Deadly Little Games Read Free

my usual bowls and vases, I’ve been sculpting things from my future. First it was a car—the same one I spotted on the day Matt took me captive. Then there was the pinecone, which looked just like the air freshener that dangled from the rearview mirror of Matt’s car. About a month ago it was a swordfish, similar to the wooden cutout affixed over the door of Finz restaurant, the place near where Debbie Marcus was hit by a car.
    Debbie was a girl at school whose friends made it look like she was being stalked. They sent her creepy notes, making her believe that Ben (once on trial for the murder of his girlfriend on the cliff that day) wanted her to be Victim Number Two.
    Debbie believed it, too. One night, on a walk home from a friend’s house, anxious that Ben might’ve been following her, she wasn’t really paying attention to where she was going and was struck by a car. The accident almost took her life.
    When she came out of her coma two months later, even though Ben wasn’t to blame, she was determined to make him pay—to make someone pay—for her lost time. And so she tried to frame him for stalking me in hopes that he would be forced to leave our school once and for all.
    “Wait,” Wes says. “Are you to imply that our dear Chameleon is once again having premonitions by way of pottery?”
    “I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t call me reptilian names,” I say.
    “Would you prefer it if I called you a freak?”
    “Plus,” I say, failing to dignify his question with a response, “it hasn’t only been body parts. What about the car, the swordfish, the pinecone?”
    “Well, I still suspect something shady’s going on,” Kimmie says. “I mean, why Adam’s mouth?—why not Ben’s or your own? And why did it look all pouty, like he wanted a kiss?”
    “There’s more.” I tell them about last night, how, when I couldn’t sleep, I sculpted Adam’s eyes.
    “See?” Kimmie folds her arms. “More body parts.”
    “Whatever,” I sigh, refusing to get into it again.
    “Do you think you’re sculpting this stuff and thinking about him because you miss him?” she asks.
    “Or this could be your subconscious’s way of trying to sabotage your love life,” Wes suggests. “I saw something similar on Love Rehab .”
    Kimmie rolls her eyes—yet again—at the suggestion. She grabs a straw and attempts to blow the wrapper into Wes’s recently overgrown yet still mousse-laden dark hair, but the wrapper fails to penetrate the hair’s crusty outer surface. “Camelia hasn’t even revealed the most disturbing piece in her jigsaw puzzle of a life,” Kimmie says.
    “Right,” I say, knowing full well what she’s talking about. “While I was sculpting Adam’s mouth, I whispered the words ‘You deserve to die.’”
    “At me,” Kimmie points out.
    “More like, near you,” I clarify. “It’s not like I think you deserve to die.”
    “Then who?” Wes asks.
    “No one. It’s like someone put those words in my mouth—like the phrase got stuck in my head, and I couldn’t let it go.” I sink back in my seat, reminded of how sometimes, when I’m having one of my psychometric episodes—if I should even be calling it that—I’m able to hear voices.
    About a month ago, I sculpted a horse kicking its legs up. It turned out to look just like the horse on the pendant that Ben gave to Julie shortly before she died. All the time I was sculpting the horse I kept hearing a voice in my head—a voice that told me to be careful.
    The horse sculpture turned out to be a clue that someone was trying to trick me. That someone was Adam. Two years earlier, Adam (Ben’s best friend at the time) had been dating Julie behind Ben’s back. When Julie died, Adam, like everyone else, blamed Ben and wanted revenge.
    And so last fall, when Adam learned that Ben had come to Freetown High seeking a somewhat mainstream life again, he secretly followed. Adam enrolled at the community college nearby and sought out