Alice in Wonderland High by Rachel Shane

said something else, but I couldn’t hear him. I was still stuck on the word like .

CHAPTER 9
    â€œYou brought her, I see.” Whitney leaned against the conglomerate of open doors forming a pastel tunnel into her house. Her arms shook as if the doors would spring closed any moment and knock her over.
    â€œNothing gets by you.” Chess relieved her of doorman duty and held them open with more ease.
    She gave him a dirty look, then turned to me. “Think of this like a verbal contract. You enter, you keep your mouth shut.”
    Taking that vow, I stepped through the doors, then paused at the décor inside. Hats—ranging from formal top hats to the artistic creations usually found on the Queen of England—dangled from a chandelier. I spotted the trucker hat Kingston had been wearing in gym perched delicately on one of the hooks. White polka dots covered a purple wall in front of me. Curvy stripes of varying widths alternated in teal and subdued candy-apple red on a different wall. The mirror in front of me distorted my body like a fun house.
    Whitney must have seen me staring because she said, “My mom’s an installation artist.”
    â€œWhat does that mean?”
    â€œIt’s art you have to go see. Experience.” She gestured at the five-door concoction. “It’s really a pain sometimes, everything in the house has been remodeled into something else—something far more annoying.”
    We followed her into the kitchen. Large, metal spikes poked out of the refrigerator door instead of a torture-chamber wall where they belonged.
    I pointed to it. “New diet regimen?”
    She flicked her eyes toward the fridge. “Obstacles for our basic survival needs.”
    â€œIt’s a bitch to open that thing,” Chess said. “You have to hold your arm at the right angle or you might end up in the hospital explaining you weren’t trying to slit your wrists.”
    â€œThat sounds like a case for Child Protective Services.”
    She shrugged. “I keep essentials in the basement fridge. That one I haven’t let her revise.”
    â€œYour house is like a museum.” I set the box of days-old cakes on her counter.
    â€œYep. Look, but don’t touch.”
    â€œIf you charged for tickets,” Chess said, “that would cover some funds.”
    â€œBut then what would Kingston be good for?” Whitney chuckled to herself and stopped in front of the kitchen counter. Bending underneath, she pulled a blender out of the cabinet.
    Chess reached above her and retrieved cups off a tall shelf. They were repurposed from various found objects. A shellacked paper-towel roll had become a highball glass. Layers of buttons were welded together in a closed formation. He even set a conch shell wrapped in tightly coiled wire on the counter.
    Whitney slid a cutting board and knife over to me. “Chop this.” She tossed me an array of herbs.
    I spotted lavender and basil among a bunch I didn’t recognize. They smelled flowery and a little musky, too. “What are these?” I pointed to several unfamiliar herbs of various shapes and textures.
    â€œThe special ingredient.”
    â€œWhere’s Kingston?” Chess asked, shaking some spices into the blender.
    â€œFinishing up a sale.”
    â€œDoes he work at the Garden Center, too?”
    Whitney snorted. “No. He’ll be here in a sec. Then we’ll have a little huddle.”
    I chopped the herbs until Whitney snatched them away and added them to the blender. Chess angled his body over the fridge and pulled out some kind of murky liquid without submitting himself to a bloodletting ritual. He boiled the liquid on the stove and added some other ingredients that looked like cherries and coffee beans. Then Whitney dumped the contents of the blender into the pot. I watched in awe, trying to figure out this odd recipe.
    Kingston arrived fifteen minutes later, wearing a