Page 8 of Soul of Shadow #1

The Silver Shores High cafeteria looked more like a grand dining room than a place where students ate mini pizzas and Salisbury steak.

Gold trim ran along the ceiling. A fireplace loomed large and unlit in one corner.

Portraits of the school’s founders hung on the walls.

And massive windows let light stream inside, spilling over the hardwood tables.

But to Charlie, it was just where she ate lunch.

By the time she walked through the cafeteria’s entrance, a set of high openings in the wall with flowers engraved around their edges, Lou and Abigail were already seated at their usual table: the one in the far back left corner, right beside an arched window.

The girls stuck up their arms when they saw Charlie, waving her over as if she hadn’t known before she walked in where they would be.

She nodded at her friends. Then, before she could stop herself, her eyes flicked across the sea of cushioned benches and wooden tables to find where her brother always sat.

Mason was at the head of the table, as usual, laughing loudly at something one of his friends said. On the tray in front of him were spiced chicken nuggets and potato chips. Yet another difference between the two of them: she always brought lunch; he always bought.

His table was filled with the usual suspects: boys that had grown up at the Hudson household, running through their backyard covered in mud or generally causing havoc throughout the neighborhood.

They were all seniors now and had traded capture the flag and ghost in the graveyard for kegs of beer and handles of vodka.

But Charlie still saw them as she always had: young, mischievous, and more than happy to follow her older brother wherever he went.

But today there was a new member at the lunch table. A new boy sitting to Mason’s right, his back toward Charlie.

She didn’t have to see Elias’s face to know it was him. His hair—shaved around the sides, long and curly on top—stood out amid the sea of crew cuts and man buns. He sat lazily back on the bench, leaning all his weight onto one hand.

The school had been buzzing about him all morning.

Elias Everhart, as Charlie had since learned his last name was, had moved to Silver Shores from a town in eastern Michigan.

He was eighteen, single, hot as hell, and rumored to have a criminal record, though nobody could corroborate this rumor with any evidence.

Charlie shook her head and started to make her way across the cafeteria.

“What up, loser?” Lou said fondly when Charlie arrived. She patted the place beside her on the red cushioned bench. “We were just talking about you.”

“Oh?” Charlie set her brown paper bag on the table and climbed over the bench to sit down. “Do tell.”

“We were debating who you’ll ask to homecoming. ”

“Oh God.” Charlie rolled her eyes as she started pulling items out of her lunch bag: carrot sticks, apple slices, and a turkey-and-avocado sandwich. “Don’t start. I didn’t agree to anything.”

“Oh yes you did.” Lou picked up a piece of celery from Abigail’s tray and munched happily on it. “My money is on Eugene Powers.”

“ Eugene ?” Charlie stared at Lou in disbelief. “The same boy who used to try to trap squirrels during recess?”

“Oh, come on,” Lou said. “He’s changed.”

“She has a point.” Abigail swatted away Lou’s hand, which was going in for another piece of celery. “Eugene got hot this summer. Plus, he has, like, the best GPA in the school. Besides me, obviously.”

“If you like him so much,” Charlie said, tearing the crust off her turkey sandwich, “then you ask him.”

“Absolutely not. You know my rule: no fraternizing with the competition.”

“What about that Hinge girl you went to coffee with last week?” Lou asked. “Lana? There’s no rule that says you can’t bring someone from another school.”

“Cute, but not out of the closet to her family yet.” Abigail shrugged. “You know my rule about that , too.”

Abigail had been openly bisexual since long before she arrived in Silver Shores.

At her old school in New York, no one had made a big deal out of it.

The first time it came up in Silver Shores, however, a girl in the grade above them had looked at Abigail with wide, earnest eyes and said, “Wow, that is so brave of you.”

Abigail had burst into laughter .

“Oh, wait,” she’d said, covering her mouth apologetically when the girl hadn’t joined in. “That was serious?”

Her rule about not dating women who weren’t out of the closet came from a particularly awkward situation she’d experienced shortly after moving to Silver Shores.

What started as a few casual hookups with a girl Abigail met at a concert in Michigan City quickly turned into something serious.

Abigail updated Lou and Charlie almost every night on how things were progressing with Bunny Ears—their nickname for the girl, based on the light-up bunny-ear headband she’d been wearing when Abigail met her—and seemed really excited about where they were headed…

… right up until they ran into the girl’s mother at a coffee shop, and Bunny Ears loudly introduced Abigail as her “chemistry partner,” resulting in a twenty-minute-long investigation by the highly suspicious mother, who said she knew everyone in her daughter’s grade.

“Never again,” Abigail had sworn after breaking things off with Bunny Ears. And for over a year, she’d stuck to it, though Charlie always wondered if she’d break it if the right person came along.

“Besides,” Abigail said now, “I’d prefer to ask someone from Silver Shores. Gives me a better chance to vet them.” She swatted Lou’s hand away again. “And would you get your own lunch already?”

“I didn’t bring any money,” Lou said.

“You never bring any money,” Abigail pointed out.

Lou was a notorious cheapskate. It’s not that she couldn’t afford to buy her own lunch; her parents were both surgeons who supplied their daughter with a healthy allowance.

It’s just that Lou never seemed to spend any of it.

The girl would have a hundred-dollar bill in her pocket and still ask for five bucks to pay for her ice cream.

“I brought a second sandwich.” Charlie pulled another cling-wrapped bundle from her lunch bag and waved it in the air. She did this every day, and Lou always pretended to be surprised.

Lou clapped. “How fortuitous!”

Abigail shot her a look over her plastic box of crudités. “Do you even know what that means?”

“Of course I do.” Lou started unwrapping her sandwich. “Just because I don’t spend every night with my nose buried in a thesaurus the way you do—”

“It’s not a thesaurus ,” Abigail snapped. “It’s the Top 3500 High-Frequency Words for SAT , and I only look at it twice a week, not every night.”

“Is it tough to see from up there?” Lou asked. “On your high horse, I mean.”

“Listen,” Abigail said. “Back in New York—”

Charlie and Lou groaned in tandem.

Abigail had moved to Silver Shores during their freshman year, just three months after Sophie died.

Coming from New York City, she was furious that her parents had dragged her to, quote, “one of those cold, hairy armpits of America.” She loudly repeated that sentence to anyone who would listen on her first day at Silver Shores High School, a first impression that didn’t win her many friends.

When it came time for lunch that day, Abigail sat alone in the very back corner of the cafeteria.

Charlie would love to say that it had been her who suggested they keep Abigail company. But as usual, the decision wasn’t hers; it was Lou’s .

“Let’s sit next to the new girl,” said Lou, jutting her chin out at the back corner as she balanced the two sandwiches and an extra-large serving of sweet potato fries Charlie had gotten her on her tray. Lou was constantly, unfathomably hungry.

Charlie looked at the girl’s shoulders, hunched dismally downward as she stared out the window, a curtain of braids falling over one side of her face. “Really?”

“Sure,” said Lou. “Why not? Things are getting dull around here. We might as well add a third to our group.”

“What group?” Charlie asked. “It’s just you and me.”

In the three months since Sophie’s death, Lou had gently prodded at her best friend many times, trying to get her to branch out.

She’d invited other girls to join in on their hangs, girls who had been peripheral friends over the years, girls they’d invited to birthday parties or sat near on field trips, but with whom they never spent any time one-on-one.

Charlie knew that Lou was only trying to widen their social circle, to distract her best friend from her grief.

But it didn’t feel that way to Charlie. It felt like they were hosting tryouts.

Inviting girls to audition for the role of Replacement Sophie.

And Charlie couldn’t stomach it. She withdrew further into herself with every new girl who stepped into her living room.

Eventually, Lou stopped inviting other girls to hang out with them altogether.

But that afternoon was different. There was a certain gleam in Lou’s eyes, a determination.

“Why her?” Charlie asked.

“She seems cool,” said Lou. “When’s the last time someone moved here from New York City?

I’ll tell you when: never .” She pointed to the new girl’s table, and Charlie could tell she was gearing up for one of her soapbox speeches.

“Right now, people are intimidated by her. She’s new, she’s hot, she has a pierced nose, and she’s one of approximately ten people in this school whose skin isn’t the color of Santa Claus’s ass crack.

Soon enough, people will get over their intimidation and realize exactly how cool she is.

If we want to befriend her, we need to strike now . ”

Charlie hesitated, chewing her bottom lip. Lou was right; it would be fun to befriend someone who hadn’t lived on the same block as her their whole life. Still…