Pyxis: The Discovery (Pyxis Series) (7 page)

When we got home, I dashed down to my room and pulled out my phone. There were texts from Hannah and Genevieve that sounded so similar I would have been amused if I weren’t so shaken. They were both
dying
to put streaks in their hair, and wanted to hang out “
ASAP!!!
”

I hit the shortcut for Angeline’s number, and she answered after the first ring.

“Oh my God, Harriet Jensen practically attacked me on the way home!” I gave her the play-by-play, and we had a mutual freak-out.

We decided that, for the foreseeable future, I wouldn’t go anywhere alone.

I didn’t even consider telling my parents or anyone else about Harriet. That would mean revealing the
pyxis
, and there was just no way I wanted to do that. I had a strange feeling that I
couldn’t
do it, even if I tried.

It was like the
pyxis
belonged to me in an intimate way. Like the way my diary from junior high or the reflection of my own face in a mirror belonged to me.

* * *

Before first hour the next morning, I showed Ang the texts from Hannah and Genevieve.

“I think you should call them on it,” Ang said. “Seriously, invite them over tonight and try to dye their hair. See how they react.”

I laughed. “Okay, if you say so.” I punched in a text message and sent it to them. Seconds later, I got their enthusiastic replies and showed them to Ang. “Guess we’re on.”

Ang and I went upstairs to junior hall to find the two girls who’d taken yellow cookies the day before. We wandered past where they were talking to a couple of junior guys. I tapped one of them on the shoulder—Kristin, I thought.

“Hey, how are you?” I said and gave her and her friend my brightest smile.

She gave me a blank look. “Oh … good, thanks. How’re you?”

“Um, fine. Maybe I’ll see you at the coffee shop again,” I said.

Ang and I moved on.

“Okay, that was like
nothing
. The other girl didn’t even seem to recognize you,” she said. “You definitely need to get Hannah and Genevieve talking tonight.”

“You’re going to come over and help me, right?”

She looked pained. “No, I can’t. My aunt and uncle are coming for dinner, remember?”

“Oh, crap, that’s right. You’re not working today, either.”

“Sorry.”

That meant I’d have to decide whether or not to give out more cookies
and
deal with Hannah and Genevieve on my own. Ugh.

We walked through the halls until we found Scott, the guy who’d stuffed a blue cookie in his face at the coffee shop. I caught his eye and fluttered my fingers at him, but he just looked around as if he thought I was trying to get someone else’s attention.

“Great,” I said, deflated. “I don’t think we know any more than I did a few days ago.”

“No, it’s okay,” Ang said. “Even a negative result is still a result.”

I laughed. “Okay, you’ve been watching the science channel too much or reading ahead in biology or something. What do you mean?”

“Well, if you try something and nothing happens, that’s still information.”

“I guess. It would be a whole lot more helpful if the results made everything clear and obvious, though.”

After school, Ang walked me to the Rainbow Café and then headed home. She made me promise I’d get a ride after my shift.

“Hey, Marissa,” I said to the barista. I stashed my bag under the counter.

“What’s up, Corinne?” Even though Marissa was only around twenty-two, her voice was husky from all the cigarettes she smoked. She had funky cropped maroon hair and a ton of piercings in her ears and face. “You going to the rally in Danton on Saturday?”

I gave her a withering look. She knew I didn’t know or care about any of her political causes, but she always said things like that, anyway. “Yes, I have my bullhorn polished and my signs all painted.”

Her good-natured laugh dissolved into a burst of coughing.

I readied the containers of cookies under the counter and pulled out my geometry homework just as a herd of seven or eight girls crowded through the door. I recognized their affiliation immediately: dance team. The heart of Sophie’s high school life. The group was Sophie-free at the moment, though.

Barely considering what I was doing, I plopped the box of yellow cookies on the counter. The girls kept jabbering and giggling as they placed their orders, hardly acknowledging my presence. But they each took a cookie, and that was all I cared about. After they left, I wrote down all their names on a sticky note.

I felt a tiny bit weird about what I’d just done. I wasn’t sure why, so I didn’t offer up any more cookies the rest of my shift. I called Brad for a ride home, citing the large bags of to-go boxes full of chicken cacciatore, rice pilaf, and Caesar salad as the reason.

After dinner, I texted Hannah and Genevieve to come by my house anytime. I set out all the hair dye stuff in my bathroom, and found two old t-shirts they could wear so I wouldn’t get dye on their clothes. I heard the doorbell ring, and I ran up to get it, relieved that Bradley had his music up so loud in his room he didn’t seem to hear.

“Can we see your room?” Hannah asked as I led them down to the basement.

“Uh, sure.” I detoured to my bedroom instead of leading them straight to the bathroom.

“Oh my God, cool chair,” Genevieve said in her breathy voice, pointing to a purple velvet chair I’d found second-hand. “Where did you get it?”

“I hopped into my time machine and stole it from 1978,” I said.

Hannah gaped at me and Genevieve scrunched her nose.

“It’s from the thrift store out on the highway.”

I watched them take in the details of the Kandinsky posters on my walls, the black-and-purple satin duvet, and bookshelf stacked with scrapbooks and adorned with framed photos of me and Ang, and me and Mason. Well, there used to be some of me and Mason, but I’d stuck those in my closet.

“You sure you still want me to do your hair?” I asked, giving them one last chance at an out.

They glanced at each other, and then looked at me and nodded. “Yeah, totally!” Hannah said.

I grabbed my iPod and some little speakers, and the three of us crowded into the bathroom. Hannah sat on the edge of the bathtub, and Genevieve perched on the closed toilet. I put my iPod on random and started pulling the hair dye stuff out of a plastic shopping bag.

“I have blue, too,” I said. “Do you want that instead?”

“No, I like the purple,” Hannah answered, and Genevieve nodded her agreement.

I really, really wished Ang were there. I took a deep breath and started mixing the hair dye in a small plastic bowl.

“So, um, we’ve never really talked much before…” I said, hoping they’d chime in and give me some clue as to why they were sitting here in my bathroom.

“I know, so weird,” Genevieve said with a little frown. “We were talking about that on the way over. We always thought you seemed cool, but, I don’t know. We’ve been friends with Sophie for so long…”

I forced a nonchalant smile as I handed them my old t-shirts.

“Yeah, she and I aren’t exactly BFFs,” I said, and they both giggled.

“How come you hate each other so much?” Hannah asked.

“Oh, we used to be friends, but you know … sometimes, stuff just happens.”

The truth was, Sophie and I had been pretty good friends in grade school. Our moms carpooled us to gymnastics and ballet, and we went to each other’s birthday parties and sleepovers.

Things started to change in fifth grade, the year Ang moved to Tapestry. I started spending more time with her and less with Sophie. That was about the time Sophie got really interested in boys, and all she wanted to do was talk about who was the cutest and which of them liked her. She started getting much more competitive in gymnastics and ballet, always trying to show me up. It drove her nuts that I was better than her at both.

But it wasn’t until a fifth grade slumber party at Sophie’s house that things changed for good. There wasn’t any big fight or anything, but a couple of days later, Sophie moved in with her aunt, and she had been horrible to me ever since. Not just regular Sophie-mean, but targeting me, humiliating me, and generally looking for ways to make me miserable.

“Okay, are you ready?” I turned to the girls. “Pull out a chunk of hair that you want dyed, and pin the rest back.” I handed them each a hair clip, those ones that look like jaws of pointy teeth mashing together.

I folded each of their dye-saturated strands in foil and set the timer on my phone. We had fifteen minutes before I could wash out the dye. It felt like an eternity.

“Um … so why did you decide to talk to me after all this time?” I said, hoping I sounded less awkward than I felt.

Hannah pulled her mouth to one side. “I guess it was after the bake sale. We were both just like, yeah, why
shouldn’t
we be friends with Corinne?”

“But the other day at the coffee shop you didn’t seem too excited when I offered you the cookies.”

Genevieve scratched at the back of one hand and stared at the floor. “Yeah, that was weird. We were all into it last week, but by yesterday … I don’t know, not as into it. But then after we saw you, we remembered that we really, really wanted you to dye our hair.”

She smiled at me in a hopeful way that appealed for my approval, and I felt a little bit sorry for her. I knew she wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, but she seemed a little confused, and I had a sneaking suspicion that the yellow bottle from the
pyxis
was responsible.

I asked them what kind of music they liked, and they both relaxed a little. Before I knew it, the timer went off. I had each of them bend over the sink so I could shampoo the dye out of their strands.

“So this is permanent?” Hannah asked.

“Semi-permanent,” I said. “It’ll wash out in a few weeks.”

“Oh, cool. Then maybe we could try a different color.”

I wanted to laugh. I still couldn’t believe they’d let me do it. I had them pose together and I snapped a picture with my phone.

After the girls left, I texted Ang the pic and told her to call me as soon as she could. My phone rang a few minutes later, and I gave her the report.

“Oh my God, Corinne.” Her voice squeaked with glee. “Wow. I don’t think they’re faking. I mean you
dyed
their
hair
.”

I grinned. “Yeah, I don’t think so either.” My grin faded. “But what do you think it means about the
pyxis
?”

We both fell silent, reluctant to try to put the answer into words.

|| 12 ||

THE NEXT DAY IN the coffee shop, the bell on the door announced the arrival of almost the exact same horde of dance team girls who had been there the previous afternoon. But this time, they crowded around the counter and gaped at me like I was an adorable puppy in a pet store window.

“Hey!” said Jen, a senior dance team co-captain who used to be in my gymnastics classes. “You did such an awesome job on Hannah and Genevieve’s hair!”

“Oh, yeah, I should open my own salon, huh?” I tried to force a smile, but I knew it was weak. My eyes flitted from one cheerful face to the next. I could feel Ang’s stare boring a hole in the side of my head.

A few of the other girls chimed in, and then they just stood there grinning at me.

“So … can we get something started for you?” I asked.

They all ordered their coffees. Ang was pursing her lips so hard they were turning a little white, but she waited until we were alone before she turned to me. A faint case of nerves made my stomach flutter.

“What in the world is going on?” she asked, her hands on her hips, surveying the room. I saw the insight hit her, and her green eyes went wide. She looked at me with equal parts surprise and accusation. “What did you do, Corinne?”

“I, um, may have gotten rid of some cookies yesterday,” I said, shrinking away from her a little. I started twirling a strand of hair around my index finger.

“To a bunch of Sophie’s friends?” She shook her head. “You did that on purpose. We talked about this.”

“Oh, whatever,” I said. “It was only, like, eight girls. The experiment was
your
baby, and you ditched me yesterday, so I had to make all the decisions.”

“Eight girls? We don’t even really know what we’re dealing with here, and you’re trying to use it to, I don’t know, get at Sophie or something.” Ang was straining to keep her voice low enough that no one would overhear. “That’s not right at all. That’s what
she’d
do if she had the
pyxis
.”

I folded my arms and glared at the floor in front of Ang’s black ballet flats, but I couldn’t help silently acknowledging that I was playing with something I didn’t understand and couldn’t really control. But it wasn’t fair—she should take responsibility. It was all
her
idea in the first place.

A middle-aged lady was approaching the counter, so I pulled my face into what I hoped was an appropriate expression. But I felt as if my insides were shrinking, and my lungs wouldn’t expand enough to let me take a full breath.

When our shift finally ended, Ang stashed her apron, grabbed her bag, and barely looked at me as she said a terse goodbye. She didn’t even check to make sure I had a ride home from work.

That night, I sent her a bunch of texts, and even left a couple of voice mails, but she wouldn’t talk to me. I tried to distract myself by reading
The Great Gatsby
for English Lit, but it was hard to concentrate with a cold ball of anxiety rolling around my insides. I’d never gone more than half a day without talking to Ang. I wanted to run over to her house, but I thought it might be better to give her a little more time. Besides, she couldn’t avoid me forever.

I arrived at school early the next morning and sat on the floor in front of the locker I shared with Ang. But the minutes ticked by, and she didn’t show. When the first bell rang, I sent her a text.

Where r u???

I waited as long as I could, and dashed to class just before the late bell. I didn’t see her all day and started to worry. Was Harriet after her, too?