Of Starlight Read Free Page A

everybody out.”
    “Hang on, I’m going to go around one more time.”
    We drove on in silence. I pressed my forehead to the glass. Narrow, dilapidated houses guarded by chain link fences and rabid bulldogs slid by, along with groups of what looked like gang members. They jockeyed with each other, trying to look tough. Just kids being kids.
    This was wrong to be here profiling them. Why weren’t we looking for criminals in a rich neighborhood? All this time we thought we were open-minded, and here we were perpetuating racial and social inequality like the worst of them. On top of everything else we’d done, it didn’t feel good.
    “You’re going to have to tell him,” said Megan.
    “Who?”
    “You know who.”
    My mind went back to Emory kissing me on the beach, making me dizzy all over again before the guilt kicked in. I groaned and dragged my hands down my face. He did whatever he wanted to me and my body fell into line like a whipped puppy. A guilty, whipped puppy that would do anything to please its master. I was helpless.
    “I get it,” said Megan. “You killed his sister, so now you think it’s okay to fuck him too. Why not, right? Might as well score while you can.”
    I stared at her. “Why on Earth would I think that, Megan? I don’t think that way. You think that way.”  
    “I’m not the one fucking him,” she said.
    “I’m not fucking him,” I spat.
    “Then what are you doing, Leona? Why are you hanging out with him? You’re violating your own rule.”
    “I know what I’m doing.”
    Megan chewed her lip. “You’re not going to tell him, are you?”
    A pause. “No.”
    “Because that would be something we’d have to talk about. Telling him. We’d have to decide on it together. And you do realize he would hate you for the rest of his life, right? He would never forgive you.”
    I nodded, my throat dry all of sudden. “Yeah . . .”
    “But have you thought about it?” she said.
    “Thought about what?”
    She kept her voice casual, but her knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “You know . . . telling someone.”
    I looked sharply at her. “Megan, I’m not going to tell anyone.”
    “I’ve thought about it,” she said quickly, and her throat jogged as she swallowed.
    I said nothing.
    She added, “I mean, we could if you want to . . .” Her voice trailed off into silence. “Never mind. It was stupid.”
    I shifted in my seat. Here I was lying to her—not only had I thought about telling someone, I’d shown someone Ashley’s body without telling her—while Megan was just trying to work through her own guilt. The thought made me feel even lousier. To distract myself, I pulled out the contact lens case containing dark matter and unscrewed one of the caps. One touch, and the dark matter jumped to the tip of my finger.
    I held it up, examining it under the cabin light. Like someone had sliced off the very tip of my finger. Invisible. As I watched, it began to creep down the digit toward the knuckle, spreading out over the skin and swallowing it from view, revealing a growing cross section of flesh and bone.
    “Huh, that’s weird,” I said.
    Megan glanced over. “What?”
    “It wants to spread out on surfaces until it covers them completely, but only some surfaces—like skin. You have to coax it around inanimate objects, or else it won’t do it. It hasn’t latched onto the ground or our cars or our houses, even though we touch that stuff all the time.”
    “Why is that weird?” she said.
    “It could if it wanted to. If it started spreading on the ground, it would eventually swallow the entire earth.”
    “How do you know it isn’t?” she said.
    A chill slipped down the back of my neck. “It doesn’t get on anything else when we wear it, because it stops being sticky. It wants to wrap around living things, but when it finds one—when it finds a host—it becomes part of its skin and doesn’t spread anymore . . . like that’s its only