“Shut up, Zora,” she snapped.
Bach shook his head, smiling, and drank the last of his ice cream straight out of the bowl.
7
“Thieves!”
Artemis’s ranting carried across the empty parking lot.
“They come here asking for truth, but they only want what looks good and sounds edgy! Did you see the way he looked at me when I said the wordhistory? He fell asleep standing up! They don’t even know this town, but they’re going to come in and stomp all over it like everyone else!”
I’d never in my life seen Artemis so incensed. I leaned against the Chevelle’s bumper, parked by Sadie’s Camry, where she and Grim sat on the trunk. Lorelei stood in Grim’s shadow. Hal was next to me, yawning, and Mads flipped through an app on her phone. The dead town council members had returned to their statue, and a few other ghostswandered around the parking lot. I needed to talk to Artemis alone, but she was ranting too much.
Artemis marched back and forth, breath coming out in streams of fog.
“Yell louder,” I said. “I don’t think they heard you in Harrisburg.”
Artemis sneered at me. “Zora, for once in your life, will you think of someone other than yourself?”
I ignored the sneer. “What are you talking about? I think of other people all the time.” I counted off on my fingers. “When I’m making fun of them, when I’m keying their cars, when I’m—what’s that look for?”
Artemis spun away from me, hair trailing her like a blond curtain. “I can’t believe we’re related.”
The others didn’t laugh, either.
“They’re here for money,” Sadie said. “They’ll get their stories and go, and we’ll have a little more foot traffic for a while.”
Artemis scoffed. “For a while. We already get enough foot traffic. Tourists keep scratching up the antique wallpaper in Newman’s, trying to find the etched initials of the lost lovers who stayed in the east room. They punch holes through the rotting parts of the covered bridge to try to see the ghost of Roadspike Stevens climbing out of Black Creek. Pastor Keller even said he found a few peopleliterally digging up gravesto find out if it was true that there were no real bodies buried in thechurch graveyard. But all this is okay with all of you? They’re tearing our town apart piece by piece to sate their curiosity and getmoney, and that’s okay?”
Mads glanced up, eyebrows raised. Hal scratched at his neck. Lorelei had disappeared behind Grim, who stared absently northwest, toward Piper Mountain. Sadie took her hands away from her ears. “Of course I’m not okay with it,” she said. “But my life isn’t going to end if some wallpaper gets scratched up or a bridge has to be repaired. The gravedigging thing is... upsetting. But whatever the case, I have a few priorities that are higher on the list than saving this whole town. Food, for one. Health insurance. Making sure my car keeps working. Keepingthis oneout of juvie.” She jabbed a finger at me.
“Excuse you,” I mumbled. “I’m old enough to get sent torealprison now.”
“Arty, look,” Mads said. Artemis jerked to a halt. “If it bothers you so much, why not talk to your mom about it? She’s the one who started all this stuff. She’s the one who can do something about it.”
It took a second for Artemis to break her wide-eyed stare at Mads, and when she spoke, it was with all the previous bluster blown out of her. “I’ve tried. It only gave her the idea to make the town more ‘interactive.’”
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “She really is turning it into Conner Prairie for the Afterlife.”
“Pretty much.”
“It sucks,” Hal said, “but my dad’s gung ho for it, too. When he found out they wanted to film at the shop, he told me to put signs up in every window so our logo gets on TV. I’ll ask around and see if anyone else is unhappy with it, and maybe we can get a town assembly called. Until then I think we’re going to have to suffer.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it’s freezing balls out here, so I’m leaving.”
“It’s, like, fifty degrees,” I said.
“My balls accept nothing less than sixty-five,” he called back as he climbed into his Ford.
“I’m leaving, too.” Mads slipped her phone into her pocket. “See you guys at school tomorrow.”
“Bye, everyone.” Lorelei hugged Grim quickly and disappeared for the last time that night.
Sadie and Grim slid from the Camry. “Grim’s staying over with us tonight,” Sadie said to me.
“The more the merrier.” I held a hand up. Grim gave me a high-five, then caught my hand and patted it between both of his, a monk on a mountainside offering a prayer. “Just don’t eat all my Fruity Pebbles, okay?”
“I have two boxes in my car for you,” Grim said.
“God bless you, Grimmie!”
