Possessions Read Online Free PDF Page B

my father is a rabbi.”
    Shayna stretched her arms overhead and dropped them to her sides. “So, Lindsay, hi. Scholarship, huh?” She gave me a fakey wink. “Don’t freak. Everybody knows. Everybody knows everything. Including why Mandy’s here instead of that so-posh school in London.” She wrinkled her nose. “Marlwood is significantly closer to home. San Francisco.”
    “We don’t know that,” Kiyoko said quickly.
    “Mandy Winters and her brother Miles were found in bed in the Lincoln Bedroom at the White House. Together.” Shayna snorted and rolled her eyes. “So they sent Mandy here, in case they feel like checking in on her. And they sent Miles back to rehab. Again .”
    “That is not true,” Kiyoko whispered, as she touched the corner of her mouth.
    A chime sounded. I jerked. Kiyoko reached into her bag with a shaking hand and took out a bookmark, laying it over the page and smoothing it as if it were very precious and valuable. Smoothing it again. It was made of red cardboard with raised black lettering and a pentagram. RUNES, it read. San Francisco’s Premier Occult Bookshop. I thought again of the weird ritual I’d seen her doing this morning with Mandy and that other girl, Lara. Were they some kind of coven? Cult?
    She pressed the book closed and started packing up. She was one of the most elegant people I’d ever seen, but kind of robotic.
    “That was the dismissal bell,” Shayna told me.
    “Thanks,” I shot back, and got to my feet. She moved out of my way, and I scuttled back to my chair. There was a lot of energy in the room, and some laughter. My fellow students were moving to the rhythm of academia and their already-established friendships. I wondered how many of them had been to boarding school before. And how many of them were dying to be friends with Mandy Winters.

    I met my dorm mates at dinner. They were all very nice: Ida, who was Iranian; and Claire, very tanned—her mom owned half of Maui; and Julie of course. And April and Leslie, our soccer jocks. Haley wanted to study opera, but for some reason, everyone called her Elvis. And last was Maria del Carmen, who went by Marica. She was wearing huge emerald earrings, despite the fact that the Marlwood booklet had said to leave valuables at home.
    Their interest in me totally peaked when they found out I was going to Jessel to watch a movie. Julie was especially wide-eyed, and I wanted to tell her so many things that I had learned the hard way. Such as: avoid the home of the cool girl. Avoid it like the plague.
    “I’ll steal you a souvenir,” I promised her, and she blinked, looking a tad hurt.
    Before I knew it, we had left the commons and my dorm mates were forking right, toward Grose, while I started down the hill, toward Jessel. Elvis was singing “Blue Hawaii” at the top of her lungs. Marica’s emeralds glittered in the light.
    I walked alone through the falling darkness and the blowsy white, past more silent horse heads, to Jessel’s front porch. I could see myself in the leaded glass windowpanes of the door as I knocked and folded my arms, trying to look casual. But in the dark, with only moonlight shining on my skin, my reflection looked like a ghost.
    I was about to knock again when the door creaked open. Mandy, not Kiyoko, stood in the doorway, in her ebony sweater and trousers. She had swapped out her more stylish city boots for hiking boots.
    As for the rest of her, if she’d had to make an effort to look gorgeous, it didn’t show. Her white-blonde hair had been rearranged into a sleek ponytail held in place with a jet clasp; and her skin was flawless. Mandy was the kind of girl who would become a beautiful woman and stop aging at some point. She would always look great, and she would moisturize with stuff that cost a thousand dollars for a quarter ounce and make sure she got plenty of sleep by hiring other people to run her errands and organize her fabulous life.
    “Oh, hi,” she said, as if we knew each