Beautiful Darkness by Kami García, Margaret Stohl

him
     the odds were she knew the guy. When had she taken that picture of the Harley in the graveyard? I punched the door in frustration.
    Link didn’t state the obvious. Lena ran away from me. It was pretty clear she didn’t want to be found. He just drove, and
     Istared out the window of the passenger’s seat as the hot wind stung the hundreds of tiny cuts on my face.
    Something had been wrong for a while now. I just didn’t want to face it. I wasn’t sure if it was something that had been done
     to us, I had done to her, or she had done to me. Maybe it was something she was doing to herself. Her birthday was when it
     all started, her birthday and Macon’s death. I wondered if it was Sarafine.
    All this time, I’d been thinking this was about those stupid stages of grief. I thought about the gold in her eyes and the
     laugh from the dream. What if this was about different kinds of stages, stages of something else? Something supernatural?
     Something Dark?
    What if this was what we’d been afraid of all along?
    I hit the door again.
    “I’m sure Lena’s okay. She probably needs some space. Girls are always talkin’ about needin’ space.” Link turned on the radio,
     then turned it off again. “Killer stereo.”
    “Whatever.”
    “Hey, we should go by the Dar-ee Keen and see if Charlotte’s workin’. Maybe she can hook us up. Especially if we show up in
     this sweet ride.” Link was trying to distract me, but it wasn’t going to happen.
    “Like there’s a person in town who doesn’t know whose car this is? We should drop it off, anyway. Aunt Del will be worried.”
     It would also give me an excuse to see if the Harley was at Lena’s house.
    Link persisted. “You’re goin’ to show up with Lena’s car without Lena? Like that won’t worry Aunt Del? Let’s stop and get
     a freeze and figure this out. Who knows, maybe Lena’s at the Dar-ee Keen. It’s right off the highway.”
    He was right, but it didn’t make me feel any better. It made me feel worse. “If you like the Dar-ee Keen so much, you should
     have gotten a job there. Oh wait, you couldn’t, because you’ll be in summer school dissecting frogs with the other Lifers
     who failed bio.” Lifers were the super seniors, the ones who always seemed to be at school and yet somehow never graduated.
     The guys who wore their letterman jackets years later, when they were working at the Stop & Steal.
    “You should talk. Could you have a lamer summer job? The library?”
    “I could hook you up with a book, but you’d have to learn to read.”
    Link was baffled by my summer plans to work at the library with Marian, but I didn’t mind. I was still full of questions about
     Lena, her family, and Light and Dark Casters. Why didn’t Lena have to Claim herself on her sixteenth birthday? It didn’t seem
     like the kind of thing you could get out of. Could she really choose to be Light or Dark? Was it that easy? Since
The Book of Moons
was destroyed in the fire, the
Lunae Libri
was the only place that might have the answers.
    Then there were the other questions. I tried not to think about my mother. I tried not to think about strangers on motorcycles
     and nightmares and bloody lips and golden eyes. Instead, I stared out the window and watched the trees pass by in a blur.

    The Dar-ee Keen was packed. Not a big surprise, since it was one of the only places within walking distance of Jackson High.
     In the summer, you could pretty much follow the trail of flies and you would eventually find your way here. Formerly theDairy King, the place had gotten a new name after the Gentrys bought it but didn’t want to fork up the money to pay to put
     all new letters on the sign. Today everyone looked even sweatier and more pissed off than usual. Walking a mile in the South
     Carolina heat and missing the first day of hooking up and drinking warm beer at the lake wasn’t anyone’s idea of a good time.
     It was like canceling a national holiday.
    Emily,