Finally, the look of awareness came to the student’s face. A light switched on. The coffee girl got it.

“Yeah,” she said, quickly pulling down the sign. “We shouldn’t collect money.”

The principal gave the pair a quick nod and walked away over the shiny polished surface to her office at the front of the school. She looked through the windows of the first pod’s reception area. A small group of girls, some who might not even have known Katelyn but who got caught up in the sad drama of a dead girl, had amassed.

Taylor Ryan was one of those girls, waiting to talk with the grief counselor. She understood that Katelyn’s death was a tragedy and there was no bringing her back, but the pain of it was a knife point to her heart.

She wanted to tell someone that she could feel Katelyn’s presence all around her. She felt that whatever had happened to Katelyn in that bathtub had the hand of another person in it somehow.

She just didn’t want her sister or Beth to see her there.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Hayley and Taylor slowed as they walked in the vicinity of Katelyn’s locker. A few members of the Buccaneers’ cheer team congregated nearby, chatting about their holiday. Tiffany, a senior, had a tan and was bragging about her “awesome” Hawaiian vacation and the hot swimsuit that she bought in a boutique in Maui. When the twins approached, she smiled.

“She was a friend of yours. Sorry,” she said.

“She was a friend. She wasn’t a really close one, but thanks,” Hayley said.

As the cheer squad moved aside, they revealed the beginnings of a makeshift memorial. A few grocery-store bouquets past their pull dates were slumped on the gray linoleum floor. Someone had taken a photo from Katelyn’s Facebook profile, blown it up, and written in very careful print: RIP, KATIE!

The fact that they’d used an exclamation point was odd, but most of the kids in school couldn’t punctuate anything properly so it probably wasn’t meant to signify that Katelyn’s resting in peace was something exuberant. Hayley thought it could have been worse.

YAY! KATIE’S ON PERMANENT BREAK!

HAVE A FUN TIME IN HEAVEN!

YOU GO (DEAD) GIRL!

Hayley stopped her train of thought as the buzzing of the other girls abruptly ceased. Starla Larsen, wearing black pants and a black cashmere sweater, joined the group in front of Katelyn’s locker.

“Sorry about Katie,” Taylor said. She resisted the urge to actually give Starla a hug because in that moment it just didn’t seem right.

“Yeah, we both are,” said Hayley, who didn’t hug Starla either.

Starla, for the first time in recent memory, looked terrible. Terrible for her would have been pretty good for a lot of other girls. Starla Terrible was quite noticeable nevertheless. Her skin was pale—in fact, very pale, especially next to the ultra-tanned senior, Tiff.

“It was a big shock,” she said, making a sniffling sound, although it didn’t appear that she had any need for a tissue. Though she had first-class designer bags under her eyes, it was pretty clear she hadn’t been crying. “We weren’t as close as we once were, but I loved her very, very much.”

Tan Tiff put her arms around Starla. “Let’s go somewhere we can talk and grieve,” she said to the others hanging around Starla. “I want to show Baby Girl the photos from my trip too.”

“Thanks, Hayley, Taylor,” Starla said, disappearing down the hallway.

Hayley turned to her sister. “Is it just me or what? Starla had dropped Katie. Those two haven’t spoken for months, and she’s saying she loved her?”

“Guilt, maybe?” Taylor suggested.

Hayley thought for a moment. “It could be guilt, or maybe it’s revisionist history.”

“Dunno,” Taylor said. “She looked tired for sure, but sad? Not so much.”

“She didn’t look sad at all,” Hayley agreed. “She doesn’t seem one bit upset, and what’s this ‘Baby Girl’ crap?”

“Cheer talk,” Taylor said, inserting her finger in her mouth, the universal sign for puking. “Worse than the twin talk we made up when we were little.”

Hayley laughed and the girls blended into the mass of Axe-drenched boys and makeup-laden girls moving like a single living organism into the doorways of classrooms.

“Please remind me never to go to another pep rally,” Hayley said.

“Gotcha.” Taylor slipped into her life science class and her sister went on to English.

Both were wondering the same thing: What was up with Starla?

THE WINTER AFTERNOON SKY TURNED INTO DUSK as Taylor trailed her sister down the stairs from their bedrooms. Hayley had just run home to grab a textbook.

“Off to hang out with Colton again?” Taylor asked. Her tone was unmistakable. The little lilt on the last word turned the question into a snipping judgment.

Hayley turned to face her. She did not have a smile on her face. In fact, she could not conceal her brewing anger. That first day back at school, Hayley had spent every minute between and after class with her boyfriend. And Taylor took every opportunity to complain about it. The incessant questioning about Colton had become more than an irritant.

It was worse than a flea bite that never went away.

“What’s gotten into you, Taylor?”

Finally, another chance to be direct, and Taylor took it. “Maybe the fact that all you ever do is hang out with him. What about Katelyn? And the ‘look’ message? We’re nowhere with it. What are you two so busy doing all the time, anyway?”

Hayley clearly didn’t like what she was hearing. “What is that supposed to mean exactly? If you’re accusing me of something, I would prefer it if you’d just spell it out.”

Taylor held her ground. “You know.”

“Colton and I are just hanging out.”

“Hey, I’m your twin. Don’t lie to me. Save it for someone who doesn’t give a crap,” Taylor spat out, trying to bury her jealousy.

Hayley wasn’t buying it. “Look,” she said, “there’s a lot going on around here that we don’t know. The two of us need to stick together to figure it all out. In the meantime, I would appreciate it if you’d please lay off the Colton jabs.”

With that, she turned the knob of the back door and was gone.

chapter 12

JEALOUSY, ANNOYANCE, WHATEVER IT WAS, reverberated between Hayley and Taylor with a vengeance. Maybe it was because they had come from the same egg, or maybe it was because even after the womb they spent so much time together. Whatever the case, the girls shared and experienced intense emotions simultaneously. The energy was almost a twin-sense, telegraphed to each other silently through the air like sound waves.

Didn’t everyone feel that way? Didn’t everyone understand the transference of emotion in the same manner?

They didn’t, of course.

Hayley’s ability to capture feelings and images came to her differently from Taylor’s. The older sister by less than a minute, Taylor could immerse herself in water and infuse her brainwaves with the past thoughts of others. Hayley’s pathway was more tactile. The transmission that came to her often came through her fingertips. It was as if she could touch an object, a person—dead or alive—and capture an instant in the real, present world.

She’d touched Katelyn’s laptop, and the exchange of the moment had taken place.

Two days after school had started, Hayley sat at the kitchen table, her parents gone somewhere, her sister upstairs reading her latest US Weekly. She drank a glass of water, because water always helped the process. She shut her eyes and tried to recall the images that had flashed too quickly through her head in Katelyn’s room. She needed to see it all in slow-mo in order to understand it. She waited. She did what she and Taylor called “hope and focus.”

In a moment, the images came. There was a computer. Hayley could tell that a person was typing on one machine and sending the words to Katelyn’s shiny silver laptop. She watched fingers glide over the keyboard as if each grenade being dropped were a mere powder puff. One fluent keystroke after another. There was very little hesitation because the writer of the message knew exactly which words to use.