Authors: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Platinum (21 page)
My whole life, everyone had thought just the opposite.
“He will see you for who you truly are.”
“Who?” I asked, letting the question hang in the air between us. Was she talking about Brock, who, as it turned out, may have actually loved me after all? Cade, who’d appeared out of nowhere and made everything out of nothing?
“The Champion.”
“But who?” I knew better than to take vague for an answer.
“You will see, Brianna.” She smiled then. “You all see. My daughters.”
Blue. Purple. Pink.
“I think she’s waking up.”
“Lilah, my star, are you all right?”
My eyelashes fluttered, and slowly, four faces came into focus.
Lexie’s boasted a lopsided grin, like she couldn’t decide between worry and pure ecstatic joy at the sheer amount of Sight in the near vicinity. Lissy was, as best as I could tell, looking at my hair and wondering how in the world it had survived time travel and a visitation without frizzing in the least (a secret I will take with me to the grave). Lissy’s mother had her lips pursed slightly, and the back of her hand was on my forehead. And Grams…
Grams was smiling. Beaming, really.
I knew her well enough to know that was never a good sign.
“Uhhhhh…Lilah?”
Brock. In the present, in one piece, and completely and utterly confused. I wondered what he remembered, and without even realizing I was doing it, I reached forward, brushed my hand against his temple, and probed his memory, pulling images from his mind and playing them out against the backdrop of my own.
He remembered coming over here to talk to me about…something.
He remembered seeing me in the driveway and thinking that my breasts looked hot.
He remembered hoping he hadn’t screwed everything up, because he’d wanted me from the first moment he’d seen me.
He vaguely remembered a haiku that involved the phrase “your lips are better.”
And after that, nothing.
Nothing about Helen, nothing about Cade, nothing about the words I’d said to stop the ring’s reign of terror over the male species.
“Brock,” I said gently. “Go home.”
“Okay,” he said, wrinkling his forehead. “Are we okay?”
Once upon a time, I’d despised the word. “Okay” was for losers, Nons, and people without perfect figures.
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re okay.”
Brock leaned forward and gave me a kiss, and as his lips brushed mine, I closed my eyes and thought of Cade and wondered if I’d ever see him again or if Brock and I would ever be anything more than just “okay” again. I pulled away from our kiss, and mumbling his goodbyes, Brock made his way down the driveway, climbed into his car, and drove away.
As he pulled out of sight, Grams (who I couldn’t call Caroline anymore, even in the sanctity of my own mind) took the rest of us inside. There, on the kitchen table, were two leather-bound books. The covers were worn and tattered, the pages uneven.
Grams picked one up and handed it to Lissy. Lissy took in the design on the cover: a starburst over three intersecting circles. She opened it, keeping one suspicious eye on Grams the entire time.
“The Book of Light,”
she read.
“You’re not the first to have Aura Vision,” Grams said. “There have been other Aura Seers in our family. This book was theirs, passed down from one to the next.” She froze the question on Lissy’s lips with a stern look. “Now it’s yours.”
Lexie and I locked eyes for a split second, and then Grams held out the second book. To me.
I shot a sympathetic look at Lexie before turning my attention to the design on the book’s cover.
“I’m always the last to get everything,” Lexie moaned, every inch the martyr.
“There’s a reason for that, dearling.”
Lexie, Truth Seer that she was, couldn’t argue with Grams’s words.
“Here,” I said, holding my book out to Lexie. “You can look at mine.”
The symbol on the cover looked strangely familiar, and the book was warm, too warm in my hands. I breathed a small sigh of relief when Lexie took it from me and gingerly opened the cover, her awed smile lighting up her entire face.
“The Book of Remembrance,”
she said.
“Let me guess,” I said. “I’m not the first person with retrovision in this family?”
Had I just admitted that they were, by any stretch of the word, family? How completely and utterly bewildering, not to mention disturbing.
“No, child, you’re not.”
I cleared my throat and met Grams’s eyes one last time. “By any chance,” I said evenly, “was one of the other retroseers named Brianna?”
21
The End
All’s well
that ends with something I can work with.
A week later, life was more or less back to normal. Fuchsia was back at my lunch table. In a way, she’d been Helen’s victim as much as the rest of us. Of course, she’d also been microseconds from kissing Brock before Helen had interfered, but still. The way I see it, you keep your friends close and your enemies closer, and in high school, sometimes, one person can be both. If the whole sordid Helen affair had taught me anything, it was that high school betrayals weren’t the end of the world. A single kiss was nothing to kill over, and maybe, just maybe, complete social annihilation was overkill as well. Besides, Fuchsia had been the first person to give me a best friends forever necklace in the fifth grade, when she’d started noticing boys and the boys had started noticing me. She’d invited me to my first slumber party, I’d helped her through her first breakup, and every once in a while, we had a seriously good time over fruit smoothies.
Besides, someone had to put a stop to the rumor that she was pregnant with Pits Ewww’s quadruplets, and it wasn’t like Tracy was rising to the challenge.
So far, Fuchsia had been on her best behavior. She’d even totally apologized for claiming to have made out with Brock, which, in our little code, meant that she’d apologized for going near him in the first place. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever trust her again. I wasn’t even sure if I ever had. But I was willing to deal her in for the next round of “What Would You Choose?” and that had to count for something.
Things with Brock were better too. He was sweeter and more charming than I could ever remember him being. He left flowers at my locker and bought me milkshakes at lunch. He’d (thankfully) given up writing his own poetry, and had actually started downloading famous poems to go with the flowers. It was amazing, really.
He never mentioned the day he’d come to Lissy’s house to find me, and I hadn’t probed his memory again.
As for Cade, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to go back to the library. Part of me was afraid to know what had happened. I hadn’t seen him again—not in my dreams, not with my Sight, not even when, late one night, I’d gone off the deep end and placed my fingertips on the crinkled page I’d torn out of the 1957 yearbook. I’d sat there staring at it, willing my mind into it, tears that he never would have wanted me to shed streaming down my face.
Nothing had happened, and my handy-dandy
Book of Remembrance
had informed me that sometimes, the past moved on. Hot spots grew cold, ghosts grew weary. Memories faded from the air and from the mind, and sometimes, a photograph was just a picture, worth a thousand words.
Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade, Cade…
Well, you get the point.
So like I said, things were back to normal. Fuchsia was Golden again, and I was unquestionably back on top (but had decided not to spread the use of the term “Platinum,” which now reminded me far too much of Helen’s ring). Brock adored me, and Cade was nothing more than a picture I kept in an old copy of
Emma
in my nightstand.
See? Everything was normal.
A little boy holding on to his mother with one hand and an ice cream cone with another.
I glanced around study hall, trying to identify the source of the memory.
Correction: things were almost back to normal.
While I pondered whether or not I was supposed to draw anything significant from the ice cream vision, and whether or not bangs were coming back in style (God, I hoped not), Lissy James slid stealthily (at least for her scene-causing self ) into the desk next to me.
On a day-to-day basis, we didn’t really talk to each other at school. It was a rule I’d left uncharacteristically unspoken, but social divides in high school were like laws of nature, and for the most part, neither of us fought the wind.
“Can I help you?”
She rolled her eyes at what she probably interpreted as some kind of weird, condescending tone in my voice (which, of course, wasn’t actually there…the girl was paranoid), and slid a familiar brown book across the table toward me.
Glancing calmly around, I looked down at the page she had marked.
Femme Fatale.
The words were written in letters so scripty that, had I not had years of practice decoding fancy girly scrawl in notes passed during class, I might not have been able to read it.
A woman who, imbued with supernatural beauty and power, manipulates the hearts of men, ultimately compelling them to cause their own deaths or the deaths of others.
Also known as a black widow, a white lady, or a succubus.
With my gel pen, I glibly added my own girly inscription to the bottom of the page, while Lissy gawked at me in horror.
Sometimes the power comes from a focus object, such as a piece of unfashionable jewelry,
I wrote.
The jewelry then takes on a life of its own. Wearers beware: accessories can kill more than an outfit.
Satisfied, I slapped the book shut and handed it back to Lissy. She blew a wisp of hair out of her face, somewhat stunned. Whether she was surprised that I’d written in her ancient book with purple gel pen, that I’d processed everything I’d read remarkably quickly, or that I’d managed to form a coherent thought of my own, I wasn’t sure.
Without saying a word to her, I reached into my purse (a Kate Spade knockoff so good that only Lexie could tell it was fake) and pulled out my own book. Meeting her eyes for just the smallest fraction of time, I slid the book over to her.
She took it from my hands and looked down at the page I’d marked: a family tree. The First Seer had had three daughters: Brianna, who had inherited her mother’s ability to see the past; Sorcha, the annoying middle child, who could see auras; and Meara, the Truth Seer, who was still, to me, largely a mystery. The book said nothing about her after Shannon’s death, only that she was the youngest, and that she was pure.
I knew that if Lissy took the time to flip three pages forward, she’d see a drawing, done by the second retroseer in Lissy’s line, a chick named Clarabelle (poor girl).
Somehow, I was betting that despite everything I’d told her about all my visions, Lissy still would have been as startled as I was to see our faces staring back at her from Clarabelle’s drawing of Meara, Sorcha, and Brianna. I’d come to terms with the whole past life thing. I mean, after all, it made perfect sense. I’d always found Lissy James more than a little annoying, we constantly argued over radio stations when we carpooled, and she’d never heeded a single piece of advice I’d thrown her way. She thought I was bossy and mean and probably stuck-up. Was it any wonder that in a former life, we’d been sisters?
Okay, reincarnation, visions, superpowers, and femme fatales. Maybe my life wasn’t back to normal, but you know, at Emory High, I made the rules, and this season, I’d decided that normal was highly overrated.
About the Author
Jennifer Lynn Barnes grew up in Oklahoma and went to college in Connecticut, at Yale University, before moving to England to study autism at the University of Cambridge. She can’t see auras or cute ghost boys, but she is suspiciously good at predicting what will happen next on all of her favorite TV shows. Jennifer wrote her first book,
Golden,
while she was still a teenager, and her next book,
The Squad: Perfect Cover,
is due out in February 2008. To learn more about Jennifer, visit her online at
www.jenniferlynnbarnes.com
.
Also by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
GOLDEN
TATTOO
Published by Delacorte Press an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc. New York
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Text copyright © 2007 by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
All rights reserved.
Delacorte Press and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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