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finger. A dark-haired guy with his shirt off, muscles shining with sweat. Bruises.
    “You ready for this, boy?” I didn’t see the voice’s owner, but could hear the emphasis on the last syllable, could see bruised muscles tensing in response.
    “I don’t want to fight you.” The shirtless guy was obviously lying, his body rebelling against misplaced restraint.
    “Then maybe you should have left Helen alone.” Five voices spoke the same words in different rhythms, each seemingly unaware of the others, and the blond-haired girl stood there, twirling her ring.
    Air crackling, blurring, and hardening into colors that weren’t there. Purple. Blue. Pink, melting away to golden white.
    Nothing.
    “Lilah?” Lissy spoke my name hesitantly. “Are you okay?”
    Answer: no, definitely not, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.
    What was happening to me? What I’d just seen—it looked real, felt real, but it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. The details were burned into my mind—a shirtless guy who looked all too much like my very own mystery boy; a girl with platinum blond hair.
    “Lilah?” Lissy’s voice was smaller this time.
    “I’m fine.”
    I wasn’t fine. I needed help, but I wouldn’t, couldn’t ask for it again.
    “You ready?” I asked, but I didn’t bother to wait for an answer. I’d passed up a trip to the mall, hunted all over the school, and endured another brutal round of what I refused to describe as visions. If Lissy still wanted a ride home, she could darn well follow me.
    I made it out of the school in record time. I clicked the keyless entry button on my key ring, threw open the door to my car, situated myself in the driver’s seat, turned the key in the ignition, and shifted into reverse before Lissy managed to scramble inside. “Thanks for waiting,” she said dryly.
    “Thanks for coming,” I returned, mirroring her tone exactly.
    Lissy’s eyes opened wide, and she nodded almost imperceptibly. Then she blinked several times, obviously seeing something in me that couldn’t be seen with the naked, nonmystical eye.
    “Don’t start,” I told her when she opened her mouth. The last thing I needed after my Mystery Boy–filled day was an aura checkup. I desperately missed the days when Lissy’s power had been a secret and I’d thought she just had an unfortunate twitching problem.
    “Seriously, Lilah, are you okay?” Lissy was nothing if not persistent. “Because you don’t really look okay….”
    I flipped on my turn signal. “Fine,” I said.
    “Are you…sure?”
    “Positive. Are you okay?” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “Because you’re looking kind of…” I trailed off, casting a mock-sympathetic look at her frizzing hair. “…frazzled.”
    “I’m fine,” she said, looking out the window instead of at me, and then, as I’d known she would, she grew quiet. Her hair actually wasn’t anything some gel and a thorough reading of Cosmo wouldn’t fix, but I couldn’t afford for her to be asking what-happened-back-there kinds of questions when we picked Lexie up from the middle school. Luckily, playing the frizz card worked, and the two of us rode in a silence that only broke when Lexie James blew into the car, a broad smile on her pixie face.
    “You wouldn’t believe what happened today,” she said, and just listening to her say it, I was overcome with the feeling that I couldn’t possibly believe what had happened today. Part of me even wanted to hear what had happened, and it had been years since anything related to middle school had even remotely interested me. I hadn’t even been interested in the middle school when I’d gone there myself.
    “I was showing Molly how to smile with only half of her mouth, and…”
    I never got to hear what unbelievable thing had resulted from the half-mouth smile lessons, because about that time, Lexie picked up on the way I was death-gripping the steering wheel and the fact that Lissy couldn’t keep from glancing over