Darynda Jones: Death, Doom, and Detention

And, yes, things had been weird.

“People are acting strange, and the world has dark, fuzzy edges,” Brooklyn continued.

Before I could suggest a visit to the school nurse, an arm snaked around my neck from behind and I felt something poke my temple. A quick sideways glance told me it was a hand shaped to resemble a gun.

“Give me all your money,” Glitch said through gritted teeth, pulling out his best Clint Eastwood impersonation.

Glitch, a connoisseur of computers, skipping, and coasting through school with less than stellar grades, was our sidekick and partner in crime. We weren’t the greatest criminals, so we really didn’t partner up for such endeavors often. Glitch and I had grown up together. He was half Native American and half Irish

American, and he had the dark skin and hazel green eyes to prove it.

I wasn’t sure what I’d done to deserve either of my two best friends. Even when they found out I’d been possessed—was still possessed—they didn’t bail on me. That was true friendship. Or insanity.

Either way.

I shook off his arm and tossed a grin at him from over my shoulder.

“You cut your hair,” I said to him, noticing his blond highlights were missing. The trim left only his jet-

black hair, spiked as usual with just enough gel to make him almost cool. He was too much of a geek to be genuinely cool, but he was getting there.

“Yeah.” He raked his fingers through it. “So, what’s up with you two?”

“Brooke feels fuzzy.”

He bounced around until he was facing us, walking backwards with his backpack slung over his shoulder, his brows drawn in concern. “Fuzzy? Really?”

“I didn’t say I felt fuzzy. I said the world has fuzzy edges.”

He looked around to test her theory then back at us. How he managed to walk backwards in this crowd was beyond me. And rather awe inspiring. If I’d tried that, I would soon resemble a pancake covered with lots of footprints.

He furrowed his brows again in thought. “I don’t think it’s so much fuzzy as nauseatingly yellow, a color that is supposed to calm us, I’m sure. But did you hear?” he asked, suddenly excited. “Joss Duffy and Cruz de los Santos got in a fight during third.”

Brooklyn pulled me to a stop, her expression animated. “What did I tell you? Joss and Cruz are best friends. Everything is turned upside down.”

As bad as I hated to admit it, she was right. I’d felt it too: A quake. A disturbance in the atmosphere.

Everyone seemed to have short fuses lately. The slightest infraction set people off. We’d been warned about an impending cosmic war. Was this how it would begin?

With a sigh, I started for PE again. Maybe we were reading too much into it. Or maybe the moon was full. People did crazy things when the moon was full. And besides, I didn’t want everything to be turned upside down. I’d had enough of upside down when I was hit by that truck. When I was possessed by

Satan’s second-in-command. When my parents disappeared.

Some days I was almost okay with the fact that a demon had slipped inside my body when I was six, nestled between my ribs, curled around my spine. Other days that fact caused me no small amount of distress. On those days, I walked with head down and eyes hooded as my vertebrae fused in the heat of uncertainty and my bones writhed in sour revulsion.

Today was one of those days.

I’d awoken in a panic to the sensation of being crushed, unable to escape an invisible force, unable to breathe. The remnants of a nightmare still ricocheted against the walls of my lungs, squeezing them until air became a precious but fleeting commodity. At first I thought I was having an asthma attack, then I realized it was only a dream. The dream.

And the dream was always the same. In it, I would float back to that day so long ago and inhale the beast all over again, his taste acidic, his flesh choking and abrasive. Since I was just a kid at the time, one would think it was a small demon, possibly a minion or a lower-level employee. Like a janitor. But I’d seen him that day. How his shoulders, as black as a starless sky, spanned the horizon. How his head reached the tops of the trees. “Small” was not an accurate descriptor.

And now, thanks to my pathetic need for sleep, I could relive that memory over and over. Yay, me. On the bright side, I’d ditched that other recurring dream I’d been having since I was five. The one where bugs scurried under my sheets and up my legs. That thing was messed up.

Still, if not for all that, Jared would never have come to Riley’s Switch. We may be only a tiny speck on the map of New Mexico, hidden among juniper trees and sage bushes in the middle of no and where, but we were important enough to warrant an extended visit from the Angel of Death. Surely that meant something in the grand scheme of things.

“And Cameron has been acting strange too,” Brooke continued, mentioning the fifth member of our posse, if you included Jared. Which I did. But I hadn’t seen Cameron in a couple of days, which was odd.

“That’s because Cameron has a crush on you,” I said without thinking. I cringed when Glitch’s eyes widened a fraction of an inch. He caught himself instantly and turned away.

“No, seriously,” she said, oblivious. “He keeps asking if I’m okay. If you’re okay. If Glitch is okay.”

Glitch whirled back around and glared, but Brooke missed it once again.

“We need to practice,” she said, pulling a compact mirror out of her backpack. “Try again to get a vision, only try harder this time. Put a little elbow grease into it.”

She handed it to me as Glitch glowered at her, his mood taking an acerbic turn. “Really? Here?”

“Yes, really, here. She has to be ready.”

Along with all the other magnificent oddities in my life, my shaky status as a prophet meant I had visions. But visions weren’t normal, and I was trying desperately to get back to normal. It was my new goal in life, right after grow five inches and get boobies. So as far as everyone on the planet was concerned, the visions had stopped. They hadn’t been getting stronger every day, filling my head with images and knowledge I didn’t want. Didn’t need.

That was my story, and I was sticking to it.

Sadly, my sudden inability to have a vision only made Brooke even more determined. She poked and prodded me into practicing nonstop. So I would touch her arm or her hand and pretend to try really, really hard to have a vision, only to be disappointed again.

I had sunk so deep into this lie, I didn’t have the heart to tell her that the visions were coming at me left and right—so much so, I had to fight the urge to dodge them. I didn’t want to know the future or the past.

Normal people had no such luxury, and since normal was my new goal in life since my old one—get

Jared Kovach to fall in love with and marry me—had been thwarted by my grandparents. Just one more reason for my smiles to be contrived.

But Brooke, ever the trouper, had done some research. She read that a shiny surface helped psychics and mediums see into the future or the past, hence crystal balls. And according to her research, mirrors worked just as well. Hence her compact.

“I have to get to History,” Glitch said, his shoulders tense. “Mr. Burke threatened to skin me alive if

I’m tardy again, though I don’t think he actually has the authority to do that.”

“Later,” I said, opening the compact with a sigh. The last thing I needed was to get a vision every time

I looked in a mirror. The experience was bad enough as it was.

As we exited the main building and headed for the gym, I looked down into the shiny surface. Brooke dragged me along so I wouldn’t fall on my face. I pretended to concentrate, trying not to focus on the fact that my gray eyes seemed darker than usual and my auburn hair seemed curlier. Curlier? I leaned in for a closer look. Oh, the gods were a cruel and humorless lot. Because that’s what I needed. More curls.