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Элизабет Чандлер

Soulmates

With her chin held high and her cloud of curly blond hair tossed back from her face, Ivy shut the school counselor's door and walked down the hall. Several guys from the swim team turned to stare as she moved toward her locker. Ivy forced herself to return their glances and to look confident. The pants and top she wore for the first day of the school year had been selected by Suzanne, her oldest friend and fashion expert.

Too bad Suzanne didn't pick out a matching bag to go over my head, Ivy thought. She walked past the senior class bulletin board. People whispered. People pointed her out with small nods. She should have expected it.

Anyone whom Tristan Carruthers had fallen for would be pointed out Anyone who had been with Tristan the night he was killed would be whispered about. So naturally, anyone who had tried to kill herself because she couldn't get over Tristan's death would be pointed to and whispered about and watched very, very carefully. And that was what everyone said about Ivy: brokenhearted, she had taken some pills, then tried to throw herself in front of a train.

She could remember only the brokenhearted part, the long summer after the car accident, the nightmares with the deer crashing through the windshield. Three weeks ago she'd had another of her nightmares and had woken up screaming. All she could recall from that night was being comforted by her step-brodier, Gregory, then falling asleep, looking at Tristan's photo. That photo, her favorite picture of Tristan, in which he was wearing his old school jacket and a baseball cap backward on his head, haunted her now. It had haunted her even before she'd heard her little brother's strange account of that night.

Philip's story of an angel saving her hadn't convinced her family or the police that this wasn't a suicide attempt And how could she deny taking a drug that had shown up in the hospital's blood tests? How could she argue against the train engineer's statement to the police mat he wouldn't have been able to stop in time?

"Chick, chick, chick. " A soft quivering voice interrupted Ivy's thoughts.

"Who wants to play chick, chick, chick?"

He was calling to her from the shadowy space beneath the stairs. Ivy knew it was Gregory's best friend, Eric Ghent. She kept on walking.

"Chick, chick, chick…"

When she didn't react he emerged from the dark stairwell, looking like a skeleton startled out of his tomb.

His wispy blond hair lay in strings across his high forehead, and his eyes looked like pale blue marbles set in bony sockets. Ivy had not seen Eric for the last three weeks; she suspected that Gregory had kept his jeering friend away from her.

Now Eric moved quickly enough to block her path.