one being all moody and weird today. Daniel treating you wrong or something?"
Luce leaned back on her elbows. "That would require us actually seeing each
other, which apparently we aren't allowed to do."
If Luce closed her eyes, she could let the sound of the waves take her back to the
very first night she'd kissed Daniel. In this lifetime. The humid tangle of their bodies on
that languishing Savannah boardwalk. The hungry pressure of his hands pulling her in.
Everything seemed possible then. She opened her eyes. She was so far away from all of
that now.
"So your sorry-ass ex-boyfriend--"
"No." Shelby made a zip-it motion with her fingers. "I don't want to talk about
SAEB any more than I guess you want to talk about Daniel. Next."
That was fair. But it wasn't exactly that Luce didn't want to talk about Daniel. It
was more like, if she started talking about Daniel, she might 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
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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 flames. 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 puffy 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
flushed 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 fill
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 fluctuations 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 finally, making a chill-out motion with her hands. "I was at
this party one night in Corona. Things got pretty crazy, half-naked seances 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 floating above his hands. He
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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