My questioning gaze bounced between them. What the hell was going on? Did someone put magic mushrooms in the lunch? And did Cole and Lex eat them or did I?

“Ser, listen to us.” Cole spoke calmly and evenly, squeezed my elbow to get my full attention. “It’s time. Time to do the things we used to do.”

“It’s a school night. Mom’s been up my ass ever since the Mini Mart Mugger thing. We can go this weekend, maybe,” I said.

Lexi brightened. “It’s okay. I’m sure your mom won’t mind. I’ll call her. I’ll ask.”

It bothered me to hear Lexi suggesting she could ask my mother, but there was something else about their behavior that concerned me. Their voices sounded perky, their eyes encouraging, their words insisting I go to the movies. On a school night? This screamed of Mom. All week she’d been prodding me to take their calls, to talk to them. Which really meant talk about Kori’s death.

I knew what this was … This was an intervention!

I gritted my teeth. But before I unleashed, I realized they’d just given me the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone. Get out of this movie-intervention and have an alibi so I could go down to LoDo with Kori’s fake ID and finish what she’d started.

But I couldn’t tell them that. They were walking on eggshells around me as it was and this would definitely qualify as padded helmet behavior.

“Actually, I can’t. The real reason is I have a date.” I shut my locker door. “With Anthony. And Mom doesn’t know, so I need you guys to cover for me, okay?” I looked directly at Lexi and asked, “I can count on you, right?”

“Yeah, sure, of course,” Cole assured me.

I looked at Lexi and she gave a tiny nod. The way I see it, they forced me to lie to them. And Lexi owed me. Big.

twenty-four

Korianne,” the Duke Nukem clone bouncer exaggerated sarcastically. With one eye pinched for greater scrutiny, he glanced at the ID and then at me. I feigned what I hoped would pass for Kori’s sleepy-eyed sexpot look. “Kori-anne? Korean? Kory-en?”

I scowled, mimicking her, as if it would make a difference. “Corian is a countertop. Everyone calls me Kori.”

“What’s your address?”

“Nineteen oh one Aspen Run,” I spouted back.

“Your eyes aren’t brown,” he said.

My heart thumped hard. “The DMV guy screwed up. I wrote b-l-u not b-r-n. I think he was on something.”

The bouncer looked at me. For a moment I knew it was over and wasn’t sure what to do. Grovel? Run? He shook his head, disgusted. Apologize? Then he said, “I know the DMV guy I had was on something. Do I look like I’m three twenty-five?”

I gulped. He looked 500 pounds to me. “Um, no?”