Beautiful Darkness by Kami García, Margaret Stohl Page A

Savannah, and Eden were hanging out at the good table in the corner with the basketball team. They were barefoot, in
     their bikini tops and supershort jean skirts—the kind with one button left open, offering up a powerful flash of bikini
     bottoms without ever completely falling off. Nobody was in a very good mood. There wasn’t a tire left in Gatlin, so half the
     cars were still sitting in the school parking lot. All the same, there was plenty of loud giggling and hair flipping. Emily
     was spilling out of her string bikini top, and Emory, her latest victim, was loving it.
    Link shook his head. “Man, those two wanna be the bride at the weddin’ and the corpse at the funeral.”
    “Just so long as I’m not invited to either.”
    “Dude. You need some sugar. I’m gonna get in line. You want somethin’?”
    “No, thanks. You need some money?” Link never had any money.
    “Naw, I’m gonna get Charlotte to hook me up.”
    Link could talk his way into and out of almost anything. I pushed my way through the crowd, as far away from Emily and Savannah
     as I could get. I slumped down at the bad corner table, beneath the shelves of soda cans and bottles from around the country.
     Some of the sodas had been there since my dad waslittle, and you could see the different levels of brown and orange and red syrup, disappearing to the bottom of the bottles
     from years of evaporation. It was pretty disgusting, I guess, that and the fifties soda bottle wallpaper and the flies. After
     a while, you didn’t even notice it anymore.
    I sat down and looked at the disappearing dark syrup, my mood in a bottle. What happened to Lena back at the lake? One minute
     we were kissing, the next she was running away from me. All that gold in her eyes. I wasn’t stupid. I knew what it meant.
     Light Casters had green eyes. Dark Casters had gold. Lena’s weren’t completely gold, but what I’d seen at the lake was enough
     to make me wonder.
    A fly landed on the shiny red table, and I stared at it. I recognized the familiar churning in my stomach. Dread and panic,
     all turning into a dull anger. I was so mad at Lena, I wanted to kick out the glass window next to our booth. But at the same
     time, I wanted to know what was going on and who that guy on the Harley was. Then I’d have to kick his ass.
    Link slid into the booth across from me with the biggest freeze I’d ever seen. The ice cream rose about four inches above
     where the plastic cup ended. “Charlotte has some real potential.” Link licked the straw.
    Even the sugary smell of the freeze was making me sick. I felt like the sweat and the grease and the flies and the Emorys
     and Emilys were closing in on me.
    “Lena’s not here. We should go.” I couldn’t sit around like everything was normal. Link, on the other hand, could. Rain or
     shine.
    “Chillax. I’ll suck it down in five.”
    Eden walked by on her way to refill her Diet Coke. She smileddown at us, as fake as ever. “What a cute couple. See, Ethan, you didn’t need to be wastin’ time with that lil’ tire slasher
     window basher. You and Link, y’all lovebirds were meant for each other.”
    “She didn’t slash your tires, Eden.” I knew how this was going to look for Lena. I had to shut them down before their mothers
     got involved.
    “Yeah. I did,” Link said, his mouth full of ice cream. “Lena’s just bummed she didn’t think of it first.” He could never resist
     the chance to harass the cheer squad. To them, Lena was an old joke that wasn’t funny anymore but nobody could drop. That
     was the thing about small towns. No one ever changed their opinion of you, even if you changed. As far as they were concerned,
     even when Lena was a great-grandmother, she would still be the crazy girl who busted out the window in English class. Considering
     most of our English class would still be living in Gatlin.
    Not me. Not if things were going to stay like this. It was the first time I had really