Sublime(24)
Author: Christina Lauren

Was it because she died near the lake? Is that the connection for them? Maybe if she understood what happened to the other Guardians on campus, she’d know more about why she was back and why she can take Colin to her world. Colin’s little sister died on the school road, and her mother drove them all over a bridge, possibly trying to find her. Now that Colin knows how to find Lucy’s world, could it be different for them? Could they manage this strange balance in the world above and the one below? Where did Henry die, and is that where he goes when he’s gone?

In the library, Lucy searches the archives for any information about Henry Moss. The name shows up in several places: for a dentist in Atlanta, a high school football star in Augusta. And then a story about a twenty-two-year-old college student from Billings killed by a hunter’s stray bullet while hiking deep in the woods of Saint O’s campus. Leaning back in her chair, she stares at the picture of Henry before he died, smiling at the camera with his trademark wide grin.

Caroline Novak was hit by a delivery truck heading into the school. Henry died in the woods. Lucy died in the lake. All of them returned and seemed to return for someone: a heartsick mother, a boy with cancer, and an orphan who kept a murderer from killing countless others.

“But why do we disappear?” she asks aloud, absently rubbing the firm shape of her arm. She’s starting to suspect that she returns to the lake and had always been there. Is it true for the others too? Are they hovering in some mirror image of this world when they’re gone?

She needs to find Henry. She needs to ask when he feels the most solid and permanent and whether he feels the polar opposite right before he vanishes. But she needs to do it without giving away that she feels the best when Colin is only barely escaping death.

It turns out this time he’s easy to find, reading on a bench beneath a large nak*d maple near the arts building. When Henry sees her, he stands, shouting her name and gesturing for her to join him. They climb the stairs and walk through the massive doors together, right as the sky opens and the snow begins to fall.

“Where’s Alex?” she asks. Henry gestures to the quad at their backs. “English. I’m tired of the history class I’ve been sitting in on this semester. It’s not like I remember anything about the past, but I still feel like I’ve heard it before.” With a wink, he tugs on her hand, and she follows him into the auditorium, down the long center aisle, and into the deep orchestra pit. Although their footsteps echo in the small quasi cave, it’s easy to tell that they’re completely alone. They’d be able to hear a pin drop on the stage.

“I have to tell you something,” she says, pulling at the sleeves of her shirt. “I know how you died, or, at least I know who killed you.”

“Oh,” he says. “Oh. I was . . . murdered too?”

“Yeah. Well, maybe ‘manslaughter’ is a better word. You were hit by a hunter’s stray bullet. I think you were visiting the area on a break from college and that’s when you were shot.”

Henry stands, takes a few steps away before sitting down again, and Lucy bites back a smile at his familiar ignorance. If Colin hadn’t told her about her death, she would probably still be in the dark about it all, too. Henry looks up to the ceiling, pauses, and then blinks back to Lucy. “I always half worried that I’d have that last piece of information and boom, the sky would open up and I’d be set free or sent back or whatever it is we’re waiting for.”

“That’s why Colin didn’t tell me how I died at first; he worried it would be the thing that would send me away for good.” Lucy shivers, hating the ticking-time-bomb sensation beneath her skin, that bleak unknown. What will be the thing that sends her away? She hesitates. “But I think there’s something about this school. Like it traps us somehow. Everyone I know of who died here, died on what was technically school grounds. I think there have been others, maybe there are others here now.”

“Have you seen someone?”

She shakes her head. “No, but Colin’s mother swore she saw the ghost of her dead daughter, Caroline. She drove them off a bridge, and I wonder if she thought she figured out a way for the family to be together again. Colin barely survived the accident. What if his mother was seeing her daughter? What if we’re just ghosts, and we’re just . . . here?”

“Without a purpose?”

Lucy nods. “Without a purpose. Haunting. Stuck.”

Henry doesn’t seem to like this idea, shaking his head sharply. “If Caroline were a Guardian like us, no way would she have led her mother over a bridge.”

Unease tightens Lucy’s chest. “I guess.”

He stares at her in his intense Henry way, as if he can see her thoughts hovering beneath her skin. “How’s Colin lately?” he asks.

“He’s good,” she says, not adding what a miracle that is.

“What else is on your mind, little sis?” Henry turns his chair so he’s facing her, elbows resting on his knees.

“Do you sometimes feel stronger than other times?” she asks.

“What do you mean by ‘stronger’? You mean more solid?”

She nods, picking at a thread on her sleeve. “I know this is personal, but sometimes Colin can barely touch me, and other times I feel like . . .” Lucy remembers the picture of Colin at prom, his hands resting on a human girl’s curves. “Like he can grab on to me. But I don’t think I understand what I do to make it happen. I wish I knew so I could do it more.”

“I have no good advice because it doesn’t ever seem to change for me,” Henry says apologetically. And then he growls, giving her a playfully dirty look. “Lucky.”

“But when Alex touches you, can he, like, touch you?”

As if on cue, Alex walks into the auditorium. His boots clomp down the center aisle and down the steps into the pit before he collapses into a chair next to Henry. He looks back and forth between them, the bruises beneath his eyes almost black in the shadows. “What’s up?”

Henry reaches down and pulls Alex’s legs across his lap. “Lucy asked if you like to touch me.”

She groans and buries her face in her hands. “That is not what I asked. I asked whether you can touch him. I don’t need a testimonial.”

Alex grins. “Yeah. But he feels like he’s covered in static.”

Henry watches Lucy for a beat before asking, “I’m sure you’ve already considered this, but what’s going on when you feel strongest?”

She thinks back to when she’s noticed it: at the lake, when Colin leaves for a ride. But also when Colin got back from the hospital. She wishes she could pinpoint a mood or even an event. “I notice it when we’re outside together, or when he’s riding his bike. I thought it was about him being happy, but then I felt it also when he was recovering.”

“Even if he was recovering, I think he was probably happy to be alive, in his bedroom with his hot girlfriend, so I wouldn’t rule out your theory.”

Lucy ducks her head, grinning at her lap. “I guess.”

“But my theory? You feel strongest when you’re on the right path, when you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing here. Maybe it’s when Colin is happiest, maybe it isn’t. Pick the one moment you felt strongest, most real, and do that again.”

She looks up at the ornate ceiling overhead, painted deep scarlet and gold and decorated with intricate molding. She felt almost solid before Colin chose to go into the lake. Is it wrong, she thinks, to keep this secret from Henry? Wouldn’t he want to know that he could be with Alex like this?

“I mean,” Henry says, breaking into Lucy’s internal debate, “I think I feel stronger every day. And Alex is still in remission. It tells me that whatever I’m doing for him is right.”

That makes up Lucy’s mind for her. She can never tell Henry what she’s letting Colin do in the lake. “Okay.”

“My point is, look at Colin. Watch him. If you do something to make him happy, you should feel that strength inside you build. If the strength is from something else, you’ll notice. I saw your name on some chemistry plaques in the science building,” he says with a wide grin. “Go do some experiments.”

She stands, but decides to start right away. “Henry, what color is my hair?”

He gives her a tilt of his head before breaking into soft laughter. “Not the strangest thing you’ve asked me, but okay, I’ll bite. It’s brown.”

Chapter 30 HIM

IT’S COLD AS HELL, AND COLIN CUPS HIS HANDS around his mouth and breathes, trying to warm them up. The wind whips around the side of the library, chilling him through a thermal, two T-shirts, a beanie, and his favorite jacket. Colin shrinks further into the warmth of his hood and rocks slightly, forward and back on his skateboard, watching Jay buzz his bike down the long flight of stairs. Huge piles of dirty snow line both sides of the stairway, and the sky looks heavy and swollen, like it’s ready to crack open and fall all around them.

The deicer scattered along the sidewalk pops and crunches beneath Colin’s wheels as he rides over to Jay.

“I thought it was supposed to warm up. Why is it so damn cold?” Jay grumbles.

Colin doesn’t answer, not wanting to think about what will happen when the lake begins to thaw. Instead, he relishes the freezing temperatures, the way each breath burns cold in his lungs, and how the other students rush by, practically sprinting up the stairs to get inside.

“Thank God we’re not at the lake today,” Jay says, teeth chattering. “We’d both be freezing our balls off. Literally.”

Colin laughs. “You’re not the one that ends up nak*d and wet.”

“Yeah. I’m the one sitting on the side of a frozen lake for an hour while you’re having all the fun.”

Colin snorts at Jay’s use of the word “fun.” Their idea of a good time has never made much sense to anyone else, but with Jay, it seems perfectly normal to characterize jumping into a freezing lake in January as fun.

“Think she’ll want to go again?” Jay adds. “She got up and left kind of suddenly today.”

“No clue.” Colin exhales loudly into the cold, the condensation forming a small cloud in front of him. He remembers how, as kids, he and Jay used to think they were cool and pretend they were puffing on invisible cigarettes. He knows the tiny particles in his breath freeze when they meet the icy air, moving from a gas to a denser liquid and solid state, forming ice crystals before dissolving back into invisible particles. He sort of hates that this reminds him of Lucy, like it’s some giant metaphor for what will happen when the days becomes dry and warm in the spring and there’s nothing left in the air to hold her together. Is it possible she’ll vanish along with the cold?

Jay pops his wheel and leans against the railing. “So that’s it, then? We’re done? Just when we’re getting it down?”

“I don’t know,” Colin answers. “She says she doesn’t want me to, but . . .”

“God, I still can’t believe it worked. I mean, for all of my doubts, have you ever really thought about what you’re doing? You’re having an out-of-body experience and making out with a ghost. Never mind how insane that is. It’s like you’re cheating death, Col. Again! It’s totally awesome.”

“Do not say it like that in front of Lucy,” Colin says. He climbs the stairs and looks out across the quad. He hated that phrase growing up—cheating death—as if he were somehow more life-savvy than his parents and managed to pull an ace out of his sleeve at the last minute, leaving him alive but his parents dead. “I’m not cheating anything. People get in cars every day, get on planes, get into boats. People hike and hang glide and ski down ridiculous mountains. Enough people have done those things and survived that we don’t even think twice when we start the ignition on our car and head out on Route Seven with the drunk and methed-out truckers barreling down there every day. But what if what I’m doing isn’t any more dangerous than skiing a black diamond? You don’t know, Jay. No one does it, so you think it’s wild. Maybe it isn’t.”

Jay is nodding almost the entire time Colin is ranting, and he puts his hands up in the air when he’s done. “I get it. Like, at first I was doing this only because it felt like I never saw you anymore. But now I think it’s cool. Leave it to you to find the fun in freezing your nuts off.”

Colin stands on his board and kicks off the concrete, crouching and jumping upward as he leaps, popping the tail so the board leaves the ground. Even being as sore as he is, there’s that singular moment of being airborne, where his head clears and the rush of adrenaline eclipses the wind in his ears and the cold on his face. His front truck makes contact, grinding the rail, and too soon, his wheels slam into the concrete. Colin weaves as he struggles to land steadily, gripping the handrail to stop from falling.