“Hey, baby,” Chelsea said in a voice that bordered on baby talk as Mike bent down to give her a quick kiss. “Miss me?”
Violet almost rolled her eyes.
“I thought about you all period,” he answered, his voice husky. “Did you get the note I left in your backpack?”
Violet couldn’t hold back any longer; she rolled her eyes. Neither of them noticed.
“I did. You’re so sweet.” The cooing verged on sickening. “Did anyone say anything about your mustache?”
Mike winced, as if he suddenly remembered the patchy hair on his upper lip. “A coupla’ people,” he reluctantly responded, and Violet suspected that he’d taken his fair share of ribbing over it.
Chelsea ignored the obvious distress in his voice. “Vi and I gotta run or we’ll be late.” She stretched up to kiss him and then rubbed her thumb across the hairs above his lip as if she were petting them. “See you after class.”
Chelsea tugged at Violet, who was still staring at his unsightly mustache. It was like seeing a car accident . . . hard to look away.
“So do you? Like it, I mean?” Violet asked as she was being dragged down the hallway.
“The mustache?” Chelsea grimaced. “God, no. It’s hideous on him.”
“Then, why?”
“I told you, to see if he’d actually do it. Don’t worry. I’m gonna make him shave it this weekend.”
Violet wasn’t sure whether to congratulate her friend on her training abilities or reprimand her for being so cruel. In the end, she didn’t do either, mostly because she knew it wouldn’t make any difference.
Chelsea was Chelsea. Trying to convince her that what she’d done was wrong would be like banging your head against a brick wall. It would be painful to you but accomplish nothing.
Jay sat down across from Chelsea and took both of her hands in his. The oversized lunchroom was buzzing with activity, and he practically had to yell to be heard.
“Chelsea, for the love of everything good and holy, please . . . please stop ruining my friend.”
Violet bit her lip to stop from laughing at the two of them. She knew what he was talking about before he even explained. It was the new facial hair.
Chelsea jerked her hands out of his. “Oh, relax, drama queen. He’s not broken. Besides, I’m gonna fix him this weekend.”
Jay seemed relieved. “I wish you’d do it sooner. The poor guy’s really taking a ration of crap over that thing.”
“He’ll be fine. Trust me. It’s like a character-building exercise. When this is all over, he’ll be a stronger person.” She said it like she meant it. She was actually trying to convince someone that this was all for Mike’s own good.
Jay wasn’t buying it, but he let the subject drop when Mike came up behind Chelsea and planted an enthusiastic kiss on her cheek. Obviously, Mike wasn’t suffering too much from Chelsea’s little experiment.
Chelsea rubbed the spot where his lips had touched her and made a face that only they could see. “There’s my guy!” she said. “Jay was just telling me that he doesn’t like your ’stache, baby. But I told him he’s crazy. I think it’s hot.”
Mike looked embarrassed that they were talking about it again. Violet realized that it was a sore subject and wondered what Chelsea had done to make him so eager to please her.
But before she could speculate, something strangely familiar drew Violet’s attention, just out of the corner of her eye.
It was so faint, and gone so fast, that she wasn’t even certain she’d seen it. A blink. A weak flash.
Violet turned in the direction from which it had come, wondering what it could have been.
Students crowded tables and leaned against walls. They moved in and out of doorways, and she could see them drifting idly through the hallways that surrounded the administrative offices at the entrance of the school, just beyond the cafeteria.
It could have been a camera. Or the pulse of a flashlight, although that seemed oddly out of place at school . . . during the day.
It might have been nothing.
But it wasn’t. A gentle hum beat through her veins. She knew that it wasn’t nothing.
She stood up, ignoring the others around her. “I’ll be right back,” she said to no one in particular as she scanned the area, trying to locate the translucent flicker once more. She couldn’t be sure from where, exactly, it had come, but she headed toward the busy hallways. She recognized everyone but no one in particular.
She felt like she were chasing phantoms as she searched each face, looking for something that might distinguish one individual from the rest. Looking for that certain something that he wouldn’t even realize he carried.
It was the light, the pulsating flashes that had woken her the night the dead cat had been left outside her house. With everything else going on, she’d nearly forgotten about the cat . . . and its killer. And now here it was, the imprint of death.
Even though it was washed out, almost completely blanched by the light of day, she was sure that was what it was.
Icy fingers gripped her heart at the thought of one of her fellow students, someone she knew, someone she was so near every day, having done something so horrendous. And then leaving it for Violet to find.
She tried to locate the flash again, tried to pinpoint it among the faces around her. When she couldn’t see it, she started to think that maybe it was gone. Or, possibly, that she’d only imagined it.