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date him despite the vicious rumors.”

Summer shrugged.  “I guess.” She still hadn’t looked up to meet my eyes.

“Summer, you’re not considering this, are you?”

She shrugged again.

“But why?  Why would you do that?  To Devon or to yourself?”

She looked up at me, frowning.  “Oh, I wouldn’t actually have sex with him.  I’d just tell people that we did.”

“But everyone would think that you just went out and slept with him.  Do you think they won’t be calling you a slut by lunchtime if you do this?”

“You know how Trinity is.  If I say no, it’s hard to tell what she’ll do to me.”

I growled, sliding off the bed to pace the floor.  Everyone was afraid of Trinity, afraid of what she would do if she was angered.  Trinity was smart, though.  She never pushed the wrong people.  She always picked the weakest ones of the herd to do her dirty work.  She would never ask me to do something like that.  I might bite my tongue a lot, but she knew I wouldn’t go along with something so deplorable.  It was times like this that made me wonder if Stanford was really worth it.

“Summer, you can’t do this.”

“I have to,” she said miserably.

I paced the floor, thinking.  I stopped when a possible solution occurred to me.  “Devon’s a nice guy.  Let me talk to him.  If he refuses to take you out, problem solved, right?”

Summer’s eyes lit up and she clapped excitedly.  Though this disaster was averted, I knew it was just a matter of time before Trinity thought of something else, some other despicable way to win Devon back.

I called Devon and, as I suspected, he was more than willing to go along with our counter-Trinity plan and keep it hush-hush.

********

The next morning, I decided to drive to school.  There was an away game that night and I didn’t want to get stuck riding home with somebody else when the bus dropped us back off at school.  Since I could never count on one of my rogue parents to be a reliable back-up plan, I tried always to make other arrangements—me.  As usual, I was my own plan B.

I pulled my old Civic into a parking spot and grabbed my duffel from the back seat.  I had to hurry.  I was running late.

I scurried into Home Room and scooted into my seat, dropping my bag quietly onto the floor.  Mrs. Dingle was going over the local news, as she did every morning.  She felt it was her duty to keep us informed of what was going on around us, as if we were all so oblivious we wouldn’t find out otherwise.  But then I realized something.  She was probably right.  The only reason I knew what was going on was because I went to sleep with the television on.  I couldn’t tolerate silence.  Or, better yet, I couldn’t tolerate the places my mind went in the silence.  Either way, I heard the news whether I wanted to or not.

The first tidbit she force-fed us was the increase in the number of animal deaths.  Farm animals were being mauled and brutally killed all over the area.  The Wildlife Officers had neither confirmed nor denied speculation that there might be a pack of wolves or even a mountain lion terrorizing livestock in the region.  As an avid animal lover, topics like that disturbed me, even more than those involving the Slayer, which was what Mrs. Dingle moved on to next.

Southmoore was a thriving city that lay just north of our small South Carolina town, Harker.  For that reason, citizens and reporters alike had all been closely following the killings there.  As a community, we hadn’t been put on lockdown yet, but if things got much worse up north or, heaven forbid, moved down south to us, our freedoms would be quickly and severely curtailed.

As she droned on, I let my mind wander.  For some reason, it meandered straight down a path that led to the guy I’d seen at the field the day before.  I could picture his face with perfect clarity, as I’d done countless times since yesterday.  There was just something about