Fallen - Lauren Kate [61]
“I need your help setting up,” Gabbe purred.
Luce looked around and realized they were the only four people left in the classroom.
“Having a little party in my room later,” Gabbe said, pressing her chin into Cam’s shoulder to address Luce and Penn. “Y’all are coming, right?”
Gabbe, whose mouth always looked sticky with lip gloss, and whose blond hair never failed to swoosh right in the second a guy started talking to Luce. Even though Daniel had said there was nothing going on between them, Luce knew she was never going to be friends with this girl.
Then again, you didn’t have to like someone to go to her party, especially when certain other people you did like would probably be there…
Or should she take Cam up on his offer? Was he really suggesting they sneak out? Only yesterday, a rumor had flown around the classroom when Jules and Phillip, the tongue-pierced couple, didn’t show up for Miss Sophia’s class. Apparently, they’d tried to leave campus in the middle of the night, a secret tryst gone wrong—and now they were in some type of solitary confinement whose location even Penn didn’t know about.
The weirdest part was, Miss Sophia—who usually had no tolerance for whispering—hadn’t shut the madly gossiping students up during her lesson. It was almost like the faculty wanted the students to imagine the worst possible punishment for breaking any of their dictatorial rules.
Luce swallowed, looking up at Cam. He offered his elbow, ignoring Gabbe and Penn entirely. “How about it, kid?” he asked, sounding so charmingly classic Hollywood that Luce forgot all about what had happened to Jules and Phillip.
“Sorry.” Penn butted in, answering for both of them and steering Luce away by the elbow. “But we have other plans.”
Cam looked at Penn like he was trying to figure out where she’d come from all of a sudden. He had a way of making Luce feel like a better, cooler version of herself. And she had a way of crossing his path right after Daniel had made her feel exactly the opposite. But Gabbe was still hovering beside him, and Penn’s tug was growing stronger, so finally Luce just waved the hand still clutching Cam’s gift. “Um, maybe next time! Thanks for the necklace!”
Leaving Cam and Gabbe confused in the classroom behind them, Penn and Luce booked it out of Augustine. It felt creepy to be alone in the dark building so late, and Luce could tell from the hurried slap of Penn’s sandals on the stairs in front of her that she felt it, too.
Outside, it was windy. An owl crooned in its palmetto tree. When they passed under the oaks alongside the building, straggly tendrils of Spanish moss brushed them like tangled strands of hair.
“Maybe next time?” Penn mimicked Luce’s voice. “What was that about?”
“Nothing … I don’t know.” Luce wanted to change the subject. “You make us sound very posh, Penn,” she said, laughing as they trudged along the commons. “Other plans … I thought you had fun at the party last week.”
“If you’d ever get around to reading my recent correspondence, you’d see why we have more important things on our plate.”
Luce emptied her pockets, rediscovered the five uneaten M&M’s, and shared them with Penn, who expressed a very Penn-like sentiment that she hoped they had come from a sanitary place, but ate them anyway.
Luce unfolded the first of Penn’s notes, which looked like a photocopied page from one of the files in the underground archive:
Gabrielle Givens
Cameron Briel
Lucinda Price
Todd Hammond
Previous locations:
All in the Northeast, except for T. Hammond
(Orlando, Florida)
Arriane Alter
Daniel Grigori
Mary Margaret Zane
Previous locations:
Los Angeles, California
Lucinda’s group was noted as arriving at Sword & Cross on September 15 of this year. The second group had arrived March 15, three years earlier.
“Who’s Mary Margaret Zane?” Luce asked, pointing.
“Only the very virtuous Molly,” Penn said.
Molly’s name was Mary Margaret? “No wonder she’s so pissed off at the world,” Luce said. “So where’d you get all this?”
“I dug it out from one of