Now, if I could just get Nash to forgive me sometime in the next day or so…

“So, are you and Tod a couple now?”

“I don’t know. It seems kind of pointless to put a label on it, considering that we’ve only really got one day together.”

Emma’s face crumpled, and I wished I could take the words back. Evidently that was one reminder too many.

“How can you be so casual about this?” she demanded in a fierce whisper, brushing tears from her eye with the side of one finger, like she was wiping off a smear of eyeliner. “It’s like you don’t even care.”

“Everyone keeps saying that,” I whispered back, leaning closer to keep from being overheard. “But I don’t know how else I’m supposed to act. This isn’t like dying of cancer, Em. I’m not sick, which is a huge plus, obviously, but I’m not going to linger for another month while I say my goodbyes. There’s no wiggle room, and I can’t tell the world that I won’t be here after tomorrow. So I don’t have any choice except to go on living for the next twenty-four hours, trying to distract myself from how mind-bendingly final the whole thing seems by bringing down our demon teacher.” And by spending time with a living dead boy whose interest in me I’d discovered much too late to properly explore.

And by trying to explain to Nash why I’d kissed his brother, then asking him for forgiveness he had no reason to give either of us.

“I know. I’m sorry.” Emma sniffled and pulled a tissue from the minipack in her purse. “It just feels like you’re leaving me. Senior year’s going to suck with no best friend.”

“Yeah, sorry about that.” But at least she’d have a senior year….

“I wish there was something…” Em began, but then the late bell cut her off, and Mr. Beck closed the classroom door.

Math sucked even more than usual that day, mostly because every single minute counted down by the clock over the door felt like a minute of my life wasted. And I didn’t have that many minutes left to spare.

I watched Mr. Beck as he went over the homework I hadn’t done, then called people up to the board to help him demonstrate the day’s lesson. There was nothing inappropriate about him in class, and I had to keep glancing at Danica’s empty chair to assure myself that I hadn’t imagined the whole thing.

During the rush for the door after the bell rang, I caught Mr. Beck watching me and Emma—the very first overtly predatory look I’d seen from him—so I pretended to search through my backpack for something until we could reasonably be last in line for the exit. Then I threaded my arm through Em’s and glanced over my shoulder, shooting Mr. Beck my best vixen smile, trying not to show the nausea churning in my stomach.

Emma spun toface him from the doorway and held up eight fingers, silently mouthing “eight o’clock.” He nodded, anticipation firing in his gaze like sparks from a bonfire, and she tugged me into the hallway.

Where I almost ran smack into Nash and Sabine.

“Can I talk to you?” Nash asked, before I’d recovered from the near-collision, and that’s when I realized he’d come looking for me. Neither he nor Sabine had any other reason to be in the math hall between first and second period.

“Yeah.” We both had class in four minutes, but school had never mattered less. This might be my only chance to explain what had happened and why. To see for myself how he was handling the breakup. To ask him to forgive Tod, even if he couldn’t forgive me—it was killing me that I’d come between brothers, and I wanted to clean up at least that part of the mess we’d made before I lost the chance.

“I’ll see you later, Em,” I said, and I couldn’t help noting the fury on Sabine’s face as she and Emma watched us walk off together toward the parking lot. But there was something more there, beneath her anger. She was…worried. About what? That I’d try to take him back?

Nash took an immediate left when the glass doors closed behind us and wound up leaning against the wall, just out of sight from the hallway. For nearly a minute, we both stared at the ground, and I assumed that, like me, he wasn’t sure how to start this conversation. So I jumped in.

“I’m so sorry about yesterday,” I said, through the lump that had formed in my throat. “I didn’t mean for that to happen. Any of it.” Though my lame apology couldn’t possibly make things okay between us, any more than his apology was able to fix things when he’d messed up.

“I was kind of hoping you’d say that.” Nash leaned with one shoulder against the bricks, facing me from a foot away, and I couldn’t quite interpret the intense swirl of greens and browns in his irises. “I don’t want to fight, Kaylee. Especially now. I don’t want you to die mad at me, or thinking that I’m mad at you. So if you say it meant nothing, I’ll believe you. It’s Tod I’m pissed at anyway, not you.”

The second period bell rang, and my head rang with it, and it actually took me the length of that clanging to figure out what he was really saying. And when it finally sank in that he wanted to get back together, my guilt was almost too thick to breathe through.

“Nash, I…” I glanced at the ground, at a complete loss for words. He didn’t know Tod and I had moved beyond that first kiss, and he’d obviously come to school assuming that if he forgave me, we could pick up right where we’d left off. “Things aren’t the same anymore.”