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woman, perhaps the kindly ghost of Grandma’s own mother. At her own wish, Grandma Gwenny’s mother had been buried not in the town cemetery but high on the ridges where she loved to walk at the end of a long day of cleaning other people’s houses. Once a month, sometimes with the girls, Gwenny tended the two white rosebushes she’d planted near the modest copper plate in the ground that showed where her mother lay. Only last year had she told the girls that one of the rosebushes was meant to symbolize Gwenny’s own twin, Vera, who’d drowned as a child. Gwenny regretted that she had never moved Vera’s poor little wooden box up into the hills near the family camp, where she could sleep beside her mother. Grandma was a halfway decent Catholic, not a fanatic like some of her siblings were. But she also thought that anywhere love abided was holy ground.
    So if Merry—and David—had seen not a woman but a cougar, was it too a spirit? Or some crazy sign? Cougars were extinct in the east, and if one had wandered down from Canada, it had wandered a long, long way. Did it hate men, which would have accounted for Mallory seeing it staring down so hungrily on the boy Eden loved? Was it a zoo animal, which would account for its exotic coloration?
    During study hall, she slipped into the library and typed in “Cat Mythology.”
    Bast, a god in cat form, was one of the top guns in the Egyptian pantheon. Many ancient religions considered cats spirit guides for humans, wise but unable to reveal their wisdom because they could not speak. Was this what the mountain lion meant? And why was she seeing it, now that David was gone? Why had it appeared in their school, when clearly no real animal had been there? Was it still after Eden’s boyfriend? Or was it after Eden?
    She was ashamed that she’d run away from Edie.
    How could her visions be so at odds with what she felt inside?
    David had been model-handsome and a monster. But long before the visions, Mallory sensed something way off base about David. Eden wasn’t like David. Her heart told her Eden was caring and good.
    Grandma had told them that “the gift” came from above, that it was meant for them to use for good, that it was granted the twins for a reason that only the saints knew. She had to do this: She accepted that it was her destiny. Grandma Gwenny told her that the gift went down among the Massenger women like a gene for hair color (or a disease, Mally thought!).
    The last bell rang. Mally looked up toward the sky. The star blanket.
    She didn’t realize until later that her lips had moved and hoped everyone who saw her thought she was using an earpiece for her cell, as she addressed the giver of the damned gift.
    She said, “If this really is what my grandmother believes it is, and you want us to fight for the right or whatever, can I please at least have some rules?”
    That was when she heard the scream.

SPLIT DIVISION
    C rystal Fish went on screaming all the way into the ambulance from the pain of torn ligaments that would need surgery and months of physical therapy. Her hope of making varsity as a sophomore was shot.
    The tryouts were postponed until the second week in November. Mallory felt sorry for Crystal. Hitting the floor in Chinese splits when it was only possible for you to get there after a half-hour warm-up must have been killer.
    “Someone put tape on her shoes,” Merry told Mallory after the ambulance left. They sat down in the cafeteria to wait for Drew to be finished with cross-country.
    “But why?” Mallory asked.
    “It’s a cheat. People used to do it to slide better, but it’s illegal because, obviously, it makes you go too fast. This can happen to someone even if she knows the tape is there.”
    “Maybe she put it there herself,” Mally suggested, opening her math book.
    “Impossible. Crystal is a total stickler for stuff like that. And plus, she can do horizontal splits anyhow. She can do regular splits against a wall if she’s