Free School Spirits (Hex Hall Novel, A) by Rachel Hawkins

face him. “Who do you live with?”
    Dex widened his eyes in mock innocence. “Oh, I live by myself. Didn’t I mention? I’m thirty-five.”
    When I just rolled my eyes, he relented. “I live with my Nana.”
    He said it lightly, but Mom had taught me and Finn to pay attention to body language. Dex was twisting the strap of his bag around his fingers so tightly that his knuckles were turning white.
    Before I could ask anything else, a face suddenly popped up over the seat in front of me. “Hey,” Romy said. “Izzy, right?”
    “That’s me,” I said. “Have you, um, been there the whole time?”
    “Romy’s like me,” Dex said, nudging the back of her seat with one pointy-toed boot. “Picked up entirely too early, sleeps the whole ride.”
    “Tries to sleep,” she corrected. “This idiot usually keeps me awake.” Despite the insult, there was affection in her voice, and Dex was grinning at her.
    “Anyway, just wanted to say thanks for tearing Ben McCrary’s arm off yesterday.”
    “I dislocated his shoulder,” I said, but Dex waved me off.
    “I like Romy’s version better. And just wait, by spring break, the story will be that you tore off both his arms and shattered his spine.”
    Romy snorted. “Did you tell her about the meeting?” she asked Dex.
    “No, I was boring her with my life history first,” Dex replied. “Why don’t you give her the hard sell?”
    Eyes twinkling behind her glasses, Romy rested her chin on her hands. “Well, since you’re such a rad chick and all, we thought you might want to join our club.”
    I hoped my face looked confused rather than relieved. All that worrying over how I was going to get into the club, and then, bam , I’m invited. Maybe today really would be better than yesterday.
    Doing my best to furrow my brow, I looked back and forth between them. There was something unnerving about their identical expressions of glee. “Um, is this one of those clubs where the first rule is you don’t talk about it?”
    Dexter threw his head back and laughed, and Romy made that snorting noise again. “No,” she said. “But if it were, I’d definitely want you in that one, too. This is actually a school-sanctioned thing, so it counts for extracurricular stuff on college applications.”
    Oh, right. College. That was something I’d have to pretend to be thinking about, too.
    But then Dex sat up and said, “Romy, I don’t think Harvard is going to very impressed by your membership in something called PMS.”
    A startled giggle burst out of me. Paranormal Management Society. PMS. I hadn’t even thought of it like that.
    Romy looked a little chagrined. “I didn’t come up with the name, and by the time we got it, Anderson had already made the T-shirts,” she insisted, which only made Dex laugh harder.
    “So what is PMS?” I asked, even though I already knew. “I mean, I know the traditional definition.…”
    “Paranormal Management Society,” Romy answered, swatting at Dex.
    “Oh,” I said weakly. “That’s…um…that’s awesome.”
    “Okay, see, I feel like when you’re saying ‘awesome,’ what you mean is ‘lame’ and ‘making me not want to be friends with you,’” Dex said.
    “No.” I shook my head. “That doesn’t sound lame at all. It’s just…I never heard of a school-sponsored monster-hunting club. What do you guys do?”
    “Mostly we lurk around places at night with dorky equipment purchased off the Internet,” Dex offered, making Romy smack his arm again.
    “We research local ghost legends, and then we…investigate them.”
    Dex leaned over and said in a stage whisper, “‘Investigate’ is code for lurking around places at night with dorky equipment purchased off the Internet.”
    “We’re working on doing more,” Romy said quickly.
“Anderson—you’ll meet him later—is our resident ghost-lore researcher, and he’s looking into ways we can
actually, like, banish ghosts and exorcise places.”
    She sounded so