To make matters worse, the faculty decided to crank the heat in the building, forcing me to either sweat bullets underneath all the fabric or risk exposing myself. Also, my gym locker was right in the middle of everyone else’s. There was no way nobody wouldn’t notice the tattoos if I got dressed in front of everyone, forcing me to change into my uniform from inside the bathroom stalls yet again. I needed to come up with a different plan. Maybe invest in some good theater-grade make-up.
“Why is Reese crazy?” I asked.
“Hello, gas station. Remember?”
Okay, Eric did have a point. I thought the same thing at the time. “But all you guys said the same things about him long before that. And don’t tell me it’s because he’s a West Ender.”
“No, I say that because Harry Houdini over there just weirds me out. Trust me, if you grew up having to go to school with him, you’d know what I mean.”
I rolled my eyes.
This didn’t do me any favors, because Eric’s expression blanched. “Alright, I’m not one to buy into idle gossip here, but seriously.” He leaned in, lowering his voice. “Is there something going on between you two?”
Great, someone else who’d jumped on the Kat’s-a-skank bandwagon.
I just scoffed, snatching up some plastic utensils.
I still wanted to talk to Reese to ask if he found anything out about my runes, but I couldn’t find an opening. The only class we shared where we sat anywhere near one another was Physics, and we didn’t have that until tomorrow. As for lunch, talking to him was apparently out of the question. Mystic Harbor’s cafeteria had its own system, an intricate operation that mapped out its hierarchy. The most popular students, like Ava Ashford and Becky Sorensen, sat at the table nearest the long window overlooking the fountain in the courtyard below. The other jocks, cheerleaders, and socialites, which included my friends, were positioned at the tables beside them. The farther you were from the Queen Bees, the further your popularity status tanked.
With the torrential downpour, eating outside on the football field bleachers was out of the question, which explained why Reese resigned himself to actually staying in the cafeteria today. He planted himself down in the last lunch table on the far end of the room. The few mathletes who had been sitting there took one nervous glance at him and quietly slipped out of the bench to the next available table. There obviously wasn’t enough room to accommodate them all comfortably, but that didn’t stop the trio from squishing themselves in as if the table was the last available lifeboat on a sinking ship.
It had now become impossible to ignore Reese. Every time he was near, I’d feel that flushness creep across my chest before I even saw him in the hallways. And for the very first time, I actually noticed him. Not just him as a person, but the way everyone else reacted to him. Now knowing what he could do, I figured out pretty quickly that he mostly roamed the hallways—invisible, because Reese slipped through the crowds without so much as a blink of an eye from our fellow classmates. However, anytime he entered a classroom or the cafeteria, it was obvious that everybody could see him because they all shrank away from him like he was a highly infectious plague. The only people to ever address Reese were loudmouthed jocks who never missed out on an opportunity to harass him. He never did anything to provoke these attacks, yet name-calling and forceful shoves were plentiful. Hell, my own friends partook in it. Seeing it made me sick, but the fact that I’d been blind to it up until now made me sicker.
There was one unspoken—but highly regarded—rule in Mystic Harbor, and that was: never challenge the status quo. Mom lived by this tenet like it was her life source. Yet there I was, about to rock the boat so hard, it’d probably capsize. I handed my money to the lunch lady and started making my way around Ava’s table, seeing Carly and Daniel move over to make room for me and my tray. But I kept walking.
“Kat?” Carly shouted after me. I didn’t stop.
“This seat taken?”
Reese took a break from stabbing the slop of ground beef on his tray to look up at me, and immediately froze.
Chapter 14
The Devil Within
Reese’s eyes widened, only to narrow a second later. He looked around me, and I didn’t need to see for myself that others were staring. The natural ruckus of the room had suddenly fallen to a low chorus of whispers.
“What are you doing?” he asked, clearly suspicious.
“I’m joining you.” I didn’t wait for an invitation, putting my tray down on the opposite side of the bench from him. “Though I can’t say I really have an appetite. I’m pretty sure this food was prepared as a pretext to a dare.”