by Stacey Jay
I could just feel that this person was up to no good. Add to that the fact that the footsteps sounded eerily similar to the footsteps I'd heard in the bathroom right before I'd had my head smashed in, and you had a recipe for nearly making me pee my pants.
Okay, so I did pee my pants. Just a little. What?! Like you've never done it.
I'm pretty sure my eyes would have stayed closed until scary-foot person did their business in the office and vacated if Trish hadn't started jabbing me in the throat with her elbow. (Once more, don't ask. We were like conjoined twins sharing a very cramped uterus.)
Finally, when it became clear Trish wasn't going to let up until I gagged or opened my eyes, I cracked my lids just in time to see none other than Gavin the sex god sneaking out of Principal's Samedi's private office with a big fat file folder filled with yellowed paper! On his way out, he walked close enough to have reached out and touched us, but he didn't. Instead, he held his thieved file at the perfect angle for me to read the title:
Rare and Forbidden Spells
Not just rare, not just forbidden, but rare and forbidden. That was what little Mr. Swim Team, Most Likely to
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Succeed, I'm-everybody's-friend-and-get-good-grades-and-would-never-rip-out-brains McDougal was lifting from the principal's office.
My eyes bulged, and I jabbed Trish somewhere in the vicinity of her ribcage. I had been so right all along! Gavin was the one to blame. He had the motive, he had opportunity, and now he had stolen a big fat spell folder so he could finish the job he'd started when he'd hacked out those poor, innocent girls' brains.
Trish and I waited until his footsteps faded down the hall before spilling out onto the floor in a grunting pile of bruised internal organs.
"I knew it! We have to go tell Principal Samedi," I said, scrambling to my feet.
"No, we don't! What are we going to say? 'Hey, we were snooping through your office when we saw Gavin McDougal stealing files'? We can't let anyone know we were here. We'll have to find another way to--"
"We don't have time to find another way! He could be boiling Penelope and Kendra's brains in a huge vat of oil right now!"
"I've never heard of any spell that involved boiling brains in oil."
"You're the one who said the spell involved a bunch of brains in a pot."
"But I never said anything about oil. Or boiling," Trish said as we tiptoed toward the door. "Besides, if he's really the one taking brains and--"
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"What do you mean 'if? How much more evidence do you need?" Trish was so mentally challenged when it came to seeing the truth about Gavin. If I didn't know better, I'd think she was crushing even harder than I was-- but that was impossible since I still wanted to trap Gavin in the janitor's closet and kiss him until our lips turned inside out, no matter how evil he was. I was weak and had totally fallen prey to his sex-god vibe.
"More than we've got now," Trish replied. "So, like I said, if he's the one doing this and he really wants to work the super-zombie spell, he's going to need more than two brains. We've got some time."
"Not much," I whispered, a chill running across my skin as we dashed down the hallway back toward the girls' dorm.
Call me crazy, but it didn't feel like we were alone anymore and I could have sworn there was a weird odor drifting from somewhere near the bathrooms. Could have just been generic bathroom stank. Or it could have been the rancid breath of my murderous roomie, or even the pungent aroma of the vinegar Gavin was using to preserve his thieved brains until the time was ripe for his spell to be cast.
Whatever it was, I wasn't ready to go bursting into the bathroom and find out. I'd had my share of nearly getting killed in lavs for the day. I wanted to solve this mystery and get those girls back their brains, but I really didn't want to lose my own in the process.
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"So what's our next step? How are we going to prove that Gavin is the harvester before he strikes again?"
"I still think it's Darby and Clarice," Trish said. "Or maybe Principal Samedi trying to make it look like Darby and Clarice."
"Okay, fine." She was going to be proven wrong, but there was no point in wasting time arguing. Right now neither of us had the goods to back up our beliefs. "How are we going to find out for sure? We'll need proof before we start accusing anyone."
Trish turned into the stairwell leading up to our floor, wisely avoiding the elevator, where we might run into more guards or upperclassmen or Resident Assistants. "Let me think about it tonight. I'll stick a note in your locker before class tomorrow and we can go from there."
"Just don't ask me to come meet you in the girls' bathroom." I followed her up the stairs and hovered behind her as she opened the second-floor door.
"I won't." She peeked out into the hall. "All clear. See you in the morning."
"Be careful," I said, feeling strangely anxious about Trish going one way down our hall and I the other. It would be so much better if we could stick together.
"I'll be fine. I'm not the one with the potentially lethal roommate," she said with a grin.
"Thanks."
"Try to sleep with one eye open."
"Right." I rolled my eyes and waved goodbye before
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dashing back down the hall and slipping quietly into my room.
My lonely room.
Clarice, who had been snoring away when I'd left, was no longer in her bed, which meant she could have been the source of the stank lurking downstairs. For all I knew, she and Darby and Gavin were all three working together. Crap! Trish and I hadn't even thought of that.
Who knew what else we hadn't thought of? Probably lots of things. I just hoped, as I miraculously drifted off to sleep without much trouble at all, that none of those things would end up getting us brain harvested. Or worse.
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CHAPTER NINE
Clarice sucks butt.
Karen Vera sucks bigger, dirtier butt.
--Bathroom stall, second floor girls' bathroom
I'd been the walking dead for days but hadn't even known it.
I mean, I knew I was a zombie, but the social suicide thing was a complete surprise until I entered the cafeteria for lunch on Thursday. I'd been so busy befriending Trish, crushing on Gavin, launching my investigation, being attacked, and dealing with creepy roommates that I'd had no idea just how horribly unpopular I was on the way to being--until I saw the writing on the bathroom wall. (Really, I think I ranked somewhere between a used length of dental floss and toe jam. Way below the discarded candied brain bites presently sitting on top of the garbage.)
Trish hadn't been kidding about that whole Deprogrammed-and-Death-Challenged-not-hanging-together thing. It seemed no one knew quite what to do with me, and the nasty looks and narrowed eyes came from both sides of the cafeteria. The Deprogrammed were just as unwilling to clear a chair for me as the DCs were.
My and Trish's cozy two-seater table was occupied by
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a pair of sophomores studying for midterms, and Trish herself nowhere to be found. I was forced to circle the lunchroom solo, clutching my tray and feeling my heart rise progressively higher in my throat as back after back turned against me, making it clear I was about as welcome as flesh-eating bacteria.
I, Karen Vera, the girl voted "Most Popular" every year of junior high, was now a lunchroom pariah. I had just about decided to dump my tray and run for the safety of my room when someone called my name.
"Hey, Karen. Over here. We've got a chair free."
I never thought I'd be so relieved to hear the voice of a murderer, but hey, at least he was friendly. Gavin was seated at a table of fit-and-trim swim team guys too intent on feeding their faces to spare me a second glance as I set my tray down and sank gratefully into the chair beside Gavin.
"Thanks," I mumbled. "I was starting to wonder if I had cooties or something."
"Nope, no cooties. At least none that I can see." He smiled and shoved a huge bite of stew from the hot line into hi
s mouth. "But then you can hide a lot under these uniforms."
"True." What was that supposed to mean? I would have smelled an insult, but the smile was throwing me off.
Still trembling slightly from my brush with social death, I picked up my fork but couldn't seem to recover my appetite. I just didn't understand why this was happening. Why
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was I being lumped into the butt-sucking category with Clarice? I hadn't been mean to anyone, and I'd gone out of my way to smile and remember the names of all the people in my classes. In any case, I'd been here less than a week, so how could I have made so many enemies?
"Hey, you okay?" Gavin asked, though I couldn't help but notice that even his voice wasn't as nice as it had been a couple of days before.
"Yeah, I... um..." Okay, this wasn't doing me or the investigation any good. Here I was, cozy with one of my suspects. It would be stupid not to try to get him talking about something, and this situation was really bothering me. "No, I'm not. I don't understand what's going on here. Is everyone always this unfriendly?"
Gavin stared at me for a second, his weirdly electric blue eyes surveying me with suspicion. "No, they're not. But then, it's been a bad week, and most people don't become instant best friends with the shadiest girl at school their first day on campus."
"Clarice is not my friend! She's just my roommate and I'm going to apply for a--"
"I'm not talking about Clarice."
Oh. He wasn't? "You're not?"
"I'm talking about Trish. You didn't really give people a chance to know you as anything but her little sidekick, so--"
"Hold the phone," I said, letting my fork clatter to my tray. "I am no one's sidekick." Did that really need to be said? Did I look like sidekick material to him?
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"Whatever you say." He shrugged in a way that made it clear his sidekick opinion had not been altered in the slightest. Argh!
"Trish has been really nice to me," I said, struggling to keep my cool. "I didn't see any reason not to be her friend. I know all about her being in juvie when she was younger and there were extenuating circumstances that I can completely sympathize with. So if that's the only reason all these people think they're better than she is, then I--"
"No one thinks they're better than she is," Gavin said, loud enough to earn a glance or two from the boys around us before they returned to their meals. (Thank. God. I mean, I'm a fairly confident person, but I didn't know if I could handle the scrutiny of an entire tableful of cute guys.) "She's the one with a problem. She's had an attitude about being Deprogrammed from the day she came here."
"So what? That seems valid. The Deprogrammed are obviously not treated fairly."
"Oh, please." He rolled his eyes. "Just because we have to do work-study? Cry me a river."
"Well, that's not really fair, is it?" I asked, feeling sort of stupid but determined not to show it. "That Deprogrammed have to do work-study, but Death Challenged kids don't?"
"The Death Challenged alumni who make the donations that run the school took a vote and decided they didn't want their money to go toward Deprogrammed tuition," Gavin said in between bites of stew. "They thought it
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would make it harder for the DCs to receive the quality of education they got when they were in school here." "But that stinks!"
"It s their money, and it could have been a lot worse. The alumni could have put pressure on the school board and voted us out of the school altogether." He laid his fork down and turned his full attention to me, making it clear his next point was an important one. "Then Principal Samedi would have had to deactivate every single rogue zombie she'd ever Deprogrammed. You get what that means, right?"
I nodded. "Deactivated" didn't leave a lot of room for interpretation. If the school board hadn't let the Deprogrammed stay, they would have all had to go back to their graves and stay there. The thought of Trish and Gavin six feet under made my bones ache. I couldn't imagine the school without them.
"So work-study seems like a pretty good deal to me," Gavin said, returning to his meal. "Besides, the DCs have to do four years of mandatory public service to the Undead community after they graduate, and Deprogrammed kids don't."
"Oh yeah?" They did? This was news to me. Though I did sort of remember Principal Samedi saying something, during her visit to our house, about being tied up until I was twenty-two. I'd been too busy munching fried brains to pay too much attention, but the community service thing would make sense in that context.
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"That's how you reimburse the community for paying for your education. It's also like an apprentice program. You'll learn all about the different jobs available to adult DCs and have a chance to try some of them out. After the four years are done, you can either apply for an Undead job--"
"Like what?" I asked.
"Well, you can work for the High Council as part of the Undead militia or on a Special Ops investigation team," he said, a gleam in his eye that made it clear Gavin found the idea of Special Ops pretty cool. "Or you can teach at one of the schools, do administrative work at the halfway houses for new adult DCs, be a Patroller who checks in to make sure everyone living in the human world is keeping our world top secret--all kinds of stuff."
"And if we don't want to do any of that stuff?" I asked, though the Special Ops thing sounded pretty cool to me too.
"Then you can apply for a visa and go to a human college or get a regular job in the human world. That's what most Deprogrammed people do, work in the regular world like we would have if we hadn't died. It all works out in the end, and no one really stresses out about it."
"But... it doesn't seem that way. It seems like there's major tension around here."
"That's only because of what happened to Kendra and Penelope and the rumors about the spell. And I'm sure Trish isn't helping things with her--" Gavin's mouth
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snapped closed, and he turned his attention back to his stew. "You know what? Never mind."
"No, tell me what you were going to say. You're sure Trish isn't helping things with what?"
I was starting to get a bad feeling in my stomach about my new BFF. Had she really been exaggerating the stress between the two groups, or was Gavin oblivious because he was a golden boy and immune to the suffering of the masses? And what was this about Trish being shady? That still hadn't been explained to my liking, especially since Gavin was the shady character who'd stolen forbidden spells from the principal's office.
"Nothing. None of my business. Besides, you can't be too careful." He shot me another suspicious look, which nearly made me lose it and confront him with his crimes. But I couldn't, not yet.
The worst thing I could do was let him know I was on to him and give him time to cover his tracks. Or worse, make sure I never had the chance to tell anyone what I knew. Looking at Gavin now, with his friendly, open expression and drool-worthy lips, it was hard to believe he'd be capable of taking anyone out, but isn't that what people always say about psycho serial killer types? That they were "so nice and normal" and "the last one you'd suspect of something so heinous"? Meanwhile, the freaks were collecting people's internal organs and storing them in alphabetized freezer bags in their veggie crisper.
Yep, I'd have to tread carefully with Gavin, especially
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considering my inherent vulnerability to his particular level of adorableness.
"Trish has done nothing to make me doubt her," I said, forcing myself to take a stab at my meal. "Until I hear some real reason why I shouldn't trust her, something other than a difference of opinion about the state of DC vs. DP politics, I'm going to keep being her friend."
Gavin's mouth quirked up on one side. "Politics?"
"Seems pretty political to me. There are two groups of people being treated differently for reasons having more to do with what they are than who they are or anything they've done."
He rolled his eyes. "You're not going to make the 'this is so like raci
sm' argument, are you? Because there's no way the situation here is anything close to--"
"No, I wasn't going to do that," I said. "But it isn't fair, either. You say it all evens out in the end, but it still stinks that neither side has a choice. What if I'd rather do work-study than waste four years of my life after graduation volunteering? Why shouldn't I have that option, or vice versa?"
"That's just the way it's always been." He shrugged, but looked a little less sure of himself.
"Well, that sounds a lot like what people said when they didn't want women or minorities to have the same rights as everyone else." I shifted uncomfortably in my chair, feeling weirdly like it was my mom's voice coming out of my mouth. I'd always thought she took the feminist
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thing to an annoying place, but now... I was sort of glad I'd been forced to endure her ranting. "I'm not saying the situation here is the same, but there are similarities."
Gavin chewed thoughtfully for a few seconds. "You might be a little bit right. At least you make a logical argument."
"Thanks." I tried not to grin, but failed. Geez! I was a pathetic flower way too eager to blossom in the rays of Gavin's sun. His sun was evil! And I didn't have petals! I should get up and walk away from him right now before I fell any deeper under his boy-spell.
"You're pretty smart," he said, destroying all hope of resistance. "A lot smarter than you come off at first. What with the big pink bows and all."
"A love for pink bows and intelligence are not mutually exclusive, last time I checked."
"I totally agree," Gavin said. "In fact, I think it would be stupid to underestimate someone just because they happened to be a cute little blond."
Before my heart could quite recover from the explosive bliss of being called a cute little blond, Gavin was gathering his tray and sliding his chair back from the table. Argh! He couldn't leave now! Now, when we'd just started to get somewhere. What did he mean by that last statement? And just how cute did he think I was? Like puppy cute or Kate Bosworth in Blue Crush cute?
