Текст книги "Sublime"

Автор книги: Christina Lauren

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

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.

“Nice,” Jay says, leaning back against the railing.

“Borked the landing.”

“Dude, you were hypothermic yesterday. Cut yourself some slack.”

Colin comes to a stop in front of him. “What you said earlier to Lucy about the devil on my shoulder . . . You know I’m not looking to get hurt, right?”

“I know. What I think is you have bigger balls than the rest of us.”

Colin shakes his head. “No, listen. You know that feeling when you ride down a skinny from twenty feet up? Or look over a fifteen-foot drop to flat and think, ‘Let’s do this’? It only works if you never doubt that you can. Standing over that ice, I feel totally safe.”

“Like you’re in the zone,” Jay says.

“Exactly.”

“But you have to convince Lucy of that.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, hurry it up, you lucky bastard. I don’t have a ghost girl. At least let me live vicariously through you.”

CHAPTER 31 HER

COLIN AND JAY ARE NEAR THE BACK OF THE library, jumping from rails to stairs, when Lucy returns. Colin approaches her slowly, as if she might roar, first inspecting her eyes and then reaching for her hand. “Are you mad?”

“I wasn’t mad.” She pulls his fingers up to kiss them.

“You totally were,” Jay says, coming to a skidding stop next to them. “You just have to trust that we are completely legit. We are adventure experts.”

“Legit?” She shakes her head at him, fighting a smile. “Don’t do that, Jay. You can’t pull off nineties gangster.”

“Ignore him,” Colin says, pressing a hand to Jay’s chest and pushing him away. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I needed to think. I went to talk to Henry.”

“You told him about the lake?”

“No, no,” she assures him quickly. “I wanted to know why I feel different lately. But it doesn’t happen to him. He says he’s always the same.”

Colin’s face falls, but he tries to hide his disappointment. “We’ll figure it out.” He kisses her cheek before turning to watch Jay grind down the stairs again.

In turn, Lucy watches Colin, thinking of what Henry said in the auditorium. She puts her hand on her opposite forearm, feeling the swirling energy beneath. “How do you feel today?”

He glances at her and then back to Jay. “I’m good. I swear. No tingling in my fingers anymore.” He wiggles them playfully in demonstration, but Lucy only feels the tightness in her chest intensify. She’s missing something. She’s missing something and she can’t disappear again.

“And you really do want to go back to the lake?”

He turns to her fully now, eyes bright. “Yeah, I do.”

Lucy squeezes her arm. Nothing. Colin looks hopeful, bordering on giddy, but she basically feels the same: somewhere in between a solid and a gas. In that strange no man’s land on the verge of the sublime. “And it works for you, going into the water alone? Having Jay pull you out?”

“Absolutely.” Colin is practically vibrating with joy now, but Lucy doesn’t register any change in herself. It can’t be tied only to his happiness. There’s something she isn’t getting right. “Is there a better way to do it?”

“Other than packing my bed with ice and curling up with me?” he says, laughing. “No. This works.”

With him.

The idea sparks a realization so fierce it takes her a moment to see beyond it and into the present, where Colin has looked away again. She came back from the lake to be with him but has been sending him into the water alone. Every time he goes in, she’s stronger. . . . She’s grown stronger so she can help him.

“Do you want me to go into the water with you?”

Her fingers sense the shock of energy surging into place beneath her skin, and she pulls her hand back as if she’s plugged her own fingers into a generator.

Colin reaches for her shoulders, steadying. She remembers the first day, in the dining hall, when she saw him and felt starving for details about his face up close, his voice, the feel of his skin on hers. She’s been staring at his face at a distance for years. The face that is here, right in front of her, bending close and kissing her as if she’s made from blown glass.

“Yeah,” he says. “You would do that?”

“Of course I would.”

“I’d follow you anywhere, Lucy. You just point the way.”

“Then, let’s swim.” She’s convinced she’s smiling with her whole body.

“When? When can we go?”

She pulls away and looks behind Colin to where Jay is very much not looking at what they’re doing. “Jay, you free tomorrow?”

Jay whoops and walks to Colin, bumping fists with him. “I’m in.”

It’s early, barely dawn. The sky clings weakly to darkness until clouds take their place and begin to drop fluffy snow. Colin and Jay shove peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into their mouths as they do a final check of the supplies.

“Still ready?” Colin asks her, heaving a large duffel over his shoulder.

Lucy nods, unable to open her mouth for fear she’ll admit that she’s never felt this strong or this sure of anything

By the time they’ve arrived and hiked to the shore, the surface is blinding in the early-morning sunlight, brilliant white broken up by tiny speckles of fallen brown leaves. Colin’s original site of entry, the jagged and thin section of ice in the middle of the lake, shines a brilliant blue, thinner than the ice around it. Now when she sees the sharp edges pointing like arrows to the center, Lucy’s memory of Colin falling in is rewritten as something calm and idyllic. Like a reel of images, she sees him going under, his face relieved instead of terrified. She remembers hearing him call her name on the trail, of the first sensation of solid skin to skin, of the way his eyes begged her to not ruin it by pointing out that something was very wrong.

Their shoes crunch along the surface, and she hears Colin slip on the ice, and both guys laugh behind her. She doesn’t even turn around because she wants in. It’s different now that they’ve decided to go in together. Something heavy pulls inside her chest, a sudden tether to some unseen anchor underwater.

She turns and looks at him here and wonders if it’s true that she lived in the lake for so long. Did she see him? Is that the hunger that takes over every thought? Beneath the blue ice there’s something deeper, a space carved for them. It’s all she can do to not pull him down to the opening with her. Her hands are magnets and his skin is iron and their place together is just below the surface.

While Jay unrolls the foil blanket and unpacks his kit of supplies, Lucy strips down to her underwear, unwilling to waste a single second. Boots, pants, sweater, shirt form a rumpled pile at her feet. Her skin is startlingly white in the sun, iridescent and more opaque than she’s ever seen it.

She looks up at a surprised Colin, his eyes taking in every inch. He stutters a few sounds before fumbling with his own buttons to catch up.

“I’ve never seen you . . . like this,” he says, eyes bright, cheeks flushed.

Lucy glances at the opening to the water and then back at him. “On the count of three?”

They dive in, arms stretching out into the clear blue water. It presses against every inch of her, cold and silvery. When they dip under a fallen tree, a fluff of moss waves in their wake, releasing a million tiny bubbles to travel the surface. Lucy doesn’t know exactly where she’s going, but she’s pulled toward the deep end of the lake, under the shadows where the ice is thick and dark.

She feels Colin’s fingers brush the skin of her ankle, his hair on her thigh as he pushes to catch up and swim beside her. As she turns her head, she sees him trying to hold his breath. Behind them, his unconscious body floats to the surface.

“Let go,” she says as clearly as if they were on dry land. She takes his hand and pulls him closer. It’s warm in hers, solid and familiar. At the surface, Jay pulls Colin’s body out of the lake. “Jay’s got you out.”

He struggles for a moment, a look of fear passing through his wide eyes as he works to let go of the instinct to breathe. Tugging his arm, she leads him forward, where the deep blue slowly morphs darker and darker, turning into a tunnel of soft black.

“Luce,” Colin whispers from beside her. “Where are we?” “I don’t know exactly,” she says. And she doesn’t. Even though being back in the lake feels familiar, she realizes she’s never known what this world is. It’s not heaven or hell. It’s not a different universe.

Light shines above, and they both look to the whiteness over them and push up through the crystal-blue water until they break the surface on this strange, other side. It’s unlike anything Lucy has ever seen since her return, but the space is so familiar and tugs at something in the back of her mind, some instinct that she’s finding the world she retreats to when she vanishes.

There’s a brief flash of disappointment: Everything is the same—trees and boulders and the trail—but then Lucy realizes that it’s not at all like the shore they just left.

Instead, it’s a mirror image, a replica of the icy earth aboveground, but it’s so much more. More color, more light, more reflections on every surface. Entering this world feels like stepping into the center of a diamond.

Lucy and Colin climb out of the water onto a shore of sand so crystalline, it glimmers in the indirect sun filtered through the trees. Branches of amber, leaves of a silver green so bright Lucy has to blink away, let her eyes adjust.

Beside her, Colin is silent, and when she looks to him, she registers that he’s watching her reaction, waiting. “There was something different about that world, something perfect,” he’d said. He’s seen this every other time he’s been here, and it’s she who’s forgotten what it’s like, because, until now, she didn’t go under with him.

“You can see this?” she asks, looking up at a sky so blue it almost needs another name. It’s the lake reflected, an entire galaxy, a massive ocean in a single glimpse of sky.

He nods, taking her hand and pulling her toward the trail. But when she expects him to pull her in the direction of the shed, he surprises her, walking the other way, away from the field and the school buildings and deeper into the woods instead.

Beneath their feet, amber leaves crunch like splinters of precious stone. The snow is mesmerizing, winking back a hundred shades of blue reflected from the lake and sky. It’s like she can see every frozen, glittering crystal that blankets the ground and trees and hills beyond.

Lucy’s memories come back slowly, giving her mind time to adjust the same way her eyes adjusted to the light: first recover. And then see: see the world that must have been her home for the past ten years.

“It’s like a reflection,” she tells Colin, following his lead at a fork in the trail. “Everything up there is down here. Buildings and trees. Even the lake. Like Wonderland.” She points back at the water behind them, looking like a sapphire planted in a bed of quartz.

He must hear the awe in her voice because he stops, turning to face her. She shifts where she stands. “Except people. I mean, I think I’ve been alone, watching.”

His dark brows pull together, and he whispers, “I hate that.”

Not wanting to worry him, she adds, “I don’t think time passed the same way. I mean, I remember being here, but I don’t feel like I was sitting around, bored out of my mind for the past ten years.” His face relaxes, and she says, “I remember looking up, as if I could see everything through a glass. I think I was waiting. And I remember watching you.”

“Really?”

Nodding, Lucy takes his hand and leads him down the trail this time, feeling a pull to go forward, to keep moving. “I remember watching you on the hill during a winter social. You and Jay swung from a tree branch and jumped down onto the lake.”

Colin laughs, shaking his head. “I’d forgotten about that. We were twelve. I broke my ankle.” There’s a hint of pride in this admission that makes her smile.

“I saw you ride out here the first time,” she says, the images unrolling in her head like a reel of film. “You were a little scared but a lot more excited.” She grins as she remembers his pink cheeks and smiling face, the way he kept glancing back over his shoulder as if he expected to be caught any minute. “You two were the only ones who came out here at first, but you didn’t seem to be looking for me.”

“I remember that! Jay dared me to walk out on the ice when we were seven. The joke ended up being on him because he cut himself on the dock and needed a tetanus shot. Man, we got in trouble for that.”

Their joined hands swing between them as they continue to walk along the trail. Every few minutes Colin lifts the back of hers to his mouth, kissing it. His lips are warm. She can feel the puff of air against her skin, the heat of his breath as he exhales.

“And obviously it didn’t stop you.”

He grins. “No way. We’ve grown up hearing stories about this place. About Walkers and disappearances, of people claiming to see a girl slip along the shore or hearing voices.” He bends to pick up a leaf, spinning it in front of him. “I mean, it was creepy, yeah. But not everyone bought into it. Just adults discouraging crazy kids from drinking and fornicating at the lake. Made it sound cooler, really.”

Lucy snorts and shakes her head. “Of course the prospect of danger would make it more appealing to you. And even before I died, I don’t think we were supposed to come out here. Too far from the main buildings, too many ways to get in trouble.”

They stop walking, and he bends to her, whispering, his smiling kiss covering her lips, “I can think of lots of ways to get in trouble out here.”

“How long have we been gone?” she asks, tilting her head back as Colin kisses a path from her chin to her neck. He mumbles something unintelligible, and she means to ask him what he said, but a bird cuts through the air over his shoulder. A raven. It’s beautiful, with wings like shards of ebony. It flies overhead, calling out into the silence before circling back and landing somewhere in front of them.

Lucy turns to find it, to point out the hauntingly beautiful bird to Colin, but she freezes, the words lost in a gasp when she realizes how far they’ve walked.

She can see the hulking shape of Ethan Hall behind them in the distance, and ahead of her is the raven, its talons wrapped around the highest arch of the imposing metal gate that surrounds Saint Osanna’s.

But something is different. Instead of feeling an invisible bubble pushing against her chest and sending her back to the trail, she feels like a fish caught on the end of a hook. Pulled. Slowly reeled in.

She takes a step forward.

“Luce?” Colin asks. “You okay?”

“I don’t know,” she says, continuing on, her steps quicker now. Purposeful. As she nears the iron fence, she looks up and meets the raven’s watchful stare, can see her own reflection in the luminous black of the bird’s eyes. “Something . . . something’s different.”

She hears the crunch of snow as Colin jogs to catch up, feels the beat of a pulse in her hollow veins. When Colin stops at her side, the pull gets stronger. “Do you feel that?”

“Feel what? Lucy, what’s going on?”

“Like suction? Like I’m metal and there’s this giant magnet on the other side? You don’t feel that?”

Colin shakes his head, eyes wide as he blinks from Lucy to the gate and back again. “Do you think you can get through?”

“I don’t know.” Her mouth is suddenly so dry, drier than she can ever remember. For the first time since waking, she wants something to drink, can almost imagine the feel of cold water as she swallows.

“Touch it,” she hears Colin whisper. “Lucy, touch it.”

She licks her lips, shaking as she lifts her arm, fingers trembling as they find the icy metal. There’s no resistance. She holds her breath, watching as her hand passes between two of the ornate balusters and to the other side.

“Oh my God,” she gasps. “Oh my God!” There’s the faintest hint of a tan; blue veins form a map across her palm and up her wrist. There’s a scar. Freckles. Imperfections. She forms a fist, feeling the warmth of her own skin. “Colin!”

But he doesn’t answer. Colin is gone.

CHAPTER 32 HIM

SOMETIME DURING THE NIGHT, COLIN FEELS Lucy slip into bed behind him. The mattress shifts with her weight as she burrows under the layers of quilts and electric blankets to wrap her arms around his chest. He’s not sure how, but Lucy and Jay have managed to move him from the lake to the dorm and up to their room without anyone noticing. He’s wearing a set of old flannel pajamas and is in bed beneath a pile of blankets. Jay is gone, so Colin assumes he must have had the first watch. He doesn’t remember anything after leaving Lucy’s underwater world.

“Hi,” she says, her voice muffled against his back. “Hey.” It comes out as a croak, and he closes his eyes tight against the burn. His throat feels swollen, scorched, as if he ate a meal of solid fire. “Have you been lying here for long?”

“No. I got here a few minutes ago. I’ve been waiting for Dot to go to sleep. She’s been down in the common room stirring the same cup of coffee and staring at a blank TV for more than an hour.”

He doesn’t want Dot to see him like this, and the guilt he’s been trying to ignore flares inside his chest. “She didn’t see you, did she?”

“No,” Lucy assures him. “She never would have let me get past the stairs.”

So Dot came to his dorm to be close to him? He rubs his face, groaning quietly. “She’s worried. She feels so responsible for me.”

“Yeah.”

“I think she knows I’m doing something crazy. She knows about you.” He shivers and presses the heating pad closer to his chest.

“I thought she might.” Lucy ignores the way anxiety burrows into her skin and tucks the blankets more securely around his body. “Are you warm enough?”

“Mm-hmm. But if you want to seduce me, you might have to leave on my socks,” he says, trying to lighten the mood. He doesn’t want to think about the downside to any of this. Only wants to feel her curled behind him and remember the world underwater. A fraction of his mind registers how crazy this is, that from the outside looking in, he might even appear suicidal. And with a piercing stab to his chest, he realizes this is how his mother must have felt. Doing whatever she could do to have even one more day with her daughter. Colin has never been more positive that his mother wasn’t insane after all. She simply wanted her family back.

It’s early—hours before the sun comes up and the students flood campus—and Colin can hear one of the delivery trucks outside, dropping off supplies at the kitchen. The steady beep as it backs up echoes off the stone buildings and fills the empty quad. “Hey, how’d you two get me up here anyway?”

“That would be Jay. Turns out he’s excellent at distraction and a lot stronger than he looks.”

“How is he?”

“He’s okay,” she says, and he feels her shrug slightly. “I mean, he seems to thrive on this kind of thing. I don’t get it, but I’m glad he’s like that. What he’s doing for us is amazing.”

“I know.”

“I wonder if we’d be able to do it without him. I wonder if I could get you out of the water somehow.” She pauses, watching him. “I wonder if that’s why I’m so strong now.”

Colin is silent in response to that. He’s given this some thought. If the lake is where Lucy was before she found him and where she goes when she disappears, Colin wonders if he could simply go find her there. He’s not exactly sure how they got to the other side because his head is still a bit foggy, but he likes to think if he had to, he could find it alone.

“Tell me what happened,” he says. “It’s true, isn’t it? You got past the gate.”

“You remember that?”

He nods.

She shivers beside him. “Other than finding you, I don’t remember ever feeling so drawn to something. I saw my hand, and it looked alive, Colin. I felt like I needed to be on the other side of the gate.”

“Do you think that’s how it works? We need to get you off campus? Like, unlocking some puzzle?”

“I don’t know. Somehow I don’t think it’s that simple. It can’t be.”

“Maybe you’re overthinking it.”

She doesn’t answer, just presses her cheek into the back of his shirt, reassuring herself that he’s warm and really here.

“It’s where you were before you came back?” he asks.

“I think so. I feel like I’d been pacing inside a cage, looking out through the lake, waiting to come be with you.”

“And you think it’s where you go when you disappear?”

Her arms tighten around him when he says that. “Yeah, but I don’t plan on disappearing again.”

Maybe not, he thinks. But at least I know where to find you. Colin relaxes. This knowledge makes the prospect of the approaching spring much less terrifying.

CHAPTER 33 HER

THE DEEP PURPLE WATER-SKY TREMBLES ABOVE them, with stars made out of a million of the smallest bubbles. The illusion of earth and lake bottom turns into the soft, inviting blackness. An instinctive burst of energy courses through Lucy’s system, and she pushes forward faster.

“God, I can’t wait to get there,” Colin says, floating behind her. “I hope we can stay longer this time. I want to try the gate again.”

Lucy doesn’t respond, simply kicks her feet through the icy clear water. It’s all she’s been able to think about: how her skin looked like real flesh, that she felt the sting of the cold air on her fingertips, but she’s worried there’s something they haven’t considered yet.

It’s strange to not be able to see but to know exactly where to turn, like the directions are embedded in her muscles. Does he feel it too?

“Can you find it?” she asks, stilling. “What?” He stops next to her, his arm pressed along the length of hers.

“Do you remember how to get there? Could you find it on your own?”

He looks behind them, to where the water has simply emptied into blackness, and then forward again. “Not like this. I can’t see anything. I don’t think this is how we got here before.”

“Never mind,” she says, grabbing his hand to pull him closer. “I guess it’s a feel thing. Maybe after you’ve been here a few more times.”

“Maybe,” he says, though he sounds unsure.

A few seconds later, she instinctively turns. A light in the distance grows brighter and brighter.

It takes a moment for their eyes to adjust, but everything is exactly as they left it. A canopy of crystalline leaves sparkles above them. The sun is a trapezoidal beam of yellow sweeping across the frozen shore. Orange, blue, red, and purple flowers bloom in small pops before they freeze, leaving waves of stained-glass color in their wake. A light snow is falling, and Colin holds out his hand; intricate, lacy snowflakes land in his palm.

She grins at him, watching him look around. It’s everything at once: vibrant color and glistening ice. They can smell the wet earth beneath the snow and hear the water freeze across the lake. It becomes disorienting and overwhelming, and she can see the moment it becomes too much for him when he sits on the bank and covers his eyes.

She sits next to him, resting her hand on his bent knee. “Are you okay?”

“I love you,” he says quietly, slowly blinking up to the sky.

She breaks into a grin so wide it takes her several seconds to respond. “I love you back.”

He picks up her hand and massages her fingers. “I thought I knew what love was before.”

“I didn’t.” She leans down, kisses the back of his hand.

Colin looks over at her, his eyes as hungry as she feels when she pushes him onto his back in the snow.

“Cold?” she asks, moving over him.

He shakes his head, hands running up her sides, lifting her shirt up and off in a single movement. “Not even a little.”

Her hair falls in a curtain around them, and he pushes it back, kissing her like she’s a normal girl he can grip and feel and not worry about breaking.

Lucy wonders if time moves down here at all because before she knows it her clothes are gone and Colin is smiling down at her, snowflakes in his hair and clinging to his lashes, disappearing into the skin of his bare shoulders. He bites his lip as he moves above her, fingers memorizing every inch and finding where they come together.

Frost gathers on their skin and disappears as quickly. Light explodes behind her eyes, and Colin holds her shaking hands with his. He says her name against her mouth, that he loves her, that even having all of her will never be enough. He groans into her neck, and when they still, his heart silent against her chest, she can hear the sound of feathery snow falling around them.

“How’s it possible to feel like I want to be here with you but I shouldn’t be?” he asks. They’re on the trail again, hand in hand as they make their way toward the front of the school. Lucy tried to say no—to distract him—but there wasn’t any conviction behind her words.

“I don’t know,” she says, “but it’s how I feel bringing you here too. It feels selfish.”

“Lucy?” he says, and she watches a cloud of anxiety pass through his eyes. “I think this is what we’ve been missing. Don’t you?”

She looks up, watches how fast the sun seems to move across the snowy sky. She can feel it with every step: the need to keep going, to escape.

They stop with the iron gate in front of them, its hulking mass like a scar blooming out of the pristine snow. Lucy notices Colin rubbing the spot over his sternum. “Jay’s bringing me back. My chest hurts,” he says. “We don’t have much time, Luce.”

He reaches for her then, pulling her to him with a smile that doesn’t completely fill his eyes. His mouth is soft but insistent, wet and warm.

She turns, a sense of longing filling her chest like a warm bath, a tug behind her ribs pushing her toward whatever is on the other side of the fence.

The same feeling of anticipation coats her skin, and she reaches out to lift the latch. The old gate groans, the hinges squeak, and Lucy steps back as it swings open.

She twists her fingers with his, and as if acting on instinct, steps through first.

She hears the gasp before she’s even turned around. He’s smiling. Tear tracks line his face, and he’s looking at her as if she’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.

“Your hair,” he says. She looks down. It’s brown, every shade of brown at once. “And your eyes.” He’s laughing now, disbelief etched in every part of his face. “They’re green.”

“Come here,” she says, and pulls him forward.

She’s on the old trail again. Her feet dig easily into the snowy earth, but she almost trips on a bank of snow when she catches sight of Jay, curled in half and throwing up the contents of his stomach several feet away from where Colin’s body lies.

Colin’s lips are blue, and when she gets closer, she can see that his eyes are open, but hollow and staring straight up at the heavy gray sky. His chest rises and falls in shallow pants, but when he hears her feet crunching across the ice, he turns his head to her and tries to smile. His breathing grows more ragged; his eyes roll closed.

“GET AWAY FROM HIM!” Jay screams, wiping his mouth on his sleeve and stumbling to Colin, shoving Lucy out of the way. “I just got him back, Lucy. Stay away from him!”

Jay’s eyes are squeezed shut. He refuses to look at her. “What happened, Jay? Why is he so bad?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” he mumbles. “It’s not working.” Still, he keeps his eyes down, frantically shoving hand warmers under the blankets and against Colin’s cold skin.

Dread trickles along her arms. “Are you afraid of me?” “When he comes back, you look fucking terrifying,” he says, voice shaking in the cold. He points without looking. “Grab that bag; it has gloves.”

She walks to the bag numbly, Jay’s words echoing over and over. He’s said it before: When he comes back, you look terrifying.

It’s the same reaction Joe had when he fell through his porch. He told Colin she looked like a demon. Lucy feels the high of her time with Colin underwater begin to evaporate.

“Here,” she says, carefully handing Jay the gloves. “What can I do? Is he going to be okay?” Her voice is so flat, sounds so indifferent. She squeezes her eyes shut, unable to get rid of the image of Colin in front of her, smiling up into the sun right before he slipped away.

“He’s been under for more than an hour, Lucy! He’s nonresponsive with a pulse of thirty. Thirty! His normal resting pulse is sixty-four. Do you even know what that means? He might die!”

“Just let me closer; he’ll be better when I’m there.” She’s so sure of it that at first she doesn’t register that when she puts her hand on his arm, the small monitor at his side lets out a steady, flat beep.

“Lucy!” Jay gasps, pulling at her arm and staring where his hand wraps firmly around her flesh. “Go away. Go away. Go away,” he whispers over and over. She realizes she was completely wrong when she assumed a silent Jay is a panicked Jay. This Jay is panicked, and he’s unable to stop whispering to himself. He’s a rubber band pulled taut, about to snap.

“Let’s get him to the dorm,” she says. “I think I can help you carry him. I feel so strong.”

“No. Don’t touch him again. I don’t think you’re helping.”

“Of course I’m helping. Jay, we have to get him out of here. You can’t carry him alone!”

Sirens wail in the distance, and Jay meets her eyes, apology and fear and anger and fresh tears brimming inside. “I called nine-one-one. I didn’t know what else to do.”

The ambulance crunches along the trail, coming to a skidding stop. Paramedics burst from every door, rushing to Colin’s body, pulling away the blankets and heat pads, checking his vitals. They wrap him in some type of bag and pepper Jay with questions. How did he go in? How long was he under? Has he said anything? Jay answers, wooden. No one even looks at Lucy.

She watches as the two men lift Colin onto a stretcher. His hand reaches out weakly, and she waves.

“I’ll meet you there.” Somehow, she thinks. Her thoughts grow panicked and jumbled as the ambulance starts up, beeping loudly in the echoing quiet of the lake as it backs down the trail. How can she possibly follow him?