Free Texting the Underworld by Ellen Booraem

Radiant with firelight and happiness, Ashling smiles up at the young man, who smiles back.
    She should stop dancing, leave that traitorous pig behind, come to stand safely at his side.
    The drums thunder. The dancers circle. He stays where he is, watching, his blood beginning to burn.
    â€œWhat did Sir Walter Raleigh lose in 1618?”
    Conor sat bolt upright and tried to focus on Ashling’s grin, her tousled head sticking out from the game cupboard.
    â€œHis head!” Ashling crowed. “What’s the longest—”
    â€œAshling,” Conor croaked. “Give it a rest, okay? I have to go to school.”
    â€œAll right then. What were President John F. Kennedy’s last words?”
    â€œDo you think you might be a little obsessed with death?”
    â€œHe said, ‘My God, I’m hit.’”
    Reincarnated hairy guy or not, Conor left the house with his bike helmet on. Glennie pretended she wasn’t with him as they walked to the corner. Which was fine with him—today’s temporary tattoo was a large black widow spider on her cheek, to spite him.
    Javier rode the bus with James and Mohamed again, so Conor didn’t get a chance to apologize for being a bad friend until they were at their lockers.
    â€œThat’s okay.” Javier didn’t take his head out of his locker. “Maybe there’s something wrong with your brain after all.” He walked off to homeroom without waiting.
    It was a long morning, a stony-faced Javier two or three seats away in every class. At their usual lunch table of seventh-grade boys, he and Conor sat at opposite ends.
    Before they were even halfway through their American chop suey, Andy walked by and snagged the chocolate cupcake off Javier’s tray. The entire table froze. Javier just sat there, lips pursed, poking at his chop suey as if examining some insect habitat.
    Conor got up, walked over to Andy’s table. Andy grinned at him, his mouth full of cupcake. “That’s attractive,” Conor said, and grabbed Andy’s own cupcake off his tray. He walked back to his table with body, honor, and cupcake intact.
    It was a tricky moment, handing the cupcake to its rightful owner. Everybody knew that Javier should have been the one to take it from Andy. Conor thought for a second that Javier might refuse to accept it from him.
    Andy now had had time to swallow. “Hey, Pixie-poop,” he yelled, voice hoarse with frosting. “Where’s your helmet?”
    The rims of Conor’s ears caught fire. Javier’s mouth quirked up at one corner. “Ignore him.”
    â€œI am,” Conor said.
    Javier took the cupcake from Conor. “Not sure I want this thing,” he announced in a loud voice. “It might have lice.”
    â€œNah,” Ifraho said. “Lice hate chocolate.”
    â€œEat it,” Conor said. “Chocolate feeds brain cells and I need help with pre-algebra.”
Help blowing pre-algebra,
he thought. Javier, thinking the same thing, choked slightly on his first bite of cupcake.
    They walked back to class together.
    Conor didn’t call home at all that day, although he kept wanting to. After school, instead of going to the lunchroom for Adventure Boys, he went back to the library. He did an Internet search for “how to get rid of a banshee.”
    He got a lot of video game answers at first, but after re-Googling a few times he found stories about old Irish guys shooting at banshees or otherwise driving them away from their loved ones. The loved ones always died anyway.
    He got sidetracked into the Greek myth of Persephone, who had to stay in Hades, the land of the dead, three months of every year because she ate three pomegranate seeds. He thought about buying a pomegranate to see if that would send Ashling back to her version of Hades, but came to the conclusion that eating food from a place probably meant you had to stay there.
Don’t feed her. She’ll