“We know,” Charlotte said, gulping down another giggle. She grabbed their hands. “Come on. I have to find a dress that can handle my hot body.” Her voice was sarcastic, but the bitter edge was gone. “And Sutton …”
“Yeah?”
Charlotte shook her head. “Nothing. Thanks. Or … you know … I forgive you. Both of you.” She looked at Madeline, too.
“Hey, I didn’t apologize,” Madeline joked, looping her arm through Charlotte’s.
“That’s because you’re a bitch,” Charlotte said lightly. “You can’t help it. But I still forgive you.”
They started down the mall together, my best friends and my sister. “Thank you,” I whispered to Charlotte. “Thanks for forgiving me.”
Everything changes. Sooner or later, we all grow up.
17
RESEARCHING AND REMINISCING
During free period on Wednesday, Emma slipped into the school library. The library was a bland, beige room lined with metal shelves and hung with posters of celebrities holding books. The librarian’s name was Ms. Rigby, a youngish woman who wore cat-eye glasses and vintage cardigans. She had a perpetually aggravated air, as if she simply could not believe teenagers would turn down a chance to use actual research materials on a daily basis, but if she caught sight of a student perusing the stacks voluntarily, she immediately softened. Emma had been in the library a few times since her arrival in Tucson, first to check out materials for an English paper and again to get some books for pleasure reading. The librarian had treated her with skepticism at first—she seemed to know Sutton by her bad-girl reputation rather than by actual library attendance. But over the past few weeks she’d seemed to accept that Sutton Mercer had taken a bookish turn.
Emma had decided to follow Ethan’s suggestion and do some digging into her mother’s illness. It might not help her solve Sutton’s murder, but at least it’d give her some insight into what Becky was going through.
“Hi, Sutton,” Ms. Rigby said, smiling up at her from the reference desk.
“Hey, Ms. Rigby.” She looked around to make sure no one could overhear her, though the library was mostly empty. “I’m doing some research for a presentation.”
“What’s the topic?”
“Uh, mental illness.”
Ms. Rigby leaned back in her chair thoughtfully. “That’s a pretty big subject to tackle all at once. Anything specific you’re interested in?”
“Well, I’m interested in … violent cases.” Her pulse quickened mildly just saying the words out loud.
The librarian nodded. “The violent ones are always the most interesting, aren’t they?” she said. “I have to admit, Abnormal Psychology was one of my favorite subjects in college. Follow me.”
The librarian led her to an aisle in the middle of the nonfiction stacks. There were four and a half shelves full of titles like An Idiot’s Guide to Personality Disorders and Case Studies in Mental Illness. A lot of the books looked outdated and moldy.
Ms. Rigby surveyed the shelves for a moment, then found what she was looking for. “The Devil’s Playground,” she said cheerfully. “It’s about criminal insanity. It’s a good read, and it should give you a good place to start your research if you’re interested in that sort of thing.”
Emma liked Ms. Rigby, but it was a little chilling to hear her talk about violent insanity as if it was a source of entertainment. “Um, great.”
“The school board obviously doesn’t let us keep anything too disturbing in the library, so you might also check the university. They’ll have tons of stuff.”
The librarian returned to her desk, and Emma looked back at the shelves. She grabbed a few more books and went to a table hidden behind the science fiction section, a little out of sight of the front desk.
She started to leaf through the first book. It contained lots of pictures, from woodcuts of the Salem witch trials to before-and-after pictures of lobotomies in the 1960s. She flipped to the index and ran her finger down the list of entries, unsure what she was even really looking for. Then she remembered something the nurse had said in the hospital: It looks like a total psychotic break.
She found the entry for psychotic break and flipped to the page indicated. Psychosis is marked by a complete removal of the patient from reality, it said. Delusions, hallucinations, disordered thinking or behavior, and poor impulse control are all indicators of a psychotic break. Then the book went on to describe a bunch of serial killers with names like the Night Slasher and the Dallas Axe Killer who had received instructions from the voices in their heads to kill and kill again. They murdered people they loved. Parents. Sisters. Children. All because a voice told them to.
Emma’s stomach turned. Becky had been taken to the hospital because she’d pulled a knife on someone. Had a voice commanded her to do that? What might she have done if the security guards hadn’t intervened?
“Good reading?”
Thayer stood over her, his dark hair falling shaggily into his hazel eyes. Emma slapped the book shut and placed it at her side, face down. A book on criminal psychosis didn’t seem like typical Sutton Mercer reading material.
Thayer flopped down across from her, and suddenly a package of Twizzlers manifested itself in front of her nose. The sweet strawberry smell made her mouth water. “For you!”
“These are my favorite!” Emma exclaimed, taking a large bite of the sticky, sugary candy. Emma had always kept a package of the candy in her purse back in Nevada, hiding it from foster siblings with personal-space-and-property issues. “How did you know?”
His brow crinkled. “Because I used to bring them to you every day?”
Emma smiled at the thought that she and Sutton had the same favorite candy. So much about their lifestyles seemed so different, but maybe there had been some tastes they’d shared after all.
“What are you reading, anyway?” Thayer asked. He grabbed at the book and let out a low whistle of surprise. “Whoa. You have a dark side I didn’t know about.”
“Is that why you’re here? To find out about my dark side?” Emma asked.
Thayer nodded. “Obviously. I’m stalking you.”
Emma felt her cheeks getting warm under Thayer’s gaze. He thinks he’s looking at Sutton, not me, she reminded herself. A tickle of curiosity stirred in the back of her mind. Thayer had seemed so unhappy and brittle when she first met him, and it still surprised her to see this friendly, sweet side of him. Then she remembered something and cleared her throat.
“Do you remember that day at the fair when you won me the big Scooby-Doo?” she asked.
His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “How could I forget? I only threw rings at bowling pins for three hours to get the stupid thing.”
“Laurel reminded me about it the other day,” Emma said softly. “It was really … sweet.”
Thayer frowned. “You said it was stupid. You said carnival animals were full of lice.”
“Oh please, I loved it,” Emma murmured. For a moment she imagined herself as Sutton, receiving the stuffed animal, rolling her eyes to keep her diva reputation intact but later laying her cheek against the cheap plush toy and smiling at the thought of Thayer. She felt sure that her sister had secretly swooned over the gesture.
An image came to me of the Scooby-Doo sitting on my bedspread. Thayer and I had loved each other so intensely, but we’d only been together a short time. It just wasn’t fair.
Thayer reached across the table for Emma’s hand. For a split second she let him curl his fingers around hers—but then she pulled quickly away.
He flushed. “Sorry,” he said. “Old habits die hard.”
She was spared having to say anything else when Celeste, idly shuffling a deck of cards, emerged from behind a bookshelf. She was wearing a green lace jacket over a short, shapeless gray dress, and a large purple stone on a lanyard hung around her neck. The rings on her fingers glittered as she played with the cards. She stopped when she saw Sutton and Thayer. “Helloooo,” she said, drawing out the word.
“What do you want?” Emma asked, frowning. She wasn’t in the mood to hear more about her damaged aura today.
Celeste smiled at Thayer, her expression looking like it was somehow filtered through a soft-focus camera lens. “I don’t know if I’ve met you. Are you Sutton’s boyfriend?”
Thayer coughed and glanced at Emma awkwardly. “I’m Thayer,” he said, holding out his hand.
Celeste didn’t shake it. She slid next to Thayer and looked at Emma unblinkingly. “Sutton,” she said finally, “I think I’ve been sent here to give you a message.”
Thayer widened his eyes, clearly enjoying this. Emma remembered he’d said that Celeste had a celestial body. Typical guy. “A message?” she challenged. “Really? Who from?”
“From the universe.” Celeste’s gaze was distant. “I was heading toward the Student Center to meet Garrett when I felt an undeniable urge to come in here. I don’t know why—I wasn’t planning to visit the library. But something guided my steps, straight to you.” She leaned even closer. “I think I should read your cards, if you don’t mind.”
Emma stopped. She’d had her tarot read once before, when she and Alex had snuck into a New Age convention at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas. The psychic had been a slender woman with long dark hair and an accent that seemed to waver between Jamaican and Southern. She’d told Emma that she saw family difficulties on the horizon—secrets and lies exposed, a death—but that in the end Emma would gain financially. She and Alex had laughed about it. At the time it’d seemed like a good joke, since Emma didn’t have a family.
But she did now. And that family had difficulties in spades.
Emma chewed on her lip. She wasn’t sure she believed in fortune-telling. But she was out of ideas. And maybe, just maybe, the cards could tell her something. “All right,” she said. “Go ahead.”
Celeste said nothing, just started shuffling the cards. Emma couldn’t help noticing that, in spite of the faraway expression on her face, her hands moved with the speed and confidence of a seasoned cardsharp.
Celeste laid out the first card, which pictured a woman blindfolded and tied up in front of a row of swords. The drawing was simple and colorful, the woman’s face mostly obscured by the scarf around her eyes—but Emma’s skin crawled just looking at it. The woman was trapped, surrounded by blades.
“The Eight of Swords,” Celeste said carefully. “It indicates that you are incapacitated. That your options are limited and you cannot see a way out.”
Emma’s hands started to tremble, and she hid them under the table. Celeste drew another card. Two dogs stared up at the man in the moon. The face in the moon looked strange and unfriendly.
“The Moon.” Celeste turned her gaze up to meet Emma’s, her face serious and sad. “There’s madness around you, Sutton Mercer.”
The words sent a shaft of ice through Emma’s heart. The way she’d said it made it sound like it was Emma’s fault, like she’d generated insanity. She shook her head almost imperceptibly as Celeste turned over the third card. She didn’t need to have that one explained to her. The dark, skeletal rider carrying a black banner. That one was obvious.
Comments