I stopped in my tracks. Half the basketball team collided into me.
“No way.” Shawn was as surprised as I was when my name came out of her mouth. He was the kind of guy who had game.
“Hot.” Link just stared, with his mouth open. “TDB hot.” Third Degree Burns. The highest compliment Link could pay a girl, even higher than Savannah Snow hot.
“Looks like trouble.”
“Hot girls are trouble. That’s the whole point.”
She walked right up to me, sucking on her lollipop. “Which one of you lucky boys is Ethan Wate?” Link shoved me forward.
“Ethan!” She flung her arms around my neck. Her hands felt surprisingly cold, like she’d been holding a bag of ice. I shivered and backed away.
“Do I know you?”
“Not a bit. I’m Ridley, Lena’s cousin. But don’t I wish you’d met me first—”
At the mention of Lena, the guys shot me some weird looks, and reluctantly drifted off toward their cars. In the wake of my talk with Earl, we had come to a mutual understanding about Lena, the only kind guys ever come to. Meaning, I hadn’t brought it up, and they hadn’t brought it up, and between us, we somehow all agreed to go on like this indefinitely. Don’t ask, don’t tell. Which wasn’t going to be much longer, especially if Lena’s odd relatives started showing up in town.
“Cousin?”
Had Lena mentioned a Ridley?
“For the holidays? Aunt Del? Rhymes with hell? Ring a bell?” She was right; Macon had brought it up at dinner.
I grinned, relieved, except my stomach was still wrenched into a massive knot, so I must not have been that relieved. “Right. Sorry, I forgot. The cousins.”
“Honey, you’re lookin’ at the Cousin. The rest are just children my mother happened to have after me.” Ridley hopped back in the Mini Cooper. And when I say that, I mean, she literally hopped over the side of the car and landed in the driver seat of the Mini. I wasn’t joking about the cheerleader thing. The girl had some powerful legs.
I could see Link still staring as he stood next to the Beater.
Ridley patted the seat next to her. “Hop in, Boyfriend, we’re gonna be late.”
“I’m not… I mean, we’re not—”
“You really are cute. Now get in. You don’t want us to be late, do you?”
“Late for what?”
“Family dinner. The High Holidays. The Gathering. Why do you think they sent me all the way out here into Gat-dung to find you?”
“I don’t know. Lena never invited me.”
“Well, let’s just say there’s no keeping Aunt Del from checking out the first guy Lena’s ever brought home. So you’ve been summoned, and since Lena’s busy with dinner and Macon’s still, you know, ‘sleeping,’ I drew the short straw.”
“She didn’t bring me home. I just went by one night to drop off her homework.”
Ridley opened the car door from the inside. “Get in, Short Straw.”
“Lena would’ve called me if she wanted me to come.” Somehow I knew I was going to get in even as I was saying it. I hesitated.
“Are you always like this? Or are you flirting with me? Because if you’re playing hard to get, just tell me now and we’ll go park at the swamp and get it on already.”
I got in the car. “Fine. Let’s go.”
She reached over and pushed the hair out of my eyes with her cold hand. “You’ve got nice eyes, Boyfriend. You shouldn’t keep them all covered up.”
♦ ♦ ♦
By the time we got to Ravenwood, I didn’t know what had happened. She kept playing music I’d never heard, and I started to talk, and I just kept talking, until I had told her things I had never told anyone, except Lena. I can’t really explain it. It was like I had lost control of my mouth.
I told her about my mom, about how she died, even though I almost never talked about it with anyone. I told her about Amma, about how she read cards, and about how she was like my mom now that I didn’t have one, except for the charms and dolls and her generally disagreeable nature. I told her about Link, and his mom, and how she had changed lately and spent all her time trying to convince everyone that Lena was just as crazy as Macon Ravenwood, and a danger to every student at Jackson.
I told her about my dad, about how he was holed up in his study, with his books and some secret painting I was never allowed to see, and how I felt like I needed to protect him, even though it was from something that had already happened.
I told her about Lena, about how we’d met in the rain, how we had seemed to know each other before we’d even met, and about the messed-up scene with the window.
It almost felt like she was sucking it all out of me, like she sucked on that sticky red lollipop, the one she kept licking as she drove. It took all the strength I had to not tell her about the locket, and the dreams. Maybe the fact that she was Lena’s cousin just made everything a little easier between us. Maybe it was something else.
Just as I was starting to wonder, we pulled up at Raven-wood Manor, and she flipped off the radio. The sun had set, the lollipop was gone, and I had finally shut up. When had that happened?
Ridley leaned in toward me, close. I could see my face reflected in her sunglasses. I breathed her in. She smelled sweet and sort of damp, nothing like Lena, but still familiar somehow. “You don’t need to be worried, Short Straw.”
“Yeah, why not?”
“You’re the real deal.” She smiled at me, and her eyes flashed. Behind the glasses, I could see a gold glint, like gold-fish swimming in a dark pond. They were hypnotic, even through her shades. Maybe that’s why she wore them. Then the glasses went dark, and she messed up my hair. “Too bad she’ll probably never see you again once you meet the rest of us. Our family is just a little wack.” She got out of the car, and I followed her.
“More wack than you?”
“Infinitely.”
Great.
She put her cold hand on my arm, once again, when we got to the bottom step of the house. “And, Boyfriend. When Lena blows you off, which she will in about five months, give me a call. You’ll know how to find me.” She looped her arm through mine, suddenly strangely formal. “May I?”
I gestured with my free hand. “Sure. After you.” As we walked up the stairs, they groaned under our combined weight. I pulled Ridley up to the front door, still not quite sure if the stairs were going to support us or not.
I knocked, but there was no response. I reached up and felt for the moon. The door swung open, slowly—
Ridley seemed tentative. And as we crossed the threshold, I could almost feel the house settle, as if the climate inside had changed, almost imperceptibly.
“Hello, Mother.”
A round woman, bustling to lay gourds and golden leaves along the mantel, startled and dropped a small white pumpkin. It exploded onto the ground. She grabbed onto the mantel to steady herself. She looked odd, like she was wearing a dress from a hundred years ago. “Julia! I mean Ridley. What are you doing here? I must be confused. I thought, I thought…”
I knew something was wrong. This didn’t seem like your average mother-daughter hello.
“Jules? Is that you?” A younger version of Ridley, maybe ten, came walking into the front hall with Boo Radley, who was now wearing a sparkly blue cape over his back. Dressing up the family wolf, as if nothing unusual was going on. Everything about the girl was like light; she had blond hair and radiant blue eyes, as if they had little flecks of the sky on a sunny afternoon in them. The girl smiled, and then frowned. “They said you’d gone away.”
Boo started to growl.