The Dead Girl's Wheel of Wish novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Nobody Spins for Her
In a packed lecture hall Jo snatches Roxanne's phone to stop her spinning the dead girl's wheel, and the class turns on her. A message from Corinna's account tells her to come to Bell Hall at 2:14.
At 8:40 on Thursday morning, two hundred students in Statistics 201 were watching a spinning wheel on the projector screen.
It had eight colored slices and one black arrow.
The slices said Money, Future, Beauty, Love, Health, Fame, Luck and Truth.
Nobody was looking at the professor, who hadn't come in yet.
It was the ninth day since Corinna Newcomb, the campus beauty, jumped off the roof of the humanities building.
It was the third day since the wheel had appeared on the campus forum.
The student body president stood at the front with a letter in his hand.
"Hollis Law called me Wednesday at seven in the morning," he said. "I spun Future on Tuesday night. They gave me a guaranteed seat."
The class clapped.
Brock VanDerpool sat on the lab bench next to him with his lacrosse jacket open.
"My dad won the state lottery Wednesday night," he said. "Five million. I spun Money that morning."
The class roared.
In the front row sat the girl who had shared a lab table with Corinna all year.
Last week she had weighed over two hundred pounds, and everyone had a name for her.
This morning she was thin, with a sharp jaw and clear skin, and people kept turning around to look at her.
"I spun Beauty," she said quietly. "I went to sleep and woke up like this."
Then Roxanne stood up.
Roxanne Rowe had been my best friend since the first week of freshman year.
She was wearing her mother's old denim jacket, and her eyes were already red.
"My mom's in the ICU at county," she said. "The doctors said weeks. I'm going to spin Health."
She held up her phone, with the wheel open on the screen.
The class went quiet for her, and then somebody started clapping.
I knew the seat the president was holding.
In February Corinna had shown me the letter on her bed, grinning, with her feet in my lap.
Hollis Law, a guaranteed first-year seat, Corinna Newcomb's name at the top.
Two weeks after the rumors started, the committee had reassigned it.
I reached over and took the phone out of Roxanne's hand.
"Jo," she said. "Give it back."
"No."
"Jo, it's my mom."
"Everything this wheel has given anybody was Corinna's," I said. "The seat was hers. Look at his letter."
Dane Whitlow folded the letter against his chest. "The committee made that decision, Jo. It has nothing to do with her."
"Then why does she have Corinna's cheekbones?"
I pointed at the girl in the front row.
She touched her own cheek and went white.
Brock stood up.
"Easy for Hartigan," he said, loud enough for the back rows. "Her mother's healthy and she's got nothing to lose."
Someone threw a pen.
"If Roxanne's mom dies, you killed her!" a boy yelled from the third row.
"Saint Jo, everybody," a girl said, and filmed me with her phone.
Four more phones went up, and then twenty.
Roxanne was crying openly now.
"Why are you doing this?" she asked. "Why would you take this from me? She was the kindest person I ever knew. She'd want me to have it."
I looked at her.
Her bag sat open on the desk, and a second phone lay inside it, a cheap one with a cracked screen.
It buzzed twice against the zipper.
She reached down and turned it face down without looking at it.
I had never seen that phone before.
I filed it away behind everything else, because two hundred people were still shouting.
"Nobody here knows what that wheel is," I said. "Corinna jumped off that building because every one of you piled on. And now you want to ask her for things."
"She's dead!" Brock shouted. "She can't hear you!"
The room laughed.
Under the shouting was a number I had been carrying for nine days.
2:14 a.m.
Corinna had called me from her own phone at 2:14 on the night she died.
I had been asleep after a double at the diner, with my phone on silent.
I saw the missed call at seven, and by then she was gone.
I had never told anyone.
So I put Roxanne's phone in my own pocket, turned my back on the room and walked out.
Behind me, two hundred people were still shouting my name.
In the stairwell my own phone buzzed.
It was a private message from a forum account I had never seen.
The username was Corinna_S.
The message was three lines long.
You didn't spin. Good.
Bell Hall. Tonight at 2:14.
Come alone.
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