Pascal's eyes flicker for a moment, and then he chuckles. "Dude, you really have no idea. I'll have her if I want her. And there's nothing you can do about it." He calls over to Peregrine, "Hey, who invited this douche up here anyhow?"

"He's with Eveny!" Peregrine singsongs, breaking away from her make-out session long enough to smirk at me. "I told her it was a bad idea."

Pascal turns back to me. "Way to go, Eveny. We have a firm no douchebag rule in the Hickories."

"Then how do you manage to eat lunch here every day?" I ask evenly.

His face darkens for a moment, long enough to make me feel uneasy, but then he laughs. "Touche," he says. "But seriously, babe. You can't just let commoners up here." He turns to Liv and adds, "Although you're welcome anytime. Preferably with fewer clothes on."

He shoots Drew a challenging look, but I put a hand on Drew's chest and say, "Don't."

Drew appears to relax after a moment, turning to Liv. "I've been meaning to ask you: would you be my date to the Mardi Gras Ball?"

Liv turns pink. Her eyes dart to me for a second and then back to Drew. "For real?" she squeaks.

Drew grins at her. "I'd love to take you."

"I mean, I guess, yeah, that would be fine." She's trying to play it cool, but when her eyes meet mine, I can see her fighting a grin.

"Oh, puke," Pascal says, rolling his eyes. "Eveny, you want to be my date to the ball?"

"Not a chance," I reply sweetly.

On the walk back to class after lunch, as Drew and Max head toward the north wing of the building, Liv catches up with me, grabs my hand, and asks, "So did you hear Drew ask me to the ball?"

I nod and give her hand a squeeze before letting go. "That's awesome."

"You think?" Her brow creases with worry. "What if he was just asking me to piss off Pascal?"

"He wasn't. He likes you."

"How can you be so sure?"

"I just am," I tell her.

She grins. "So how about you? Do you think you'll go to the dance?"

Caleb flits across my mind, but I dismiss the thought. If I'd had any hope that we could get around the protector rule, it was dashed last night, when Caleb swore me off then literally ran away. "Probably not," I say.

"You shouldn't miss out on it," Liv says. "What if you and Max go together? As friends, I mean."

"Maybe," I say. "I'll probably just skip it."

Liv looks disappointed but switches tacks. "So that was weird today, huh? In the Hickories?"

I laugh. "That's a pretty normal day up there."

She wrinkles her nose and shakes her head as the bell rings. "They all creep me out. Those cookie-cutter girls and those guys who don't seem to think for themselves-"

"So what's going on with Drew's band?" I interrupt her brightly.

She stares at me for a minute. "You're changing the subject."

"Yeah, you caught that," I say with a smile.

She laughs. "All right, have it your way." And as she starts to tell me about a gig they're trying to book in New Orleans, and a producer who's expressed some interest in them, I relax into the conversation and appreciate what it's like to talk to someone whose life isn't already prewritten.

My cell rings at five thirty that evening, startling me. I'd been poring over my mother's herb journal, trying to memorize the plants, roots, and potions that seemed most important to her. Lemon for protection. Blackberry to send evil back to enemies who try to inflict it upon you. Wormwood to prevent car accidents. Bayberry for good health. Chia seed to quell gossip.

I reach for my phone and see Liv's name on the caller ID.

"What are you doing right now?" she asks after I've said hello.

I look at my mother's journal, open on my lap to a hand-drawn sketch of a zandara doll. "Not much," I tell her.

"Good," she says. "Come out with me and Drew, then."

"You and Drew?"

She's silent for a minute. "He just called and asked me to dinner tonight. I already had plans with Max, and I don't want to just bail on him."

"Sooo . . . ," I prompt.

"So could you be Max's platonic date for the night? It would really help me a lot. Plus," she adds, "I kind of want to get your read on whether Drew's actually into me. Please come?"

I'm about to say no, but then I think about Meredith and how different Liv is from the girl I'd always thought of as my best friend. Liv may not approve of everything in my life- and I can't exactly blame her for disliking the Dolls-but she's never been unsupportive of me. I've only known her for a few weeks, and I realize that already, the friendship I have with her means more to me than the one Meredith is so casually tossing aside. I owe it to her to have her back.

I close my book and push it to the side. "Okay, I'm in."

"Woo-hoo!" she cheers on the other end of the line. "You rock, Eveny. I owe you one. Can you meet us at Cajun Eddie's at seven? It's out in the Peripherie, and it's Drew's favorite."

"Sure," I agree. I check my watch. I know Liv's not thinking about the fact that I don't have a car, and I don't want to bug her while she's getting ready for a date. The weather's supposed to be nice out, and I should have enough daylight left to ride my bike. "Just text me the address."

"You're the best!" she says before hanging up.

I cast one last reluctant glance at the herb book. As I head to the bathroom to put on some makeup for my "date" with Max, I'm repeating some of my mother's favorite herbs in my head in an attempt at memorization.

I've just started applying tinted moisturizer when my cell rings again. Drew's name flashes on the screen, so I pick up. "I hear we're doing dinner in an hour," I say.

"Word travels fast. Liv said you're meeting us, but I know you don't have a car. Want me to come get you?"

I pause. "You don't have to," I tell him. I don't want Liv to get the wrong idea if I show up with Drew.

"I don't mind," he says. "How else would you get here, anyhow?"

"Bike?" I venture.

He laughs. "I'm not making you ride your bike all the way to the Peripherie when it'll barely take me any time to swing by your place."

I'm ready to go ten minutes later in a black tank maxidress and a striped cardigan with ballet flats. While I wait for Drew, I boot up my laptop and check my email, which I haven't done in days. Along with a few dozen junk messages and a bunch of ads for Sephora, Glamour magazine, and some online bookstores, there are a few forwarded chain emails from Meredith, which I delete instantly, and a note from a guy named Ross I had a few classes with back in New York asking whether I want to go see a movie with him. I laugh out loud at that; a date with a guy who hasn't even noticed I'm gone doesn't sound like the best idea.

I check the time and see that I still have a couple of minutes, so I pull up Google and enter LSU newspaper into the search box. It sends me to the site of The Daily Reveille, the official school paper. I enter Carrefour into the search engine and am relieved when nothing comes up. Then I type in murdered + fraternity, and one result, from earlier today, is returned. I click on the article and begin to read.

The body of a Louisiana State University senior was found early Sunday afternoon in the Fantome Swamp region of Louisiana, about an hour outside Baton Rouge, after Louisiana State Police received a call from the man's fraternity brother Sunday morning. I nearly drop my laptop when I get to the next line: Blake Montoire, 21, a member of the Lambda Delta Epsilon fraternity, was stabbed several times before his car was stolen, police say.

Blake Montoire was the name of guy who was talking to me at Peregrine's party, the guy who tried to walk me home before Caleb stepped in. But the grainy photo featured on the website doesn't match the person I met, except for the glasses, which can only mean one thing: I was talking to Blake's killer. Worse, he'd seemed overly interested in getting to know me.

"Eveny?" Aunt Bea's voice from the door startles me. I look up to see her staring at me suspiciously. "What were you reading?"

"School assignment," I lie as I quickly shut the computer.

"You look awfully freaked out for an assignment," she says.

"Math scares me," I say as innocently as possible. I know that if I tell her what's going on, she'll insist we leave Carrefour. But if I go, the town will have no chance of surviving now that Main de Lumiere has gotten in.

Like it or not, this is my fate. And I have no choice but to face it head-on.

23.

Ishoot Peregrine and Chloe a quick text telling them that I saw the probable killer-the fake Blake Montoire-then I shut off my phone and try to forget about zandara and death for the evening.

Drew arrives at 6:45 on the dot, and when I open the door, he grins. "You look real pretty," he says. Once we're in his pickup, he turns to me. "You know I wanted to ask you out, right? When you first got back to town?"

"What? No!"

He gives me a look as we rumble down the hill. "What'd you think that invitation to the crawfish boil was?"

"I thought it might be a date," I admit. "But then you kind of acted like we were just friends."

"Admittedly, I don't have the smoothest mackin'-on-theladies moves," he says.

"Mackin'-on-the-ladies moves?" I repeat, stifling a laugh.

"Fine, so maybe I'm not good at talking about my moves either," he concedes. "But then you came to my show, and I figured, hey, girls go for musicians, right? But you disappeared with Caleb Shaw before I could do anything."

"I'm sorry," I say. I want to explain to Drew that our shared history makes him feel more like a brother to me. But I have the feeling that'll only make things worse.

Before I can say anything, he says, "I guess I was stupid to think you could like someone from my side of town."

"That's not it at all!" I say instantly. "Look, if I did anything to hurt your feelings-"

He cuts me off. "I wasn't trying to make you feel bad, Eveny. I was just saying that I'm glad. I mean, it worked out the way it was supposed to. I hadn't really thought of Liv like that, but then I kept running into her because of you, and . . ." He shrugs and says, "Well, anyway, I'm really happy she said yes to going with me to the Mardi Gras Ball."

"She's a great girl," I tell him.

We're halfway out to the Peripherie when I finally ask the question that's been on my mind since Caleb mentioned it. "Before she died, were you dating Glory Jones?"

Drew looks at me in surprise. "Where'd you hear that?"

"It doesn't matter," I say. "And I don't care if you were. I just want to know."

"No," he says after a pause. "But we were friends. Really good friends, actually."

"So why did you act like you barely knew her at her funeral?"

"Because I promised her I'd keep our friendship a secret. I'm still trying to honor that, Eveny, so I'd appreciate if you didn't say anything to the Dolls." There's bitterness in his voice, but there's pain there too. "You know about the line between people from central Carrefour and the Peripherie."

"If she liked you, if you two were friends, she should have been open about it. People would have had to be okay with it."

"I used to tell her that. But it meant a lot to me to have her in my life at all. I don't have a lot of good friends, and I didn't want to hurt her by making Peregrine and Chloe turn their backs on her because of me."

"You really think they would have done that?" But I know the answer to my own question. They treated people from the Peripherie like sources of power, not human beings.

"Peregrine and Chloe aren't the people you think they are, Eveny," Drew says. "They're not nice, they're not good people, and I think they were ruining Glory's life. She died before I had a chance to figure out how to help her."

"You must miss her."

"Sure I do," he says. "All the time. But we were from two different worlds." He clears his throat and adds, "Kind of like you and me."

"I'm not from a different world than you," I say instantly.

"Could have fooled me, with that big mansion of yours."

"I'm sorry," I say, but I'm not even sure what I'm apologizing for. "I'm not like them, you know. The Dolls, I mean."

Drew glances at me as he turns onto a side street in the Peripherie, but he doesn't reply.

The silence between us stretches long and thick until we pull up to the restaurant, which is in a far corner of the Peripherie, close enough to the town wall that you can see the bricks and stones that separate us from the outside world. "Welcome to Cajun Eddie's," Drew says as he puts his truck in park and turns off the engine. "You're going to love this place. Best jambalaya on the planet."

Liv and Max are already waiting by the hostess stand, and although a flicker of worry crosses Liv's face when she sees me and Drew arrive together, she relaxes when I hug her and whisper in her ear, "He talked about you the whole way here."

Twenty minutes later, I'm staring down at the first bowl of jambalaya I've ever ordered.

"You've got shrimp, chicken, andouille sausage, onions, peppers, celery, and all sorts of amazing Cajun spices," Liv explains enthusiastically as she eyes the piping hot mixture on my plate.

"Go ahead," Drew says, smiling at me as he pushes my glass of water toward me. "Try it. But it's gonna make you thirsty."

As I take my first bite, my taste buds tingle with the assault of flavors. But I have to admit, it's smoky and delicious.

The others dig into their own meals: fried oysters for Drew, a blackened fish sandwich for Max, and a Caesar salad for Liv, who nibbles nervously while looking at Drew out of the corner of her eye. Relax, I mouth to her when Drew's distracted by a debate with Max over the merits of the Beatles versus the Rolling Stones. He likes you.