Undead Girl Gang(38)

“I’m willing to risk it,” Riley says. “They killed us first.”

“Mila, can I use your phone?” Dayton asks pertly. “I can’t remember the last time I was on the internet. Think of how many Snapchat filters I’ve missed!”

I frown at her. “I don’t have Snapchat. And you can’t take pictures of yourself or talk to anyone.”

“But I could read all the posts people have been writing about how much they miss me,” she says, batting her lashes. “What if I promise to leave only footprints and take only memories?”

With a sigh, I take my phone out of my pocket and pass it to Dayton. She rubs it against her face the same way a cat rubs itself on plants it likes. She opens the web browser and types rapidly with both hands.

“That’s the stuff,” she says with a sigh of relief.

“You’re such a weirdo,” June says with a snort.

Dayton ignores her and holds her free hand out to me. “Headphones?”

I hesitate, unsure of what exactly is lurking in Dayton’s ears. Sure, she looks pink and clean right now, but I know that a couple of minutes ago she was literally rotting. But it’s rude to discriminate, even against the sort-of dead.

I unwind the headphones from their perma-ball in my pocket. Dayton pops them into her ears and hunkers down. Binx trots down the stairs, squeezing past me to sniff the Chipotle bag before wandering into the kitchen, presumably to find something more alive to eat.

“She always ends up on her phone instead of studying,” June says, inclining her head at Dayton. “She’s better at study breaks. I had to ask her to stop coming to our meetings at Starbucks. She was too distracting.”

I frown at her. “You kicked your best friend out of your club?”

June highlights a line in her book with one long swipe. “I don’t rank my friends, Camila Flores. I have a lot of them. None are better than the others.”

“The best in best friends isn’t a quality judgment,” I say. Leave it to June to make everything a race to be first in her heart. “The best is for the closest. The person you trust the most. The person who”—I can’t help but look at Riley—“who you’d bring back from the dead.”

Riley glances over at me, her face expressionless but pinker around the edges. “Don’t expect June to understand loyalty. She was born an ice queen and will die an ice queen. Twice. The night she died, no one even knew where she was. Not one of her friends. She was sneaking around, and no one will ever know why.” Her eyebrows shoot up, almost knocking into her brown roots. She touches her lips like they’re infused with magic. “Mila, I—”

I gasp. “You remembered something! Something recent!”

“Oh, spare me,” June snaps. “You could have just made that up. Why would you know where I was the night I died?”

Riley scrubs her hand over her cheeks, jaw slack with astonishment. “My brother got a phone call from your parents. We were watching TV—something stupid about aliens. The house phone rang, and we thought it was a business call—a pickup for Dad. That’s what the house phone is for. But Xander answered it, and it was your mom. She said you weren’t answering your phone and no one knew where you were. But Dayton wasn’t with you.” She swings her head to look at Dayton’s oblivious face, intensely watching my phone. “Because Xander texted her and the Nouns, and none of them had seen you either. And then your body and Dayton’s were found by an old man walking his dogs before sunrise. My parents went to collect you, and Xander cried so hard that he threw up. And I called Mila while he cleaned himself up.” She swallows. “Right?”

“Yes,” I say in a whisper. “That’s exactly what happened.”

She presses her hands into her temples as though trying to squeeze her brain. “After that, it goes dark again. I don’t remember my dad preparing the bodies or the families coming to pick out caskets or—”

“Stop!” June shouts, a tremor running through the word. “That’s me you’re talking about. Not some random dead body.”

Binx trots back into the room, chasing a skittering spider. His tail knocks through a pile of rune stones, and I move my leg out of the way so that both of them can pass by me.

“June,” I say delicately, “the more you guys can remember, the better. It could help us catch your killer if we knew exactly—”

“I don’t want to remember ‘exactly,’” she interrupts. She tosses aside her highlighter and scoops Binx up before he can kill the spider. He goes limp in her hands with a face that implies that some great indignity has fallen upon him. “I don’t want to know how they got us alone or what kind of rope they used or how they managed to lift us up in the tree. I don’t want to remember the last thing they said to me or if I had to watch Dayton die or if it was the other way around. It doesn’t matter. Because we’re still dead, and turning a killer over to the police won’t change that, so just stop it! Stop digging around for why. As the murdered party, I don’t care! I can’t have my life back!”

Dayton pops out one of her headphones, her thumb on the screen of the phone to pause it. “Hey, June? Sorry to interrupt, but could you come here for a sec?”

June drops Binx onto the ground. He mews lightly and pads over to Riley.