Platinum by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

her. I couldn’t sarcastically ask if it was past her bedtime. I couldn’t even tell her to go home and bug her actual older sister.
    All I could do was answer her. “We’re going to the library.”
    Lexie waited patiently for me to elaborate.
    “I need to look something up.”
    “What something?” she asked softly, her dancing eyes ruining her attempt at sounding casual.
    “There’s a slight chance,” I said, knowing even as I spoke that telling her was a mistake, “that Mystery Boy killed someone. Or several someones.”
    Five voices echoed in my head.
    “You should have left Helen alone.”
    Who was Helen? Without saying another word, I started walking. “Come on,” I said. “I’ll fill you in on the way.”
    Lexie matched my pace and, as always, she said the first thing that came into her mind. “Lilah?”
    “Yeah?”
    “If there’s a slight chance Mystery Boy killed someone, what’s the chance that he’s going to kill somebody else?”
    Looking at her, I could tell she wanted an exact percentage, like 84.2 or 11.6, but I didn’t answer. At this point, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to know.

 
    10

    Kiss
    A kiss is never just a kiss.
    “Wow. You have broad shoulders. Do you play football?” Lexie didn’t give Brock a chance to answer. “I bet you play football,” she continued, and then, with a hugely conspicuous wink in my direction, she nodded to confirm her words. “He plays football.”
    Brock stared at Lexie, trying to wrap his mind around her mile-a-minute chatter and the fact that for some bizarre reason, I’d brought an eighth grader with me on our library “date.” Somehow, when I’d asked him to come, I hadn’t pictured him actually being there in the middle of everything. How was I going to do the research thing with Brock literally breathing (and, knowing him, wanting to do who knows what else) down my neck?
    “You’re Molly’s brother, right?” Lexie continued, blissfully unaware that Brock was in a state of chatter-induced shock. “Molly’s great.”
    “Uhhhh…thanks.”
    Lexie looked intently at Brock for a moment, and then she turned back to me. “I’m going to go work on the thing, ” she said. Lexie was more or less incapable of lying, a side effect of True Vision that made her the most unstealthy person ever to exist in the history of the world. Sometimes I wondered how she made it through her all-truth, all-the-time existence. It was a miracle that she didn’t have some kind of complex.
    “You two have fun,” Lexie instructed me seriously. With that, she was off to do something “good and researchy” with her Sight, and I was alone with Brock.
    “She wanted to come,” I said, playing with the tips of my hair.
    Brock, still a little shell-shocked, just nodded. I leaned my head toward him, and he snapped out of it, the edges of his lips curling upward into a slow smile. “Missed you today,” he said, leaning forward to pull me into a kiss.
    “I’m not dead, Princess.”
    Mystery Boy’s words echoed in my mind, and as Brock’s mouth covered mine, my lips tingled with the memory of the ghost’s kiss. I closed my eyes and my mind against any and all retrovisions in the near vicinity and tried my best to lose myself in my oh-so-hot boyfriend’s embrace. That endeavor lasted approximately three minutes, at which time I felt his tongue in the back of my throat.
    Carefully, I pulled myself back. Once upon a time, kissing Brock had been a dream. Now even the possibility of a Hollywood heel-popping moment was pretty much out of the question. Either his tongue had tripled in size, he’d totally lost his mojo, or I’d somehow lost mine. Sadly, given recent events, I couldn’t rule out the last explanation.
    “You okay, baby?” he asked, brushing the hair out of my face.
    I looked down. We’d been together so long that sometimes I forgot to expect him to ask things like that. Brock was all smiles and goofing off and declarations of my hotness. A