Steadfast(8)

Mrs. Bristow looked as surprised as Verlaine felt, but she recovered quickly. “Okay, Jeremy, why would you say that?”

He doubled down on the surprise factor by not giving a smart-ass answer. “Well, she blames the man who jilted her for ruining her life. He hurt her, of course, but he didn’t ruin her life. She could easily have found someone else or done something productive with her time. Instead she locks out the world and surrounds herself with memories of how someone wronged her. Miss Havisham didn’t give herself any more chances for happiness. So I think she’s delusional for blaming anybody else. She ruined her own life.”

“That’s—very good.” Mrs. Bristow blinked. “Excellent insight.”

It was the first evidence Verlaine had ever had that Jeremy might have a brain in his head. She had a lot of evidence to the contrary. And he’d been polite, even pleasant, when he spoke—

Quickly she snatched her phone again and texted, There’s NO WAY this is really Jeremy Prasad.

“Verlaine’s right,” Mateo said as he and Nadia headed toward chemistry class. “I know what I saw, Nadia. It wasn’t a dream, a vision, anything like that. It was the most real thing ever. Jeremy Prasad is dead.”

“And he’s also walking straight toward us,” Nadia said.

Mateo glanced up to see she was right; Jeremy seemed totally unbothered as he sauntered toward class, just like always, except for the disappearance of his usual smug expression.

Still, when Mateo looked at him, all he could envision was the way Jeremy had fallen into the wet sand, utterly lifeless. As he passed them, Jeremy just nodded like any other guy would—any other guy but Jeremy, who seemed to come up with snide comments for every occasion.

Mateo pulled Nadia close; it wasn’t like Jeremy-or-whatever would try anything right here, but he felt better trying to keep her safe. It had only been a few nights ago that she’d been lying unconscious at his feet. He’d thought she was dead. He’d been given a glimpse of his world without Nadia, and he didn’t ever want to see it again.

“Raising the dead,” he said. “Can witchcraft do that?”

“No. At least not any way you’d ever want them to be raised. I’m going over the alternatives, and all the ones I know are . . . extremely, extremely bad.” Nadia went pale; her arms tightened around Mateo. “And it just got worse.”

Mateo glanced over his shoulder and saw Elizabeth walking into class.

Nobody else looked remotely surprised to see her; why would they? She attended school as though she were any other student. Granted, she was out a lot of the time, because she could make the teachers and other students forget her absences completely—but that only made it weirder that she chose to come at all.

And of course, Elizabeth was still his lab partner.

“Ah, young love,” said Mrs. Purdhy, who had walked up while they were distracted. Mateo and Nadia pulled apart slightly. “What a beautiful sight. Also, what a stupid reason for a tardy. You two want to get into class?”

“Oh, yeah, right.” Nadia shared a glance with Mateo. They were stuck.

As they walked in, Jeremy was arranging the stuff for today’s experiment neatly on the lab table he shared with Nadia. (Oh, crap, how did I forget that he’s teamed with Nadia?) Elizabeth went calmly to her own table to wait for Mateo, staring at him the whole time he approached. She didn’t so much as glance at Jeremy.

Memories flickered through his mind: the two of them as eight-year-olds, making cookies and giggling. Swimming together in the surf on a blazing-hot summer afternoon. Hiking around Breakheart Pond two years ago, on a cool, bright autumn day much like this one.

Those were some of the happiest memories of Mateo’s life—and each and every one was fake.

“What the hell are you doing here?” he muttered as he came to the table.

“Learning about—” She squinted at the board. “Combustion, apparently.”

“Stop lying to me!” That came out too loudly; a few people turned their heads in his direction.

Elizabeth just smiled and pushed up the sleeves of her cardigan. Her hair was a little disheveled, her cardigan not quite on straight. Had she always been like this? Slightly askew? “I doubt you’d like the truth any better. But don’t worry, Mateo. I’m not here for you today; I’m not even here for her.” She nodded over at Nadia, who was currently watching the un-Jeremy obediently start filling out today’s worksheet. “I have my own reasons.”

From the front of the room, Mrs. Purdhy started lecturing. “Okay, everyone. We got an inadvertent lesson about combustion over the weekend—” People groaned at the bad joke, and she nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know. Work with me here. Today’s lesson is going to be a lot more controlled than that, and hopefully a lot more fun.”

Between Elizabeth standing there next to him like nothing was going on and the dead guy right by Nadia, Mateo could hardly pay attention to what else the teacher was saying . . . but then he realized she’d stopped talking.

He looked toward the front. Mrs. Purdhy was standing very still, her eyes wide with what he knew was fright. She wasn’t looking at Elizabeth or Not-Jeremy, not at anything in particular. Her eyes seemed glazed with fear.

People started glancing at one another, looking for confirmation that this was definitely weird. After a moment, Kendall Bender raised her hand and said, “Um, Mrs. Purdhy, do you know you’re, like, acting all weird?”