He nods, hooking his bag over his shoulder before walking into the kitchen to cross his name off of his dining hall shifts. The marker squeals in the silence with a sound of finality, and he can feel the pressure of Dot’s attention on his back. He hates disappointing her. He knows how much she worries about him; it’s a constant, obsessive loop in her mind.
It’s why he hid in his room with a broken arm last night instead of going straight to the infirmary. It’s why Dot and Joe will never, ever know half the stupid shit he’s done.
Pulling his hood up against the wind, he grips the handrail as he climbs the steps of Henley Hall. The metal is cold and familiar beneath his palm, colder even than the autumn air that snakes around him. White paint has started to flake away, the surface marked with the scars of tires and skateboard axles—most of them his. The beginnings of rust bloom around the edges. What little sleep he got last night was broken up by stabbing pain; now he’s just sore and tired and not sure he can deal with today.
He pushes through the door, and emptiness greets him; the space ticks dully with the synchronized rhythm of the clocks at either end of the long hallway.
The halls don’t stay empty for long, though. The bell rings, and he turns the corner to find Jay pressing a girl against a locker outside class, a set of red-tipped acrylic nails running through his dirty-blond hair.
Jay looks back as Colin approaches, smirking at him over his shoulder. “About time you got here, slacker,” he says. “You missed the world’s most painful calculus class. I could practically hear my brain bleeding.”
Colin nods his chin in greeting, lifting his cast. “I think I’d have preferred calc over this.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Jay’s latest conquest reluctantly leaves as he and Colin walk into the classroom. Students continue to file in around them, and Colin drops his bag at a desk inside, bending to dig for his assignment.
“So you were right,” Jay says, motioning to the cast. “Broken?”
“Yeah.” As quickly as he can with one functioning arm, Colin finds his paper and stuffs everything else back in the bag.
“Joe and Dot read you the riot act?” Jay’s been at Saint Osanna’s as long as Colin has—since kindergarten—and knows just as well that Dot has never appreciated the two boys’ particular thirst for adventure.
Colin looks at him pointedly. “Dot did.”
Jay straightens. “Did she ground your fun money?”
“Yeah. And I’m restricted to school property indefinitely. Thank God you took my bike to your parents’ house last night or she’d probably take that, too.”
“Brutal.”
Colin hums in agreement and hands his assignment to the teacher. What kills him the most is that this ride wasn’t even that dangerous. A week ago he jumped from the lip of the quarry onto a boulder at the base and came home without a scratch. But yesterday he couldn’t land even a rookie jump without wiping out.
“Hood off, Colin,” Mrs. Polzweski says. He pushes it off and shoves his hair back from his eyes as they move to their desks.
Just as the second bell rings, she walks in. The girl from the dining hall. Colin hasn’t seen her in a week, and he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about what she said just before she ran out the door.
I think I’m here for you.
Who says shit like that? He’d tried to call after her, but she was gone before the words dissolved in the air in front of him.
She slips through the noisy room and takes the seat in the row next to his, moving her eyes to him and then quickly away. Her arms are empty, no books or paper, no backpack. A few people watch her sit down, but she moves so fluidly, she seems to already have joined the rhythm of the room.
“If you can’t ride for a whole month, we’re going to need a plan,” Jay whispers. “No way can you be stuck inside that long. You’ll go insane.”
Colin hums, distracted. It’s crazy; the girl seems otherworldly, almost as if a faint sheen of light surrounds the exposed skin on her arms. Her white-blond hair has been brushed free of leaves, and she has these badass black boots laced to her knees with a French-blue oxford tucked into the navy uniform skirt. Her lips are full and red, her eyes lined with thick lashes. She looks like she could rip through the wool of his trousers with only a dirty word. As if feeling him watching, she pulls her legs farther under the desk, her arms closer against her body.
Jay pokes Colin right above his cast. “You’re not going to let that little cast stop you from having fun, are you?”
He pulls his eyes from the girl to look at Jay. “Are you kidding me? There’s tons of other ways to get in trouble without leaving the grounds.”
Jay grins and bumps Colin’s good fist.
Mrs. Polzweski organizes her stack of papers at her desk, ignoring the flurry of hushed activity: books being opened, pages turning, and students grumbling, the occasional cough, a pencil being sharpened somewhere. The girl sits, staring ahead, looking like she’s trying as hard as she can to not be noticed.
Where has she been?
In the periphery, Colin sees her thin fingers reach for a pencil that someone has left on the desk. She turns it over and over in her hand, as if the movement requires practice, examining it like she suspects it’s a magic wand.
Colin doesn’t think he’s ever seen such light hair before. When she tilts her head slightly, inspecting the pencil, her hair catches a dusty sunbeam, making it seem almost translucent. The strands twist and spill over shoulders that are hunched forward and wrapped in a shirt that’s too bulky for someone so delicate. She looks like a shadow of a girl. A shadow wearing a cap of sunshine.
As if she can feel him staring, she turns, an involuntary smile lifting the corner of her mouth. Her dimple makes him think of giggled pleas, mischievous promises, and the taste of sugar on his tongue. Gunmetal eyes meet his, and the color is alive, churning like an angry ocean, pulling him in.
He lets himself drown.
Chapter 3 HER
THE ONLY PERSON LOOKING AT HER IS THE same boy whose face has haunted her all week, with wild dark hair that needs to be cut, an arm in a new cast, and eyes that pierce her, amber and fierce. “Hi,” she rasps, tucking away her smile. Her voice is rough because this is the first time she’s used it in six days.
The first time she used it since she spoke to him and then burst from the dining room, intending to run into town to find the police and tell them she needed help. She could get only as far as a hulking metal campus gate a half mile down the gravelly road. Each of the three times she tried to escape, one step past the gate put her right back on the trail where she woke up, as if she’d stepped into a skipping song.
The boy’s gaze narrows and slips across her cheeks, over her nose, pauses at her mouth. He blinks once, slowly, then again. “Where did you go?”
Nowhere, she thinks, envisioning the empty shed she found in the middle of a barren field beside the school. It was as deserted as her memory bank, after all, and seemed the perfect home for a girl who has no name, no past. After being inexplicably drawn to this school building every morning for a week, she finally grew brave enough to steal a uniform, walk inside, and sit down.
“You disappeared,” he says.
She shifts in her seat, glancing at his mouth. “I know. I wasn’t quite sure how to follow up my stunning opening line.”
Laughing, he says, “Here,” and pushes his open textbook closer to her.
She blinks, the phantom trace of a pulse racing inside her throat at the way his eyes move over her face, the way he purses his lips slightly before smiling.
“Thanks,” she says. “But I’m okay. I can just listen.” He shrugs, but doesn’t move away. “I think we’re covering the history of labor-management relations today. Wouldn’t want you to miss out on the full experience.”
The girl isn’t sure what to do with his attention. She suspects, from the way her skin seems to be aching to move
closer to him, that he’s the reason she’s drawn here every morning, just as she found herself in the dining hall that first day. But he seems so sweet, almost too open, like she’s a strip of paper dragged through poisoned honey and this perfect boy flies innocently around her. How good can a girl be when she doesn’t need to eat or sleep and keeps finding herself snapped back to school grounds every time she tries to leave? He continues to stare, and she shifts her hair over her shoulder, lowering it like a curtain between them. “Colin?” It’s a woman’s voice, clear and authoritative. The pressure of his gaze on her lifts. “Sorry, Mrs. Polzweski,” he says.
Now that the girl knows his name, she wants to whisper it over and over.
“Who are you, honey?” the teacher asks.
The room is a vast bubble, silent and pulsing with expectation, and the girl realizes this Ms. Polzweski is speaking to her. But with the question hanging in the air, a man’s voice speaks in the girl’s mind.
“I bet you didn’t know your name means light,” he whispered, lips too close to her ear.
“I did know,” she wanted to say, but the hand on her throat made it hard to even draw breath.
“Lucia,” she remembers in a gasp. “My name is Lucy.” The teacher hums in acknowledgment. “Lucy, are you new?” Something inside Lucy stirs at the sound of someone else saying her name. For a heavy moment, she feels real, as if she’s a balloon and someone has finally weighted her to the ground. Maybe a girl with a name won’t float off into the sky. Lucy nods, and a phantom heat burns across her cheek where Colin’s gaze settles again.
“You’re not on my roll, Lucy. Can you go to the office to check in?”
“Sorry,” Lucy says, fighting panic. “I just started today.” Ms. Polzweski smiles. “You need to make sure to pick up your add card. I’ll sign it.”
Lucy nods again and slips away, wanting to disappear like a shadow into black.
Lucy knew she’d be told to go, but she doesn’t even know where the office is and isn’t quite ready to brave the outdoors and the winds that weigh more than she does. And here her feet seem grounded anyway, keeping her from leaving. She sits at the end of the hall, knees to chest, waiting for the next tug of instinct to pull her up and forward.
A door opens and closes shut with a quiet click. “Lucy?” It’s one of the only two voices in this world that she’s connected to a name—Colin—and it’s hesitant and deep and quiet. It cuts straight down the hall, and his lanky figure moves just as smoothly, straight to her. “Hey. Do you need help finding the office?”
She shakes her head, wishing she had something to gather to take with her so she could look purposeful and less like a lost girl sitting on the floor. Instead, she stands and turns, watching the lines of wood flooring weave a path in front of her as she walks away. She knows how it would go, anyway: He would walk with her, notice how she fights the wind, ask if she’s okay. And how would she respond? I don’t know. I only remembered my name five minutes ago.
“Hey, wait.”
She reaches a door, but it’s locked. She tries another beside it. Also locked.
“Lucy, wait,” Colin says. “What are you looking for? You can’t go in there. Those are janitor closets.”
She stops, turning to face him, and he’s looking at her. Really looking, like he wants to capture every detail. When their eyes meet, he makes a strangled sound, narrowing his gaze and leaning closer to look. Her eyes are murky greenbrown; she’s stared at them for hours in an old mirror hoping to remember the girl behind them.
“What?” she asks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He shakes his head. “You’re . . .”
“I’m what?” What will he say? What does he see?
He blinks again, slowly, and she realizes it’s just something he does: an unselfconscious, unhurried blink, as if he’s capturing an image of her and developing it on his lids. “Intense,” he murmurs.
With that word, the other man’s voice appears in her head again, an echo from the same intrusive memory, “You have to know how intense this is for me.”
She stumbles back, eyes wide.
“Are you okay?” Colin reaches for her arm, but she’s already turning, hurrying away.
With lips wet and pressed to her ear, he asked, “Are you afraid of dying?”
“Lucy!”
A flash of her reflection in a crisp blade of silver. Breath smelling of coffee and sugar, cigarettes and delight. Cool water lapping near her head. A knife, drowning in her own blood, the feeling of being pried open.
She bursts through the side exit, sucking in a huge gasp of sharp, autumn air.
So that’s who she is. She’s the girl who isn’t alive anymore.
Chapter 4 HIM
THERE’S THAT NEW GIRL,” JAY SAYS THROUGH a mouthful of sandwich. Colin follows his gaze and grunts, noncommittal, as Lucy glides across the soccer field. When she’s alone, she’s statuesque, long lines and slim profile. When she gets closer to the other students, she shrinks in on herself: shoulders pulled in, head down.