
I hesitated. Saying the words here seemed almost sacrilegious. I knew before I said it that it would sound wrong on my tongue, the same way that Sidhe did on Annabelle's. In the Otherworld, my voice was ancient, but here, I was seventeen, and it sometimes bordered on squeaky.
“The Otherworld,” I said. “That's what Zo and I decided to call the … you know … other world.” I paused, trying to work my way up to telling Annabelle the names Adea had mentioned when we'd first crossed over the night before.
Sidhe. Home.
The words weren't words so much as a memory of a feeling that I couldn't begin to articulate, so instead Iparted with the other, less personal—and less true— names.
“The Otherworld,” I repeated. “Also known as Faerie, Olympus, Avalon, and the Beyond.”
Sidhe. Home.
The feeling receded to the back of my head as I said the other names of the place that after only one night, I held very close to my heart.
A place where I would never be lonely.
A place for running and beauty and tasting clouds on your tongue.
“Faerie, Olympus, Avalon, and the Beyond,” Annabelle repeated. “You know, there are probably at least a dozen other names in cultures across the world that refer to the exact same thing. I'll do some digging online and see what I can pull up.”
A few minutes later, the four of us split up to go to our fourth hours. Delia left me with very firm instructions for mine: “Get a picture of your geek.”
I rolled my eyes, but got the distinct feeling that my friend wouldn't be taking no for an answer.
“And remember, Bay,” Delia said, in the tone of someone imparting great and sought-after wisdom. “It's totally possible to have two crushes at once.”
I slid into my seat in study hall five seconds after the bell rang, but the proctor didn't notice. A certain amount of obliviou
sness was a necessity for anyone proctoring study hall, given that the job required them to continuously overlook the hordes of students not studying. As I knew from personal experience, this particular teacher didn't even notice when, for example, you passed out on your physics book. A just-barely-tardy wasn't going to rank much higher on the notice meter.
Feeling vaguely wicked for getting away with something that at least two of my teachers considered a cardinal sin, I pulled out one of my textbooks and offered my appreciation to the proctor by at least pretending to study. I flipped through the pages, looking at the pictures, and with each one, I traced my finger over its surface, thinking how the contrast between photos taken in the seventies and the modern world was in some way similar to the differences between the Other-world and Earth. It wasn't just a difference in color, and it wasn't just a difference in sheer size. It was a difference so great that the two didn't even occupy the same number of spatial dimensions. The real world was 3-D; these pictures were trapped on the two-dimensional page.
If time was the fourth dimension, then the Other-world was 5-D. At least.
After a while, I got bored with the pictures, and I glanced around the room, looking for the mysterious Mr. Talbot-Olsen, he of the mussy hair and physics gallantry. Today, he was sitting beside me instead of behind, which meant that I only appeared mildly (as opposed to massively) sketchy trying to look at him without letting on that I was doing so. Like me, he was pretending to study, and he had a notebook out. I squinted, forgetting about subtlety in favor of potentially parsing out what he was writing. I'm not sure what I expected to see in his notebook, because it wasn't like he was likely to have conveniently spelled out the origin of his knowledge about ancient languages, and I doubted that he was sitting there daydreaming about me and doodling “Mr. Bailey Morgan” in the margins of his notebook.
Despite my best squinting efforts, though, I couldn't make much sense of his scribbles from this distance. His handwriting was pretty much as messy as his hair. Thinking hair thoughts distracted me for a few seconds because I kind of wondered what it would be like to touch his, and then I thought about running my hands through it, and that led me to thinking about James and the vampiric redheads petting him the night before.
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