The Screaming Season Read Free Page B

Claire drawled, her Maui tan from the holidays finally beginning to fade. “You’d better get your butt back to classes or you’re going to flunk out of here.”
    “Oh, my God, don’t stress her out,” Ida snapped, smacking Claire on the arm. Ida was Iranian, very exotic-looking in a sleek black trench coat and messy Kate Moss I-don’t-give-a-damn hair.
    Elvis was equally beautifully dressed in a bronze cashmere sweater, black leather pants, and expensive boots. Marica, from Venezuela, played off her flamenco-dancer looks with scarlet and black, plus her enormous emerald earrings, which had been her grandmother’s. Everyone’s makeup and hair were in place. At an exclusive all-girls school like ours, the stakes were incredibly high when it came to parwading your family’s ability to make you look as good as possible. We had professional models and actresses in our midst, but even the amateurs were Teen Vogue worthy.
    “Seriously, Linz, it’s not that bad,” Ida added.
    “Maybe your parents could hire one of the faculty to tutor you,” Elvis suggested, then blanched as she obviously remembered that my parents had no money. My dad was still trying to pay off the stacks of bills our insurance hadn’t covered when medical science had failed to save my mom.
    “Um, or we could help you,” Julie said, as everyone started nodding like bobble heads and smiling brightly. Too brightly, with eyes a bit too wide to be genuine. They didn’t know what to make of me. I had gone completely crazy in the operating theater, but the cracks had been appearing way before then. At least, that was how it would appear to someone who didn’t believe in ghosts.
    “Rose too, of course. She wanted to come with us,” Julie said, which seemed a bit random. Poor Julie was nervous. “But she had to cram for a test.”
    “Oh, that’s okay,” I said.
    I felt Celia shift anxiously inside me. It wasn’t okay with her. She had begged me to kill Rose when Rose had become possessed. If Rose hadn’t been so drunk at the time, she would have posed a greater threat, and I might have had to hurt her—at least—to defend myself. For some girls, the possessions came and went. The spirit that had possessed Rose seemed to have moved on. Same thing with Julie. I didn’t know why.
    Mandy Winters, whom I had detested on sight, was possessed by the spirit of Belle. Allowing herself to become possessed was a deal Mandy had made—a pact with the devil—in some twisted bargain to protect Miles, her twin brother, or be his girlfriend, or both, at least as far as I could tell.
    Miles. My skin crawled. My face tingled. Ruled by his own demons, Miles had been the one to carry me out of the operating theater when I had raged at them all, shrieking that I would kill them. At the time, I had been fully possessed by Celia, who was even more insane than he was.
    Cold flooded me as if she were protesting my opinion of her. Denying her my attention, I sat down in the leather chair, and everyone else sat back, as if they could relax now that my academic fate was being seen to.
    Celia’s grip faded. Not for the first time, I realized she had a greater hold on me when I was under stress. Even after all that had happened, I still had moments when I wondered if she was real. I had suffered a nervous breakdown back in San Diego. But I hadn’t imagined things, hadn’t seen things that weren’t there. And I wasn’t imagining them now. Marlwood was haunted.
    It was.
    I was.
    I lifted the lids to the breakfast selections—they had brought me everything from a veggie-and-cheese omelet to a bowl of Froot Loops—and my stomach lurched. I was hungry, but I didn’t know if I could eat anything. I wanted to sit my dorm mates in rows like elementary school students and give them a lecture on the real history of Marlwood. To tell them about Celia, and Belle, and the man the two girls had loved—the doctor, David Abernathy. The man who had betrayed them, leaving them