I'm With Cupid (2 page)

The morning after the party, Lena woke up with triumph practically bursting out of her chest. She'd kissed a boy! And a whole four weeks before the deadline she'd set for herself. At this rate, she'd check off all her eighth-grade goals (first date, first kiss, first dance) by Thanksgiving.

As she jumped out of bed, Lena vowed to make Abigail a thank-you present. Maybe she'd sew her a quilted makeup bag. Lena hadn't wanted to stay at the party last night after she'd found out Brent Adamson and his plump lips weren't going to be there, but Abigail had insisted she stick around. And it had been worth it.

Of course, both Abigail and Hayleigh had wrinkled their foreheads when they'd found out about the kiss that had happened while they were in the bathroom. Hayleigh had even asked, “Isn't Marcus Torelli kind of a weirdo? He's got a nice smile, I guess, but his hair is too long and he's so quiet. And one time I saw him carrying an old model spaceship around during gym class. Who does that?”

Lena hadn't let her friend's comments bother her. Marcus was shy, but he wasn't any weirder than anyone else. And she liked the way his shaggy hair curled around his ears and the way his smile lit up his whole face so you couldn't help grinning back at him. Besides, the
who
of the first kiss didn't matter. All Lena cared about was the big, fat check mark on her list.

Lena grabbed a solar-system-themed calendar off her desk. She flipped it open to yesterday's date and carefully wrote “First Kiss” in red letters. She'd had the calendar since January, determined to mark all the big events in her life. She'd only had two before last night, and unfairly, they'd both happened on the same day. Last spring had been both her thirteenth birthday
and
the day Eddie had appeared to tell her she was a soul collector.

Now, finally, Lena had something else major to write down in her calendar. If all went well, on Monday she'd be able to add “made the school play” too.

She hummed to herself as she made her bed, lining up the corners of her handmade quilt so they were perfectly even. Her friends liked to tease her about her quilting hobby, but Lena didn't care. Quilts were all straight lines and predictable patterns. They made a whole lot more sense than people did.

As she finished fluffing her last pillow, Lena's phone rang. It was her boss Eduardo, a.k.a. Eddie.

“Hey, kid,” he said in his faint Spanish accent. “I have another job for you this morning.”

“Already? I just did one yesterday.”

Eddie let out a distracted-sounding chuckle. Lena was willing to bet he was playing with some new gadget while he talked to her. Even though he was around her dad's age, Eddie was like a big kid who always had to have the latest tech toys. “It's a busy time of year. Lots of jobs in the fall.”

“There's a ‘busy season' for people dying?” Lena asked with a laugh.

“You would be surprised. Statistically speaking—”

On second thought, Lena didn't feel like listening to Eddie ramble on about numbers. “I know this is against the rules, but is there any way someone else could take over for me today?” she interrupted. “I'm supposed to go over to my friend's house to get ready for
Alice
in
Wonderland
auditions. It's really, really important.”

“No can do, kid. Once a job is assigned to you, it's yours. But if you like theater, then you will enjoy this one. Be there in an hour. I'll send you the address.” Before she could resort to begging, Eddie had already hung up.

Lena sighed and started getting dressed. Maybe if her job didn't take long, she could go over to Abigail's after.

A minute later, she heard her dad calling from down the hall. “Lena! Are you awake or have you developed somniloquy?”

“Somnilo-what?” she called back, opening her bedroom door.

“Talking in your sleep!” her dad answered.

When Lena shuffled into the kitchen, Professor rushed over to greet her by dropping a dirty sock at her feet. At least it was hers this time and not the next-door neighbor's.

“Thanks, boy,” she said, scratching behind his pointy German shepherd ears. He rubbed up against her leg, leaving a coating of fur on her pajamas, before going back to his post at the sliding glass door that looked out onto the yard. Tracking the neighborhood's squirrel activity was Professor's favorite pastime.

Even though it was Sunday, Lena's dad was sitting at the table dressed in his work clothes, flipping through a scientific journal and sipping a mug of hot water. Once again, he'd forgotten to put coffee into the coffeemaker and was too distracted to notice how bland his “cup of joe” tasted. If he started eating air instead of toast, Lena would have to have a serious talk with him.

For a second, she had a flash of how things used to be. Dad bustling around the kitchen, making cheesy scrambled eggs for her and Mom. Mom fixing the coffee so it would be just right. Dad turning to Lena and saying something like, “Chipmunk, you're right on time!”

No.
Lena squashed the memory down, down, down. That life didn't exist anymore. Really, it never had. Not when, all that time, her mom had been planning to leave.

“Lena, good, you're up,” Dad said, glancing up from his magazine. He never called her Chipmunk anymore. “Have a seat. I need to talk to you.”

She perched on the edge of a chair. This couldn't be a good sign. Her dad was always saying that breakfast should come before pretty much anything else.

“What's wrong? Is Mom okay?” Normally, she wouldn't ask him about such a sore topic, but thoughts of her mom were still bouncing around in her brain.

Her dad put down his mug. “As far as I know, your mother is fine. If anything happened, I'm sure your grandmother would let us know,” he said in his level, scientist voice. Dad had always been pretty low on the emotional scale, but since Mom had left, he'd practically turned into a talking piece of wood.

“Then what is it?” Lena's stomach plummeted into her toes. Oh no. Had her dad found out her secret somehow?

Eddie had made Lena swear not to tell anyone about her alter ego, but even if he hadn't, Lena would
not
have shared the truth with her dad. He'd probably do a scientific study on her and publish it:
The
Neurochemistry
of
a
Teen
Soul
Collector
. No way. She wanted to be a famous actress, not a famous case study.

“Lena,” he announced, “I have a lunch date today.”

She had to laugh. “A date? Is this Aunt Teresa's doing again?”

He slowly shook his head. “I should have known better than to have dinner alone with my sister. She always manages to talk me into these dates, and then…” He took another sip of hot water.

Suddenly, something in Lena's vision changed, like someone had colored in the air around her dad with a gray marker. And for a moment, all she could think was how horribly, miserably lonely he was.

But that was crazy. Dad wasn't lonely. He was fine!

Lena blinked, and the gray color disappeared, along with the wave of sadness that had crashed over her.

“Are you all right?” her dad asked. “You look a little pale.”

Whatever that weird aura had been, it was gone now. “I'm great.” If she mentioned suddenly seeing gray clouds, her dad would drag her in for a brain scan or something. “So who is this woman?”

He let out a soft laugh. “She's actually a scientist too. Your aunt Teresa met her at one of her book groups. She's a physicist.”

“She sounds perfect for you,” Lena had to admit as she got to her feet.

“I don't want you to worry that anything will change,” Dad said. “You know how I feel about romantic love.”

“I know. It's only chemicals in our brains that make us think we're in love,” she recited, grabbing a cereal bowl.

“Exactly. And once those chemicals fade, what are we left with? Nothing.”

Since her dad studied brain chemistry, he had to know what he was talking about. His theory certainly explained how Lena's mom could have left the two of them behind. It was also why Lena had decided to work her way through a checklist of things to accomplish before she turned fourteen. She was
not
going to let hormones and brain chemicals control who she kissed or dated or danced with. She was determined to have an average middle-school experience without all the drama that usually went with it. The only drama she was interested in was the onstage kind.

“Dad?” Lena asked in between bites of granola. “I'm going over to Abigail's to run lines for
Alice
tryouts, okay?” She didn't mention that she had to make a quick stop on the way.

He nodded, still clearly distracted thinking about the horrors of dating. Then he glanced up as if he'd finally registered what she'd said. “So you're trying out again this year? Good! I like to see that kind of perseverance.” How embarrassing that even her dad thought she probably wouldn't get in.

Lena's phone beeped, reminding her she had a half hour to get to the collection location.

She rushed to finish getting ready and kissed her dad good-bye. Forget the school play. It was time to go on soul patrol again.

As Lena rode her bike over to the address on her phone, she ran through the audition scene from
Alice
in her head. She knew better than to hope for the lead, but maybe this year, they'd at least cast her as a tree. She had to get into the play if she was ever going to make her dream—the dream she'd had since fifth grade—come true.

That spring, not long before she'd moved out, her mom had taken Lena to a Shakespeare festival. Lena had been mesmerized. For once, she hadn't thought about the “chemical reactions that caused emotional attachments” and the other things her dad was always going on about. She'd simply believed the story the actors were telling, and she'd even imagined they were performing it just for her.

After the play, she'd sworn to herself that she would be up there on that stage one day, no matter what. So far, the closest she'd gotten was backstage in the dusty wings at school.

When Lena got to Mrs. Katz's house, she jumped off her bike and stashed it behind some bushes. The front door was unlocked thanks to the science—Lena refused to think of it as magic—of soul collecting. She took a second to get herself focused and then went inside.

As Lena wandered through the house, the air thick with the smell of freshly baked gingerbread, she was expecting this assignment to be a sleeper like the others had been. That's why she sucked in a surprised breath when she spotted the old woman, Mrs. Katz, sitting at her dining room table, flipping through a stack of photo albums. Totally awake.

Eddie had warned Lena that her assignments would get harder as they went along, but she hadn't expected it to happen so soon.
Breathe
, she told herself, trying to swallow the sudden pounding in her throat.
You'll be okay.

Lena stepped quietly through the room, although Mrs. Katz didn't seem to notice she was there, and was surprised to see that the photo albums on the table weren't full of family pictures. They were old grainy photos of actors on a fancy stage.

Something clicked in Lena's head. She'd met Mrs. Katz before. The old woman always came to the plays at Lena's school. She'd sit in the front row, and after the play, she'd come up to all the kids in the cast and tell them what a good job they'd done. Lena had always been in the wings, organizing props and lugging around sets, but she liked to think that Mrs. Katz was congratulating her too.

And now, Lena had to gather her soul.

Why did this assignment have to be somebody she knew? And why couldn't Mrs. Katz at least be asleep?

But Lena knew she had no choice. This was the order of things. This was how the world worked. She had to do it quickly, before she lost her nerve. That's why Eddie had said she'd been chosen to be a soul collector in the first place, because of her no-nonsense approach to life and death.

She planted her feet squarely under her shoulders and focused on calling up her energy. The only time her touch was actually dangerous was when her fingers were glowing and her mind was completely focused on the soul in front of her. The manual insisted that it could never happen by accident. Souls weren't willing to leave their bodies unless it was their time, and even then, they needed a soul collector's energy to set them loose so they could move on to “After.”

Lena often wondered what “After” was like, but Eddie refused to talk about it. All he'd say was that, “It is a place any of us would be glad to live.”

Her dad, of course, would insist that there was “little scientific probability of an afterlife, blah blah blah,” but as Lena positioned herself behind Mrs. Katz, she hoped what Eddie said was true.

After a moment of total concentration, her fingers started to glow purple. Except…they weren't quite purple. They were closer to maroon. Or maybe even red. That was weird.

But Lena didn't have a chance to think it over because her phone started to beep, telling her she had two minutes to do her job and get out of there.

She closed her eyes and focused on sensing the woman's soul. Then she let the energy pulse out of her hand and into Mrs. Katz's shoulder. When it was done, Lena stepped away, her head spinning.

“I'm sorry,” she whispered. “I hope you're happy wherever you're going.”

As she backed out of the room, Lena watched Mrs. Katz put down the photo album and draw in a sharp breath. The old woman's body seemed to sag…

And then she sat straight up and let out a surprised-sounding laugh.

Lena stared. Huh?

Mrs. Katz jumped to her feet and laughed again. Then she did something like a jig across the room.

What was going on?

Suddenly, the doorbell rang. Oh no. This wasn't how the soul collection was supposed to go! Whoever was at the door was probably meant to discover Mrs. Katz's body.

Lena dove behind a bookcase as Mrs. Katz went down the hallway. She tried summoning energy in her hand again, but it was too late. She'd missed her window.

Mrs. Katz swung open the front door. “Hello!” she sang. “Isn't it a lovely morning?”

Lena peeked around the bookcase and saw an elderly mailman standing on the stoop, holding a small box.

“Are you Mrs. Cecelia Katz?” he asked, reading the label.

“Yes.”

“I have a delivery for…” He finally looked up and met Mrs. Katz's gaze. “You.”

The two of them stared at each other for so long that Lena thought maybe they were frozen. Suddenly, the weird shift in her vision happened again, like she'd put on a pair of glasses, and the air around the two old people turned bright yellow. In the lemony haze, sparks flitted between them like lightning bugs.

Lena gave her head a firm shake, trying to snap herself out of whatever this was. She didn't have time for her brain to play tricks on her. She had to
think
.

Finally, right as Lena's vision cleared, Mrs. Katz giggled and said to the mailman, “Would you like to come inside?”

Lena ducked behind the bookcase again as the two practically waltzed into the living room. She didn't know what to do. Stay and try to fix things? Leave and come back later? She couldn't remember the manual saying anything about this kind of situation.

Finally, she grabbed her phone and sent Eddie a message.
Emergency! Something went wrong with the Katz assignment!

She hid in the corner, listening to Mrs. Katz and the mailman giggling over absolutely nothing. The old lady was acting like Connie Reynolds did around guys, throwing her head back and laughing so all her teeth showed. At least Connie's teeth were all real.

After ten minutes, Eddie still hadn't gotten back to her. Maybe he was trying out a new video game or something. In that case, it could be hours before he called her back. Lena had to get out of here. She'd never seen old people flirting before. It was scarier than watching a horror movie.

She'd come back later, she decided, after she'd heard from Eddie about how to fix this.

Lena slipped outside and got back on her bike. As she pedaled home, dripping with sweat, her mind whirled. What had gone wrong? She'd done everything by the book. Yes, Mrs. Katz was the first awake person she'd been assigned, but that shouldn't matter, should it? Once she was home, she'd go through the manual and see if there was something there that could explain what had happened.

Her phone beeped. Lena pulled over, hoping it was Eddie. No such luck. It was Abigail, wondering when she was coming over. Running lines was the last thing on Lena's mind right now, but how could she explain to Abigail that something had come up that was literally a matter of life and death? Instead, she told her friend she was sick and started pedaling for home again.

Think
, she told herself. Something had to be different. Well, there had been that red light coming out of her fingers.
That
had never happened before.

Lena hit the brakes. That had to be it. But what did it mean? She'd collected four souls before today, and her energy had always been purple. She hadn't eaten anything strange or accidentally stepped in radioactive goo. Just in case, she checked the bottoms of her sneakers. Nothing.

Her phone beeped.
Sick?
Abigail had written back.
See? I told you you shouldn't have kissed Marcus Torelli! You probably got his germs.

Her first kiss.

That was something different. After all, the whole point of rites of passage was that your life was never supposed to be the same again. And then she remembered the energy that had raced through her when her lips had touched Marcus's and how the air had seemed to crackle around them. For a second, she'd even thought she'd seen weird smoke coming out of her shoes. Maybe that hadn't just been a chemical reaction to a first kiss. Maybe that had been something else.

But why would her power get messed up because of a kiss? Had some of it rubbed off on Marcus and that's why it wasn't working the right way?

No
, Lena told herself. Marcus had seemed totally fine when she'd left the party last night. If her power had somehow affected him, she would have seen it right away.

Still, she should check on him, just in case. Maybe that would help her figure out what had gone wrong.

Her heart clanging in her chest, Lena changed direction and started pedaling furiously toward Marcus's house.