Lost Girls(62)

But he wasn’t waiting for me when class was over. When I got to lunch, I discovered he wasn’t in the cafeteria, either. Or at least, I couldn’t see him from the lunchroom door, because that was as far as I got. I paused, backpack in one hand, cell phone in the other when I got a text from Molly.

How was your weekend?? Never heard from you again.

Weird. Where are you?

A few seconds passed before a reply came.

Home. Asthma. Going to doctor.

I sank back against the doorframe, letting the throng of hungry teenagers pour past me. This was what it had been like throughout our childhood. If Molly ever got too stressed out, she got sick, really sick. Like she couldn’t breathe and had to go to the hospital sick. You never knew what would trigger her asthma, either, because sometimes she’d have a small attack at first and then a worse one a few days after. I remembered how she had fumbled with her inhaler the other night when we were in my car, right after I’d kicked the crap out of Janie Deluca.

Molly was probably sick because she was hanging out with me again.

Leaving for doctor. Call me after dinner? she texted.

Yeah.

I was just putting my phone away when Lauren came out of nowhere, grabbed me and half-dragged me down the hall toward the girls’ bathroom. All the way, she tried to shush me. I kept asking her the same questions over and over—what’s up?, what’s wrong?, where are we going?—but she wouldn’t talk until the two of us were locked together in a stall.

As far as secrecy went, this place would have been at the bottom of my list.

People had seen us come in here. They could see us now with our legs poking out below the bottom of the stall, and once we started talking they would be able to hear us.

“This isn’t exactly a cone of silence,” I said when she finally released me.

“It is if we whisper,” she said. “Look what I got!”

I probably shouldn’t have been surprised. I mean, hadn’t God and the universe and my own retrograde memory banks been preparing me for this moment? Still, the serendipity of it caused my eyes to widen and a loud gasp to come out of my lungs.

She held two black and silver tickets in her hand.

Platinum Level.

“It wasn’t just a rumor.” Her voice came out in a low, hoarse whisper.

I shook my head.

“So what do you think? You wanna go with me, don’t you?”

I nodded. My words had evaporated. I kept seeing that door opening and the blinding light; I kept hearing the loud cheering that came from the other side, sounding somehow different from what we’d always heard during the normal Phase Two raves.

“Cat got your tongue, girlfriend?” Lauren laughed.

“I, um, yeah, I guess. Did you get any instructions or do you know where to go?” I didn’t want to tell her too much, like the fact that I had just found out my boyfriend was a car thief or that I had gone to a Platinum Level event before, or that some really bad stuff might have happened there. I had to go to this tonight and I had to find out what was on the other side of that door. It was the only way I would ever find out what had happened to Nicole.

“I have the directions in my car,” she said. “It’s not anywhere they’ve held raves before.”

“Any chance it’s off the 10?”

“Yeah! How did you know? Did you get tickets, too?” A disappointed expression darkened her features.

“No, it’s just somebody I know went to one of these once. I only remembered it this morning.”

“Really? Did she say what it was like?”

“Nope. She was totally secretive, like, I can’t give you any details.” I was going to Hell for this. I was lying to one of my friends and possibly putting her life in danger. “What if it’s dangerous, Lauren?” I asked, giving her a chance to back out. “What if it’s not what we expect, like we could get hurt or something—”

“That’s why we’re going together. Nothing can happen as long as we stick together, right?”

I swallowed nervously. Well, technically, we could both wind up beaten to death and dropped off by the side of the road, or we could end up missing like the other Lost Girls. I gave her a look that revealed all my concerns and doubts.

“You’re not afraid, are you?” she asked. “You’ve never been afraid of anything.”

“No. I’m not afraid. I want to go. I just wonder if maybe we shouldn’t go. Not this time—”

She shook her head, sent that long, golden Rapunzel hair spinning around her. “No way. I’m not giving you these tickets so you can go with somebody else. You’re coming with me or not at all!”

There was a slender moment when I could have grabbed those tickets away from her and ripped them up. But it was almost as if she sensed what I was thinking. She pulled them back, then stuffed them in her Prada purse.

“What’s it gonna be?” she asked, a cold expression in her eyes. “Me and you? Or me and somebody else?”

I sucked a long breath through my teeth, forcing myself to relax. I was still tempted to lunge at her and wrestle her to the ground and yank that designer purse away—which would be hard in this tight space. We’d probably smash our heads on the wall or the stall or the floor. If we were out in the hallway, or outside the building, it would have been easy to take her down. But in here, I might lose. Somebody might come in the bathroom, some teacher or janitor or administrator, and think they needed to break us up. They’d be wrong, of course.