Free The Sixes by Kate White Page A

with her chin toward the living room.
    “I have to meet someone in a minute,” Gwen said.
    “It won’t take long, I promise,” Phoebe said. Begrudgingly the girl led Phoebe into the living room. Though Gwen continued to stand, Phoebe perched on the edge of a faded floral sofa. Above the mantel of the walled-in fireplace hung another Pennsylvania Dutch hex symbol. When you were this age, weren’t you supposed to have Twilight movie posters plastered on your walls? Phoebe wondered.
    “I love how you’ve fixed up your apartment,” Phoebe said, smiling. “This reminds me a little of my college apartment, but ours didn’t look nearly as nice.”
    “Thanks,” Gwen said, unmoved.
    “I’m so sorry about Lily’s death. Were you friends with her too?”
    “I knew her. But she was really Blair’s friend.”
    “I heard she was thinking of staying here the night she disappeared.” She let the comment hang there.
    “You’ll have to ask Blair that,” Gwen told her after a moment. “I really have no idea.”
    “So you hadn’t heard that?”
    Gwen rolled her dark green eyes back and sighed in exasperation.
    “Yeah, I heard that—after the fact. To be perfectly honest, she hadn’t really been staying here much anymore.”
    “Did Lily ever seem depressed or worried to you lately?”
    Another sigh. “I just told you, I really never saw her.”
    Phoebe didn’t even consider broaching the subject of the Sixes. Gwen would only tip Blair off, and Phoebe would lose her edge when she spoke to the girl directly.
    “Understood,” Phoebe said. She let her eyes roam absently, as if she was gathering her thoughts, when she was really checking out the space.
    “Could you ask Blair to call me, then?” she said finally. She took out a pen from her bag and scribbled the information on a piece of paper.
    “Sure,” Gwen said, taking the paper limply, as if she planned to let it flutter to the floor the moment Phoebe departed.
    As Phoebe started on her way back home, she found it hard to judge whether Gwen’s attitude was just the general sullenness that Phoebe often witnessed in girls that age or something else—a defensiveness because she had something to hide.
    The apartment had surprised Phoebe. Its tidiness, its pretty decor. And then there were the hex signs. Such an odd choice for college girls. One would have said a gift from Mom; two said something more intentional.
    Phoebe herself had never liked hex signs. She’d first seen them on a trip to Pennsylvania Dutch country with Alec. The Amish farmers didn’t display them, but other people in the area did, and they popped up everywhere—on barns, houses, calendars, and half the souvenirs at the various tchotchke shops. She had almost bought note cards designed with them, just for something to take back, but she realized that she found them creepy. Maybe it was because of the flat, two-dimensional design—or the fact that they were supposed to ward off evil, hinting at witchcraft.
    Could that be what the Sixes were about? Phoebe wondered, stopping abruptly on the sidewalk. Didn’t the word hex mean to put a spell on something? Maybe the girls in the Sixes pretended to be witches and threatened to cast evil spells on girls they didn’t like or who broke their code. If so, that could explain Alexis Grey’s hysteria. Nothing like finding out that a witch’s curse has been placed on you to send you over the edge.
    And then with a start Phoebe thought of something else. The word hex also meant “six.”

6
    B ACK HOME PHOEBE flipped open her laptop and did a Google search for hex signs. She discovered that they’d been introduced by German settlers in the 1600s, though there wasn’t a consensus as to why. The most common theory, as Phoebe had suspected, was that they were used to ward off evil. The word hex was actually derived from the German word for witch. So wait, Phoebe thought, does it not have anything to do with the Greek word for six ? It seemed it