Platinum Read Free Page B

Audra and flicked a French fry expertly toward her face.
    And these were the people Lissy chose to spend her time with.
    “Don’t call me loverboy,” Dylan said, his too-long hair obscuring his face from my view. Not that I was looking.
    By the time I actually reached the table, Lissy seemed to have zoned in enough to add her own complaint. “He’s not my boyfriend,” she said. “And I wasn’t zoned out.”
    Likely story, I thought. On both counts. About that time, I remembered why I’d bothered to brave this side of the cafeteria to begin with. Hint: it had absolutely nothing to do with Lissy’s love life or her friends’ tendency toward impromptu food fights and only a little to do with the fact that my own friends were getting harder and harder to take.
    “Lissy,” I said, announcing my presence. Audra immediately froze, halfway to chucking the fry back at Dylan, who, like Lissy, seemed completely unaffected by my sudden appearance in Nonville. “I need to talk to you.” I glanced away from her just in time to smile across the room at Brock and Tate as they entered the cafeteria, finished with their football meeting.
    Brock smiled back, raking his eyes up and down my body and yelling out the words to his haiku.
    “You what?” Lissy asked, like my request had been somehow less than explicit.
    “I need to talk to you,” I repeated, never taking my eyes off Brock as he made a beeline for my table, and by the transitive property, for Fuchsia, Tracy, and what was left of my chocolate milkshake.
    Lissy didn’t respond immediately, and after I mouthed a hello to Brock, I looked down at her and forced an icy smile onto my face. I didn’t want to be here, at her table, asking—okay, demanding—her help. It wasn’t the smartest thing to do, it wasn’t the coolest thing to do, and it wasn’t a Lilah thing to do. And yet, here I was.
    Lissy glanced at me, frowned, and looked over at the table I’d just left. Then she looked back at me and blinked several times.
    I refused to ask her what she was blinking at. When it came to what Lissy James saw with her magic aura-seeing eyes, I preferred to know as little as was humanly possible. “Can you just come to the ladies’?”
    I turned away before she could respond. It was a trick I’d picked up from Fuchsia back in middle school. If you didn’t give people a chance to answer, they couldn’t say no.
    “Ow-oooooowwww!” The half-grunt, half-yell clearly came from the Golden side of the cafeteria. Roughly translated, “ow-oooooowwww” was guy-speak for “so hot.” I knew without turning around as I walked, my skirt swishing around my thighs, that at least half the male population of the school was checking out my butt. In general, I took more or less the same philosophical stance toward such butt-staring as I did toward Brock’s haiku: it was better than being ignored.
    “Could your skirt get any shorter?” Lissy huffed, and then she made a small eeping sound, like she hadn’t meant to huff anything out loud.
    “Lissy,” I teased, relieved that she’d actually followed me, “don’t argue with success.”
    I opened the door to the ladies’ room and waited until it was shut firmly behind us before turning to face her.
    Lissy was pretty, probably prettier than she knew, though not as pretty as she could have been if she’d been the type to accept fashion advice from well-meaning upperclassmen named Lilah. Her hair was thick and a little bit wild, her eyelashes were long and dark, and the scowl on her lips was only somewhat unflattering.
    Without thinking, I glanced at myself in the mirror. A little girl with dark hair, flawless skin, and sooty eyelashes stared back at me, her expression solemn.
    Air crackling, trembling like the surface of rough water.
    I blinked hard, and when I opened my eyes, the sooty eyelashes were my own, made thicker by long-lasting mascara and a steady hand with an eyelash curler, necessary adaptations for