My Dearest Darkest by Kayla Cottingham

Author:Kayla Cottingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2022-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

Selena didn’t hear from Finch for the rest of the weekend. She tried to send a few texts, but they all went unanswered. After their unsuccessful plea to Kyra and the other girls about Nerosi, along with everything that had happened at the party, Selena figured she just needed some space.

She did, however, hear from Simon, who was wondering how much she knew about Tunger Hall.

“Where I lived for two years? The quarantined dorm? Of course I know Tunger.” Selena said as they sat in her bedroom. Technically, boys weren’t allowed in rooms at Ulalume, but Selena and her friends had a bit of leeway with the lighthouse, seeing as they didn’t exactly have a housemother to enforce the rules.

Simon nodded. “Do you remember how Victor’s mom talked about his girlfriend, Margo, and showed us some of her drawings? I dug through some old Ulalume room records and found out she lived there. You’ve said Tunger has lots of places to hide stuff, so maybe we can find something.”

This was true—Selena, Amber, and Kyra used to keep their booze stashed in the drop ceiling tiles above their beds. One time, they’d decided to explore their ceiling and found a bunch of weird stuff with labels from the 1990s. The girls across the hall from them even mentioned that they’d found old marionettes in their ceiling, and everyone in Tunger kept joking they had a puppet curse. Still, it was tradition to hide stuff up there, and it was entirely possible Margo could have left something.

“Do you know which room she lived in?” Selena asked.

He shook his head. “No, but the records mentioned it was a single, and based on the dorm blueprints, singles only fit up against the elevators. So we can try the rooms on either side of those on each floor.”

“You do know that Tunger is entirely off-limits to students, right?” Selena said, but she was already smiling.

“Not if you go through the tunnels,” Simon corrected.

He jokingly elbowed Selena in the ribs, flexing his eyebrows, and saying, “Eh? Eh?” She did the same until they were smacking each other’s arms like they had when they were kids, giggling. Simon whipped around and tickled her, and she involuntarily smacked him in the face so hard it stung her palm. They both just stared at each other for another minute before Simon cussed Selena out, and she laughed out a halting apology as she gasped for breath.

“Can I say something?” Simon eyed her sideways. “Sometimes I feel like I…miss you. It sounds kinda stupid, but I miss talking to you and not…Ulalume Selena.”

“What, like I’m two different people?”

Simon shook his head. “No. But you act so different around your Ulalume friends. You’re all mean and shitty like they are, and it sucks because you’re not actually like that. Every time we come back from Boston after the summer you change again.”

Selena wanted to snap and correct him, but she paused. He was right. She was different back home—every summer when

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