The bag with the heart in it.
“Why are you in my room?!” I demand as I storm in, reaching for the bag in his hand. A corner of the duct tape on the front is peeling back, and I can see the corner of the letter J peeking out.
He jerks it out of my reach. “Chill, okay, I was just—”
“Don’t tell me to chill! What are you doing in here? Why were you under my bed?” My fingers are burning and my palms are prickling and I clench my hands into fists to stop myself from doing something I’ll regret. Something I can’t control. I can’t keep the quaver out of my voice, though.
“I’m trying to tell you, I was—”
“You have no right to be—”
“Oh my god just let me explain, you don’t have to be such a—”
“Don’t you dare call me—”
“WHAT IS GOING ON IN HERE?”
We both turn to see Pop standing in the door, hands braced on the frame. His entire face is red, all the way up to the top of his scalp, and his eyebrows are a long, low furrow of what-the-hell. He’s wearing his worn-out college sweater and a pair of cargo shorts, which is his sitting-in-the-office-all-day-reviewing-depositions outfit. If he could hear us all the way back in his office, with the door closed and his white noise machine going—we were shouting at each other at top volume. I’m out of breath. Shit. Shit. This is really bad.
Pop looks between me and Nico and the file folder in Nico’s hand and the bag in Nico’s other hand, which I’m still reaching for.
“Um,” we both say, and Pop crosses his arms.
“Nico was in my room,” I say.
“Alexis was being a total—” Nico starts, then catches the look on Pop’s face and stops midsentence. He doesn’t finish what he was about to say.
“Why were you in her room, Nico?” Pop asks, his voice strained with the extreme patience of a parent mediating between his kids. Nico’s ears flush and he mumbles something unintelligible. “I beg your pardon?”
“I was looking for something,” Nico says, just loudly enough to hear this time.
“What were you looking for?” I demand. “And why didn’t you just ask me for it?”
“Because I knew you’d say no,” Nico says, not looking at me. He brandishes the file folder in his hand. “I was looking for your final essay from when you had Nichols for English in your sophomore year.”
Pop’s brows were already low, but they drop even farther at hearing that. Nico looks like he wants to crawl under my bed and hide. “Why would you want her final essay?” Pop asks. I can’t imagine that he actually doesn’t know—maybe he’s just trying to give Nico an opportunity to defend himself.
“He was going to copy from it,” I answer. Nico’s still holding the bag with the heart in it, and I’m trying to figure out how I can make sure he doesn’t get so distracted by being in trouble that he takes it with him. I reach for it again, but as I do, he turns to me with a look of shock and betrayal.
“I wasn’t,” he says, but it’s for Pop’s benefit. “I just know how you save all that old crap, and I wanted to see what approach you took—”
“Oh please,” I start to say. Pop cuts me off.
“Nico,” he says in a level voice that’s trying very hard not to be lawyerish, “isn’t that essay due tomorrow?”
Nico looks miserable. “Yes. That’s why I wanted help.”
“I see. Let’s go talk about this somewhere else.” Pop gestures to Nico, who turns to trudge out of the room. They walk toward Nico’s bedroom to talk about how much trouble Nico’s in, and I hear Pop saying, “We both know that copying and ‘getting help’ aren’t the same thing, young man,” as he half closes the door to my bedroom behind him. As the door swings shut, I catch a last glimpse of the bag still dangling from Nico’s hand.
“No no no no no no no,” I moan, falling onto my bed and pulling a pillow over my head. Nico has Josh’s heart. He’s holding it. He’s going to forget that he took that bag out of my bedroom, and then he’s going to notice it and remember that he’s pissed at me, and then he’s going to decide to snoop. He’ll open it and see what’s inside, and how am I going to explain why there’s a heart that isn’t bleeding in there?
What am I supposed to say?
Sorry to leave you out of the loop, Nico, but your big sister is actually some kind of magical freak who accidentally killed a guy she barely knew because she was about to sleep with him for all the wrong reasons. Oh, and she keeps hurting people when she gets freaked out and she’s pretty sure she would have hurt you if Pop hadn’t interrupted that fight. Please don’t tell anyone?
And then I realize that if I can’t get the heart back from him, I’ll probably hurt people even more. That’s what Iris said: the tension of the spell is what’s making me accidentally hurt people, including myself. What if I can’t get the heart back from Nico and then I lose control and kill someone else?
What if I hurt him? Or Dad, or Pop? I know I should feel just as bad about hurting anyone, because hurting anyone at all is awful, but … what if it’s one of them? I’m already a murderer. What if I can’t stop killing people?
What if I’m a monster?
I scream into the pillow.
I’ve never screamed into a pillow before. It always kind of seemed like a cliché. But now that I’m doing it … it’s pretty satisfying. I scream into it again, so hard that my throat burns, and then again, and I’m just gearing up for another scream when I hear the door to my bedroom open.
“Did you impale an eyeball on something?” Pop asks, pulling
