For ten days, he looks. He goes to class, he works when he has to, he finds his way to the trail where she woke up, hoping she’ll be there again. Maybe she’ll walk toward him, wearing her ass-kicking boots and a stolen uniform that’s too big.
He considers telling someone that she’s missing, but then realizes there’s nobody to tell. No one even notices that the pretty girl with the unsettling eyes and snow-colored hair is gone.
Finally, he can’t take the dorm, the school, the shed, any of it. Every single wall is imprinted with her shape, her willowy shadow. He bursts from the grounds on his single speed, blowing powdered snow and slush over the sidewalk as he takes off.
Legs pumping, heart racing, blood so hot so hot so hot in his legs, his chest, his grip so tight he can feel electric pulses of pain up and down his newly healed arm.
He jumps from curbs and trucks, train cars and the cables between. He rides over an icy rope bridge he’s never been able to balance on before, along a narrow train track and slips only twice. The sound of the train as it roars down the track, closer and closer, only makes him see more clearly, breathe freer. Feel alive. He does backflips he shouldn’t. He rides until his outsides feel as battered as his insides.
He tries to pretend that he’s not looking in every shadow for her. He decides it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. Death lingers in cars, in quiet school buildings, and beneath the freezing earth. Death is everywhere, but his ghost is gone.
When he makes it back to his room in the thick of the night, he’s bruised and covered in scrapes. He suspects one of his ribs is cracked, but he’s alive and Lucy is only a memory.
Chapter 16 HER
LUCY HOVERS ON THE EDGE OF A DREAM WHEN the air seems to change around her. Behind her eyes it’s been wonderfully dark, but it’s so simple to lift her lids, let in the dull sunrise that creeps into the room. Colin is there, sleeping and warm. Somehow in the night they’ve changed places. She’s behind him with arms wrapped around his ribs.
“Are you working breakfast?” She glances at the clock. It’s already seven. “You’re going to be late.”
He rolls over so fast it’s jarring, his eyes full of terror and relief. And fury.
“Lucy.”
Fury?
He grabs her, pulling her to him so fast that she gasps as he presses his face into her neck. She closes her eyes, and the rapid beat of his heart moves through him and into her, vibrating her silent, empty chest, and she feels so full, almost carbonated. He makes a sound of frustration, almost a howl, as if he can’t hold her tight enough, can’t wrap enough of himself around her. She laughs and urges him onto his back, but when she looks down, she realizes he’s not laughing.
“What’s wrong? And what happened to you?” She reaches for a scrape on his forehead, an angry bruise on his chin. Those weren’t there before.
He sits up abruptly, and she slides from his lap onto the foot of the bed, landing a few feet away from him. His fury is bigger now. There’s more fire than affection in his hazel eyes.
“Where have you been?”
“What are you talking about?” she asks, reaching for him again. “You’ve been asleep. Last night was . . .” She stops, terrified now that what they did was only a strange, dark dream. “Last night you touched me and . . . I thought . . .”
“Last night? Last night, Lucy? Last night you weren’t here. You’ve been gone for almost two weeks.”
Cold fingers slip up inside her chest and curl around where her heart used to beat. “What?”
We just have to wait for you to vanish.
Thankfully, most do.
“Where have you been?”
She can see it now, the subtle changes that happen to the living in only a few short days: His hair is the tiniest bit longer. A cut on his knuckle has healed over, and new ones surround the fading mark. “I didn’t know I was gone!”
He yanks at his hair before standing and walking to his closet. He’s in a different pair of boxers and begins pulling on clothing as if he doesn’t want to be seen. A wrinkled dress shirt and blazer. His school tie left open around the very neck she finally kissed. Layer upon layer that separates him from her. “Luce, I last saw you ten days ago. It was December seventh, today is the seventeenth.”
Her stomach drops into an abyss. “I don’t understand,” she says.
“I looked for you—at school, the trail, the shed—” He stops and presses his knuckles into his chest roughly, as if it hurts the same way hers does. “One minute you were here and then you were just gone. Where did you go?”
He steps closer and then away, making a fist. He seems torn between wanting to come to her and wanting to punch the wall.
“You fell asleep. And for the first time, I was able to close my eyes and dream. . . . It didn’t even seem that long. I . . . saw this dark trail underwater. I walked to the end, where it was dark and . . . calm. And then I woke up just now.”
“Well,” he says, picking something up from the corner of the room and placing it on the bed. Her clothes, from that night. She hadn’t even realized she was wearing nothing but underwear. She crosses her arms over her bare chest, suddenly self-conscious. She sees him wince, but he says, “I’m glad you felt supercalm on the black underwater supertrail. I was freaking out, thinking I’d never see you again.”
“Colin, I’m so—”
“I have class.”
The walk across campus is excruciating. He won’t talk; he won’t look at her. Worse, he won’t touch her. She reaches over, tentatively putting her hand on his and he pulls back, like he’s surprised all over again by how it feels. She’d hoped her touch would be familiar, comforting even. But maybe the quiet buzz of sensation only reminds him how impermanent she is.
“I had no idea I would disappear.” Her steps slow, then falter, widening the space between them.
He exhales slowly before stopping, turning to face her. “I know.”
Is this how break-ups happen? Someone disappears—literally or metaphorically—and the rhythm is forever ruined? “I would have been a mess if the situation were reversed.”
He reaches for her but then shoves his hand into his hair. “I’m not trying to be a dick. I seriously thought you were gone for good. I’m just really freaked.”
Apparently, there will be no comforting touch in this reconciliation, and this thought leaves her overwhelmingly sad. She hates having no answers. She died, she’s back, and she wants to be near him with every particle of her strange body. And still, there is absolutely no meaning to any of it. “I’m here,” she says lamely.
His eyebrows pull together and his eyes darken a shade. “For how long? I mean, how can we know?”
Shrugging, she looks past him at the trees rooted so firmly in the frozen ground, at the buildings that have been there for more than a century. Ghosts have haunted the world since the beginning of time, and suddenly, she’s plagued with the desire to know how to do it right.
Chapter 17 HIM
SO SHE WAS JUST . . . BACK? LIKE, WITH NO EXPLAnation of where she’d been?” Jay’s stretched out on his bed, thumbing through an old magazine he found under his pillow. Colin doesn’t look too closely.
“Yeah. It’s sort of—” His eyes move to the ceiling.
“Complicated.”
“Complicated. Dude, you’re talking to the guy who took two chicks to the formal and managed to get away with it. I think I can keep up.”
“Jay, this isn’t a joke.”
With a bored sigh, Jay sits up, throws his feet over the side of the bed, and assesses Colin. “Look, I know this isn’t a joke, okay?
And I get that Lucy’s . . . different from other girls. I’ve never seen you dive this deep into anything,” he says, lifting a single brow for emphasis. “I just want to know that you’re okay.” “I am,” Colin says. It sounds like a lie, even to him. If he were okay, he would have told Lucy everything, including his role in her murderer being caught. Including the fact that he was the last person to see her alive and couldn’t save her. The superstitious fraction of him feels like he needs to hold some detail back, as if the entire truth would untie the balloon from the cart and he’d be left to watch it drift away.
“What if she . . . like, what if she went on a bender?” “She didn’t.”
“Or, I don’t know, Col. Like, back to a boyfriend in
Portland for a week. I wasn’t kidding when I called her mysterious. Literally no one around here knows her, except you and me. If I said, ‘Lucy who hangs with Colin,’ it’d take anyone else five minutes to remember what she even looks like.” Colin stares at him, hoping to burn a hole in Jay’s forehead. “I can handle this.”
“Are you sure? Because when she was gone, you were flipping out. I know you’ve lost your entire family, but I’ve never seen you like that before. You didn’t talk to me, or Dot, or even Joe. When was the last time you talked to Joe?”
When Colin doesn’t answer, Jay presses on. “And I—what if it happens again? You gonna be okay then, too?”
Colin pushes away from the desk and scrubs his face with his hands. The answer to that is a big, unequivocal “NO,” but there’s no way he can tell Jay that. “We’re working it out. It won’t happen again. We’re good.”
This is one of those moments that define why they’re friends. Jay knows Colin is lying his ass off, but he also knows it’s the only way he’s holding it together.
“See, this is why I don’t do relationships.” Jay makes little quotation marks with his fingers, and Colin rolls his eyes. “Sure it is.” “All right, then,” Jay says. “Where is the magic elusive spirit girl, anyway?”
Colin’s head snaps up, and he gapes at him—Jay’s hit awfully close to home—but he’s smacking his gum and flipping through his magazine again. Clueless. “She’ll be here any minute.” Colin closes his math book and glances at the clock, trying not to appear as restless as he feels.
Jay stands and adjusts his baseball cap, walks to the window and back, before resuming his seat on the edge of his bed. He’s as anxious to get out there as Colin is. “We seriously can’t leave until she gets here? I’m bored.”
Colin shakes his head. “I want her to come along.” The night before Lucy came back, the night he almost rode himself into the ground, was the first time Colin felt sane in days, like he’d beaten his anxiety into submission.
Some of the stuff he and Jay have done is a bit crazy and a lot dangerous, but it’s always been the case that, on his bike or board, everything blurs at the edges until he’s focused on one thought: breathe. The wilder he is, the safer he feels. It’s a paradox he can live with. It’s just that now he wants Lucy to stay close.
“It’s a good thing Lucy’s cool or I’d have no choice but to kick your ass,” Jay says. “So where are we going? They put in this killer jump at the track, but last week it was full of Xavier posers, so that’s out.”
Colin fiddles with the straps on his biking shoes, remembering the night with Lucy at the lake, her legs dangling to the knees in the frozen water. Other than the section near the oak tree, she seems to like water—the pond, the lake, her crazy dream about underwater blackness. “I think the lake’s frozen over. No way will anyone else be down there. You up for some tricks?”
Jay agrees and heads down to mess around with his bike while Colin searches through the piles of clean laundry for something warmer to wear.
Lucy materializes at the door, wearing a new stolen uniform. This version has the ugly navy slacks, which is probably why it was easy for her to find and snag: Hardly any of the girls wear them. But her black boots lace almost to her knees, and her hair is piled in a messy heap on top of her head and bound with a bright red ribbon. He has no idea where she found it, but she looks like punk rock trying to go straight. He still can’t get over how relieved he is to see her. The weirdness of having a girlfriend he can barely kiss seems so unimportant compared to the relief he feels at having her back.
“Not exactly standard attire,” he says, tugging on her white oxford where she’s knotted it just beneath her ribs, mocking the cold air around her.
Her mouth curls up into a teasing smile. “The administration is free to notice and unofficially expel me.”
He laughs. Lucy’s been lurking around campus for more than two months—minus the ten days of unexpected vanish—and no teacher really bothers to question her presence, let alone her decidedly non-dress-code boots.
She glances at his bike shoes hanging from his free hand.
“Where are we headed?”
“Your favorite place: the lake.”
“Sure. To . . . ride?” She looks skeptical.