This isn’t the first round of tragedy for the school, which was built on a burial site for settlers moving west and which lost two young children in a fire two days after the school opened in 1814. Saint Osanna’s has been struck by tragedy regularly over the years, with its proximity to the woods, glacial lakes, and harsh elements resulting in a number of student and visitor deaths.
Colin stops, closing the window on the screen before anyone sees what he’s reading. “Lucia Rain Gray,” he says aloud. He lets his heart take over every sensation in his body, pounding relentlessly in his chest and throat and ears. Lucy was telling the truth.
Colin doesn’t see her all day. She doesn’t show up for history, and she’s not outside at lunch. He doesn’t find her anywhere on campus, and he grows more frantic as he circles buildings and checks every classroom. He tells himself he’ll stop looking after this preliminary search but gives that up after gym, dressing quickly so he can scout the woods bordering school before seventh period.
Days go by, and Jay tells him that she’s stopped coming to his English class, too. The desk she sat in that first day stays empty. Colin doesn’t understand why that feels like a punch to the stomach. If this situation is as crazy as he keeps telling himself, then why does he even care? Why does he keep rubbing his palm, trying to remember what it felt like to touch her? Why does he want to do it again?
He wants to remember: Her skin was warmer than air, but not by much. Her eyes change, like ripples in a pond. She’s never cold, even with the strongest wind outside. Except for a pencil on that first day, he’s never really seen her touch anything. And even that looked hard, like she had to work at keeping it between her fingers. Her eyes, when she asked about Joe, changed colors as he watched, from deep gray to an aching, honest blue.
He considers leaving campus to try and find her but has no idea where she even goes when she isn’t here. Does she vanish into thin air?
By Friday night, Colin has the same feeling he gets when he doesn’t ride his bike for a long stretch—antsy and like something is growing inside him and pushing his vital organs into a tiny corner in his chest. He’s worried that Lucy has left, but he’s even more worried that she’s simply evaporated. That she reached out to him and his rejection somehow sent her away. He takes his bike to the woods, riding the narrow trails along the rickety boards he and Jay propped there years ago. He hops boulders and streams, crashes down hills. He beats himself up until he’s bruised and sore. He does everything he can to clear his mind, but nothing works. He eats dinner and tastes nothing. The heat in his dorm room feels claustrophobic, oppressive.
Sitting on his bed, he thumbs through a bike magazine before tossing it to the floor and flopping backward, fists to his eyes.
Across the room, Jay pauses his repetitive bouncing of a tennis ball against the wall. “Do you have any idea where she is?”
“No. The last place I saw her was . . .” His words fade away as he registers that maybe it doesn’t matter where he saw her last. Maybe what matters is where this started for her.
“Colin?”
“I think I might know. I’ll catch you later.”
Jay glances out the darkening window, concerned, but
keeps any objections to himself. “Just be careful, man.” Colin takes off down the path toward the park, headed for the strip of chain-link fence that he and Jay busted when they were freshmen, which probably hasn’t even been discovered by the groundskeepers. It leads directly to where he thinks Lucy awoke by the lake.
The trail is only about a mile long, but he’s practically frozen by the time he gets there. Now that he knows at least some of the legends might be true, Colin feels and instinctive shudder of fear as he nears the water. Once the sound of his sneakers on the gravel quiets, it’s eerily silent. The idea that Lucy could be sitting out here alone makes his hands shake in a way that has nothing to do with the cold. Or maybe it’s because he’s afraid she’s not here at all.
He looks around, hunching forward against the wind. The sky looms heavy and dull overhead, the clouds so thick it’s impossible to tell where one stops and the next begins.
There’s an old dock not far from where the trail ends. It’s missing a lot of planks, and the wood that remains is waterlogged and decomposing, but despite this whole area being off-limits, the most daring kids still occasionally horse around on it in the summer. Now, though, it’s covered in a light dusting of snow, and for some reason, Colin isn’t surprised when he sees Lucy sitting at the end of it, perched on an uneven outcropping of broken and rotting boards. Long, blond strands fall almost to her waist, and the wind lifts them, tangling them in the breeze that whips across the lake.
The wood creaks beneath the weight of his careful steps. She’s changed her clothes, though her signature boots sit unlaced on the dock just behind her. The hoodie he left for her rests in her lap.
Now that he’s here, he realizes he’s spent more time trying to figure out how to find her than how to talk to her. Staring at her back, he files through appropriate openers. He needs to say that he’s sorry, that he’s a clueless boy who has no idea what to do with a living girl, never mind one who isn’t. Maybe he should tell her that he’s an orphan and probably needs an anchor as badly as she does.
Slowly, he walks toward her. “Lucy?” he says, and hesitates, taking in the scene in front of him. Her skirt is pulled up above her knees and her skin is pale and perfect in the retreating light, not a scar or a freckle anywhere.
“It’s not cold,” she says, looking down to where her legs dangle in the water below. It has to be thirty degrees out, and the lake has that syrupy look, where the algae is gone and the water looks like it’s hovering between liquid and solid. Colin’s limbs ache watching the icy water lap against her skin. “I mean, intellectually, I know it’s cold,” she continues, “but it doesn’t feel that way. I can feel the sensation of the cold water, but the temperature doesn’t bother me like it should. Isn’t that strange?”
The wind seems to have stolen his words, and he’s not sure how to respond. So instead, he reaches out, placing a hand on her shoulder. Her eyes widen at the contact, but she doesn’t say anything.
“I didn’t know where you were,” he says finally. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay,” she whispers.
He looks at his hands in amazement. He can feel the weight of her hair as it moves over his fingers, the texture of the skin on her neck, but where there should be warmth, there’s only the tingling sensation of movement, a stirring breeze. It’s as if whatever is keeping her here—keeping her body upright, her limbs moving forward—is pulsing beneath his fingertips.
They stare at each other for a long stretch, and he finally whispers, “I’m sorry.”
A smile twitches at the corners of her lips, dimple poking sweetly into her cheek, before the grin spreads across her face. Her eyes morph from dark to pale yellow in the light of the bright, full moon. “Don’t be.”
He’s not sure how to reply because whether she needs an apology or not, he feels like a jerk for disappearing that night.
“Do you want to go for a walk?” she asks.
He smiles and moves back as she pulls her feet from the water, and he uses the hoodie to dry her legs. They feel like ice against his fingertips. Her eyes drop, and holy shit, he thinks she’s looking at his mouth. Suddenly, his head is full of other possibilities: What would it be like to kiss her? Does her skin feel the same everywhere? What does it taste like?
“When did you do that?” she asks, pulling on her boots.
He struggles to rein in his thoughts. Reflexively, he licks his lips and realizes she means his piercing. “My lip?”
“Yeah.”
“Last summer.”
She pauses, and it gives him a minute to watch the breeze whip her hair all over the place, like it weighs less than the air. She takes a while to say anything else, though, so he watches her lace up her boots while she thinks. “The school doesn’t have rules about that?”
“The rules are so old that piercings never made it into the book, but I dare you to try and wear short pantaloons to class. Dot and Joe say I can look like a ‘no-good punk’ as long as I act like a gentleman. You don’t like it?”
“No, I do. It’s just—”
“You sound surprised that you do.” He laughs, watching her stand.
“I don’t think many boys did that when I was in high school. At least not boys like you.”
“‘Boys like me?’”
“Nice boys. Burnout boys would be inked and pierced and rowdy.”
“Oh, I’m definitely rowdy.”
Her lips curve in a half smile. “I don’t doubt that.”
“And how do you know I’m nice? Maybe I’m a burnout with a ghost fetish.”
She gapes at him, surprised, and he wants to grab a rock and crack himself over the head with it. But then she throws her head back and laughs this ridiculous loud, snorting laugh.
Colin exhales a shaky breath. Apparently ghost jokes are okay.
She grins up at him. “You are nice. I can see it all over your face. You can’t hide a thing.”
He watches her eyes shift from green to silver in the light, and her lips skew into his favorite playful smile. He considers her hair, her eyes, the way she fades into the background for everyone but him. “Neither can you.”
“Really?”
“At least, not from me.”
Her smile leaves her lips but stays in her eyes, even when she blinks away. “Good.”
Something flaps in a cluster of reeds next to the trail, and the last forgotten leaves crunch beneath their shoes as they walk deeper into the woods. Their steps are evenly paced, but Lucy’s seem lighter than his, quieter somehow.
And now that he’s starting to let himself believe, he sees other differences: Her cheeks aren’t flushed from the cold. While each of his breaths seems to float like small puffs of smoke in the air in front of him, the space in front of Lucy’s lips is noticeably empty.
Beside him, she looks around as if she can see every detail in the light of the moon, and it makes him wonder, is she like a cat? Does she have amazing night vision? Although it seems strange that there would be any off-limit topics now that they’ve both acknowledged that she is dead and he isn’t, he feels like it would be strange to ask her what it’s like.
“So you believe me?” she asks.
He considers telling her what Joe said, but opts instead for the simpler answer: “I looked up your story. Saw your picture. You were killed by the former headmaster, out by this lake.”
She nods, staring out at the water, and seems largely uninterested in what he’s told her. “I wonder why I like being out here, then. That’s sort of morbid.”
“Is it weird to not remember everything?”
She picks up a leaf and examines it. “I guess. The weird thing is it’s all or nothing, and about the strangest things. I remember with crazy detail a bouquet of flowers my dad bought me for a holiday, but I can’t remember his face.”
“Wow.” Colin feels lame, but, really what can he say to that?
“The other night I was thinking about it. You know those game shows where someone stands in a phone booth and money shoots up from the floor and the person gets to grab as much as they can in a minute?”
He has no idea what she’s talking about but goes with it. “Sure.”
“Well, some of the bills are twenties, maybe a few hundreds but most of them are ones. So it looks like it’s a ton of money blowing around, but it’s not. And no matter what you end up with, you’re happy because you have money in your hands.”
She glides around a boulder in the middle of the trail, and he hops on it and then leapfrogs onto a long, rotting log. He can feel her watching him out of the corner of her eye.
“Anyway, I feel like at some point after I died, I must have had a minute in a booth with my memories and I grabbed a couple of fives, but mostly ones.”
“So, in other words, you’re happy to have something—”
“But what I ended up remembering was pretty useless,” she finishes, smiling wryly.
“Not enough green to buy much, eh? Like who you were or why you’re here?”
She laughs, her eyes glowing with relief. “Exactly.”
It’s the relief that kills him because he’s starting to believe that if one person was supposed to understand her from the start, it was him. “I’m sorry I was a dick.”
“You weren’t a dick.” She snorts. “God, I forgot how much I love that word used like that. And ‘douche.’”
“That one applies too. You were all, ‘Hey, I died,’ and I was like, ‘Wow, that sucks. I gotta jet.’”