Undead Girl Gang(35)
I can’t argue with that. I bite into my double cheeseburger, effectively spoiling my dinner. Which is in less than an hour. I’ll have to be home to help set the table the second the sun sets, not that I can see the sun from Yarrow. With the blacked-out windows, time sort of stops in Yarrow House. It’s unsettling, but I suck it up since the girls have to endure it.
“So, I’ve been thinking about why someone would want to kill you guys,” I say, hiding the food in my mouth behind a flimsy napkin. “I think it might have something to do with the Rausch Scholarship. You were all top contenders for it this year.”
June rolls her eyes. “I was the top contender. My essay was about how important my work on the charter school board was.” She arcs a hand through the air, imagining a headline. “‘Guiding the Flow of Communication’ by June Phelan-Park. I was so gonna win.”
“Mine was about staying positive in the face of adversity,” Dayton chirps. “My whole family went on a mission trip last summer. It was life-changing.”
“It was in San Diego,” June says. “You could find poorer people if you’d stayed in Cross Creek.”
“Joke’s on you,” Dayton says. “We were helping farm animals. I brushed an alpaca.”
Riley cuts her eyes at me. “What does this have to do with us being murdered?”
“It’s kind of the only thing you guys have in common,” I say. “And, for whatever reason, basically everyone at Fairmont wants to win the Rausch.”
“We want the party, duh,” Dayton says. “It’s like your own private prom.”
“Xander’s scholarship gala was so awesome,” June says. She shakes out a ketchup packet between her thumb and forefinger and tears off the edge with her teeth. “It was even better than prom. Someone snuck in a flask of vodka—”
“I did,” Riley interrupts.
“You did?” I ask. “You never told me that.”
Riley swings her head to look at me. “I didn’t want you to be jealous. It was when I was dating Myles.” She seems cautiously hopeful that she’s remembered something from her continued blackout period. “When was that?”
“The end of May.”
Her face falls, and she turns back to her line of nugget sauces. “Anyway, Myles found a handle of Seagram’s—”
I gag. “You drank found vodka? Why would I be jealous of found vodka?”
“Because,” Riley says heavily, “it was at the Rausch dinner with popular people.”
“And I’d be hella jealous of you getting drunk with who? The Future Zombies of America here?”
“Excuse you,” June says. “Riley was only there because she’s Xander’s sister. No one thought she was cool.”
“And you were only there because you were Xander’s girlfriend, and you puked all over the dashboard of his brand-new car on the way home,” Riley says.
“People are already talking about how you guys dying means that the scholarship is up for grabs now,” I say. “All we have to do is figure out who would want it enough to kill you.”
Dayton takes a pull from her soda and wrinkles her nose. “And then what?”
“And then we get them to confess or take them to the police. Justice, revenge. You know, the whole reason I brought you back to life?”
“You brought us back by accident,” June corrects. “You just wanted your friend back.”
Irritation makes my lips crackle. I rub them together to keep the first ten things I think to say in reply from shooting across the room like bullets. “Okay, sure. But don’t you want someone to go to jail for killing you guys?”
The room goes quiet except for the sound of Binx’s rolling purr as he rubs his head into Riley’s side.
June takes a loud slurp from her soda. “Whatever. It’s not like they could kill us again.”
“The affairs of the living aren’t really our business anymore,” Dayton says with a world-weary flounce of her wrist.
“What?” I gape at them. “You’re not serious, are you? Someone murdered all of you in one week. It was a fucking rampage. Why would they stop murdering people now that it’s working out for them? They’ll probably try to kill me when they realize that I’m searching for them.”
Riley pops a nugget into her mouth. A drop of honey mustard splashes onto her lower lip. “Then stop searching.”
“I can’t!” I yell. The sound makes Binx dart across the room and leap up the stairs. “If anyone else dies, it’ll be my fault for not stopping it. And have any of you considered that what you do while you’re here might have an effect on what happens Sunday night?”
“Sunday night we die again,” June says. “Kind of no matter what, according to your old book.”
“And what happens after that?” I snap. “Do you think you’ll get to go to your ‘eternal reward’ if all you did with your second chance was yell at the Nouns and steal from Walmart? Assholes don’t get to go to heaven.”
June slams down her soda. “We didn’t ask to come back to life! You brought us here.”
“No one asks to be born either,” I counter. Barbed anger curbs my hunger. I toss aside my burger, letting it skid and fall apart on the floor, beef rolling over pickles. “You still get judged based on what you do with your time on earth. And, guess what? You have been a total dick for sixteen years, so maybe spending a couple of days doing something for someone other than yourself would help your chances of a decent afterlife.”