Cold as Marble

by Zoe Aarsen

  “Hey,” he said, rising to his feet.

  “Trey,” his mother warned, urging him to sit back down.

  “Hey,” I said back shyly, ignoring his mother. “You saw Mischa on TV, right?”

  He glanced over his shoulder in the direction of his parents. “I haven’t been allowed to watch.”

  “She’s safe,” I said as tears formed in my eyes. I placed my hands on his forearms just to touch him, to feel connected to him. “She’s alive and back at home.”

  A slow smile formed on Trey’s lips, and he nodded in approval. “Are they sending you back to Sheridan?” he asked. He was wearing his one and only suit, the same one he’d worn to Olivia’s and Candace’s wakes, as well as to our previous fun encounters with Judge Roberts back in the fall. It still looked as absurd on him as if he were wearing a space suit or a Halloween costume.

  “Florida,” I told him. “My dad’s house.”

  Just then, a uniformed security guard opened one of the double doors of the courtroom and announced, “Emory,” summoning Trey and his parents for their hearing with the judge.

  Trey wrapped his arms around me and whispered in my ear, “Wait for me,” before his mother yanked him into the courtroom to learn his fate. I didn’t know whether or not Violet had kept her word about speaking with her father on Trey’s behalf. She’d texted me a photo of her garden after the rosebushes had been dug up early that morning, so at least she had taken to heart my request to deal with that and hadn’t wasted any time. But she hadn’t included any sort of message, which was fine with me. Although we had sort of reconciled, I didn’t have any desire to keep in touch with her on friendly terms.

  I more or less got my answer about whether or not Trey would be returning to Northern Reserve when I saw Walter Emory’s Hyundai pull out of the driveway next door the next morning with Trey buckled into the front passenger seat. I knew from experience that we wouldn’t be allowed to talk on the phone during the first full week of his readmission there, so it would be a long, painful wait until I could hear from him firsthand whether or not his sentence had been changed.

  Even though I cried like a baby on my flight to Tampa at the thought of not seeing Trey again until July, when he turned eighteen, Florida turned out not to be so bad. By the time I arrived, Rhonda and Dad had already gotten my room ready for me, and Dad had taken the liberty of buying me a new laptop for school. They were in full-tilt super-parent overdrive, asking me tons of questions and making all kinds of promises of weekend road trips we’d take together to keep me in positive spirits about my new surroundings. It was weird to sleep in a perfectly normal, not-haunted bedroom.

  I tried to seem as appreciative and positive as possible for Dad and Rhonda’s benefit and grinned at every suggestion they made of airboat rides and visits to crocodile farms. When I was finally told by one of the administrators at Northern Reserve that Trey’s phone privileges were being resumed two weeks after he arrived back on campus, I couldn’t wait until that Wednesday evening, when he would be allowed to call me.

  “July,” he informed me proudly. “If I’m a good little soldier and don’t mess anything up, I’ll be free to walk out of here on my birthday.”

  I knew in my heart that as soon as Trey was permitted to leave his school, he’d make his way to Florida to be with me. Playing by the rules in Florida was my plan, no matter how much I missed home and regretted everything that had happened so far that year.

  At my new school, it seemed like all of my new classmates had some kind of strange intuition that I was suddenly among them due to suspicious circumstances (even though Dad had assured me that I was not nearly as much of a nightly news star in Florida as I was in the Midwest). Life in Florida was still unfamiliar and new, but I chatted with Henry frequently on WhatsApp, although we were both careful not to discuss details of what we’d done in Michigan. The story he’d told the police in Michigan was that he’d just happened to be skiing down the slope at Stevens’ Pass when the avalanche occurred. He insisted he’d been totally oblivious that kids from his hometown, including Trey and me, had been on that part of the mountain that afternoon.

  Knowing that he was lucky to have gotten out of Michigan without being punished for aiding and abetting runaways, he made fast plans to get himself out of the Midwest. Confident that he’d avenged Olivia’s death, he signed up to teach tennis at a fancy resort in the South of France. He jetted off for what he hoped would be the adventure of a lifetime, with every intention of continuing his college studies at Northwestern in the fall. I didn’t mention anything to him about my last conversation with Kirsten, and prayed that she didn’t reach out to him directly. I considered it a small mercy instead of an act of deceit to let him enjoy his time in France without burdening him with the knowledge that Kirsten suspected the curse was still active in one way or another.

  Strangely enough, surviving the avalanche together and participating in the game of Light as a Feather, Cold as Marble made Cheryl and me closer friends than ever before. Using carefully chosen words in text messages, we both shared our experiences of bad dreams about being buried in snow. Of course, Cheryl was sensitive enough not to ask me about the pendulum I’d used during the game we’d played with Violet (I was still a little paranoid about my parents spying on my private communication). There were a lot of things I’d done back in the fall that I regretted, but mistreating Cheryl and not valuing her as a friend was right up there alongside agreeing to play Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board at Olivia’s birthday party when Violet had suggested it. Cheryl was the best kind of friend anyone could ever hope to have, and I knew I wouldn’t soon forget that.

  Mischa didn’t hold back at all once she finally realized that I had unrestricted use of my phone in Florida. I’d waited for her to contact me rather than reaching out to her first, not wanting to accidentally say something that broke the memory spell that Kirsten had put on her to make her forget her time in hiding. It would have been understandable if she’d wanted to put the entire experience with Violet behind her, and never again dwell on the horrible weeks she’d spent believing that she could die at any moment. But as soon as I posted to Instagram from Tampa for the first time, she sent me an uncharacteristically long message.

  OMG, McKenna! I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to you guys, but the news of your sentences was only revealed for the first time in the Willow Gazette today! Florida? I am so jelly! How is getting a tan and drinking coconut water considered a punishment? So not fair!

  Anyway, it’s weird to be back at school. Everyone treats me strangely now because of the amnesia, and my trauma counselor constantly asks me weird stuff to try to trigger memories. She believes that I endured horrible things while I was missing that I’ve blocked out. I can’t explain it, but I really don’t think anything bad happened to me while I was gone. I still have no idea where I was all that time, but a couple weird things have happened in the last few weeks that make me wonder exactly what I was doing and who I was with!

  One of the weird things is that there’s this girl in my lunch period who always has a deck of tarot cards with her, and the first time she did a spread for me I somehow knew what all the meanings of the cards were. How is that even possible? Where would I have learned all that? The girl at my school said that everyone has a tarot card that aligns to their personality and it has special meaning when it comes up in their spreads.

  She had everyone who sits at our table try to find their special card by pulling one from the deck. Sometimes people didn’t like the first card they chose and tried again to get another one. But I pulled the same card every single time! It’s the Tower. When it appears in a spread upright, it’s supposed to mean broken pride, or disaster. When it shows up upside down, that’s called a reversal, and it means delayed disaster or fear of suffering. Funny that it should keep popping up for me as my personal card, right?

  Anyway, this girl is going to teach me how to do readings because she thinks it’s cool that I can
always pick the Tower out of the deck no matter how she shuffles the stack. Next time I see you, I’ll read your cards for you!

  My heart was beating so hard as I tapped my phone to call Mischa that I believed there was a good chance I’d go into cardiac arrest before she answered. Very annoyingly, my call went straight to her voice mail.

  Mischa’s message was shockingly similar to the story Violet had told me about how she’d discovered the powers she’d acquired through the curse by playing with cards at school. I should have known—we should have known—that Violet’s spirits would outsmart us. Just as Kirsten had told me, we hadn’t broken the curse, we’d just changed the spell. Because we’d tricked the spell into bypassing Mischa, she’d inherited it. She will always be next, Jennie had told me.

  And just like the spirits had tricked Violet into believing at first that her evil power was a fun new talent, they were doing the same thing to Mischa. She was probably unknowingly assigning deaths to everyone around her, and she had to be stopped.

  GOOD BYE

  More from this Series

  Light as a Feather

  Book 1

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The original draft of this sequel was written online for my Wattpad readers who had been asking about Mischa’s destiny and whether or not McKenna would restore her friendship with Cheryl. It delighted me that everyone was just as interested in the strength of my characters’ friendships as they were in McKenna’s romantic relationship with Trey because this story is, at its heart, about a girl doing whatever it takes to save her friend’s life.

  Although this version of the sequel is different—and I think better—than the online version, my readers’ investment in these characters was my inspiration to keep writing. So, many thanks to @TatianaCanFly and @Schlag_girl for their beautiful fan art, @MissNoor, @DeaAspasia, @Katieisapenguin, @insha921 and so many more for your gorgeous book covers. Thank you to @TasonyaGray, @LGBTfantasy, @kaykay_is_vogue, @TaylorManton1, @SomeLikeitMalik, @tiffanygy, @edenae22, @mandyoysmoysoy, @Missbookaholic_4ever, @ash_lynn_18, @immakiller, @GeminiQueenRocks, @SGMitchell, @Starquinski, @sushinegirl29c, @BMadden18 and hundreds more of you who were my frequent commenters!

  Special thanks to the team at Simon Pulse who helped me reimagine this next installment of McKenna’s quest to make it more exciting and provide readers with a better understanding of how Violet came into her deadly powers. Jessi Smith’s direction heightened the stakes for breaking the curse and shaped Henry Richmond into a stronger love interest for McKenna. I am so very grateful for Rebecca Vitkus’s sharp eye as well as her familiarity with Wisconsin and the real towns on which Willow was based. And as always, I’d like to thank and acknowledge my high school English teacher, the late Sonia Kallick, and my French teacher, Kelly Ercoli, for encouraging me to dream beyond the edges of my small hometown.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ZOE AARSEN is a graphic designer and copywriter originally from the Midwest. She is pretty convinced that her apartment is haunted by the ghosts of every cat and hamster she’s ever owned. Visit Zoe Aarsen’s blog at zoeaarsen.com. Follow Zoe on Twitter @ZoeAarsen.

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  ALSO BY ZOE AARSEN

  Light as a Feather

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  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  SIMON PULSE

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  First Simon Pulse edition October 2019

  Text copyright © 2019 by Zoe Aarsen

  The author is represented by Wattpad.

  Cover illustration copyright © 2019 by Avery Muether

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  Cover designed by Laura Eckes

  Interior designed by Mike Rosamilia

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Aarsen, Zoe, author.

  Title: Cold as marble / by Zoe Aarsen.

  Description: First Simon Pulse paperback edition. | New York : Simon Pulse, 2019. | Series: [Light as a feather ; 2]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019020411 (print) | LCCN 2019021939 (eBook) |

  ISBN 9781534444317 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781534444300 (paperback) |

  ISBN 9781534444324 (eBook)

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.A145 (eBook) | LCC PZ7.1.A145 Col 2019 (print) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020411