AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“She’s been lurking for weeks now,” I tell him. “She didn’t do anything to Rachel. She’s just trying to get me to do something for her.”
At least, I hope she didn’t have anything to do with Rachel passing out. If she did, I’ll find a way to banish her so she can’t ever do it again.
Carter doesn’t look convinced. I should probably try harder to block him from my thoughts.
“Who is this girl, again?” he asks, looking at the yearbooks in my hands.
“She was in my year at high school.”
“Did she have a crush on you?”
“What? No.” No one had a crush on me in high school. I was the weirdo who talked to himself and kept to himself and wouldn’t give anyone the time of day.
“You’re so oblivious. I seriously doubt no one had a crush on you,” Carter says. “Which one of those is she in?”
I sigh as I pass him my old yearbook. “Page twelve, near the middle.”
“Sara, Sara …” he murmurs as he opens the book and flips the pages.
I move to the couch and sit down since Carter’s blocking my path out of the room anyway, probably on purpose knowing him. I open the old yearbook, feeling weird about touching it. It belonged to my aunt. The handwritten messages in the front are all written by friends for her, wishing her luck and saying goodbye. It feels like an invasion of her privacy to be looking at them, so I skip past them quickly.
Wolf Creek High School looks the same as it did when I went there. It was an old building with poor ventilation and functionally sturdy design features and furniture. I admired the workmanship of the carved depictions of Gods and Goddesses, but otherwise, I hated every minute I spent inside, tortured by the spirits who followed me around the building and disrupted any efforts I made to actually apply myself to the work.
“So that’s what she looks like,” Carter says suddenly, sinking down beside me with the open book.
I roll my eyes and move along a bit as he shuffles his ass around in the seat.Never sit in the middle of the couch. Carter will only take it as an invitation to snuggle in close like an overgrown cat.
He shows me the page, raising an eyebrow at me.
“I know what she looks like. I see her all the time,” I mutter as I take my time turning the pages of the older book, wondering what the hell she’s expecting me to find inside.
Maybe I should take it out there and ask, but I get the feeling that’ll only earn me yet another excruciatingly vague conversation. There’s something she doesn’t want to say out loud, clearly.
“She looks like the kind of girl who finds dark moods and ugly tattoos sexy,” Carter teases.
“She knows about Rachel,” I remind him. “She doesn’t have a crush on me.”
“Hmm.” Carter doesn’t sound convinced.
I ignore him as he leafs through my yearbook. I concentrate on examining the photos in my aunt’s book closely. My eyes start to glaze over a few pages in. Looking at a bunch of faces I don’t know is boring as hell. I switch my efforts to reading the names, one by one, and it’s a little easier to stay engaged. The sheriff’s in here, back when he was a young, confident basketball star. I recognize the receptionist from the academy, too. She doesn’t really look too different. Shifters definitely age slower than humans, and reptilian shifters seem to age the slowest of us all.
“Did you not go to prom?” Carter asks, almost done with my yearbook already.
“What do you think?” I ask without looking up.
“I think Adrian took the hottest girl in school to prom, and you stayed at home telling ghosts to fuck off back to whatever rock they crawled out from, probably while drinking whiskey out the bottle.”
It’s eerily accurate, except for one thing.
“I take ice in my whiskey.”
“Right. How could I forget?”
He closes the book and I feel him leaning against my arm.
“If you’re sleepy, go back to bed,” I warn him.
“I’m not tired,” he says. “I’m just trying to get a better look. What’s up with the hairstyles?”
