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With a small, chagrined smirk, Gwen jerked her head over her good shoulder toward the cafeteria, where Mikey stood behind one of the wide windows, the side of his face and both palms smashed against the glass. Dressed in a black-and-white checkered hoodie and a pair of sunglasses that sat slanted across his mashed nose, he reminded Isobel of a giant swatted fly.
“Wow,” Isobel said.
“He makes up in skill what he lacks in couth, if you catch my drift,” said Gwen with a wink.
“Won’t Mr. Nott catch him doing that?”
Gwen shrugged, then set the paper basket down on the bench next to Isobel’s things. “I think he’s trying to cheer you up. You gotta cut him a break, though. He doesn’t know anything about, y’know . . . anything.”
Isobel knew Gwen meant Baltimore. And Varen. And her.
Even though Isobel didn’t quite get Mikey’s allure, she was glad he and Gwen had started dating. Or pseudo-dating or . . . whatever was up with them. Mikey’s added presence to Isobel and Gwen’s locker run-ins and lunch breaks gave Isobel an excuse not to talk about things that fell into the “anything” category Gwen had mentioned. And a reason for Gwen to continue keeping her questions to herself. Aside from that, though, and perhaps most important of all, Isobel could tell Gwen was falling for the guy.
The tipping point, she knew, had been the morning Mikey had flown up to Baltimore to get Gwen—January nineteenth, the same morning an anonymous stranger had dropped Isobel off, soaking wet and half-dead, at the city’s university hospital.
The same morning she’d flat-lined.
Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday.
A week later Isobel had come home with her family. A week after that, she’d returned to school to learn through Gwen, during their initial and only private locker visit since Isobel’s literal reintegration into reality, that Mikey had used money from a pizza delivery job to buy his plane ticket. Since Gwen had suffered a fractured arm at the hands of Reynolds while trying to help Isobel in the cemetery, the task of making the eleven-hour return drive in her Cadillac had fallen to Mikey as well. According to Gwen, however, he’d made the trek in under eight. Having ridden with him the night of the Grim Facade, Isobel didn’t find that hard to believe. At all.
In addition to filling Isobel in on the details of her return, Gwen had also recounted how Reynolds had run from the police after Isobel had shut him out of the dreamworld. The responding officers, Gwen had said, had seemed determined to detain anyone involved in the scuffle, even if that someone happened to be the Poe Toaster himself.
No one had caught him, though. He’d vanished, like he did every year, and Gwen had used the distraction of his flight to take refuge behind the headstone he’d flung her against. After that, she’d made her own escape by slipping into the crowd of onlookers.
Because of the overshadowing story that the Baltimore Ravens had lost the finals, missing out on their Super Bowl ticket, the only mention of the Poe Toaster ordeal in the press had been how a few spectators had scaled the cemetery walls. Again.
And while Gwen’s parents (who thought Gwen had headed to New York to meet up with her cousins for a concert) had bought their daughter’s carefully constructed story—one that included a mosh-pit mishap—Isobel’s parents had perceived much more of the truth.
Though they knew nothing of Isobel’s trip to the graveyard, Gwen’s involvement, or how everything tied to Poe, Isobel’s mom and dad knew enough to guess that she had gone to the city looking for Varen.
Her mother and father had interrogated her a thousand times over as a result. In each instance, Isobel had regurgitated the lie that she remembered nothing past the point of sitting down to dinner at a restaurant with her father.
No, she didn’t know whose car their Baltimore waitress had seen her climb into. No, she didn’t remember where the driver had taken her or why. No, she didn’t know who had dropped her off at the hospital. No, she wasn’t faking, and no, she wasn’t lying. No. No. No.
Thankfully, Isobel’s psychologist, Dr. Robinson, had instructed her parents to stop the barrage of questions, to carry on with day-to-day life and wait for the memories to resurface on their own.
In truth, Isobel would never forget what had happened. Ever.
Bloodred rose petals, falling ash, broken shards. Destruction and ruin—everything reversed. A beautiful monster and a monstrous beauty. Voices in the corridor. Varen. The cliff . . .
Her ribbon floating up and away, a fluttering line of pale pink blotted with her own blood.
“Pretty bad if you’re trying to cheer up a cheerleader, huh?” Gwen asked.
Isobel blinked from her reverie. “I’m not a cheerleader anymore.”
“Ehh.” Gwen waved her off. “You’re just on sabbatical. You and I both know your feet won’t stay fixed to the ground for long.”
Isobel winced but tried to hide it by glancing at Mikey, who had since started to mime walking up and down an imaginary flight of stairs, his lower body hidden by the school’s brick siding. He switched to mimicking rowing a boat just as Mr. Nott appeared behind him, his lined face fixed in a glower.
“So . . . you two are going to the Valentine’s Day dance tomorrow, right?” Isobel asked.
Shifting her weight, Gwen gave her a hooded glare. “Like you weren’t standing right there when he asked me. Hey, how about I see your obnoxious bid for a subject change and raise you one swift kick in the spankies?”
Isobel tried for a smile, but it didn’t stick.
Frowning, Gwen tucked her good hand inside her patchwork purse and withdrew a folded newspaper, holding it out to her. “Listen, I know you said you wanted to be alone or whatever, but I saw this in today’s paper and thought you should know.”
