What would you trade your soul for?
The answer is simple for Jessa: nothing. Life isn't perfect, but it's pretty good with her best friend Taylor at her side.
But everything changes when the Devil--disguised as an attractive high school girl--comes...
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Lana Gibbons was not in class on Tuesday.
For a brief moment, I considered the possibility that I had hallucinated her entire existence. But then Ms. Morgan called her name during roll call and my fantasy shattered.
Still, I couldn't complain too much. Even though I still couldn't remember her, I preferred that she wasn't around. Something about her made my skin crawl.
"Here," I said, passing Taylor a Tupperware container as we left home room. "It's not a muffin, but I thought you might like some of these."
"What are they?" she said, peering through the blue-tinted plastic.
"Christmas cookies." My mother seemed to realize sometime last evening that we did not need ten dozen Christmas cookies. She had packaged most of them into small Tupperware containers and pawned them off on Mallory, my dad, and me. She said she was going to send the rest to Evan in a care package, but I doubted that even my brother could eat that much.
"In October?" Taylor asked, pulling out a snowflake before passing the box back to me. She took a bite and her eyes widened. "Wow, these are sweet. Where'd you get them from?"
"My mom," I said. "She went into this weird baking mode yesterday." I rubbed my face. "But that's not the only weird thing that happened. Lana showed up at my house."
"Didn't she say she was going to do that?" Taylor said, finishing the cookie and pulling out her phone.
"Yes, but she was being so weird. She kept asking me questions, like where I wanted to go to college and if I ever got jealous of Mal and Evan and wanted them to go away, and..."
I trailed off because I realized that Taylor was no longer paying attention. She was looking down at her phone with a grin on her face.
"Taylor? Are you listening?"
She jolted upright, then blushed. "Sorry. I'm the worst." She slipped her phone away. "What were you saying?"
I ignored her question and pointed at her pocket. "What were you looking at?"
"It's nothing," she said, her eyes flitting to a poster tacked on someone's locker. "Just this art forum I post on sometimes."
"Oh. Is it like Deviantart?"
"Sort of. It's a new social media site for artists. You can post your artwork and get feedback, but it can also pair you up with people who live locally if you want to meet up and work on projects together. I posted some of my portfolio pieces to get feedback before I submit them to art schools. And I've been getting some nice comments."
I almost snorted. "You're amazing. You don't need people on the internet to tell you that."
She laughed. "Thanks Jessa. But it's still nice to hear it from someone besides you."
I pressed my hand to my chest in mock disappointment. "But I'm your biggest fan!"
"You're right. You're my biggest fan and I'm being a terrible friend by not listening to you," Taylor said, waving off the topic and getting back to business. "So what was Lana asking you yesterday?"
