Sublime(17)
Author: Christina Lauren

His skin is sun-kissed, but now that she’s closer, she sees the circles beneath his eyes. And there’s something underneath, an exhaustion in the way he holds himself, bruising that pushes up beneath his skin, stiffness in his movements. It’s almost like Lucy can see through him, to a part that lies deep inside, draining him.

“Lucy, where is your Protected?” Henry asks. Lucy jerks herself back to the conversation. His eyes move over her face as she tries to understand his question.

“My ‘Protected’?”

He grins. “Sorry. It’s how I think of Alex. I mean, where’s the person you came back for?”

“You mean Colin?”

Laughing, he straightens and wipes his hands on his jeans. “I need to start at the beginning with you, don’t I?”

She presses her hands to her cheeks in what she knows to be reflexive movement, a leftover from the long-forgotten days when she would have blushed. “I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time processing some of this. I knew there had been others at one point or another. I just didn’t think I would meet any.”

“Well, partly that’s because you’re here for Colin. I don’t think it’s natural for Guardians to think that much about anyone other than our Protected. But I suspect we’re all over. We’re the kids no one ever remembers. We’re the ones no one misses at the reunion. Even I haven’t noticed you before.”

Because he wasn’t looking, she thinks.

Alex and Henry continue to watch her with the same small and patient smiles while his words hover in the air. She laughs briefly, a soft exhale. “You think we’re Guardians?”

“I do,” Henry says. “And there’s no one here to tell me I’m wrong. I didn’t know anything when I got here. I walked around, aimless. But when I found Alex, being near him didn’t just feel right; it felt critical. As in, when I left him alone, I felt I was doing something wrong.”

“Yes,” Lucy whispers, tingling down to her fingertips.

“I don’t know why he needs me, if it’s because he was sick and I make him healthy, or something else. But in the year since I found him, I feel like I finally have purpose, and lately, I feel stronger every day. Just look at him; he looks so much better, too. Something in his eyes . . . I know I’m doing what I’m here to do.”

Lucy looks to Alex again. Is that what she sees, his illness? She wonders if Henry sees it too. When she looks at Alex, she doesn’t feel quite as hopeful about his condition. She also doesn’t see anything different about his eyes. They’re blue, in the same way that hers are brown. Except to Colin.

“You’re sick?” she asks.

“Acute lymphocytic leukemia,” he says matter-of-factly. “Henry found me the week I was diagnosed.” He glances at Henry before adding, “I’m in remission now.”

“I’m so glad,” Lucy says. “But—who? Who sent us back? Why us? Why Colin and Alex?”

Henry stills her with a hand on her knee. “You’re wasting your time asking questions. I asked them every day for a year, and trust me, no one will drift down from the clouds and give you the welcome pamphlet.”

Lucy envies Henry’s certainty, and maybe the only way she’ll get it is with more time. The thought is both a relief and mildly depressing. “How much do you remember about your life before?”

“Not much,” Henry admits. “I know my name. I know I loved sports because I have brief memories of playing, or watching. But other than a flash here and there—a face, a feeling—it’s pretty blank. Nothing around here looks familiar.”

Lucy remembers waking on the trail and the instinctive way she knew where to find someone. “So you weren’t a student here?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“We’ve gone through the yearbooks,” Alex offers. “Nothing.”

“Huh.” Lucy pulls at her lip, thinking.

“What’s ‘huh’?” Henry asks, leaning forward to catch her gaze.

“I was a Saint Osanna’s student. I died here. According to an article Colin found, I was killed at the lake. That’s where I woke up. I figured that we had this connection, which explained why I was here for him.”

“Oh. Wow,” Henry says. “I’m so sorry, Lucy.”

“But then what is the connection? Why are we both here? And why can’t we leave?”

Henry and Alex look at each other, each of them shaking their heads. It doesn’t add up. Lucy pulls her sleeves over her hands. She’s not cold, exactly, but a strange creeping sensation spreads up her arms. “How are you so sure about the Guardian thing? Don’t you ever worry you’re . . . bad?”

Henry’s roaring laugh is so surprising, Lucy actually scoots back when it bursts from him. “You think you’d come back to hurt him? Can you even imagine?”

She can’t. She shakes her head, exhaling a slow, anxious breath as she aches to let go of Maggie’s horrible suggestion. “But you’re here and Alex is still sick.” Before Henry can protest, she adds, “And yesterday, Colin fell into a frozen lake and almost died. It’s hard to feel like it’s a coincidence that it was the first time I went along with him. I sort of feel like a bad omen.”

Henry’s expression straightens. “First, Alex might have been sick, but he’s getting better. And that kid who fell in the lake is your Protected?”

She nods. “Yeah, he fell in and . . .” She starts to tell them about the trail, about being able to touch Colin as if they were made of the same thing, but for some reason, she stops. It feels too complicit somehow, as if the accident benefited her too greatly. “And I thought he was going to die,” she says instead.

“But did he?” Henry asks, smiling a secret smile that makes Lucy uneasy, as if the location of the missing puzzle piece is obvious to everyone but her.

“Well, no, but he could have.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Alex says. “We don’t hang out with the same group, but he’s known to be pretty crazy. Hasn’t he broken, like, practically every bone in his body?” He laughs. “No wonder he has you.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Lucy, stop,” Alex says gently. His hand barely hovers over her arm, a practiced touch. “Colin’s here; he’s safe. Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re the reason he didn’t die?”

Chapter 21 HER

THIS TIME, WHEN LUCY WALKS BACK ACROSS campus, she barely registers that the howling wind no longer throws her across the path. Long strands of her hair whip around her face, and she pulls it back absently, lost in Alex and Henry’s words.

Guardian.

He almost died.

But did he?

She doesn’t think Colin has any idea how big a story this has been around school, and when Mr. Velasquez’s car pulls up in front of the dorm, it seems like the entire student body is camped outside. Colin looks pale and weak when he climbs out and walks to the front door, the headmaster pushing back the surge of whispering bodies to create a path forward. Lucy backs away from where she’s standing near the pond and sits on the bench where she first told Colin she died. She wishes she had even one drop of Henry’s certainty, because if she chooses not to believe him, then she’s every bit as lost as she was before.

Lucy’s grateful for the short days of winter. Sunset is at 6:08, and at 6:30 Colin is opening the dormitory door to silently let her in.

“Did you eat?” she asks once they’re in his room, door closed, music playing in the background. Jay has come in and left again, letting Lucy and Colin reconnect in relative peace.

He nods, studying her as he sometimes does, as if he can unlock her secrets with the pressure of his attention. “Dot brought me about five meals.”

Only now does it occur to Lucy that Colin could be sick, like Alex, that maybe that’s what they have in common and why each of them has attracted a ghost. But though Colin looks and feels different to her than other people, she doesn’t see the same underlying exhaustion she saw in Alex. There’s no illness draining the life from him right before her eyes. If anything, even in his weakened state, Colin seems more resilient. The air around him pulses with life. “Are you tired?” she asks, fidgeting.

“No. I feel like I’ve slept the last two days away.” He sits down on the edge of his mattress, pulling the heavy brown comforter up and over his shoulders. “And I can’t stop thinking about the lake.”

“I keep seeing you falling through. And then on the trail . . .” She tries to temper the longing in her voice, but her skin hums with the memory of what came after.

He blinks away and looks out the window. Fat snowflakes gather on his windowsill. “If I didn’t die, but I could touch you, then you must be somewhere in between, too.”

“I have no idea.” She moves closer but keeps some space between them when he shivers slightly. “I don’t think I’m the only one like me at Saint Osanna’s.”

Colin turns to look at her, his face shadowed in the dark room. Bluish marks sweep heavily under his eyes, but she can see interest bloom across his expression. His lips curl into a half smile. She tells him about looking for others and finally finding Henry and Alex.

“They’re like us. Henry died, too, and is back.” Colin’s brow furrows, and a hundred reactions cross his features before he says simply, “And the other guy, Alex, is . . . me in this scenario?”

“Yeah, they’re together.” “Alex Broderick? Tall, blond kid?” Colin asks, and Lucy nods. “He’s g*y?”

“Do you know him?” she asks.

“Well, I don’t know him know him, but I’ve seen him around. He used to play lacrosse and stuff before he got sick. Cancer, I think.”

“Leukemia. I guess that’s when he found Henry, right after he was diagnosed.”

Colin shifts under the blankets, eyes growing heavy.

“So I’ve wondered, if I’m a ghost, then how do I move things, wear clothes, touch you? But if I’m mostly solid, how do I know I’m not some form of demon instead? Who sent me here?”

Colin nods beside her.

She tells him about how long Henry has been here, about how with Alex being sick, Henry is sure that he was sent back for him. “I’ve always felt like my heart was taken from my body, but it somehow ended up in you. I think Henry kind of feels the same way, like he’s keeping Alex safe.”

“I’m glad,” he says, leaning to kiss her cheek. “I’ve always felt safe with you. I wonder if ghosts like you are everywhere, protecting people.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“Why would I be?” he mumbles, already drifting off.

Lucy turns and looks out the window, for the first time realizing that she is the only one who is surprised by any of this.

In the middle of the night, Colin pushes the heating pads off his chest and legs and climbs out of bed. He wraps himself in about four sweaters, twitching with constant shivering. His desk chair creaks as he sits down and begins typing. It’s 2:14 in the morning.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking stuff up,” he mumbles.

“What stuff?”

“Spirit stuff. Dying.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He scratches the back of his neck and throws her an apologetic glance over his shoulder. “Not yet. Sorry.”

She lies back to stare at his ceiling, at the tiny solar system she likes to imagine Colin meticulously sticking in place everywhere he’s moved. “You okay?”

He grunts in affirmation, and she rolls over, wishing he would come closer. She’s had a taste of what he must have felt when she was gone, and here in the dark, with him so far away, she feels a strange itch to talk some more about what he felt on the trail and what he thinks happened. It feels like a tight spring has been lodged in her chest, uncoiling slowly upward.

“Do you know how many people have had near-death experiences?” he asks, oblivious to her anxiety.

“How many?”

“Thousands. More than thousands. Most of the stuff written about it is religious. But not all. Some people think that near-death experiences are a form of hallucination, but since I know you felt everything, too, we know I wasn’t hallucinating.”

She rolls back over, forcing a lighter tone. “Are you cruising around NearDeath.org?”

“No,” he says without humor. “Seriously, Luce. So many people have almost died or actually died, and seen things or experienced things like I did, and these people are fine. There’s even a Journal of Near-Death Studies. There’s a Near Death Experience Research Organization. Like, science.”

“Pseudoscience.”

“Lucy, that makes you pseudoscience.”