“Come on!” Lena motioned, and I shook loose the memory and picked up my backpack. She gave her uncle a quick hug. “Ridley!” she called up the stairs. A muffled groan floated down from one of the bedrooms. “Now!”
“Sir.” I folded my napkin and stood up.
Macon’s relaxed expression vanished. “Be careful out there.”
“I’ll keep an eye on her.”
“Thank you, Mr. Wate. I know you will.” He lowered his cup. “But you be careful yourself. Things are a bit more complicated than they might seem.” The town was falling apart, and we’d pretty much broken the whole world. I wasn’t sure how things could get any more complicated than that.
“Careful of what, sir?” The table was quiet between us, even though I could hear Lena and Gramma arguing with Ridley in the hallway.
Macon looked down at his pile of newspapers, smoothing open the last one, in a language I’d never seen and yet somehow recognized.
“I wish I knew.”
After breakfast at Ravenwood, if you could call it that, the day only got weirder. We were late for school because when we got to Link’s house to pick him up, his mom caught him dumping his breakfast in the trash and made him sit through a second one. Then, when we drove by the Stop & Steal, Fatty, Jackson’s faithful truant officer, wasn’t sitting in his car eating a sticky bun and reading the paper. And there were half a dozen buns left in the bakery section. That had to be the first sign of the apocalypse. But even more unbelievable, we walked into the administration building twenty minutes late, and Miss Hester wasn’t at the front desk to give us detention. Her purple nail polish sat in front of her office chair, unopened. Like the whole world had somehow rotated five degrees in the wrong direction.
“This is our lucky day.” Link put up his fist, and I tapped his knuckles against mine. I would have gone with freaky.
It was confirmed when I caught a glimpse of Ridley wandering toward the bathroom. I could’ve sworn she had changed into a regular girl, wearing weirdly regular-girl clothes. And finally, when I slid into my seat next to Lena, on what should have been Mrs. English’s Good-Eye Side, I found myself in the Twilight Zone of classroom seating charts.
I was sitting where I always did. It was the room that had changed, or Mrs. English, who spent the whole period grilling students on the wrong side of the room.
“ ‘This is a sharp time, now, a precise time—we live no longer in the dusky afternoon when evil mixed itself with good and befuddled the world.’ ” Mrs. English looked up. “Miss Asher? How dusky a time would Arthur Miller think we live in today?”
Emily stared at her, shocked. “Ma’am? Don’t you mean to be asking—them?” Emily looked over at Abby Porter, Lena, and me, the only people who ever sat on the Good-Eye Side.
“I mean to be asking anyone who expects to pass my class, Miss Asher. Now answer the question.”
Maybe she put her glass eye in the wrong side this morning.
Lena smiled without looking up from her paper.
Maybe.
“Um, I think Arthur Miller would be majorly psyched that we aren’t all so messed up anymore.”
I peeked over my copy of The Crucible. And as Emily stammered to condemn a witch hunt not much different from the one she had all but led herself, that glass eye was staring straight at me.
As if it could not only see me but see right through me.
By the time school let out, things were starting to feel more normal. Ethan-Hating Emily hissed when I walked by, trailed by Eden and Charlotte, third and fourth in command, like the good old days. Ridley figured out that Lena had Cast a Facies Celata on her, Charming her Siren clothes so they appeared to be regular clothes. Now Ridley was back to her old self, black leather and pink stripes—revenge, vendettas, and all. Worse, as soon as the bell rang, she dragged both of us to basketball practice to watch Link’s scrimmage.
This time there was no hanging out in the doorway of the gym. Ridley wasn’t happy until we were sitting front and center. It was painful. Link wasn’t even on the court, and I had to watch my old teammates screwing up plays I used to run. But Lena and Ridley were bickering like sisters, and there was more going on in the stands than on the court. At least, until I saw Link get up from the bench.
“You Cast a Facies on me? Like I was some kind of Mortal?” Ridley was practically shrieking. “Like I wouldn’t know? So now you think I’m not only powerless but stupid?”
“It wasn’t my idea. Gramma told me to do it after she saw what you were wearing at the house.” Lena looked embarrassed.
Ridley’s face was as pink as the streaks in her hair. “It’s a free world. At least, it is outside of Gat-Dung. You can’t use your powers to dress people however you want. Especially not like that.” She shuddered. “I’m not one of Savannah Snow’s Barbie dolls.”
“Rid. You don’t have to be like them. But you don’t have to try so hard to be so different.”
“Same thing,” Ridley snapped.
“It’s not.”
“Look at that herd and tell me why I should care what those people think of me.”
Ridley had a point. As Link moved up and down the court, the eyes of the entire cheer squad were glued to him as if they were one person. Which, basically, they were. I didn’t even watch the court after a while. I already knew Link could probably hit a jumper from the stands, with his superstrength.