Firespell

I couldn’t imagine a life so separate from my family—at least, not before the sabbatical. “Isn’t that . . . hard?” I asked her.

Scout blinked at the question. “I’ve been on my own for a long time. At this point, it just is, you know?” I didn’t, actually, but I nodded to be supportive.

“I mean, before St. Sophia’s, there was a private elementary school and a nanny I talked to more often than my parents. I was kind of a trust fund latchkey kid, I guess. Are you and your parents close?”

I nodded, and I had to fight back an unexpected wash of tears at the sudden sensation of aloneness. Of abandonment. My eyes ached with it, that threshold between crying and not, just before the dam breaks. “Yeah,” I said, willing the tears not to fall.

“I’m sorry,” Scout said. Her voice was soft, quiet, compassionate.

I shrugged a shoulder. “I’ve known for a while that they were leaving. Some of those days I was fine, some days I was wicked pissed.” I shrugged. “I’m probably not supposed to be mad about it. I mean, it’s not like they went to Germany to get away from me or anything, but it still stings. It still feels like they left me here.”

“Well then,” Scout said, raising her cup of water, “I suppose you’d better thank your lucky stars that you found me. ’Cause I’m going to be on you like white on rice. I’m a hard friend to shake, Parker.”

I grinned through the melancholy and raised my own cup. “To new friendships,” I said, and we clinked our cups together.

When dinner was finished, we returned to our rooms to wash up and restock our bags with books and supplies before study hall. I also ditched the tights and switched out my fabulous—but surprisingly uncomfortable—boots for a pair of much more comfy flip- flops. My cell phone vibrated just as I’d slipped my left foot into the second, thick, emerald green flip- flop. I pulled it out of my bag, checked the caller ID, and smiled.

“What’s cooking in Germany?” I asked after I opened the phone and pressed it to my ear.

“Nothing at the moment,” my father answered, his voice tinny through four thousand miles of transmission wires. “It’s late over here. How was school?”

“It was school,” I confirmed, a tightness in my chest unclenching at the sound of my dad’s voice. I sat down on the edge of the bed and crossed one leg over the other. “Turns out, high school is high school pretty much anywhere you go.”

“Except for the uniforms?” he asked.

I smiled. “Except for the uniforms. How was your first day of sabbaticalizing, or whatever?”

“Pretty dull. Mom and I both had meetings with the folks who are funding our work. A lot of ground rules, research protocols, that kind of thing.”

I could practically hear the boredom in his voice. My dad wasn’t one for administrative details or planning. He was a big-picture guy, a thinker, a teacher. My mom was the organized one. She probably took notes at the meetings.

“I’m sure it’ll get better, Pops. They probably wanna make sure they aren’t handing gazillions of research dollars over to some crazy Americans.”

“What?” he asked. “We are not so crazy,” he said, a thick accent suddenly in his voice, probably an impersonation of some long-dead celebrity. My dad imagined himself to be quite the comedian.

He had quite an imagination.

“Sure, Dad.” There was a knock at the door. I looked up as Scout walked in. “Listen, I need to run to study hall. Tell Mom I said hi, and good luck with the actual, you know, research stuff.”

“Nighty night, Lils. You take care.”

“I will, Dad. Love you.”

“Love you, too.” I closed the phone and slipped it back into my bag. Scout raised her eyebrows inquisitively.

“My parents are safe and sound in Germany,” I told her.

“I’m glad to hear it. Let’s go make good on their investment with a couple hours of homework.”

The invitation wasn’t exactly thrilling, but it’s not like we had another choice. Study hall was mandatory, after all.

Study hall took place in the Great Hall, the big room with all the tables where I’d first gotten a glimpse of the plaid army. They were in full attendance tonight, nearly two hundred girls in navy plaid filling fifty-odd four-person tables. We headed through the rows toward a couple of empty seats near the main aisle, which would give us a view of the comings and goings of St. Sophia’s finest. They also gave the plaid army a look at us, and look they did, the thwack-thwack of my flip-flops on the limestone floor drawing everyone’s attention my way.

That attention included the pair of stern-looking women in thick-soled black shoes and horn- rimmed glasses. Their squarish figures tucked into black shirts and sweaters, they patrolled the perimeter of the room, clipboards in hand.

“Who are they?” I whispered, as we took seats opposite each other.

Scout glanced up as she pulled notebooks and books from her bag. “The dragon ladies. They monitor lights-out, watch us while we study, and generally make sure that nothing fun occurs on their watch.”

“Awesome,” I said, flipping open my trig book. “I’m a fun hater myself.”

“I figured,” Scout said without looking up, pen scurrying across a page of her notebook. “You had the look.”

One of the roaming dragon ladies walked by our table, her gaze over her glasses and an eyebrow arched at our whispering as she passed. I mouthed, “Sorry,” but she scribbled on her clipboard before walking away.

Scout bit back a smile. “Please quit disturbing the entire school, Parker, jeez.”

I stuck out my tongue at her, but started my homework.

We worked for an hour before she stretched in her chair, then dropped her chin onto her hand. “I’m bored.”

I rubbed my eyes, which were blurring over the tiny print in our European history book. “Do you want me to juggle?”

“You can juggle?”

“Well, not yet. But there’re books everywhere in here,” I pointed out. “There’s gotta be a how-to guide somewhere on those shelves.”

The girl who sat beside me at the table cleared her throat, her gaze still on the books in front of her. “Really trying to do some work here, ladies. Go play Gilmore Girls somewhere else.”

The girl was pretty in a supermodel kind of way—in a French way, if that made sense. Long dark hair, big eyes, wide mouth—and she played irritated pretty well, one perfect eyebrow arched in irritation over brown eyes.

“Collette, Collette,” Scout said, pointing her own pencil at the girl, then at me. “Don’t be bossy. Our new friend Parker, here, will think you’re one of the brat pack.”

Collette snorted, then slid a glance my way. “As if, Green. I assume you’re Parker?”

“Last time I checked,” I agreed.

“Then don’t make me give you more credit than you deserve, Parker. Some of us take our academic achievements very seriously. If I’m not valedictorian next year, I might not get into Yale. And if I don’t get into Yale, I’m going to have a breakdown of monumental proportions. So you and your friend go play clever somewhere else, alrighty? Alrighty,” she said with a bob of her head, then turned back to her books.

“She’s really smart,” Scout said apologetically. “Unfortunately, that hasn’t done much for her personality.”

Collette flipped a page of her book. “I’m still here.” “Gilmore Girls,” Scout repeated, then made a sarcastic sound. Apparently done with studying, she glanced carefully around, then pulled a comic book from her bag. She paused to ensure the coast was clear, then sandwiched the comic between the pages of her trig book.

I arched an eyebrow at the move, but she shrugged happily, and went back to working trig problems, occasionally sneaking in a glazed-eyed perusal of a page or two of the comic.

“Weirdo,” I muttered, but said it with a grin.

After we’d done our couple of mandatory hours in study hall—not all studying, of course, but at least we were in there—we went back to the suite to make use of our last free hour before the sun officially set on my first day as a St. Sophia’s girl. The suite was empty of brat pack members, and Lesley’s door was shut, a line of light beneath it. I nudged Scout as we walked toward her room. She followed the direction of my nod, then nodded back.

“Cello’s gone,” she noted, pointing at the corner of the common room, which was empty of the instrument parked there when I arrived yesterday.

Music suddenly echoed through the suite, the thick, thrumming notes of a Bach cello concerto pouring from Lesley’s room. She played beautifully, and as she moved her bow across the strings, Scout and I stood quietly, reverently, in the common room, our gaze on the closed door before us.

After a couple of minutes, the music stopped, replaced by scuffling on the other side of the door. Without preface, the door opened. A blonde blinked at us from the threshold. She was dressed simply in a fitted T-shirt, cotton A-line skirt, and Mary Janes. Her hair was short and pale blond, a fringe of bangs across her forehead.

“Hi, Lesley,” Scout said, hitching a thumb at me. “This is Lily. She’s the new girl.”

Lesley blinked big blue eyes at me. “Hi,” she said, then turned on one heel, walked back into the room, and shut the door behind her.

“And that was Lesley,” Scout said, unlocking her own door and flipping on her bedroom light.

I followed, then shut the door behind us again. “Lesley’s not much of a talker.”

Scout nodded and sat cross- legged on the bed. “That was actually pretty chatty for Barnaby. She’s always been quiet. Has a kind of savant vibe? Wicked good on the cello.”

“I got goose bumps,” I agreed. “That song is really haunting.”

Scout nodded again, and had just begun to pull a pillow into her lap when her cell phone rang. She reached up, grabbed it from its home on the shelf, and popped it open.

“When?” she asked after a moment of silence, turning away from me, the phone pressed to her ear. Apparently unhappy with the response she got, she muttered a curse, then sighed haggardly. “We should have known they had something planned when we saw her.”

I assumed “her” meant the blonde we’d seen outside at lunch.

More silence ensued as Scout listened to the caller. In the quiet of the room, I could hear a voice, but I couldn’t understand the words. The tone was low, so I guessed the caller was a boy. Michael Garcia, maybe?

“Okay,” she said. “I will.” She closed the phone with a snap and paused before glancing back at me.

“Time to run?”

Scout nodded. And this time, there was a tightness around her eyes. It didn’t thrill me that the tightness looked like fear.

My heart clenched sympathetically. “Do you need backup? Someone else to help clean up the litter?”

Scout smiled, a little of the twinkle back in her eyes. “I’d love it, actually. But community improvement isn’t ready for you, Parker.” She grabbed a jacket and her skull-and-crossbones bag, and we both left her room. Scout headed for a secret rendezvous; I wasn’t entirely sure where I was going.

“Don’t wait up,” she said with a wink, then opened the door and headed out into the hallway.

Don’t count on it, I thought, having made the decision. This time, I wasn’t going to let her get away with mumbled excuses and a secret nighttime trip—at least not solo.

This time, I was going, too.

She’d closed the door behind her. I cracked it open and watched her slip down the hallway.

“Time to play Nancy Drew,” I murmured, then slipped off my noisy flip- flops, picked them up, and followed her.

5

She was disappearing around the corner as I closed the door to the common room. The hallway was empty and silent but for her footsteps, the limestone floor and walls glowing beneath the golden light of the sconces.

Scout headed toward the stairs, which she took at a trot. I hung back until I was sure she wouldn’t see me as she rounded the second flight of stairs, then followed her down. When she reached the first floor, she headed through the Great Hall, which, even after the required study period, still held a handful of apparently ambitious teenagers. Unfortunately, the aisle between the tables was straight and empty, so if Scout turned around, my cover was blown.

I took a breath and started walking. I made it halfway without incident when, suddenly, Scout paused. I dumped into the closest chair and bent down, faking an adjustment to my flip- flop. When she turned around again and resumed her progression through the room, I stood up, then hustled to squeak through the double doors before they closed behind her.

I just made it through, then flattened myself against the wall of the hallway that led to the domed center of the main building. I peeked around the corner; Scout was hurrying across the tiled labyrinth. I gnawed my lip as I considered my options. This part of playing the new Nancy Drew was tricky—the room was gigantic and empty, at least in the middle, so there weren’t many places to hide.

Without cover, I decided I’d have to wait her out. I watched her cross the labyrinth and move into the hallway opposite mine, then pause before a door. She looked around, probably to see whether she was alone (we’re all wrong sometimes), then slipped the ribboned key from her neck and slid the key into the lock.

The click of tumblers echoed across the room. She winced at the sound, but placed a hand on the door, took a final look around, and disappeared. When she was gone, I jogged across the labyrinth to the other side, then pressed my ear to the door she’d closed behind her. After the sound of her footsteps receded, I twisted the doorknob, found that it was still unlocked and—heart beating like a bass drum in my chest—edged it open.