"Dibs," she said. "I called dibs."
"No you didn't," Cam said.
"Yes I did, you just didn't hear me from your weird perch back there." The words rushed out of Arriane. "I want her."
"I—" Cam started to respond.
Arriane cocked her head expectantly. Luce swallowed. Was he going to come out and say he wanted her, too? Couldn't they just forget about it? Serve detention in a group of three?
Cam patted Luce's arm. "I'll catch up with you after, okay?" he said to her, like it was a promise she'd asked him to keep.
The other kids hopped off tombs they'd been sitting on and trooped toward a shed. Luce followed, clinging to Arriane, who wordlessly handed her a rake.
"So. Do you want the avenging angel, or the fleshy embracing lovers?"
There was no mention of yesterday's events, or of Arriane's note, and Luce somehow didn't feel she should bring anything up with Arriane now. Instead, she glanced overhead to find herself flanked by two giant statues. The one closer to her looked like a Rodin. A nude man and woman stood tangled in an embrace. She'd studied French sculpture back at Dover, and always thought Rodins were the most romantic pieces. But now it was hard to look at the embracing lovers without thinking of Daniel. Daniel. Who hated her. If she needed any further proof of that after he'd basically bolted from the library last night, all she had to do was think back to the fresh glare she'd gotten from him this morning.
"Where's the avenging angel?" she asked Arriane with a sigh.
"Good choice. Over here." Arriane led Luce to a massive marble sculpture of an angel saving the ground from the strike of a thunderbolt. It might have been an interesting piece, back in the day when it was first carved. But now it just looked old and dirty, covered in mud and green moss.
"I don't get it," Luce said. "What do we do?"
"Scrub-a-dub-dub," Arriane said, almost singing. "I like to pretend I'm giving them a little bath." With that, she scrambled up the giant angel, swinging her legs over the statue's thunderbolt-thwarting arm, as if the whole thing were a sturdy old oak tree for her to climb.
Terrified of looking like she was asking for more trouble from Ms. Tross, Luce starting working her rake across the base of the statue. She tried to clear away what seemed like an endless pile of damp leaves.
Three minutes later, her arms were killing her. She definitely hadn't dressed for this kind of muddy manual labor. Luce had never been sent to detention at Dover, but from what she'd overheard, it consisted of filling a piece of paper with "I will not plagiarize off the Internet" a few hundred times.
This was brutal. Especially when all she'd really done was accidentally bump into Molly in the lunchroom. She was trying not to make snap judgments here, but clearing mud from the graves of people who'd been dead over a century? Luce totally hated her life right now.
Then a tease of sunlight finally filtered through the trees, and suddenly there was color in the graveyard. Luce felt instantly lighter. She could see more than ten feet in front of her. She could see Daniel… working side by side with Molly.
Luce's heart sank. The airy feeling disappeared.
She looked at Arriane, who shot her a this-blows sympathy glance but kept working.
"Hey," Luce whispered loudly.
Arriane put a finger to her lips but motioned for Luce to climb up next to her.
With much less grace and agility, Luce grabbed the statue's arm and swung herself up onto the plinth. Once she was fairly certain that she wasn't going to tumble to the ground, she whispered, "So… Daniel's friends with Molly?"
Arriane snorted. "No way, they totally hate each other," she said quickly, then paused. "Why d'you ask?"
Luce pointed at the two of them, doing no work whatsoever to clear brush from their tomb. They were standing close to each other, leaning on their rakes and having a conversation that Luce desperately wished she could hear. "They look like friends to me."
"It's detention," Arriane said flatly. "You have to pair up. Do you think Roland and Chester the Molester are friends?" She pointed at Roland and Cam. They seemed to be arguing about the best way to divvy up their work on the lovers' statue. "Detention buddies does not equal real-life buddies."
Arriane looked back at Luce, who could feel her face falling, despite her best efforts to appear unfazed.
"Look, Luce, I didn't mean…" She trailed off. "Okay, aside from the fact that you made me waste a good twenty minutes of my morning, I have no problem with you. In fact, I think you're sort of interesting. Kinda fresh. That said, I don't know what you were expecting in terms of mushy-gushy friendship here at Sword & Cross. But let me be the first to tell you, it just ain't that easy. People are here because they've got baggage. I'm talking curbside-check-in, pay-the-fine-'cause-it's-over-fifty-pounds kind of baggage. Get it?"
Luce shrugged, feeling embarrassed. "It was just a question."
Arriane snickered. "Are you always so defensive? What the hell did you do to get in here, anyway?"
Luce didn't feel like talking about it. Maybe Arriane was right, she'd be better off not trying to make friends. She hopped down and went back to attacking the moss at the base of the statue.
Unfortunately, Arriane was intrigued. She hopped down, too, and brought her rake down on top of Luce's to pin it in place.
"Ooh, tell me tell me tell me," she taunted.
Arriane's face was so close to Luce's. It reminded Luce of yesterday, crouching over Arriane after she'd convulsed. They'd had a moment, hadn't they? And part of Luce badly wanted to be able to talk to someone. It had been such a long, stifling summer with her parents. She sighed, resting her forehead on the handle of her rake.
A salty, nervous taste filled her mouth, but she couldn't swallow it away. The last time she'd gone into these details, it had been because of a court order. She would just as soon have forgotten them, but the longer Arriane stared her down, the clearer the words grew, and the closer they came to the tip of her tongue.
"I was with a friend one night," she started to explain, taking a long, deep breath. "And something terrible happened." She closed her eyes, praying that the scene wouldn't play out in a burst under the red-black of her eyelids. "There was a fire. I made it out… and he didn't."
Arriane yawned, much less horrified by the story than Luce was.
"Anyway," Luce went on, "afterwards, I couldn't remember the details, how it happened. What I could remember—what I told the judge, anyway—I guess they thought I was crazy." She tried to smile, but it felt forced.
To Luce's surprise, Arriane squeezed her shoulder. And for a second, her face looked really sincere. Then it changed back into its smirk.
"We're all so misunderstood, aren't we?" She poked Luce in the gut with her finger. "You know, Roland and I were just talking about how we don't have any pyromaniac friends. And everyone knows you need a good pyro to pull off any reform school prank worth the effort." She was scheming already. "Roland thought maybe that other new kid, Todd, but I'd rather cast my lot with you. We should all collaborate sometime."
Luce swallowed hard. She wasn't a pyro. But she was done talking about her past; she didn't even feel like defending herself.
"Ooh, wait until Roland hears," Arriane said, throwing down her rake. "You're like our dream come true."
Luce opened her mouth to protest, but Arriane had already taken off. Perfect, Luce thought, listening to the sound of Arriane's shoes squishing through the mud. Now it was only a matter of minutes before word traveled around the cemetery to Daniel.