Kaley rolled onto her stomach and clasped her fingers together. “What does that have to do with the chatty book in the time pocket?”

“I don’t think it was a coincidence that Zane told me about the Triad of Signs, and then the library gave me this book about Day and Night,” I held up the violet tome, “and then that Volume in the time pocket told you those clues,” I said. I waited, but she didn’t reply, so I huffed and dropped the book onto my dresser, shoving an empty mug out of the way. “The Triad of Signs was made up of three things, Kaley. The Volume gave you three clues.”

She blinked. My sister climbed up from the bed, her green eyes travelling back up to my soggy wall-napkins.

Kaley had this thing she did: she’d bite her lips together and blink. Just, blink. I knew she was holding things back, because it was the same face I used to make at Winston when I was trying to keep my thoughts about his ridiculous choices to myself.

In August, I sat across from Kaley and Emily—yes, that Emily—in a coffee shop we’d adopted as our meeting place to escape Aunt Sylvia, and I caught Kaley studying me. And she was making. That. Darn. Face.

“What?” I asked, snatching a sugar packet from the middle of the table.

“Nothing.” Kaley gulped her coffee and looked out the window.

Thank goodness for Emily, who didn’t know how to keep her feelings to herself. “Have you been using that makeup I got you?” She took a long drink of her coffee too.

“I didn’t have time to brush my hair today, okay? I got busy.” I rolled my eyes.

“Too bad you weren’t busy showering.” Kaley finally said it, and I threw my sugar packet at her. She grunted when it bounced off her nose and landed in her drink.

My fingers found my hairline, and I scratched before I could stop myself. I realized my mistake when the two beauty queens before me winced. I dropped my hand back down and tightened my fingers around the mug that was rapidly losing heat. I forced myself to take a sip, making a mental note to shower when I got home.

The dynamic of my relationship with Emily Parker had changed drastically since our grade nine, catastrophic acquaintance. She wasn’t afraid of anything, so it hadn’t taken her long to find me at school a few days after she’d woken up to tell me, “I heard a ton of the things you said while I was in a coma, Bell.” Of course, that had turned my insides into a raging inferno where I spent approximately a zillion milliseconds contemplating chucking myself in front of the next yellow school bus speeding by. But to my relief, she followed that comment with, “And I believe all those weird things you said.”

In a bizarre twist of fate, the cannibalistic monarch I once knew as Emily Parker began following me around, beating away anyone who peeped a word of unkindness in my direction. And I got to watch as my high school’s most famous social butterfly turned the bullies of my school back into the wide-eyed, whimpering caterpillars we’d all been on the first day of grade nine.