“We’re going to have a meeting, all the guys and girls who are involved. We need to put the blame where it belongs, and then, once we do, the rest of you girls will be safe.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Kenzie.” He cocks his head to the right. “I put the freaking list together, I can do whatever I want.”
The burn in my chest is like a five-alarm fire now, so wild it actually hurts with each out-of-control heartbeat. “You put it together?”
“With some help. Listen, babe.” He slides his hand back under my hair, holding my head a little tightly. “I’m going to do what I have to for my girl.” He kisses my hair again, then adjusts my face so I can’t look anywhere but at him. “Be there at ten tonight. And wear sneakers or boots.”
“Why?”
He smiles. “We’re going into the woods.”
Before I can react, he pushes up and pulls me with him, and the yearbook I’ve been clutching falls open to the page I’ve practically marked by holding my hand in the spine all this time.
Of course, he leans over and squints at it. “That’s my dad.”
“Really?” I do a magnificent job of acting surprised.
He looks hard at me and I brace for the accusations and questions. But his face relaxes into an easy smile. “Looking up my dad, huh?”
I just stare at him.
He plants another kiss on my head. “I knew you liked me a lot.”
Thank God he has a massive ego. He steps back and points a finger at me. “Ten tonight. I want you there, Kenzie. Promise me you’ll be there. Promise.”
“I …”
“Oh, and by the way,” he adds while I’m thinking. “My grandfather is setting up a special course for you to do the ropes. He said he’s been looking into your grades and references and he’s dying to give you that scholarship, so he’s gonna make it easy for you. I know he’d like to see you, too.”
What was that? An invitation … or blackmail to get me there? I just nod. “Okay.”
And that’s enough to make him grin and walk out, leaving me feeling really, really sick.
“I have to go.”
Levi stares at me and somehow I’m able to look beyond the dreamy eyes and exquisite lips to brace for his response. “Over my dead body.”
Exactly what I expected. “Under the circumstances, I think that’s a terrible answer,” I tell him.
We’re lying side by side on a grass hill where we’ve spent all of our lunch period and half of my AP Lit class. It’s warm today and we both took our jackets off to relax under rare blue skies.
I don’t even care about school anymore, which is probably the most unnatural thing about everything going on. I’m a regular class-cutter these days. When I saw Levi in the hall and he suggested we leave, I didn’t even think about it, happy to hop on his motorcycle and get out of Vienna High.
“You don’t have to go,” he says. “Dena can tell you what they’re planning, if she really goes.”
“She’ll go. All the girls on the list said yes to the invitation.”
“Not a single one had the good sense to think that maybe it’s not safe?”
“Most of them are still certain there’s a curse. Dena and Candace are the only sensible ones, and Dena wants to party and Candace wants to kick someone’s ass for ruining her hair.”
“What about Molly?” he asks.
I close my eyes, remembering her silence when we were at our lockers at the same time, and how she walked away without eye contact. “She’s mad at me,” I say, having already told him what happened the night before.
He gives me a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. “You’ll work it out with her,” he says. “And we’ll figure this out.”
“How?” I ask, still not sure what “this” is.
“For starters, I searched the Internet for information on some of the art you listed.”
I’d given him the names of any pieces I remembered from the vault in the woods and he’d promised to find out anything he could about them.
“None of the things on that list are listed anywhere as stolen,” he says. “All of them were sold to private collectors.”
“Maybe some private collector hides them underground so they don’t get stolen,” I suggest. “If Rex Collier is the collector, it makes sense, because his house is not exactly secure with all those parties he lets Josh have.”