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didn’t want to give, she was even more intellectually delayed than I’d thought. At Emory High, secrets were like currency. You traded them, bartered for them, bought silence with them. But when the secret in question centered on the fact that one of your best friends was a modern-day Siren who could bewitch guys with her singing voice? Those were the kind of secrets you just kept.
    Still, I had to tell Fuchsia something. She was my best friend. My second-in-command. My biggest threat.
    “Tracy tried to hook up with Tate right after the breakup, and he declined,” I said, thinking on my feet and giving Fuchsia the gossip she was lusting after. “Lissy overheard us talking about it in the bathroom.” The first part was true; the second part was not.
    Tracy let out a horrified gasp, but I shut her up with one cautionary look. The easiest way to keep one secret was to let another piece of information slip, and the last thing either of us needed was for Fuchsia, whose mouth was roughly the size of Montana, to figure out that it had taken more than boob, nose, and dye jobs for Tracy to land her ex-boyfriend (the second-hottest guy at our school) in the first place. If secrets were currency in the high school world, boys were more or less Gold cards. No pun intended.
    I didn’t even want to know what would happen if it got out that Tracy could seduce guys with her singing voice. Knowing Tracy, once her cover was blown, she’d probably hedge her bets and seduce the entire senior class, and I think we all know who’d end up cleaning up after that fiasco. Was it too much to ask for things to just return to normal?
    Until a few weeks into the start of my junior year, life at Emory had been predictable: the Goldens threw the best parties, hooked up exclusively with each other, and kept the Nons in their places: figuratively under our feet and literally out of our way. Harsh? Yes, but this was high school, and I knew better than anyone: life was harsh.
    Enter Lissy James. Within twenty-four hours of moving to town, she’d unknowingly hit on Brock (off-limits) and Tate (also off-limits), made friends with some of the biggest Nons in the class below me, puked in front of the entire student body, and failed to thank me even once for stopping the rumors that she was a pathetic boyfriend-stealing bulimic.
    Instead, Lissy and her so-called Sight had turned my nice, normal life upside down. It had started with her little sister letting me in on the ginormous big-sis-has-mystical-powers secret, and it had ended with the three of us and Lissy’s Nontourage saving Tracy from Mr. Kissler, a power-grubbing math teacher who’d tried to kill her to steal her Siren (aka singing seductress) voice.
    Even thinking about it made my head hurt.
    In the weeks since our little adventure, Lissy, Tracy, and I had developed an understood agreement: Lissy kept her mouth shut about Tracy’s power, Tracy didn’t tell anyone about the freakiness she’d seen when we’d rescued her, and I did my best to ignore the strange daydreams I’d been having ever since.
    I took another sip of my shake and forced my mind and my eyes back to the present.
    “Wow.”
    Ack! I thought as the word left my mouth. I hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Girls who were dating the most popular, best-looking guy in the entire school weren’t allowed to “wow” over other males, especially in the presence of my overzealous best friends, Fuchsia “I Want What You Have” Reynolds and Tracy “If I Can’t Have Tate Then I Want What Fuchsia Wants” Hillard.
    “Wow what?” Fuchsia and Tracy asked in one voice.
    I improvised and scrambled for a distracter. “Wow,” I said, zeroing in on a nearby pair of pants and saying a silent apology to their owner. “I didn’t know they made plaid the color of vomit.”
    As I’d known it would, my comment sent them off on another tangent about the day’s worst fashion faux pas, and I had a chance to examine the real cause of my