Free The Dead Girls Detective Agency by Suzy Cox Page A

staring like a tool.
    Agh! What was the point of that? Didn’t he think I’d been through enough already?
    What I was really capable of? Sorry, but being able to apparite and port myself anywhere in the city just by thinking about it seemed pretty “capable” to me. And what was all that mumbo jumbo about the Rules not being entirely true? I didn’t want to think that, because right now they—Nancy and Lorna—were the only things keeping me sort of sane.
    No, screw Edison, I thought. He’d done nothing to prove he had my best—or any of my—interests at heart so far. How did I know I could trust Lucky Strikes breath, anyway? I shut my eyes and focused. Focused on what I knew and where I wanted to be. Not on what some pretentious dead boy with gorgeous green eyes, a nicotine habit, and a James Dean complex had to say about the afterlife.
    I focused. Just as I had in Washington Square Park. Just as I had up the Empire State Building. And waited for the familiar sick feeling to wash over me.
    For the second time in twenty-four hours, David’s bedroom here I come....

Chapter 8
    IN DAWN’S STARTER LIGHT, DAVID’S ROOM looked like something from a washed-out dream. Pale fingers of light stretched from the gaps between the curtains across his bed, giving everything a tired white glow. Except, by now, I was pretty sure this wasn’t a dream, washed out or not.
    My boyfriend was lying asleep on his bed. All five feet eight inches of him curled up in an old shirt and boxer shorts. I stared at David, as if he were an animal in the city zoo. With his mop of messy hair and faded blue tee, he looked almost happy. Like there were no worries inside his head. I’d never seen David asleep before. You’d think after all the months we’d dated, all the hours we’d spent talking and planning and learning everything about each other, I’d have seen him like this: properly relaxed. But I hadn’t. Nice Charlotte was glad he’d found some peace after everything he went through yesterday. Nasty Charlotte was kinda pissed he’d taken a few hours off mourning her to crash out.
    My plan had been to come here—to train myself not to apparite around him, my trigger—but then I saw it. Curled up in his right hand. The square of pink paper. An old movie ticket. The memento he’d joked he’d keep forever. I couldn’t believe he actually had.
    As soon as I saw the crumpled piece of pink paper, I was back there: back in the movie theater, back nervously folding and unfolding my own ticket as the lights of the movie flashed on the screen in front of me. Back where it was last spring—a week after that afternoon in Washington Square—and I’d somehow ended up at the movies sandwiched between David and Leon Clark, the meathead captain of the lacrosse team. Watching some truly terrible rom-com.
    “Dude, this is lay-ay-ame,” Leon said, throwing popcorn into his mouth, but more onto the floor. If he wasn’t so generally ripped (if ripped was your thing) and in charge of the most successful sports team in our school, would Leon ever score one date? Let alone be a prom king shoo-in? I double doubted it.
    Leon turned, burping popcorn breath at me.
    Actually scratch that. Even if he were fitter than ARod and a multi-multi-and-then-some-millionaire, you would not get me on a date with Leon Clark.
    I still hadn’t figured out how I ended up here.
    Earlier that afternoon, I’d been leaving school with Ali, when I walked past David and Leon in the corridor. Leon hadn’t said more than three words to me since, like, sixth grade when I got some spinach stuck in my braces at lunchtime and he called me Charlotte Boogerman for the rest of the semester. But now David was calling me over and persuading me to go see this pathetic film with him and Leon “to say sorry for running off the other day.”
    Ali raised her eyebrows and made her excuses, but I didn’t know how to say no. So there I was, sitting between the hot new boy who was totally my