not be able to shut up. She already sounded like a broken record in her own mind--cycling on repeat through the total of oh, four physical experiences she'd had with him in this life. (She chose only to start counting once he stopped pretending she didn't exist.) Imagine how quickly she would bore Shelby, who'd probably had tons of boyfriends, tons of experience. Compared to Luce's next to none.
One kiss she could barely remember with a boy who'd burst into ames. A handful of very hot moments with Daniel. That just about summed it up. Luce was certainly no expert when it came to love.
Again she felt the unfairness of her situation: Daniel had all these great memories of them together to fall back on when things got rough. She had nothing.
Until she looked up at her roommate.
"Shelby?"
Shelby had her pu y red hood pulled over her head and was poking a stick into the wet sand. "I told you I don't want to talk about him."
"I know. I was wondering, remember when you mentioned that you knew how to glimpse your past lives?"
This was what she'd been about to ask Shelby when Dawn fell overboard.
"I never said that." The stick plunged deeper into the sand. Shelby's face was ushed and her thick blond hair was frizzing out of her ponytail.
"Yes ... you did." Luce tilted her head. "You wrote it on my paper. That day when we were doing the icebreaker? You grabbed it out of my hands and said you could speak more than eighteen languages and glimpse past lives and which one did I need you to ll out--"
"I remember what I said. But you misunderstood what I meant."
"Okay," Luce said slowly, "well--"
"Just because I have glimpsed a past life before doesn't mean I know how to do it, and it doesn't mean it was my own."
"So, it wasn't yours?"
"Hell no, reincarnation is for freaks."
Luce frowned and dug her hands into the wet sand, wanting to bury herself in it.
"Hello, that was a joke." Shelby nudged Luce playfully. "Tailored especially for the girl who's had to go through puberty a thousand times." She grimaced. "Once was enough for me, thank you very much."
So Luce was That Girl. The girl who'd had to go through puberty a thousand times. She'd never thought about it that way before. It was almost funny: From the outside, going through endless puberties seemed like the worst part of her lot. But it was so much more complicated than that. Luce started to say she'd go through a thousand more pimples and hormone uctuations if she could look into her past lives and understand more about herself, but then she looked up at Shelby. "If it wasn't yours, then whose past life did you glimpse?"
"Why are you being so nosy? Damn."
Luce could feel her blood pressure rising. "Shelby, ohmigod, throw me a bone!"
"Okay," Shelby said nally, making a chill-out motion with her hands. "I was at this party one night in Corona. Things got pretty crazy, half- naked s?ances and shit, and--well, that's not really the story. So I remember taking a walk to get some air. It was raining, hard to see where I was going. I turned the corner in an alleyway and there was this guy, kind of beat-up-looking. He was bent over a sphere of darkness. I'd never seen anything like it, shaped like a globe, but glowing, kind of oating above his hands. He was crying."
"What was it?"
"I didn't know then, but now I know it was an Announcer."
Luce was mesmerized. "And you saw some of the past life he was glimpsing? What was it like?"
Shelby met Luce's eyes and swallowed. "It was pretty gruesome, Luce."
"I'm sorry," Luce said. "I was only asking because ..."
It felt like a big deal to admit what she was about to admit. Francesca would de nitely be opposed to this. But Luce needed answers, and she needed help. Shelby's help.
"I need to glimpse some of my past lives," Luce said. "Or I need to at least try. Things have been happening recently that I'm supposed to just accept because I don't know any better--only I could know better, a lot better, if I could just see where I come from. Where I've been. Does that make any sense?"
Shelby nodded.
"I need to know what I had in the past with Daniel so I can feel surer of what I have with him now." Luce took a breath. "That guy, the one in the