“I said your necklace is so cool.” The voice belongs to a guy about her age. In one hand, he cups a perfect glass sphere on a dark ribbon the color of a blood clot that she’s wearing around her neck. The pendant is elegantly crafted: a miniature universe, sugared with stars, that swims with a tangle of twisting bodies and strange creatures. She knows this necklace, too. It’s her galaxy pendant, the one she hasn’t flameworked yet and which exists only as an idea.
“Did you make it?” the boy asks.
“Uh …” Well, the answer is she didn’t, and hasn’t the skill. She might still try—assuming, of course, that she doesn’t crash, get her friend killed, and wind up going slowly insane. “Yeah.”
“I really like how it changes depending on how you look at it,” the boy says. “It could be this dark planet with a ton of lights, like Earth from outer space. Or it could be an explosion, like the black’s about to break apart and what you’re seeing is white light through the cracks, and that lights up all the things that live in outer space that we wouldn’t normally see, you know? Like dark matter? Or what space would look like if you could somehow get outside our universe and then look back.”
It’s as if he’s read her mind. All of that’s exactly what she’s after but doesn’t quite know how to do just yet.
“Well, I—” Then she gets a really good look at this boy, and whatever she was about to say fizzles on her tongue.
Because the boy is Eric.
EMMA
As He Will Be
ERIC IS ALMOST exactly as he will be, right down to those smoldering, impossibly blue eyes fringed with long black lashes. His face is strong and lean, and his lips are full, his mouth perfectly shaped. The only difference is that he’s not as muscular, and his dark hair curls over the tips of his ears. He wears denim shorts and a black tee. His hands are slender, the fingers long. He is insanely handsome, something manufactured by a dream, and that queer sighing flutter in her chest that she feels now she will recognize as longing then.
“You’re—” she begins and stops. She has almost said, You’re not real. You don’t belong here. You weren’t here. “You’re not the regular girl. Who works here, I mean.”
“Oh. Well, no. Just subbing for the extra cash.” His eyebrows knit in concern. Releasing the galaxy pendant, he straightens. “Are you okay? Do you want to sit down or something?”
“No, I’m good.” Her throat is so dry she hears the click as she swallows. “You’re Eric,” she says, then remembers to make it a question. “Right?”
“Yeah.” His frown deepens. “Have we met?”
Not yet. “No. I, uh, I guess I must’ve seen you around.”
“I don’t think so,” he says, and then his expression changes: as if she’s glass and his gaze pierces to her hidden heart. “I would’ve remembered meeting you.”
Her pulse throbs in her neck. It’s as if he’s pulled her into a private, breathless space, somewhere warm and safe to which he has the only key. If he wants to hold her there forever …
“Emma!” The voice comes from behind. “Where’ve you been?”
No. Her stomach drops, and she turns to watch the girl striding toward her. No, no, you’re—
“I should’ve known. As if we don’t have enough reading to do. Only you would buy more books. I mean, making us read The Bell Jar? Seriously? That thing is so depressing.” Lily executes an exaggerated eye-roll, then plucks the book from Emma’s nerveless fingers. “So what else did you find?”
“Wh-what are you doing here?” Emma croaks.
“Hello, done with finals, not ready to face Sylvia Plath? Into some serious retail therapy?” Lily’s sculpted eyebrows crinkle in a frown. “Emma, are you okay? You don’t look so hot.”
Oh no, I lose my mind on a regular basis. “I’m fine,” Emma says, but she is definitely not. This is all wrong. She had not come with Lily; she didn’t know Lily back then, did she? Where had they met? On this street? In a class? She can’t remember, but she does recall that she went shopping with her roommate, Mariane, and they had lost one another when Emma wandered off toward the bookstore down East Washington, thinking now would be a great time to get a jump on all that summer reading.
Wait a second. What if this time is the first time? A strange relief floods her veins. Maybe that’s it. This is reality. All the rest—the snow, the crash, Lily’s death—is the dream, or blink, or hallucination. The street is what’s real. The taste of too-sweet coffee and chocolate still sits on her tongue. Chilly beads of condensation wet her fingers. In a few days, she will be seventeen. Lily is alive and Eric is here; he’s real.
But he shouldn’t be. He’s like the pendant I haven’t made yet: something I’ve only—
“Ugh, how can you read this stuff?” With an exaggerated shudder, Lily hands back the book Emma’s chosen. “You and your horror novels … I’d have nightmares for a year.”
Me and my … She doesn’t like horror; with her past, her life has been gruesome enough, thanks. “Well, I—” Emma begins, and then her eyes click to the book’s cover and Emma feels the blood drain from her face as her ears begin to buzz.
The jacket is smoky. In the center, there is a long dark slit edged in a fiery corona of red and yellow and orange. The slit could be a cat’s eye, or a lizard’s, or a split in the earth—or the mouth she sees whenever she gets a migraine, because there are shadowy figures and a writhing tangle of weird monsters struggling to climb out. Look at it a certain way, and you could almost believe they were about to leap off the cover and out of the book.
And the cover reads:
Franklin J. McDermott
THE DICKENS MIRROR
Book II of THE DARK PASSAGES
EMMA
What the Cat Already Sees
IN THIS JUNE of memory, Emma’s blood turns to slush.
Another book by McDermott, in a series she’s never heard of. One that she’s pretty sure doesn’t really exist. Was this in the bibliography Kramer gave us? She doesn’t think so. But McDermott knew the Dickens Mirror; he wrote about it.
Wait a second. Just because he knew doesn’t mean it’s a real thing. Writers make stuff up all the time. The Mirror could be imaginary and something that only exists in a book.
But if that was true, and even if it wasn’t, then what—who—was the first book about?