What had happened? I could've handled Lena's freak-out at the lake and feeling like she had to take off. But why him? Why the Caster boy with the Harley? How long had she been hanging out with him without tel ing me? And what did Ridley have to do with it?

I had never been this mad at her before. It was one thing to be attacked by someone you hated, but this was something else. This was the kind of hurt that could only be inflicted by someone you loved, who you thought loved you. It was sort of like being stabbed from the inside out.

"You okay, man?" Link slammed the driver's side door.

"No." I looked down the long driveway ahead of us.

"Me neither." Link tossed the key through the Fastback's open window, and we headed down the hil .

We hitched back to town, Link turning every few minutes to check the stretch of road behind us for a Harley. But I didn't think we'd see it. That particular Harley wouldn't be headed into town. For al I knew, it could be inside those gates already.

I didn't come down for dinner, which was my first mistake. My second was opening the black Converse shoe box. I shook it open, the contents spil ing across my bed. A note Lena had written me on the back of a wrinkled Snickers wrapper, a ticket stub from the movie we saw on our first date, a faded receipt from the Dar-ee Keen, and a highlighted page ripped out of a book that had reminded me of her. It was the box where I stashed al our memories -- my version of Lena's necklace. It didn't seem like the kind of thing a guy should do, so I didn't let on that I did it, not even to her.

I picked up the crumpled photo from the winter formal, taken the second before we were doused with liquid snow by my so-cal ed friends. The picture was blurry, but we were captured in a kiss, so happy it was hard to look at now.

Remembering that night, even though I knew the next moment was going to be awful, it felt like part of me was stil back there kissing her.

"Ethan Wate, is that you?"

I tried to shove everything back into the box when I heard my door opening, and the box fel , scattering everything onto the floor.

"You feelin' al right?" Amma came into my room and sat at the foot of my bed. She hadn't done that since I'd had stomach flu in sixth grade. Not that she didn't love me. We just had things worked out in a way that didn't include sitting on beds.

"I'm tired, that's al ."

She looked at the mess on the floor. "You look lower than a catfish at the bottom a the river. And a perfectly good pork chop's lookin' as sorry as you are, down in my kitchen. That's two kinds a sorry." She leaned forward and brushed my brown hair out of my eyes. She was always after me to cut my hair.

"I know, I know. The eyes are the window to the soul, and I need a haircut."

"You need a good sight more than a haircut." She looked sad and grabbed my chin as if she could lift me up by it. Given the right circumstances, I bet she could. "You're not right."

"I'm not?"

"You're not, and you're my boy, and it's my fault."

"What do you mean?" I didn't understand and she didn't elaborate, which was general y how our conversations went.

"She's not right either, you know." Amma spoke softly, looking out my window. "Not bein' right isn't always somebody's fault. Sometimes it's just a fact, like the cards you pul ." With Amma, everything came down to fate, the cards in her tarot deck, the bones in the graveyard, the universe she could read.

"Yes, ma'am."

She looked into my eyes, and I could see hers shining. "Sometimes things aren't what they seem, and even a Seer can't tel what's comin'." She took my hand and dropped something into it. A red string with tiny beads knotted into it, one of her charms. "Tie it 'round your wrist."

"Amma, guys don't wear bracelets."

"Since when do I make jewelry? That's for women with too much time and not enough sense." She yanked on her apron, straightening it. "A red string's a tie to the Otherworld, offers the kinda protection I can't. Go on, put it on."

I knew better than to argue when Amma had that look on her face. It was a mixture of fear and sadness, and she wore it like a burden too heavy for her to carry. I held out my arm and let her tie the string around my wrist. Before I could say anything else, she was at my window, pouring a handful of salt from her apron pocket al along the sil .

"Everything's gonna be okay, Amma. Don't worry."

Amma stopped in the doorway and looked back at me, rubbing the shine out of her eyes. "Been choppin' onions al afternoon."

Something wasn't right, like Amma said. But I had a feeling it wasn't me. "You know anything about a guy named John Breed?"

She stiffened. "Ethan Wate, don't you make me give that pork chop to Lucil e."

"No, ma'am."

Amma knew something, and it wasn't good, and she wasn't talking. I knew it as sure as I knew her pork chop recipe, which didn't have a single onion in it.

6.14

Bookworm

If it was good enough for Melvil Dewey, it's good enough for me." Marian winked at me as she puled a stack of new books out of a cardboard box, sniffing deeply. There were books everywhere, in a circle around her almost up to her head.

Lucil e was weaving through the towers of books, prowling for a lost cicada. Marian made an exception to the Gatlin County Library's no-pets rule since the place was ful of books but empty of people. Only an idiot would be in the library on the first day of summer, or someone who needed a distraction. Someone who wasn't speaking to his girlfriend, or wasn't being spoken to by his girlfriend, or didn't know if he even stil had one -- al in the space of the two longest days of his life.