LITMIR.BIZ

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      “Of course.” But the sponsor didn’t look like she cared what my name was. “I’ve spoken to your mother—” but I didn’t bother to tell her that would be impossible without a Ouija board “—and she wants you to take Sophie straight home. She’s going to meet you there.”

      I nodded, and ignored the sympathetic hand the danceteam sponsor placed momentarily on my shoulder, as if to thank me for sharing some venerable burden. “You ready?” I asked in my cousin’s general direction, and to my surprise, she bobbed her head in assent, stood with her purse in hand, and followed me across the quad without betraying a single syllable of malicious intent.

      She must have been in shock.

      In the parking lot, I unlocked the passenger’s side door, then went around to let myself in. Sophie slid into her seat and pulled the door closed, then turned to face me slowly, her normally arrogant expression giving way to what could only be described as abject grief.

      “Did you see it?” she asked, full lower lip quivering, and for once absent of lip gloss. She must have wiped it all off, along with the tears and most of her makeup. She looked almost … normal. And I couldn’t help the pang of sympathy her misery drew from me, in spite of the bitch-itude she radiated every other day of my life. For now, she was just scared, confused, and hurting, looking for a compassionate ear.

      Just like me.

      And it kind of stung that I couldn’t totally let my guard down with her, because I had no doubt that once her grief had passed, Sophie would go all Mean Girls on me again, and use against me whatever I’d shown her. “See what?” I sighed, adjusting the rearview mirror so I could watch her indirectly.

      My cousin rolled her eyes, and for a moment her usual intolerance peeked through the fresh layer of raw sorrow. “Meredith. Did you see what happened?”

      I turned the key in the ignition, and my little Sunfire hummed to life, the steering wheel vibrating beneath my hands. “No.” I felt no great loss over having missed the show; the preview was quite enough to deal with.

      “It was horrible.” She stared straight out the windshieldas I buckled my seat belt and pulled the car from the parking lot, but she obviously saw nothing. “We were dancing, just showing off for Scott and the guys. We’d made it through all the hard parts, including that step where Laura usually skips a beat in practice….”

      I had no idea what step she was talking about, but I let her ramble on, because it seemed to make her feel better without putting me on the figurative chopping block.

      “.and were nearly done. Then Meredith just …collapsed. She crumpled up like a doll and fell flat on the ground.”

      My hands clenched the steering wheel, and I had to force them loose to flick on my blinker. I turned right at the stoplight, exhaling only once the school—and thus the source of my latest premonition—was out of sight. And still Sophie prattled on, airing her grief in the name of therapy, completely oblivious to my discomfort.

      “I thought she’d passed out. She doesn’t eat enough to keep a hamster alive, you know.”

      I hadn’t known, of course. I didn’t typically concern myself with the eating habits of the varsity dance squad. But if Meredith’s appetite was anything like my cousin’s—or my aunt’s, for that matter—Sophie’s assumption was perfectly plausible.

      “But then we realized she wasn’t moving. She wasn’t even breathing.” Sophie paused for a moment, and I treasured the silence like that first gulp of air after a deep dive. I didn’t want to hear any more about the death I’d been unable to prevent. I felt guilty enough already. But she wasn’t done. “Peyton thinks she had a heart attack. Mrs. Rushing told us in health last year that if you work your body too hard and don’t fuel it up right, your heart will eventually stop working. Just like that.” She snapped her fingers, and the glitter in her nail polish flashed in the bright sunlight. “Do you think that’s what happened?”

      It took me a moment to realize her question wasn’t rhetorical. She was actually asking my opinion about something, and there was no sarcasm involved.

      “I don’t know.” I glanced in the rearview mirror as I turned onto our street, and wasn’t surprised to see Aunt Val’s car on the road behind us. “Maybe.” But that was an outright lie. Meredith Cole was the third teenage girl to drop dead with no warning in the past three days, and while I wasn’t about to voice my suspicions out loud—at least not yet—I could no longer tell myself the deaths weren’t connected.

      Nash’s coincidence theory had hit an iceberg and was sinking fast.

      I parked in the driveway, and Aunt Val drove past us into her spot in the garage. Sophie was out of the car before I’d even turned the engine off, and the minute she saw her mother, she burst into tears again, as if her inner floodgates couldn’t withstand the assault of sympathetic eyes and a shoulder to cry on.

      Aunt Val ushered her sobbing daughter through the garage and into the kitchen, then guided her gently to a stool at the bar. I came behind them both, carrying Sophie’s purse, and punched the button to close the garage bay door. Inside, I dropped my cousin’s handbag on the counter while Sophie sniffed, and blubbered, and hiccupped, spitting out half-coherent details as she wiped first her cheeks, then her already reddened nose with a tissue from the box on the counter.

      But Aunt Val didn’t seem very interested in the specifics, which she’d probably already heard from the danceteam sponsor. While I sat at the table with a can of Coke and a wish for silence, she bustled around the kitchen making hot tea and wiping down countertops, and only once she’d run out of things to do did she settle onto the stool next to her daughter. Aunt Val made Sophie drink her tea slowly, until the sobs slowed and the hiccupping stopped. But even then Sophie wouldn’t stop talking.

      Meredith’s death was the first spear of tragedy to pierce my cousin’s fairy tale of a world, and she had no idea how to deal with it. When she was still sobbing and dripping snot into her lukewarm tea twenty minutes later, Aunt Val disappeared into the bathroom. She came back carrying a small brown pill bottle I recognized immediately: leftover zombie pills from my last visit with Dr. Nelson, from the mental-health unit.

      I twisted in my chair and arched my brows at my aunt, but she only smiled half regretfully, then shrugged. “It will calm her down and help her sleep. She needs to rest.”

      Yes, but she needed a natural sleep, not the virtual coma induced by those stupid sedatives. Not that either of them would have listened to me, even if I’d offered my opinion on the subject of chemical oblivion.

      For a moment, I envied my cousin her innocence, even as I watched it die. I’d learned about death early in life, and as inconsolable as Sophie was at the moment, she’d had fifteen years to prance around in her plastic-wrapped, padded, gaily colored, armor-plated existence, where darkness dared not tread. No matter what happened next, no one could take away her happy childhood.

      Aunt Val watched Sophie swallow a single, tiny white pill, then walked her daughter down the hall into her room, where the bedsprings soon creaked beneath her slight weight. Ten minutes later, she was snoring obnoxiously enough to leave no doubt in my mind that my cousin had inherited just as much from her father as from her mother.

      While my aunt put Sophie to bed, I grabbed a second Coke from Uncle Brendon’s shelf in the fridge—the one realm Aunt Val’s sugar-free, nonfat, tasteless regime had yet to conquer—and took it into the living room, where I checked the local TV station. But there was no news on at two-thirty in the afternoon. I’d have to wait for the five o’clock broadcast.

      I turned off the TV, and my thoughts wandered to the Coles, whom I’d only met once, at a dance-team competition the year before. My eyes watered as I imagined Meredith’s mother trying to explain to her young son that his big sister wouldn’t be coming home from school. Ever.

      Glass clinked in the kitchen, momentarily pulling me from the mire of guilt and grief I was sinking into, and I twisted on the couch to see my aunt pouring hot tea into

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