I didn't see Dominic over the next few days, and that was probably for the best. I had nothing to say to him. He thought he knew me as a person because of one thing I said, but what did I have to be sorry for? That comment wasn't meant for him, and he knew it.
If he didn't like it, he could just stop giving in to that stupid feeling that always knew where I was for no reason at all. It wasn't my problem.
It seemed like the responsibility of everything that went wrong over the past few months had fallen on the talisman, and it was possible that this did too. There was no way that someone who claimed that I was too emotional and shortsighted would drop everything based on a stupid feeling unless he was a hypocrite and nothing more.
Dominic didn't know me. Why did he think he knew everything?
Before I could answer my own question, Sierra walked into the room and slammed the door behind her. "Not to be dramatic, but my life is falling apart real fast."
I looked up from the talisman in my hand. "Tell me about it."
"I will." She shook her head and threw her backpack onto her bed. Wasn't it clear that I was agreeing with her and not actually inviting her to tell me more? "I got so caught up in that stupid-ass talisman of yours that I literally got a thirty-three on my calc quiz. Can you believe that?"
"Sierra, it's not that big of a deal. They're not going to kick you out of school for one bad quiz grade," I said.
"I know it doesn't mean anything to you, but when I see that, all I can hear in my head is failure."
"You're not a failure. If you're a failure, what does that make me?"
She paused for a moment. "We can be failure buddies. I know we haven't always gotten along, but I think we're a lot more alike than we think."
"Because we're both failures?"
She nodded. "No offense."
I let out a laugh. "Of course. That's all you and I will ever be."
It wasn't the first time I heard that, and maybe there was a little bit of truth to it, but what was I supposed to do? Let the talisman win so I could lose again?
After one bad grade, Sierra convinced herself that she was a part of my club. But this club wasn't that easy to get into. Our password sure as hell wasn't failure. It was scapegoat.
"I know you were just trying to protect my feelings the other day. I appreciate that," Sierra said.
When did we switch topics? I wasn't done pretending I wasn't mad about the failure thing.
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"With Dominic texting you while we were at Jack's band thing. I guess that's my sign to finally give up and get over this stupid thing, isn't it?" she said.
"What?"
"Oh, don't play dumb, Lindsay. He couldn't be any more obvious that he likes you."
Sierra had never heard what he said to me, though. He didn't like anything about me besides my collarbone, and I couldn't fault him for that.
"I can generally tell that kind of stuff, and I'm one-hundred percent sure he doesn't. He hates me," I said. "But you definitely should give up. He's a jackass anyway."
Sierra laughed. "He is, isn't he? I really need a new type."
"You do. He literally drove to Harvey's place to tell me why he doesn't like me."
Sierra laughed again. "Was that really the reason?"
"Well, I whined until he told me, but he's always trying to make sure I know that he thinks he's better than me." I shook my head. "I'm not stupid. I just don't care about anything except the talisman anymore."
"Well, maybe you should care a little bit about school since that's the reason you're here."
I smiled. "That's funny."
Sierra didn't reply to that. Instead, she sat down on her bed.
I didn't say anything to her. She wasn't going to change my mind, and I wasn't going to change hers.
"You know, instead of hiding what you're really thinking, if you wear your heart on your sleeve, people have fewer blanks to fill in for themselves with whatever information they want. It's easier that way," she said.
"I don't really care how people fill in the blanks of my personality. I know what's true about me," I said and rubbed my thumb over the branched pattern of the talisman. "That's easier than letting everyone in."
Sierra paused, and it was quiet enough in the building that I could hear her sigh. I had heard enough of those to know that she was disappointed in me.
"You want to go see if we can find anything else with the metal detector?" I asked.
"I should probably try to catch up on the material that I missed on the calc quiz," she said.
"The beeping noise when you find something is really satisfying." I smiled. "Come on, Sierra."
"The talisman doesn't like me, remember? Any time I got too close to where you and Jack found it, it rained."
"Then we won't go to the pond. There's nothing else there anyway. We checked," I said.
"Where would we go? People might see us just about anywhere else."
"They wouldn't find us in the woods beyond the pond."
"Can I use the metal detector?"
My heart dropped into my stomach. "What? No."
"Then I'm not going."
"You can use the shovel. That's fun too."
"Shovels don't beep, Lindsay."
For God's sake. "I'm aware of that fact. I just can't afford anything happening to the metal detector."
"You think I'll break it?"
"Well, you do have a history of taking my stuff and refusing to give it back until I specifically ask for it."
Sierra let out a long sigh. "Fine. I'll use the stupid shovel."
"Excellent. We'll stop by Dr. Reed's office first, and then we'll see what we can find."
"Dr. Reed's office? Why do we need to go there?"
"Just to check in probably. I usually just go in there and see if she has anything to tell me, really." I paused. "She only gets mad at me sometimes."
Sierra didn't argue with that, and with the metal detector in an unlabeled box and a trowel hidden in Sierra's jacket, we headed across campus to see Dr. Reed. The door to her office was already open with a smoky smell escaping from it, and I peeked inside to see her sitting at her desk with a cigarette.
"You here with the asthmatic kid?" she asked.
I shook my head. "Nope. Just Sierra."
She put out her cigarette anyway and waved us in. "Shut the door behind you. Ashley from across the hall always gets pissed when I smoke in here."
I couldn't imagine why.
"I assume these are all stolen too," Sierra said and pointed to the ashtray on Dr. Reed's desk.
I wasn't sure why Sierra thought she could lecture Dr. Reed on stealing things, but there was a little bit of a difference between borrowing a roommate's belongings without asking and taking home a piece of someone else's history.
Dr. Reed took in a breath and put her feet up on the corner of the desk. "Why don't you get a Ph.D., and then you can criticize me?"
She could probably get that degree taken away from her for taking the artifacts, but she already knew that. She could also get in big trouble for helping me, so it was better for me to keep my mouth shut.
She kept a lot of acquired items from her specialty location of Titris Hoyuk in Turkey, but I hadn't noticed the plant in the corner of the room behind her desk the times I was in her office before. It was possible that she had just gotten it, but who would buy a dying spider plant?
Maybe I could fix that up for her. I took the talisman out of my back pocket. I probably needed a safer spot to carry it around with me like a fanny pack. No one could snatch it from a fanny pack.
Give this spider plant some extra life to survive in Dr. Reed's polluted office.
In a few days, I would check back on the plant to make sure it worked.
"You got the talisman with you?" Dr. Reed asked.
"Almost always," I said.
"She's paranoid about it. I took it for good luck once before we even knew it actually had powers, and now I'm not allowed to be alone in the same room with it," Sierra said.
"Smart." Dr. Reed put her feet back down on the ground. "Was there anything you wanted to discuss, or are you just wasting my lunch?"
"You weren't doing anything when we came in here," Sierra said.
"Do you think I keep this figure by eating lunch? Not at my age." Dr. Reed laughed.
I figured it was the smoking that kept her thin, or maybe exercise, or even good genes. I wasn't quite vain enough to get the logic of skipping the best part of the day: food.
Sierra looked over at me with her eyebrows raised and chin tilted down.
"You'll understand when you lose your metabolism," Dr. Reed continued. "If you're looking for answers about the talisman, I don't have any more than I did last week."
"Then we'll leave you to your lunch, I guess," I said.
She watched us as we left, and as soon as the door closed, Sierra turned to me as we continued out the building.
"Every time we talk to her, the more I realize she's absolutely crazy. How did you pick her to be the professor involved with the talisman?"
I laughed. "That's exactly why. She's not going to make me do the right thing and turn it in to someone who won't believe that there's really something magical about this thing."
"You didn't believe it for a while either," Sierra said.
"Well, no, but now I do. And I sure as heck don't want it to fall into hands that aren't mine. Could you imagine what someone else could do with this?"
"You gave a guy a heart attack, Lindsay."
"That wasn't my fault," I muttered. "How many times do I have to explain that?"
Past the pond where Jack and I found the talisman was the forest where Dr. Reed tried to help me learn how to control the magic (with little to no success). Sierra made sure to avoid the area where the talisman made it rain when she got too close, and with a small, discrete shovel tucked away in her jacket, she followed right behind me.
"A magical forest. How cute is that?" She giggled to herself. "You really should let me help you with the talisman stuff more often. It's like we're in a movie with all of this."
The talisman certainly made her more interested in me and what I was doing more than in the rest of the time we spent as roommates, and I was sure that she was looking for something from me. For a whole year, she took my things without asking or talking to me or doing anything besides being annoying.
I couldn't say anything about it, though. I had dug up the talisman somewhat illegally, and I was supposed to know better.
"The forest isn't magical. Believe me, if it was, I would've learned how to use this stupid thing correctly by now," I said.
"So where do you want to search?" Sierra asked.
"Well, when we found the talisman, I just knew that there was something in the pond that I was supposed to find, so I'm waiting for that feeling again."
I was also waiting to get the feeling back in my arms. The box with the metal detector was pretty heavy.
"Feelings? I get those all the time," Sierra said.
"I don't want those kinds of feelings, Sierra. It's different, almost like a—" I thought for a moment. "It's not like the upset feeling in your stomach when you screw something up or the ache in your throat when you're about to cry. It's everything, and it feels so—"
"That's a lack of serotonin, sis."
I shook my head. "It's not that. The feelings that Dominic and I get from the talisman are different, and they're not exactly bad or empty. It's just weird."
"Wait, both of you?"
I nodded.
"But he wasn't even there when you and Jack dug it up," Sierra said. "He wasn't, right?"
"No, but he was the one who told me where the pond is," I said.
"And how did he find it?"
I shrugged. "He said it's not a secret. People just don't like the mosquitoes there."
"And they don't bother him?"
I thought for a moment. "I guess not."
"Do you know what that means?"
"He's not a vampire or demon or whatever you think, Sierra."
"I don't think you should rule those options out so quickly. Remember the good old days when neither one of us believed in talismans?" she asked.
The only thing that wouldn't surprise me was if Jack was actually a really tall leprechaun, so I didn't even respond to that.
"You know what?" I set down the box with the metal detector. "This seems like a really good place to see if we can find anything."
It was a little dark and cool under the clouds and shade of the trees, and I took out the metal detector and turned it on. I took a step forward and waved the detector around for a second. No sound came from it, so I continued forward until it let out a beep by a tree.
A hit?
"Was that the beep? Did you find something?" Sierra asked.
"I guess I did. Here, dig here." I moved the metal detector out of the way, and Sierra stuck the trowel into the damp ground. It didn't move much earth, but when she tossed something circular and solid behind her, I realized that the trowel did the job.
I pulled another metallic circle out of the ground, but this one was smaller than the talisman. I wiped away the mud on the surface and uncovered a dull silver design on it.
"That's the same design as the one on the talisman. I drew it out so I wouldn't forget it," Sierra said. "Can I keep this one?"
"No."
"But you already have one. It's only fair if I get to have this one."
"I'll give it to you when you find the brown knit cardigan you borrowed from me last winter," I said. I knew damn well she still had it somewhere.
"Fine." She paused for a moment. "We should probably keep this second finding between you and me, right? It doesn't look exactly the same as the talisman, but I'm pretty sure we're not supposed to be metal detecting out here. It could be valuable too."
I nodded. "I'll try my best to keep my mouth shut until we can see if this one has powers too."
"You'll try your best? You keep your mouth shut so well that I don't even know where you're from," Sierra said.
And that was the way we were going to keep it. All that mattered was our new silver shiny coin.
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Hello everyone! Happy 2021! Thank you so much for reading (and waiting on this chapter. I had the world's most irritating sinus infection, and it's finally starting to clear up now)! I figured the least I could do was post this a few days early.
So where do you think this new discovery is going to take Lindsay? Do you think it'll be like her talisman or something else?