Hello and Welcome to the Fall 2019 YA Scavenger Hunt!
I’m Heather Reid. Author of WHEN DARKNESS WHISPERS and your host for this leg of the Purple Team Hunt!
Go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page to find out all about the hunt. There are SIX contests going on simultaneously, and you can enter one or all! I am a part of the PURPLE TEAM–but there is also a red team, a gold team, an orange team, a red team, and an indie team for a chance to win a whole different set of books!
If you’d like to find out more about the hunt, see links to all the authors participating, and see the full list of prizes up for grabs, go to the YA Scavenger Hunt page.
Chapter One
“Haley, right? Can I sit here?”
Her near-whisper registers just as I’m putting in my earbuds—I guess Frank Sinatra will have to wait. Here stands at the threshold of my domain, a prayer of asylum on her lips, another lost soul.
And boy, is she ever lost.
Her dye job—assuming shoe polish counts as “dye”—is only slightly worse than the short-and-chunky cut she’s sporting. A five year old with safety scissors could do better. Ask my sister, Vanessa! She may never forgive my contribution to her second grade class photo.
Ah, memories.
Between the butchered mop and Gap-does-goth attire, it takes me about five seconds to recognize Evelyn—Ev for short, because Ev is a Have. You know, those kids, the ones who have everything: shiny blonde curls, pom-poms, faux-indie boyfriends, and cute monosyllabic nicknames. Well, so much for the curls. Now why is she standing here, lunch tray in hand, looking nervous, of all things, asking if she can sit at the loser table?
I mean, besides the obvious. No one can sit here without my permission, so if she’s going to sit here at all, she has to ask me.
But why sit here at all? Our circa-1975 orange-and-white folding table with attached plastic stools is by far the least-comfortable place to sit in the entire school. During a big renovation a few years back, the school board failed to approve replacement tables and chairs for our gigantic new cafeteria. When the remodel was finished, Olympus High had a nice beige-and-chocolate lunchroom with navy blue accents—and tables a Crayola-perfect shade of burnt umber. The school board finally agreed to replace the tables as they broke, so when my brother, Aaron, was a freshman and the first of the replacements arrived, wood-topped and sporting padded chairs, his class made it their goal to “accidently” break every old table by the time they got their diplomas.
I claimed the last one standing on the first day of my own freshman year. It tilts and wobbles like crazy when anyone sits down on the (now, semi-attached) stools, and it’s as good at spilling your food as holding it. The rusty joints shriek like a wounded animal when the janitor folds it up each day and Brian has to patch it from time to time with his battery-powered soldering iron. I don’t know what I’ll do when he graduates. Our table is an eyesore and a nuisance and probably a safety hazard, too.
It is wonderful.
But even if it gave the janitor tetanus, this rickety deathtrap would not be my domain without my minions. People may think they avoid the loser table for their safety, but I know the truth: they stay away for their souls. It’s not a place for geek cliques or nerd herds. The chess team? AcaDeca? Orch-dorks?
Amateurs.
At the west end of my table sits a guy so socially inept he was banished from his Dungeons & Dragons playgroup for being too into it. Three stools down is a girl who wears a Starfleet Academy uniform to school every day. In addition to soldering table joints, Brian knows just about everything there is to know about electronics, but he’s obsessed with technological arson and got himself kicked out of computer club three times before they made it permanent. And then there’s my enforcer, Paul—the poet who would fit right in with the ankh-wearing hemophiles except that he’s enormously fat, has a head of curly ginger hair, and his mom—no seriously, his mom—dresses him in hideously vibrant sweater-vests every day.
I could go on.
We are the cream of the spoiled-milk crop. So one of the Haves—even on a bad hair day—sashaying over and asking if she can sit with us? Not what you’d call an “everyday occurrence.”
I study her, trying to figure out if this is some kind of joke. If it is, she’s gone to serious lengths to pull it off. But there’s something about the way her eyes refuse to meet mine, the way her shoulders hunch forward—as if to make herself smaller than her already-dainty five-foot-two. She’s asked to enter my domain, the way they all ask, because they know I’m in charge, even though they don’t really understand. And it isn’t as simple as they think. Once they sit here, they’re mine. My minions. My responsibility. And I take that responsibility very seriously.
Do I want a Have in my flock? I can say no—she’d walk away and then this weird transformation wouldn’t be my problem. It’s on the tip of my tongue. After all, I have nine minions already, when no one is absent with hay fever or a midnight-launch-party hangover. Ten feels like too many. Double digits.
She finally meets my gaze, dark brown eyes pleading for me to say yes. Eyes that have never had to plead for anything before—well, anything more substantial than daddy’s credit card. I admit, this bizarre turn of events has me intrigued. I lean back in my chair—the only upholstered one, at the head of the table—and gesture widely with my right hand, taking in the whole group. “Sure thing, Ev. Welcome to the social underworld.”
And don’t forget to enter the contest for a chance to win a ton of books by me, Aprilynne Pike, and more! To enter, you need to know that my favorite number is 17. Add up all the favorite numbers of the authors on the Purple Team and you’ll have all the secret code to enter for the grand prize!