Free Poison Ink by Christopher Golden Page B

sweet dreams tonight after all.
     
    The old school bus shuddered, engine groaning loudly. Sammi sat in back, next to a window, with a freshman girl next to her who didn’t say a word. She rested her forehead on the glass and looked out at the houses passing by, the thrumming of the bus making her skull vibrate. Her stomach felt tight as a fist; she hadn’t been able to eat anything at all this morning. A glass of orange juice had been all she could manage, and that only because her mother insisted.
    The rain had cleared overnight, but the gray skies remained. The whole world had a muted, washed-out look, and Sammi had looked in the mirror this morning and thought similar things about herself. A gray girl on a gray day.
    A knocking sound came from somewhere under the bus and for a second she held her breath, wondering if the old beast would just seize up and drop its engine right there on the road. All of these old school buses rattled and moaned and belched out thick exhaust. Either they weren’t street legal and no one cared, or the laws were more lenient on bright yellow tanks.
    And why am I so focused on buses?
    To avoid thinking about other things. Sammi knew that. In the eighth grade a bunch of other kids had told her that Kevin Mitchell wanted to ask her out. Every day for a week she had dreaded the prospect of running into him in the hall, both afraid that he would ask her out and worried that he wouldn’t. In the end, Kevin had taken her for pizza once, only to make them both realize they had nothing in common.
    That week of dreadful anticipation had faded in her memory, but this morning it came rushing back. She felt that way again for the first time since.
    The bus managed to lumber into the Covington High parking lot. Backpack slung over her shoulder, Sammi stepped off the bus last and joined the throng flowing into the school, trying to ignore the way her pulse throbbed in her temples. Tony Gregson, a hockey star who had been in her advanced English classes all through school, said hello as he passed. Sammi mustered a smile and kept it plastered on her face as she made her way up the stairs to the second floor corridor where her locker was located.
    Weaving in and out of the crowd, the hall deafening with chatter, she spotted T.Q. ahead and hurried to catch up.
    “Hey,” she said, falling into step beside her. T.Q. smiled. “Hey.” Then her smile faltered—the memory of Sammi’s betrayal rushing back—and a kind of sadness came over her face. “What’d you end up doing yesterday? Did you hook up with Cute Adam again?”
    Sammi made sure her smile-mask did not slip. She arched an eyebrow. “Duh. What did I say I was going to do yesterday?”
    “You went? You really did?” T.Q.’s face lit up with excitement and gratitude. Sammi had tainted everything on Saturday night, but it could be all right again, and it was obvious T.Q. wanted that as much as she did.
    Sammi felt sick.
    “I said I would.”
    Lowering her voice to a conspiratorial tone, T.Q. asked, “Where’d you get it?”
    They had slowed down, and now the flow of students passed around them, mostly freshmen and sophomores worried about getting to class on time. The juniors and seniors were never in quite as much of a hurry. Sammi glanced around guiltily, as if she were about to make some surreptitious drug deal.
    With a meaningful look at T.Q., she patted her lower abdomen, just inside her right hip.
    “Sweet. How big did you do it?” As she spoke, T.Q. idly touched the back of her neck where her hair hid her own tattoo.
    Sammi led the way to her locker, worked the combination, and pulled it open. Shielded by the door and T.Q., she tugged down the front of her jeans to show the inch-wide tattoo. Her heart thundered in her chest, and her throat went dry.
    T.Q. made a small squeal of delight and hugged her. “This is great. The girls are gonna be completely psyched.”
    They shared the same homeroom, so after a stop at T.Q.’s locker