by Kim Harrison
“Yeah, well, I can’t do anything about you being grounded,” he said, “but where we’re going, you won’t be setting a foot anywhere.”
“Huh?” I stammered, then stiffened when he moved behind me, taller because of the roof’s pitch. “Hey!” I yelped when his arm went around me. But my protest vanished in shock at the gray shadow suddenly curving around us. It was real, smelling like my mom’s feather pillow, and I gasped when his grip tightened and my feet left the roof in a downward drop of gravity.
“Holy crap!” I exclaimed as the world spread out beneath us, silver and black in the moonlight. “You have wings?”
Barnabas laughed, and with my stomach dropping in a tingling surge, we went higher.
Maybe…maybe this wasn’t going to be so bad after all.
Kiss and Tell
MICHELE JAFFE
1
“SORRY THIS WASN’T MORE of a storybook ending,” the man with his hands around her throat said, smiling, holding her eyes with his own as he choked her.
“If you’re going to kill me, can’t you just get on with it? This is kind of uncomfortable.”
“What, my hands? Or the feeling that you’re a failure—”
“I’m not a failure.”
“—again.”
She spit in his face.
“Still got some fire. I really admire that about you. I think you and I could have gotten along nicely. Unfortunately, there just isn’t time.”
She gave one last fight, clawing at his hands around her throat, his forearms, anything, but he didn’t even flinch. Her fists fell hopelessly to her sides.
He leaned in so close to her face that she could feel him exhale. “Any last words?”
“Three: Listerine breath strips. You really need them.”
He laughed and tightened the hands around her neck until they overlapped. “Good-bye.”
For a second, his eyes burned into hers. Then she heard a sharp crack and felt herself fall to the floor as everything went black.
2
EIGHT HOURS EARLIER…
“FOXY GIRLS KNOW THAT silence may be golden—but only for four seconds. Anything longer and you’re heading for Awkward Avenue,” Miranda read, then frowned at the book. “If you feel the countdown creeping, make him an offer! A simple ‘Would you like some nuts?’ said with a smile can break the silence stagnation in a snap. Remember, foxy is as foxy does.”
Miranda was starting to deeply distrust How to Get—And Kiss!—Your Guy.
Leaning against the side of the black Town Car parked in the loading zone at the Santa Barbara Municipal Airport that June evening, she thought of how totally thrilled she’d been when she’d found it at the bookstore. It looked like an and-they-all-lived-happily-ever-after dream come true in book form—who wouldn’t want to learn “The Five Facial Expressions That Will Change Your Life” or “The Secrets of the Tongue Tantra Only Da Pros Know”?—but having done all the exercises, she wasn’t convinced of the transformative powers of the Winsome Smile or spending half an hour a day sucking on a grape. It wasn’t the first time a self-help book had let her down—Procrastinate No More and Make Friends with YOU had both been total disasters—but it was depressing because she’d had such high hopes this time. And because, as her best friend, Kenzi, recently pointed out, any senior in high school who acted like Miranda did around her crush really, really needed help.
She tried another passage. “Rephrase one of his questions back to him, adding that hint of suggestion with a raised eyebrow. Or pick up the conversation with a pickup line! You: Are we in the china section? Him: No, why? You: Because you are fine. If china isn’t your thing, this one never fails to launch—You: Are you wearing space pants? Him: No, why? You: Because your butt is—”
“Hello, Miss Kiss.”
Miranda looked up and found herself staring up at the cleft chin and tanned face of Deputy Sergeant Caleb Reynolds.
She must have been really distracted to not even have heard his heartbeat when he approached. It was distinctive, with a little echo at the end, kind of like a one-two-three cha-cha beat (she’d learned about the cha-cha beat from You Can Dance!, another massively unfortunate self-help experience). He’d probably have trouble with that when he got old, but at twenty-two it didn’t seem to be stopping him from going to the gym, at least from the looks of his pecs, biceps, shoulders, forearms, wrists—
Stop staring.
Since she had an attack of Crazy Mouth whenever she tried to talk to a cute guy—let alone Santa Barbara’s youngest sheriff’s deputy, who was only four years older than she and who surfed every morning before work and who was cool enough to get away with wearing sunglasses even though it was almost 8:00 P.M.—she said, “Hi, deputy. Come here often?”
Causing him to frown. “No.”
“No, you wouldn’t, why would you? Me either. Well, not that often. Maybe once a week. Not often enough to know where the bathrooms are. Ha-ha!” Thinking, not for the first time, that life should come with a trapdoor. Just a little exit hatch you could disappear through when you’d utterly and completely mortified yourself. Or when you had spontaneous zit eruptions.
“Good book?” he asked, taking it from her and reading the subtitle, “A Guide for Good Girls Who (Sometimes) Want to Be Bad,” out loud.
But life did not come with a trapdoor.
“It’s for a school project. Homework. On, um, mating rituals.”
“Thought crime was more your thing.” He hit her with one of his half smiles, too cool to pull out a big grin. “You planning on foiling any more convenience store heists any time soon?”
That had been a mistake. Not stopping the guys who’d held up Ron’s 24-Hour Open Market #3, but sticking around long enough to let the police see her. For some reason they’d found it hard to believe that she’d just been leaning against the lamppost when it fell across the front of the robbers’ car as it sped through the intersection. It was sad how suspicious people were, especially people in law enforcement. And school administration. But she’d learned a lot since then.
“I’m trying to keep it to one heist a month,” she said, hoping for a light, ha-ha-I’m-just-kidding-foxy-is-as-foxy-does tone. “Today it’s just my regular job, VIP airport pickup.” Miranda heard his cha-cha heartbeat speed up slightly. Maybe he thought VIPs were cool.
“That boarding school you go to, Chatsworth Academy? They let you off campus any time you want or only certain days?”
“Wednesday and Saturday afternoons, if you’re a senior. We don’t have classes then,” she said and heard his heartbeat pick up more.
“Wednesday and Saturday afternoons free. What do you do for fun?”
Was he asking her out? No. Way. NOWAYNOWAYNOWAY! Flirt! she ordered herself. Winsome Smile! Say something! Anything! Be foxy! Now!
“What do you do for fun?” she repeated his question back to him, raising one eyebrow for that hint of suggestion.
He seemed taken aback for a second, then said very formally, “I work, Miss Kiss.”
Please give a warm welcome to Miranda Kiss, our new Miss Idiot Girl of the year, she thought. Said: “Of course. Me too. I mean, I’m either driving clients or at team practice. I’m one of Tony Bosun’s Bee Girls? The Roller Derby team? That’s why I do this,” meaning to point to the Town Car but bashing it with her hand instead. “You have to be a driver for Tony’s company, 5Bs Luxury Transport, to be on the team. We usually only have games on the weekends, but we practice on Wednesdays, sometimes on other days…,” Crazy Mouth trailed off.
“I’ve seen the Bees play. That’s a professional team, isn’t it? They let a high school student play?”
Miranda swallowed. “Oh, sure. Of course.”
He looked at her over the top of his sunglasses.
“Okay, I had to lie to get on the team. Tony thinks I’m twenty. You won’t tell him, will you?”
“He believed you were twenty?”
“He needed a new jammer.”
Deputy
Reynolds chuckled. “So you’re the jammer? You’re good. I can see why he might have made an exception.” Eyeing her some more. “I never would have recognized you.”
“Well, you know, we wear those wigs and the gold masks over our eyes so we all look the same.” It was one of the things she liked about Roller Derby, the anonymity, the fact that no one knew who you were, what your skills were. It made her feel invulnerable, safe. No one could single you out for…anything.
Deputy Reynolds took his sunglasses all the way off now to look at her. “So you put on one of those red, white, and blue satin outfits? The ones with the short skirts and that cute cape? I’d like to see that sometime.”
He smiled at her, right into her eyes, and her knees went weak and her mind started playing out a scenario involving him without his shirt but with a pitcher of maple syrup and a big—
“Well, there’s my lady,” he said. “Catch you.” And then walked away.
—stack of pancakes. Miranda watched him go up to a woman in her early twenties—thick blond hair, thin but muscular—put his arm around her, and kiss her neck. The kind of woman whose bras had tags that said, SIZE 36C, not MADE BY SANRIO in them. Heard him saying excitedly, “Wait until we get to the house. I’ve got some amazing new toys, something special just for you,” his voice husky, heart racing.
As he passed Miranda, he lifted his chin in her direction and said, “You stay out of trouble.”
“Yeah, you too,” Crazy Mouth told him. Miranda wanted to bang her head against the top of the car at how idiotic she was. She tried to give a Lite Laff (expression number four from the book) but ended up making herself choke instead.
When they were across the parking lot, she heard the woman asking who she was and heard Deputy Reynolds say, “The local Town Car driver.”
“She’s the driver?” the woman said. “Looks like one of those girls from Hawaiian Airlines you used to date, but younger. And cuter. You know how your judgment gets around cute young girls. You’re sure I don’t need to be concerned?”
Miranda heard him laugh, the genuine amusement in his voice as he said, “Her? Baby, she’s just a high school student who has a crush on me. Trust me, you’ve got nothing to worry about.”
And thought: Trap. Door. Now. Please.
Sometimes having superhearing supersucked.
3
MIRANDA LOVED THE SANTA Barbara airport, the way it looked more like an Acapulco Joe’s Cantina than an official building with its adobe-style walls, cool terra-cotta floor, loopy blue and gold tile, and bougainvillea careening down the walls. It was small, so planes just parked where they landed and had staircases wheeled out to them, with only a chain-link fence separating people waiting for someone from the people coming off the plane.
Pulling the welcome sign out of the Town Car, she checked the name on it—CUMEAN—and held it up in the direction of the disembarking passengers. As she waited, she listened to a woman in the gold Lexus SUV four cars behind her talking on her phone, saying, “If she gets off the plane, I’ll know. He’d better have his checkbook ready,” then tilted her head to focus on the low srloop srloop srloop sound of a snail slithering across the still-warm pavement toward a bunch of ivy.
She still remembered the exact moment she realized that not everyone heard the things she heard, that she wasn’t normal. She’d already spent the first half of her seventh-grade year at Saint Bartolomeo School—the part after the screening of the Your Body Is Changing: Womanhood video—puzzled by all the changes they didn’t list, like uncontrolled bursts of speed and randomly crushing objects you were just trying to pick up and hitting your head on the ceiling of the gym when you were doing jumping jacks and suddenly being able to see dust particles on people’s clothes. But since Sister Anna answered all her questions with “Stop joking, child,” Miranda thought they must just be so obvious the movie didn’t need to mention them. It was only when she’d tried to earn Johnnie Voight’s undying affection by warning him not to cheat off of Cynthia Riley again because, based on the sound of her pencil five seats away, she always got the wrong answers, that Miranda learned just how “differently abled” she was. Instead of falling on his knees and declaring that she was his goddess in a training bra and plaid skirt, Johnnie had called her a freak, then a nosy bitch, and tried to beat her up.
That was how she’d first learned how dangerous powers were, the way they could make you an outcast. And also that she was stronger than boys her age, and that they didn’t think that was cool or even good. And neither did school administrators.
Since then she’d become expert at acting normal, being careful. Had mastered her powers. Or she’d thought she had, until seven months earlier when—
Miranda pushed the memory aside and turned her attention back to the people at the airport. To her job. She watched a little girl with blond ringlets sitting on her dad’s shoulders standing next to the path and waving as a woman walked from the plane toward them, now shouting, “Mommy, Mommy, I missed you!”
She watched the happy family hug and felt like someone had socked her in the stomach. One of the advantages of going to boarding school, Miranda thought, was that you didn’t get invited over to people’s houses, never had to see them acting like normal families, having breakfast together. For some reason, whenever she imagined truly happy families, they were always eating breakfast.
Plus people who had normal families didn’t go to Chatsworth Academy, “The Premier Boarding Experience in Southern California.” Or, as Miranda liked to think of it, Child Warehouse, the place where parents (or in her case, guardians) stored their children until they needed them for something.
With the possible exception of her roommate, Kenzi. She and Kenzi Chin had lived together for four years, since their freshman year, longer than Miranda had lived with almost anyone. Kenzi came from a perfect-eat-breakfast-together family, had perfect skin, perfect grades, perfect everything, and Miranda would have been forced to hate her if Kenzi wasn’t also so completely loyal and kind. And a tinsy bit insane.
Like earlier that afternoon when Miranda walked into their room and found her standing on her head, wearing only underpants, with her entire body slathered in drying mint-colored mud.
“I am so going to be in therapy for the rest of my life to get this image out of my mind,” Miranda told her.
“You’re going to need to be in therapy that long anyway to deal with your messed-up family. I’m just giving you some TTD material to talk about.” Kenzi knew more about Miranda’s family history than anyone else at Chatsworth, almost all of it fabricated. The part about it being messed up, though, was true.
Kenzi also really liked acronyms and invented new ones all the time. As she dropped her bag and collapsed on her bed, Miranda asked, “TTD?”
“Totally Top Drawer.” Then Kenzi said, “I can’t believe you’re not coming to prom. I always pictured us going together.”
“I don’t think Beth would like that too much. You know, being the third wheel.”
Beth was Kenzi’s girlfriend. “Don’t even talk to me about that creature,” she said now, giving a fake shudder. “The Beth and Kenzi Show is officially canceled.”
“As of when?”
“What time is it?”
“Three thirty-five.”
“Two hours and six minutes ago.”
“Oh, so it’ll be back on by prom.”
“Of course.”
Kenzi’s “cancellations” happened about once a week and never lasted more than four hours. She thought the drama of breakups and the thrill of reconciliation kept a relationship fresh. And in some weird way it seemed to work, because she and Beth were the happiest couple Miranda knew. More perfection.
“Anyway, stop trying to change the subject. I think you’re making a grave mistake by missing prom.”
“Yeah, I’m sure I’ll never forgive myself.”
“I’m serious.”
“Why? What’s the big deal? It’s a big dance with a dorky theme.
You know I’m dancelexic and should not be allowed out on a dance floor near other people.”
“A Sweet Salute to the Red, White, and Blue isn’t dorky, it’s patriotic. And you do okay with the Hustle.”
“I think Libby Geer would disagree with you. If her mouth weren’t still wired shut.”
“Whatever, prom isn’t just a big dance. It’s a rite of passage, a moment when we move from who we were into the vastness of the adults we’re going to become, throwing off the weight of our youthful insecurities to—”
“—get drunk and maybe lucky. Depending on your definition of luck.”
“You’ll be sorry if you don’t come. Do you really want to grow up miserable and filled with regret?”
“Yes, please! Besides, I have to work.”
“TGI as If. You’re hiding behind your job again. You could so get one Saturday off. At least be honest about why you’re not going.”
Miranda gave Kenzi Innocent Eyes, expression number two from the kissing book. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“Don’t look at me like you’re My Little Pony. I have four letters for you: W-I-L-L.”
“And I have four letters for you: N-O-P-E. Oh and four more: M-Y-O—”
But Kenzi just went on, ignoring her, something she did professionally. “It’s true that Will might need to be vaccinated or screened for diseases after going with Ariel, but I can’t believe you’re giving up that easily.”
Will Javelin filled up about 98 percent of Miranda’s dreams. She’d been trying to cut it out since she learned he was going to the prom with Ariel—“I named my new breasts after my family’s country houses, does your family have any country houses, Miranda? Oh right, I forgot, you’re a foster child”—West, of the West-Sugar-Is-Best! fortune, but it was a challenge. To avoid bad karma Miranda said, “There’s nothing wrong with Ariel.”