Change Places with Me(15)
“Later, then?”
“We’ll see.”
Which sounded too much like what parents say to children when they mean no. She’d always hated it when her dad tried to tell her no.
CHAPTER 9
The party was packed.
“Isn’t it fun?” Rose had to shout at Evelyn over the music.
Evelyn smiled briefly, though Rose could tell she wasn’t a big fan of parties. She liked quiet evenings, thick books, old movies. Selena had certainly spread the word—there were a lot of kids there Rose didn’t know, some she didn’t even recognize, who looked like seniors, or older. Stacey would fit right in! Nick Winter hadn’t arrived yet. Rose looked around for Kim, who wasn’t there either. Skeletons bobbled around overhead; they got tangled in each other’s arms, but someone always pulled them down and freed them. Some of the pumpkins glowed, some just flickered, and a few were entirely dark. Rose made her way over to Astrid and Selena and the group inevitably surrounding them.
“You invited Kim, right?” Rose shouted at Selena.
“I said I did, didn’t I?” Selena didn’t have to shout; her voice was naturally loud.
“She’s not here.”
“Take it easy, Rose. Maybe I forgot, whatever. I’ll invite her now.” Selena took out her phone.
Rose, making sure of it, watched over Selena’s shoulder as she opened the student directory, and said, “It’s so late now. She probably has other plans.”
“You’re kidding, right?” Astrid said. “We’re talking about Kim Garcia.” She was wearing a sleeveless black dress with a web design. She pointed to a tattoo of a small black spider slowly crawling on her arm. “It’s the real thing, none of that stupid Sün-Fade stuff for me. It’s got a three-inch radius.”
“Didn’t your mother mind?” asked a girl dressed as a cowgirl.
“She’s never home to notice. She’s in Argentina now, working on husband number nine.” Astrid, whose voice was always so low, might’ve said “five”—which was more likely, Rose thought, though that was still a lot of ex-husbands. Astrid grinned. “I got another tattoo, too. Don’t ask where.”
Dylan Beck, Nick Winter’s best friend, was dressed as a banana. He wrapped an arm around Astrid. “Want to pin the tail on the donkey? You be the donkey and I’ll be the tail.” He laughed as if this was the height of wit. Astrid pushed him off; she never went out with high school guys. Dylan said to Rose, “Who are you supposed to be, your own mother?”
Rose was wearing an old dress of Evelyn’s, the color of fallen leaves. “I’m not in costume,” she said, and then thought, Yes, I am. Which didn’t make any sense.
Selena had on a leather jumpsuit and love beads with a huge peace sign. “So have you seen her yet?” she bellowed at Rose.
“Who?”
“The psychic!”
Rose hadn’t even met her. Evelyn had set her up in Rose’s room.
“I barely had to say a word,” Selena said. “She told me my uncle just died, and that I have a crush on my sister’s boyfriend. The psychic knew everything!”
Somebody else said a friend of her mom’s had gone to a psychic and uncovered a traumatic episode in her past. “My mom suspects she had memory work done to help her through it,” she added.
“What kind of memory work?” asked a girl dressed as a zombie. Retro costumes were big this year, pirates, magicians, ghosts, vampires, along with cowboys and zombies.
“Oh, could be any one of these new things,” Selena answered her. “Memory wipe, like cleaning off a blackboard, or a memory replacement of your choice, or a total memory transfer from somebody else. I saw a bunch of videos. This one woman said her sister went from hating her husband to loving him like they’d just met.”
“Yeah, I saw a few of those videos,” Rose said. “Interesting but kinda crazy, you know?”
The girl in the cowgirl dress shrieked—a skeleton foot was tangled in her hair. Another girl was helping untangle it, but not before taking a picture. “Don’t you dare make a video out of that,” the cowgirl said.
“It reminds me of Hypno-Friends,” said the zombie girl. “What a disaster! You got hypnotized into remembering a wonderful best friend you had when you were a kid. People said it made their childhood memories a million times better. But it turns out people would believe the best friends really existed and then try to find them, hiring detectives, placing ads—and then some creeps would answer the ads, saying yeah, it’s me, your best buddy, and oh, by the way, I need money. They had to shut the whole thing down.”
“I spoke to the psychic,” Astrid said. “She didn’t uncover any buried trauma or a Hypno-Friend, but she told me things I’ve never told anyone.” She shook back her long, glistening, skeleton-free hair. “And I’m not repeating any of it.”
“Darcy Franzen’s in there now,” Selena said. “She’s probably hearing, ‘You will take home a guy tonight.’ With her parents in Europe, doesn’t take a psychic to get that right!” She jabbed a sharp elbow into Rose’s ribs. “What’s wrong with your face?”
“Nothing.” Rose realized she was rubbing her jaw and stopped. That strange pain hadn’t gone away yet. She headed for her room just as Darcy Franzen was leaving—practically in tears.