Early to Death, Early to Rise - Kim Harrison [8]
I’d ditched school with high expectations, but now I was feeling totally inadequate. It wasn’t an unfamiliar emotion, but this was the first time someone’s life was in the balance. Picking a restaurant without a line, I set my hands on the counter and stared up at the menu, not really seeing it. I had the cash my dad had given me for lunch, not that I ever ate lunch anymore. Crap, I had to text him that I might be late after school today.
“You going to read it, or order from it?” said a voice right in front of me, and I jerked, bringing my attention down to find a guy about my age in a lame-looking apron with a chicken on it, boldly stating, THE CHICKEN COOP, ONE GOOD CLUCK. A paper hat tried to contain his sandy blond hair, but failed. He had a nice face, and he smiled as he saw my embarrassment. His name tag said ace. My thoughts zinged to Josh, and I felt a moment of guilt that he had been left at school.
“Uh, can I have a vanilla shake? Small,” I said, since I wasn’t really going to drink it, and he beeped it up.
“Anything for your friends?”
I turned to see Nakita with one hand on her purse, watching me with a lost look on her face. Barnabas had his head thrown back, staring at the ceiling as if he were bored. At least they weren’t fighting. “You’ve been watching me?” I asked, tilting my head to look coy. Stupid, but coy.
Ace plucked a cup a size larger than I’d ordered and smiled. “Nice move with the chair. Almost looked like you meant to do that.”
I rolled my eyes, cursing Grace for leaving it there for me. “Yeah,” I said, shifting from foot to foot, terribly conscious of my hair. I hadn’t seen anyone here with purple hair except for the pierced goddess working at Hot Topic.
Ace was silent, his back to me as he filled up the cup. There was only one other guy working in the back room, cleaning the ovens. It was too early for lunch. “So, when does school start for you?” I asked, needing to say something.
Ace turned around, eyeing me slyly as he snapped a top on the shake. “Tomorrow. I wasn’t even supposed to be here this morning, and then they called. Man, I could’ve killed my mom.” He slid the drink to me. “I had my day already planned. Surfing the web and eating cheese puffs. That’s the last time I let my mom get the phone and answer for me.”
“I work part-time at a flower shop, and I hate it when my dad does that.”
Ace adjusted his hat, grimacing. “If I’m at work, she knows where I am,” he said sourly. “She’s always checking up on me like I’m a kid. She works at the hospital, so she sees everything that comes in through the emergency room and thinks I’m going to get in an accident.”
My mind flitted back to waking up in my local morgue, dead from a car crash. My heart began thumping. I didn’t think it was the memory of me dying, though. A tingling was rising through my aura as a thought evolved in my mind. His mom works at the hospital? Can it be this easy? Maybe that’s what Barnabas meant about my instincts being good. “I hear you,” I said, glancing at Barnabas and Nakita, but they were staring at me, oblivious.
“So now everything I want to do today, I do tomorrow,” Ace said, shrugging.
I jerked myself back from my thoughts. “You said you have school tomorrow.”
“I said school starts tomorrow. I didn’t say I was going to be there.”
Ooh, a little rebel, are we?I took a straw, tearing it open and jamming it into the shake. “You ditching your first day of school?” I asked, pretending to take a sip of my shake.
“Something like that,” he said, smiling right back. “I got more important stuff to do.”
“Like what?” I said, smiling like the cool girls at my old school had taught me before I ditched them.
Ace laughed, flattered on some level. “Music. Shoe and me, we get music.”
He tossed his attention briefly to the black-haired guy in the back, and I felt a drop of