Dead Is So Last Year

by Marlene Perez

  Dead Is So Last Year

  Marlene Perez

  * * *

  GRAPHIA

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Boston New York 2009

  Praise for

  DEAD IS THE NEW BLACK and

  DEAD IS A STATE OF MIND

  "Fans who mourn the loss of TV's Veronica Mars are in for a treat

  as Perez delivers a wise-cracking, boy-lusting, determined sleuth

  of a high school protagonist ... this quick, lighter-than-air spoof

  of the undead, cheerleaders and popularity is pure pleasure."

  —Publishers Weekly

  "Sassy, romantic, and spooky-fun!"

  —Cynthia Leitich Smith, author of Tantalize

  "A hit.... Grabbed me with the first page and didn't let go."

  —Julie Kenner, author of The Good Ghoul's Guide to Getting Even

  "Snarky sisters with psychic powers; secret cabals of vamps and

  werewolves; missing parental(s); and lots of mysteries yet unsolved.

  Nightshade is my kinda town ... can't wait to hang there again ASAP!"

  —Nancy Holder, author of Pretty Little Devils

  "A fun ride from start to finish. Perez's smart and sassy style soars."

  —Mary E. Pearson, author of The Adoration of Jenna Fox

  "Psy-gn me up for more of Daisy and her psychic sisters. Hot romances,

  cold-hearted, soul-sucking vampires, and cheerleaders

  dragging roll-around coffins. What's not to love?"

  —Gail Giles, author of Dead Girls Don't Write Letters

  OTHER BOOKS BY MARLENE PEREZ

  Dead Is the New Black

  Dead Is a State of Mind

  Love in the Corner Pocket

  Unexpected Development

  Copyright © 2009 by Marlene Perez

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Graphia,

  an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be

  submitted online at www.harcourt.com/contact or mailed to the following address:

  Permissions Department, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  Graphia and the Graphia logo are registered trademarks of

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

  www.graphiabooks.com

  The text of this book is set in Adobe Jenson.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Perez, Marlene.

  Dead is so last year / by Marlene Perez.

  p. cm.

  Summary: In the beach town of Nightshade, California, home to both human and

  supernatural beings, the Giordano sisters find summer employment and uncover mysteries

  involving doppelgangers and oversized football players.

  ISBN 978-0-15-206216-3 (pbk.)

  [1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Psychic ability—Fiction. 3. Sisters—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.P4258De 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008048426

  ISBN 978-0-15-206216-3

  Printed in the United States of America

  QUM 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  * * *

  To my sister Teresa,

  who I can always laugh with

  CHAPTER ONE

  "Daisy, you're back!" Chief Mendez said when he answered the front door. "How was Italy?"

  "It was amazing," I said. My mom had taken all of the Giordano women—which means my sisters, Rose and Poppy, and our Grandma Giordano—on a surprise vacation to Italy, as soon as school let out.

  I think part of the reason for the trip had been that Poppy, who'd recently had a rather unusual breakup, had been moping around graveyards instead of celebrating her recent graduation from Nightshade High. I supposed that's just the way things went when your first serious boyfriend was a ghost.

  "Ryan's not here," the chief continued.

  "He's not?" I said, disappointed. I hadn't seen my boyfriend in three weeks, and as glorious as the trip had been, I was glad to be back home in Nightshade.

  "He's at football practice," Ryan's dad continued. "Why don't you head on over there and surprise him? He didn't think you were coming back until tomorrow."

  "We took an earlier flight and got back late last night," I said. "But football started already? So early?"

  "Summer conditioning," his dad explained. "Coach Wullf is pushing to get us into the division playoffs this year."

  "Uh, that's great," I said. I didn't know much about football, even though I'd very briefly been a cheerleader during football season last year.

  "Tell your mom I'll call her about this case I'm working on," he said. 'And Daisy, Nightshade wasn't the same without the Giordanos around."

  Chief Mendez and my mom worked together to solve crimes. She was a psychic investigator. For a long time, I had thought that only Rose and Poppy had inherited Mom's psychic gifts, but I'd recently discovered that I was psychic, too.

  "Mom's still in Italy," I explained. "She got caught up in a case over there. We flew home with Grandma Giordano."

  "I'll have to manage without her, then," he replied. "Call the station if you need anything. I worry about you girls there alone."

  "Grandma Giordano is going to check up on us," I explained. "And she may even stay over occasionally if Mom has to be away much longer."

  "That's reassuring," Ryan's dad replied. "Tell your grandmother I said hello."

  I wondered how they knew each other. Grandma spent most of her time at her condo in a 55-and-over community nearby. That is, when she wasn't volunteering for a myriad of charity functions. But Nightshade was a small town. Everyone knew everyone, at least to say hello.

  "See you later." I'd managed to bribe Poppy into letting me have the car, so I decided to head to the school to track down Ryan. When I pulled up, a group of players were running drills on the football field. Even from as far away as I was, I could hear grunts and groans as the coaches yelled at them.

  A cluster of girls sat under an easy-up tarp, sheltered from the hot sun. As I passed them, I saw it was a group of cheerleaders. There was a huge container of Gatorade for the players, while the girls were drinking iced tea or lemonade.

  My friend Samantha Devereaux bounded over. "Daisy, you're back! How was Italy?"

  "It was great," I said. "I'll tell you all about it later."

  I felt a thrill when I spotted Ryan. He was hard to pick out of the crowd, since they all wore practice jerseys and helmets, but I recognized his tall frame.

  I gave him an enthusiastic wave. A few minutes later, a pair of muscular arms encircled my waist and lifted me off the ground.

  "You're finally back," Ryan's voice said. "I missed you so much,"he added in a lower tone.

  As he set me down, I realized that the Ryan I'd left a few short weeks ago had changed. I looked him up and down in shock. He was now a rippling mass of muscle.

  I'd been gone only three weeks and Ryan looked twenty pounds heavier and about three inches taller. He was gorgeous. I loved the way the tan emphasized his green eyes, and the curls at the nape of his neck—were gone! He'd shaved his head.

  "Ryan?" I said. "You look ... different." He'd always been tall, but now he towered over me.

  He ran a hand over his hair. "It was just too hot. All the guys have been shaving their heads."

  "You've gained a lot of muscle, too."

  "Yeah, Sean and I have been hitting the weights really hard. Coach wants us to be in shape by the time the season starts."

  Sean was Samantha's boyfriend and my next-door neighbor. He was also Ryan's best friend.r />
  A whistle blew and one of the coaches said, "Break's over, boys."

  Ryan grabbed a cup of Gatorade and chugged it before he said, "Gotta get back to it. How about we meet at Slim's in an hour? We've got a lot to talk about."

  I nodded, and watched him run back to the field. My brain was still processing my boyfriend's physical transformation. Werewolf or not, he'd really packed on the muscle while I'd been gone.

  "So, any particular reason why you have that glassy-eyed stare?" Samantha asked.

  "Ryan," I confessed. "I can't believe how..."

  "Hot he looks," Sam finished my sentence. "Yeah, you came back in the nick of time." She glanced back at the rest of the cheerleaders, then whispered, "Penny Edwards was all over Ryan while you were gone. She's done everything but tie herself up in a red ribbon, not that he was interested."

  I shrugged. Ryan and I were on solid ground. If Elise Wilder hadn't tempted him, I wasn't worried about Penny Edwards. Elise was a gorgeous girl who'd moved back to Nightshade a few months back. She and Bane Paxton were now a pretty steady item, but she still made me nervous. Maybe it was her claws.

  "I'm heading to Slim's to wait for Ryan," I said. "Want to come along?"

  Samantha glanced over at the rest of the cheerleaders. "Sure," she said. "Cheerleading practice is over, anyway." She grabbed her purse and then said, "Can I catch a ride with you? My car is in the shop."

  "Of course you can ride with me, but is everything okay?" I said as we headed for the car I shared with Rose and Poppy.

  "Don't look at me like that, Daisy," she said. "It really is in the shop. The worst of the Devereaux troubles are finally over."

  Samantha's mom and dad were getting a divorce and they'd lost most of their money, which meant they had to sell their huge house. The Devereauxs had downsized and Sam had moved into a small townhouse near the UC Nightshade campus with her father.

  "How are things with your dad?" I asked. Samantha's dad had been a colleague of my dad's before he disappeared six years ago. Some people in town thought that my father hadn't disappeared at all. Supposedly, he'd run away with another woman, but my mom refused to believe those rumors.

  "Surprisingly good," she said. "And I got a job. And they're willing to work around my cheerleading schedule when school starts."

  "A job? That's great, Sam. Where?"

  "That cute boutique. Tete de Mort."

  Designer goth and nothing in the store was less than two hundred dollars. Was Sam reverting to her fall look?

  "Don't worry," she said, reading my mind. "No more dressing up like a vampire. Not now that I know they really do exist. Dead is so last year."

  "A job is a great idea," I said.

  "It's only part-time, but I get a thirty percent discount," she replied. "Want me to see if they need any more help?"

  A summer job? My oldest sister, Rose, was working at the college, at a research lab. Maybe I could find something, too. I could use the extra money and I was getting tired of asking Mom for cash all the time. Besides, I had my eye on this very expensive gourmet-cooking class.

  It seemed serendipitous when we pulled up in front of Slim's Diner and I saw the Help Wanted sign in the window.

  Slim's was a fifties-style diner, complete with red leather booths, lots of stainless steel, and a permanent smell of grease. It was also the place to get the best hamburger in town.

  When we walked in, the jukebox immediately stopped playing. I held my breath, waiting for some message conveyed through song, but it didn't start again.

  "Is it broken?" I asked Flo. Flo was my favorite waitress at Slim's. Despite her name and occupation, she was the antithesis of a fifties-diner waitress. No pink uniform and beehive for Flo. She was in her midtwenties, buff, with serious tats, and she always wore T-shirts and jeans to work. Today's shirt read VOICES TELL ME THINGS. EVIL THINGS.

  "The jukebox is pouting," she replied, from her perch at a counter barstool. "Been cranky since you've been gone."

  Slim's was nearly empty, so we managed to grab my favorite booth in front of the big window. When Flo came over to take our order, I pointed to the sign. "You need help, Flo? I'm looking for a summer job."

  She shrugged. "Guess so. Slim must have put that up. Come back in the morning at five and talk to him."

  Wait. FiveA.M.?

  "There's really a Slim? I had no idea. Why haven't I ever seen him? I thought he was made up, like Mrs. Butterworth or Colonel Sanders," Samantha said.

  "Uh, Sam, I'm pretty sure there really was a Colonel Sanders," I pointed out.

  "Oh, you know what I mean."

  We ordered large chocolate shakes and fries.

  "Now tell me all about Italy," Sam said.

  We talked about my vacation, but I left out a few of the scarier bits, like the part where I'd been chased by banshees. Thanks to my psychic powers and a little espresso, I'd managed to fight them off. There was enough supernatural stuff going on in Nightshade, so there was no need to import it. Plenty of the strange in Nightshade.

  Sean and Ryan entered the restaurant as Flo was delivering our order. I took a closer look at Sean and noticed that he'd bulked up almost as much as Ryan had.

  "Perfect timing," Sean said. He snagged a french fry from the plate. Sam smacked his hand.

  "Get your own," she said. Then she smiled at him. "Okay, we'll share, but it'll cost you a bite of your burger."

  Ryan said, "Hi, Flo, can I get a burger and fries? Burger extra, extra rare."

  "And I'll take a side of E. coli to go with that," I said. "What's with the still-moving meat?" But I knew the answer to my own question. He was a wolf boy. Of course he craved raw meat sometimes.

  Ryan shrugged. "Coach says it'll help us with our game."

  "I've been craving raw steak all day," Sean said.

  Samantha and I both shuddered.

  Ryan just grinned at me. Suddenly, I felt shy, like my boyfriend was a different person. Weird, especially since we'd been friends even before we were boyfriend and girlfriend. Ryan had always been one of the hottest guys in school, but he had gone supernova since I'd left for vacation.

  While the guys waited for their food, I decided to feed the jukebox and maybe coax it into playing again. The jukebox at Slim's, which I'd nicknamed Lil, had a mind of its own. It played what it wanted to when it wanted to.

  Ryan came with me.

  "I missed you," he said.

  "I missed you, too. Did you get my postcard?" I pretended to study the jukebox selection intently, even though I knew the playlist by heart. How dorky was I? Shy with my own boyfriend?

  I chose "Fade Into You" by Mazzy Star, which was a song Ryan and I had danced to at prom. The jukebox started, but the song wasn't something I'd chosen. Instead, "Go Away" by Elvis Costello came on. Just business as usual at Slim's. Sometimes Lil dropped hints about whatever was going on in my life. But today, she just sounded mad.

  "You look—good," I said.

  Ryan smiled. "I'm the same old me," he said. "Except now you know I'm a werewolf."

  "What about Sean?"

  "He doesn't know I'm a Were," Ryan said.

  "Are you going to tell him?" I asked.

  Ryan thought about it. "I don't think it's a big deal, but I'll tell him."I was glad to see his attitude had changed. Not that long ago, he'd been trying to keep it a secret from me.

  "Good, but what I really meant is what's going on with him? His neck is as big as my thigh. Is he a shifter, too?"

  "No. I told you, he's just been working out."

  Three weeks of working out and Sean already looked like that? Only in Nightshade. I decided to put it in the back of my mind for now and concentrate on letting my boyfriend know how much I'd missed him.

  CHAPTER TWO

  When I got home from the diner, I was in a great mood. Poppy, however, was not. She was sitting in the living room, with the shades drawn. Her laptop was on the table beside her, and the screen revealed our vacation pictures, which she'd obviously uploa
ded from the digital camera.

  "The Trevi Fountain was so beautiful," she said, then sighed. "I wish we were still in Italy."

  "Funny," I said, "because you looked miserable the entire time we were there."

  "Well, it's even harder being back in Nightshade," Poppy said. "Everything reminds me of Gage."

  Poppy's ghost boyfriend had haunted Nightshade just long enough to take Poppy to the prom before he finally left this world forever, breaking her heart in the process.

  "Have you been out of the house at all today?" I asked. I looked toward the window and, after concentrating for a moment, used my telekinesis to pull open the curtains and let in some sunshine. "It's a beautiful day."

  "Of course I've been out," Poppy said indignantly.

  "Going to the graveyard doesn't count."

  Poppy crossed her arms and gave me a pouty look. My social-butterfly sister hadn't been the same since her heart was broken.

  "Gage is gone, Poppy," I said gently. "He wouldn't want you to—"

  "How do you know what he wanted?" she snapped, then looked contrite. "I'm sorry, Daisy, I know you're trying to help. It's just that I miss him so much." Tears filled her eyes.

  It killed me to see my sister so sad, but Poppy had been moping far too long. Her hair looked like it hadn't been washed in days, and her skin was pale. Her jeans were starting to hang on her and I wondered how she'd lost weight when we ate all that pasta in Italy. Actually, come to think of it, I ate the pasta; Poppy just picked at it.

  I sat next to Poppy and put an arm around her delicate shoulders. "We've got a whole summer of fun ahead of us," I said. "We have the house to ourselves..."

  "What else is new?" Poppy said. "Mom's usually always working when she is around, and Dad..."

  "I know," I said. Our father had disappeared during a research trip, when I was twelve. Almost six years had passed and we still had no idea what had happened to him.

  But a few months back, I had gotten a lead: It seemed he might be being held against his will by the Scourge, a covert group whose goal was to wipe out the paranormal population.

  But my father was a norm, so what could they want with him? And if they did have him, where were they keeping him? These were all things I planned to find out this summer, and I had a feeling my mom did, too.