Page 27 of School Spirits
I snuck a look at Torin out of the corner of my eye. Practice kissing in a dream wouldn’t be like real kissing, after all. And—
No. No, no, no. That was a stupendously dumb idea. Torin was four hundred years older than me, and dangerous and trapped in a freaking mirror. My life had always been odd, but I wasn’t about to let it getthatodd.
I reached up and hit stop on the DVD player. “Okay, that’s enoughIvy Springsfor today.”
Torin made a sound of protest. “But Leslie was just accusing him of fancying that other girl, Lila! And I was so sure Everton was moments away from throwing her over at last!”
“We’ll watch more tomorrow,” I promised him. “Now, you—”
I was interrupted by an insistent buzzing coming from somewhere in my backpack.
“What on earth is that?” Torin asked, and suddenly I remembered: my cell phone.
I scrambled to get it out of my bag. “Mom?”
There was a pause and then, “Um, no? Is this…is this Izzy?”
It was a boy.What boy would be—and then I remembered my second day of school, giving Adam this number. “Adam! Uh. Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
“Oh, this is scintillating,” Torin muttered, and I threw him a look over my shoulder.
“So,” Adam said, “I was calling because there’s a basketball game tonight, and I thought you might want to, uh, come with me.”
When I didn’t say anything immediately, he rushed on. “I know it’s really last minute, but it starts in like an hour, and we can just meet there if you want, or I can pick you up, or…whatever.”
I glanced down at my SpaghettiO-stained T-shirt, my mind racing. A boy, coming to my house. To pick me up and take me somewhere. That was totally a date.
And I wasn’t sure I was ready for that yet.
“I’ll meet you there,” I told him. Hopefully Mom would be home soon, and if not, well, I could walk. After I changed into something not smeared with tomato sauce, obviously.
“Great!” he said, a little too loud.
“Yeah!” I exclaimed back, trying to match his enthusiasm. In the mirror, Torin didn’t roll his eyes so much as his whole body.
“So an hour, at the school. I’ll meet you there.”
“Right,” I agreed, hoping we could be done with this soon. My hands were starting to sweat. How come no one onIvy Springsever had these awkward phone moments? Leslie had probably never had sweaty palms in her life, not even when Everton called to tell her he was breaking up with her so that she could go to art school in Italy.
Finally Adam said, “See you then,” and I breathed a silent sigh of relief. “Okay. Um…bye.”
“Bye.”
That done, I tossed my phone on the bed and turned my attention to my closet.
“Whatever shall you wear?” Torin observed, propping his chin in his hand. “Let’s see, there’s the black T-shirt with black jeans. Or perhaps, if you’re going for elegance over function, you could wear the black T-shirt with black jeans. Ooh!” He sat up, widening his eyes. “Do you know what would be particularly fetching? The black—”
“T-shirt with black jeans,” I finished for him. “Hilarious.”
But looking at my closet, he did have a point. Other than that pink hoodie, my closet was a sea of sameness. A sea of black. And I didn’t have the faintest idea what girls wore to basketball games.
Gripping the closet door with one hand, I leaned in and fished out a T-shirt. “You are being stupid,” I muttered under my breath. “You have a ghost to hunt, and you are panicking overclothes.”
Even though I hadn’t been talking to Torin—and he knew it—he acted as though I had been. “But these things are all related, yes? The ghost and fitting in with these pathetic children. You are not fretting about clothing. You’re merely trying to best maintain your cover.”
