Free Eternal by Debra Glass

out.
    Her eyes narrowed into vicious slits. Her gaze flicked to the side of me and then back to my eyes. “Don’t bring that haint back to school with you if you know what’s good for him,” she warned. “I know what he did to my car, yesterday.”
    My breath stopped in my chest. I wanted to protest or to tell her I did not know what she was talking about but all I could think was that Jeremiah had been with me. But if that was true, how come I hadn’t felt or seen him?
    And how had Briar known about him?
    “H-haint?” I stammered.
    “The ghost. I know you’ve seen him,” Briar said. “And I know you put him up to wrecking my car.”
    “No, I—”
    One of the toadies’ hands found her hips. “Briar knows,” she said hatefully, her dyed blue strips of hair glowing strangely in the fluorescent lighting.
    I didn’t have much experience with bullies. Before the accident, I’d been well-liked at my other school. My initial fear transformed into anger. What right did she have to give me orders? Or to invade my private thoughts? She’d started it yesterday bombing me with her nasty telepathic thought projectiles in the hall. I took a brazen step toward her. “Or what?” Conveniently, I’d forgotten my earlier panic.
    Her eyes widened. Her mouth dropped open. She hadn’t been expecting me to defy her. Perhaps she wasn’t as gifted a psychic as I had originally thought.
    A wicked smile twisted on her lips. “You don’t know what we do, do you?”
    As if on cue, her Goth buddies took a step closer.
    The panicky feeling churned in my gut again and I fought not to shrink back from them.
    “You should ask around, Wren.” She said my name with such contempt it made me shiver.
    The tardy bell rang and she and her entourage spun and stalked away without looking back.
    Scrambling, I wrestled with my lock, trying to turn the dial, trying to remember the combination, all to no avail. Just before I admitted defeat, the locker door swung open with a creak.
    I sucked in a ragged breath. “Jeremiah?” I whispered but again, I felt and saw nothing that alerted me to his presence. But I didn’t have time to waste. Snatching my book for my next class, I slammed the locker shut and broke into a half-run.
    My trigonometry teacher gave me the hairy eyeball when I finally skidded into class so I muttered something about there being a line in the bathroom and then, under my breath, about it being that time of the month and her look softened immediately. I felt bad lying to her but I didn’t want detention during my first week of school.
    Trig consumed all my concentration to the point it made my head pound. No chance existed to talk to anyone and besides, none of my new friends were in this class so nothing prevented my mind from wandering back to the encounter with those three witches in the hallway.
    Ask around.
    Laura had already admitted Briar thought she was psychic. What more was there?
    My gut told me there was a lot more and that I should be wary of Briar—not for my own sake but for Jeremiah’s. But how could he be hurt by her? After all, he was already dead. And if he had the ability to put the whammy on her car, then what else could he do?
    Still, I couldn’t shake the awful sense of impending doom that gnawed relentlessly at my insides.
    * * * * *
    Fish sticks.
    The odor hit me before I even walked in the double doors to the lunchroom.
    My least favorite.
    I really didn’t like fish of any kind and thankfully, I could get a salad instead, but that would mean getting in the salad bar line and for some reason, it took the students longer to fix their salads than it did to toss a couple of fish sticks onto their plates.
    Craning, I searched the sea of faces for Laura.
    “Hey, Wren!” Waylon greeted, sliding in line behind me, bowl in hand. In his other hand, he balanced a plate piled high with fish sticks and crinkle cut French fries all smothered in oozing globs of ketchup and tartar sauce. I wrinkled my