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in front of the school, as per our carpool agreement that morning. Needless to say, she wasn’t.
    When my mom had up and bought me a car two weeks earlier, I’d been delighted. Bumming rides in Brock’s SUV and Fuchsia’s blue convertible had worked well enough, but having a car of my own took away some of Fuchsia’s leverage and was, as Brock had so eloquently put it, “hot.” I wasn’t stupid enough to think that my mom’s sudden generosity had nothing to do with the fact that she and Corey Nowly were getting serious, but I wasn’t completely opposed to parental bribery.
    Having my own car, unfortunately, had definite drawbacks, such as my mom’s tendency toward volunteering me to sporadically chauffeur a certain sophomore and her little sister home from school. Thus, instead of cruising to the mall with Fuchsia and Tracy, I was forced to work on a little dilemma I liked to call “Where is Lissy, and why isn’t she waiting for me in front of the school?”
    A cursory check of the hallway revealed that she wasn’t at her locker. Class had been out for a full ten minutes, so I didn’t think there was much of a chance that she was still in a classroom. Since Emory High wasn’t exactly the Colosseum of high schools, that only left a few possibilities: the cafeteria, the bathroom, the library, and the gym. The one and only time I’d ever seen Lissy involved in athletic activity involved her being hit in the head with a football, so I ruled out the gym. The cafeteria was the closest (and therefore the least likely to cause me to be seen wandering around the school looking for someone I wasn’t even supposed to like), so I decided to try my luck there.
    Luck, as it turned out, was on my side. I opened the cafeteria door, and there was Lissy, sitting on top of a table and listening intently as Audra talked, either oblivious of or neutral to the fact that she’d inconvenienced me at all.
    “Yes, he’s kind of scraggly, and I will admit, his ‘I’m a tortured teen’ routine takes some getting used to,” Audra was saying, “but he’s also obviously into you. And, God knows why, since he’s such a surly piece of work, but you seem to like him, too. So what’s the deal?”
    Lissy blew a frizzy wisp of hair out of her face. “The deal is that we’re just friends. The deal is that I’m not sure how I feel about him, and I’m not about to date someone just because my Sight says I should.” She paused. “And he’s not that surly.”
    “Lissy, Dylan’s been my best friend since we were twelve. Trust me on this one. He’s surly.”
    “Eavesdropping, Princess?”
    I jumped at the sound of Mystery Boy’s voice. I’d hoped never to see him again, and yet here he was. This cafeteria was so totally cursed.
    “No,” I said, keeping my voice low enough that Audra and Lissy, who were still engaged in their own little debate, couldn’t hear me. “And don’t call me Princess.”
    Mystery Boy paid absolutely no attention to me, keeping his eyes on Audra and Lissy. “It’s the age-old story,” he said. “Boy likes girl. Girl likes boy. Girl is somehow convinced that she couldn’t possibly like boy. Boy suffers endless torment waiting for girl to come to her senses.”
    Great. Now my hallucination (I was back to that story, and I was sticking to it) was going all philosophical on me.
    He turned back to me and shook his head. “You can’t fight destiny, Princess,” he said. “You might want to tell that to your little friend.”
    “She’s not my…” Before I could get the words out of my mouth, he’d disappeared, and Lissy and Audra had discovered that they weren’t alone.
    And then, in the next instant, they were, because my mind, my body, every fiber of my Queen Bee being was taken over by some sort of vision I couldn’t begin to understand.
    Air crackling and the colors of the room blurring into nothingness.
    A girl with platinum blond hair, a soft smile on her face, and a metal ring on her