Текст книги "Sublime"

Автор книги: Christina Lauren

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

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.’”

She laughs again, and this time it’s loud enough to echo off the tree trunks around them. He loves hearing it, loves how someone so finespun could make such a big sound. “Well, how were you supposed to react? Actually, I think I’d have been more worried if you’d been totally calm about it. I would have probably thought, ‘Maybe this guy has a ghost fetish.’”

It’s Colin’s turn to laugh, but it quickly fades away. “My mom started seeing things. It’s how she . . .” He pauses, stopping to face her. “See, a few weeks after we moved here . . . my older sister, Caroline, was hit by a delivery truck heading into school. She was on her bike. Never saw it coming, I guess. Mom kind of lost it, went off the deep end. Then, after about a month, she started saying she saw Caroline on the road a few times. One night, she got us in the car, told us we were going out for ice cream in town, and then drove the car off a bridge.”

“Colin,” Lucy whispers, horrified, “that’s awful.”

“My parents died. I survived. So, when you told me you thought you were dead, I guess you understand why I flipped out.”

“God, yeah.” She pulls her hair off her face, exposing every inch of smooth, pale skin. She’s so beautiful; he wants to feel his cheek against hers. “I’m so sorry.”

He waves her off, hating to linger on this. “Where did you go the last few days?”

“I don’t really remember what I did, but I’m sure I was around. Here, or in the field. I can’t leave campus grounds.”

“You mean, at all?”

She shakes her head and watches him a minute longer before dropping her leaf on the path. It disappears almost immediately into the mud. It’s his turn to stare, watching her profile as she looks out across the water.

“Lucy?”

She turns to him with a smile. “I like it when you say my name.”

Colin smiles back, but it turns down at the corners after a beat. “Do you know why you’re back here?”

She shakes her head. “Are you scared of me?”

“No.” He should be, absolutely. And he wants to say more, to talk about the school and the stories that surround it, about the Walkers and how maybe that’s what she is, and are they all trapped by the gate? He definitely should be scared. But now that he’s with her, close enough to touch, he can feel only relief and that strange, intoxicating longing.

Suddenly walking side by side isn’t enough anymore.

“Hold my hand?” he asks.

She coils her long fingers around his, both cool and warm, solid but retreating. He can feel points of contact against his skin, but never in the same place for very long. When he squeezes, a current runs through his fingers, making his muscles relax. She’s like a constellation, alive against his hand.

When he looks up, her eyes are closed, her teeth biting down on her lower lip.

“What’s wrong?” he asks. “Does this hurt you?”

Her eyes open, and hunger and joy swirl green and auburn inside. “Have you ever been in a pool and you hop out and jump right into a hot tub?”

He laughs. He knows exactly the feeling she means, flushing hot and amazing, but also such an intense change it feels like every nerve ending is firing. “Yeah. And how it settles into soothing hot instead of that intense oh-my-god-yes hot.”

She nods. “I keep waiting for the settling.” Her eyes fall closed again. “It never comes. When you’re touching me, it’s like the first moment of submersion, always. It’s a relief so overwhelming it almost takes my breath away.”

Colin’s heart beats heavily inside his chest. Tentatively, she reaches up and brushes a trembling finger along the ring in his lip. “Did it hurt?”

“A little.”

“The metal must be cold,” she whispers, and he feels himself leaning toward her. “What does it feel like?”

“For me or for you?” he asks, grinning.

CHAPTER 11 HER

"FOR ME," SHE ANSWERS, REACHING TO PRESS A fingertip against the cool metal.

“Wrap your hand around the pipes,” the teacher said. “The cold and the warm together feel scorching.” Lucy released the pipes with a surprised hiss, looking up at the teacher in shock.

“Some skin receptors sense cold, some heat. Both are sent to the brain, but the brain hears these mixed signals as powerful heat. It’s a form of perception we call paradoxical warmth.”

Lucy gasps at the perfect memory and the intensity of the touch, pulling her finger back in surprise.

Colin’s lip ring was cold from the wind and his skin was warm with blood, and like the pipes, the feeling of his lip pressed to her fingertip was scorching. And although she understands the science behind the pipes experiment, there can’t be any explanation in the world for what happened between them just now. For the brief contact—a few seconds—the air incinerated.

Colin swallows, his eyes never leaving her mouth. He blinks a few times. Is he going to kiss her? Her skin warms at the thought, and the closer he leans, the more flooded she becomes with a strange, intoxicating relief. It overwhelms her like a head rush.

Lucy knows now that she’s been kissed before—even that she’s not innocent—but it felt nothing like this. Memories of those monochromatic touches pale next to the vibrancy of Colin’s skin. But this reaction turns sour in her thoughts, unsettling her. If the simple touch of his lip on her fingertip felt so intense, what would it feel like to actually kiss him? She’s afraid she’d be unable to process so much sensation. And so she turns back to the trail, eyes closed for a moment as she savors the feel of the cold metal ring, the heat of his breath as he exhaled against her fingertip.

She’s taken a few steps before she hears Colin move to catch up with her. If he’s surprised by her reaction, he doesn’t show it, and they continue to walk in silence. Every few steps, Colin’s hand brushes against hers. Eventually, he gives up pretense and wraps his fingers around hers again. So carefully, just like the first time.

He bends to meet her eyes. “Still okay?” he asks adorably, somehow managing to look both confident and completely unsure of himself. She can only nod, overwhelmed by his simple touch. His skin feels hot and alive, as if with each of his heartbeats she can sense the surge of blood in his veins.

He smiles widely. “So, if you can’t ever leave campus, where do you live?”

Lucy takes him to her little home and is impressed when he doesn’t look shocked to find her living in an abandoned shed beside the school. She lights the small gas lamp in the corner before stretching out her arms, almost touching the wall on either side. “This is home sweet home.”

He folds his long frame on an old crate and she sits on another and tells him everything she remembers. The fragmented pieces from her human life are random and meaningless, but he listens like each piece is a part of a larger, greater story. When she starts to tell him everything she remembers since waking on the trail, she sees a shadow flicker on his face for a brief moment, as if he’s sad that the story of her first life adds up to so little. But her memories from this life are so numerous in comparison, she treats them like gems. He watches and listens as he leans back against the dilapidated wall of the shed.

She tells him about sitting outside the school and watching students in their everyday routine and how she didn’t feel even a single moment of envy; she simply felt as if she was waiting. She tells him that she didn’t feel the need to find her parents even though they might still be alive and how that lack of compulsion worries her somehow. Wouldn’t a girl want to join her peers? Wouldn’t she go straight to her family?

She brings him up to the present moment with a simple, “I told you I died. You freaked. I wandered around and forced myself to stay away from the school and then . . . you came and found me. The end.”

He laughs. “I had no idea you could talk so much.” “I haven’t wanted to talk to anyone else.”

His smile fades, and he looks around, like he’s seeing the

shed for the first time since he arrived. “Don’t you want to be in a more comfortable place?” he asks. “It’s kind of weird that you’re alone out here.”

“I like it. It feels like mine now, and it’s clean and quiet and no one has ever come over here.”

He hesitates and then glances down at his phone. “I should go.” She watches him brush the leaves and pine needles from his pants. When he looks up, he tilts his head, wincing. “I can’t leave you here.”

“I’ve been here for almost three weeks now.”

“Come with me, just tonight.” He senses her hesitation and pushes on. “Just until we scare up some blankets and make this whole place less . . .”

“Rustic?” she offers.

“I was going to say creepy. We should aim for rustic.” We.

She follows him down the trail, unable even in her weightlessness to match his grace over logs and through the marshy bits. All of their talking seems to have emptied them of words, and they move through the moonlight in an easy silence until the hulking gray buildings of Saint Osanna’s appear above the tips of the trees. The idea of a dorm room, of a comforter, a rug, and walls that keep the elements at bay seem almost decadent.

Colin’s room screams “boy.” Muted earth tones, bike magazines, dirty laundry. Greasy bolts on his desk, a soda can, a row of trophies. She can see, beneath the layers, strong architectural bones: dark wood windowpanes, polished hardwood. The shelves built deep into the walls are now cluttered with papers and bike parts and small stacks of photographs.

“Quite a man lair,” she says. Colin flops down on his bed and groans a relaxed-happy noise, but Lucy doesn’t want to sit down. She wants to go through his stuff. She has two school uniforms, a pair of boots, and a shed. She’s fascinated with all of his things.

“A brown comforter? How understated.” She smiles and runs her hand along the edge of his mattress.

“I like to imagine I’m sleeping in the dirt,” he jokes. She feels him watching her while she studies a pile of clothing near the closet door. He throws an arm over his face and mumbles beneath it, “Jay and I . . . we’re not so skilled with the cleaning.”

“Yeah . . .” She pushes aside a pair of socks on a shelf so she can read what books he has stacked there.

“At least my sheets are clean.” He immediately clears his throat, and she continues to stare at his books. Awkward settles like a thick gel into the room. “I didn’t mean that. Yes, I mean, my sheets are clean but . . . for sleeping. Oh my God, never mind.”

Lucy is already laughing. “I don’t sleep.”

“Right. Right.” He’s quiet for several beats before asking, “Won’t you get bored?”

“It’s nice to be near someone. I promise I won’t draw a mustache on you in your sleep.”

He yawns suddenly, widely. “Well, if you do, give me a Fu Manchu. Go big or go home.” He stretches as he stands, and a strip of bare stomach is exposed beneath his shirt. Heat pulses through her, and she wonders if it’s possible for him to notice the way her entire body seemed to ripple. Hooking a thumb over his shoulder, he says he’s going to go brush his teeth.

Without Colin’s eyes on her, she feels free to look around a little. Not to dig in his drawers or look under his mattress, but to take a closer look at the pictures on his desk, the trophies on his shelves.

He’s won races and stunt contests. He snowboards, and from the looks of it, he used to play hockey. Ribbons and plaques line two shelves, and there are so many, she quickly stops trying to read each one.

On his desk there’s a picture of a small boy with a man who looks like she imagines Colin will in his thirties– thick, wild, dark hair and bright eyes. Scattered on his desk are papers and Post-its and a few pay stubs from what she assumes is the dining hall. Tucked under his keyboard and sticky with spilled soda is a picture of Colin at a school dance with a short brunette. His hands are on her hips. She’s leaning back into him, and they’re not just smiling tight, staged smiles. They’re laughing together.

A tight ball forms in her chest and expands into her throat. The way his hands rest on her hips is mesmerizing, as if she is firm and his and there. Lucy doesn’t know how his touch will ever feel normal to her and whether she’ll ever be able to be close to him the way she imagines this girl was.

The skin on the back of her neck burns warm when she feels him return to the room, and she quickly puts the picture back where it was. She thinks he notices, but he doesn’t say anything and neither does she. It’s too soon for the conversation of what they are, let alone who that girl was. Even so, Lucy can’t quite stop the jealous fire that licks at her insides at the image of Colin with someone else.

“I realize this is lame,” he says, “but I’m actually really tired.”

The clock reads two a.m. “God. Of course you are. Sorry . . .”

With a small smile, he climbs under the covers and pats the mattress next to him. Lucy climbs onto the foot of the bed, careful to stay on top of the comforter, and sits crosslegged facing him.

“You’re going to watch me?”

“Until you’re asleep and I can sneak a permanent marker from your desk.”

He smiles and curls onto his side. “Okay. ’Night, Lucy.”

Questions pulse in her mind in the blackness of the room, begging for answers. About her, about him. About why the universe sent her back here and why he seems to be the only thing that matters. “’Night, Colin.”

“Hey there, new girl.” Jay grins, pulling out a chair next to his and patting the seat. Colin ignores this, pulling a chair out for Lucy across the table from his friend. “Lucy, Jay. Her name is Lucy.”

“Lucy is a sweet name, but New Girl is better. It’s mysterious. You can be whoever you want to be.” Leaning forward, Jay gives Lucy his best smoldering smile. “Who do you want to be, New Girl?”

Lucy shrugs, thinking. She’d never considered this aspect of being new, and untethered, and unknown. Everything she’s done has been on instinct. She looks through the open doorway to the dining hall, where most students eat. All of the girls bleed together into a single, boring uniform.

“I play bass in an all-female band called the Raging Hussies, have a math fetish, and open beer bottles with my teeth.” She grins at him. “One of those is true.”

Jay’s eyes narrow. “Please tell me it’s the band one.”

“My vote is teeth,” Colin says.

“Sorry,” she says with mock sympathy. “Math.”

Jay shrugs, taking a bite of bacon. “That’s also hot. I mean, whether or not you play the bass with a bunch of hussies, you like the lake. That makes you interesting.”

“What’s interesting about liking the lake?” Lucy turns and searches Colin’s face for explanation. “What’s not to like about it?”

“I love the lake,” Colin says with an easy smile, apparently enjoying the interaction. “Tons of bike trails, and no one else ever goes out there.” With a wink, he adds, “I’m not afraid of what’s out at the lake.”

“I don’t care about the stories,” Jay says. “It just looks creepy. In the summer, it gets so hot and muggy that everything in the air warps. In the winter, the glacial lake freezes and everything turns blue.” Jay spears a forkful of eggs and points them in Lucy’s direction. “You’ve heard about the Walkers, right?”

Lucy shakes her head, cold spreading from her fingertips up her arm. Instinctively, she shifts closer to Colin.

“People say Saint O’s is haunted. And no one goes to the lake; some people around here claim they’ve seen a girl walking around under the water. Hell, this whole place is supposed to be haunted.”

Lucy shivers, but only Colin notices. He puts a gentle hand on her thigh below the table.

“But if you want to know what I think,” Jay begins, and the eggs fall back onto his plate with a quiet smack. “People don’t like walking all the way down there because they’re a bunch of lazy asses who’d rather sit in their room and open beer bottles with their teeth.”

“I see,” Lucy says. Jay watches her, expression unreadable.

“Jay and I aren’t scared of ghosts,” Colin says.

Jay laughs and shoves his plate away. “No, dude. I don’t believe in ghosts.”

When Lucy looks over at Colin, he’s watching her, grinning with their secret in his eyes.

Lucy creates a schedule built of classes with teachers who never take roll. Only one class is with Colin—history—but it’s in the middle of the day when she needs to see his reassuring half smile, his fingers tapping out an impatient rhythm on his desk, the fingers that she knows want to touch her. It’s harder than she’d have imagined to be, well, nothing.

She watches everyone constantly, wondering if some phrase, some small mannerism, will spark a memory or a hint of what she was and of how she can stay earthbound and leave the school someday with Colin.

She finds herself thinking back on what Jay said about the Walkers and the stories that surround the school. She knows she should have asked more questions, should ask them still, but the instinctual tug she feels to be near Colin builds like static in her ears, blocking everything else out. Her questions, her doubts, her purpose, seem secondary to the corporeal buzzing she feels beneath her skin in his presence. She’s as physically drawn toward Colin as she is repelled by the gate.

“Lucy?” Her head snaps up at the sound of her name, all thoughts of Walkers gone. It takes a minute to remember where she is—French class, with Madame Barbare, who Lucy doesn’t think has ever noticed her before. Like most teachers at Saint Osanna’s, Madame Barbare assumes that if you’ve made it past the security gates and are wearing a uniform, you obviously belong in her class even if you’re not on her roll.

Her voice echoes in Lucy’s ears, reverberating up into her skull, where it bounces around uncomfortably. It’s the first time in days someone other than Colin has said her name. “Y-yes?” Only when Lucy looks up does the teacher’s attention move to her, and Lucy can tell she’s called a name whose owner was a mystery to her.

“I have a slip here telling me to send you to the counselor’s office?” She phrases it like a question, and it feels like she’s asking Lucy to confirm. She stands, painfully aware of the attention of the entire class, and takes the slip.

Send Lucy to Miss Proctor’s office. Clearly someone has noticed the girl with the stolen uniform.

Lucy has seen Miss Proctor in the halls, speaking casually with students or calling out to wild, wrestling boys down the hall. She’s young and pretty, and the boys stare at her backside when she walks past. But the woman sitting in the counselor’s office isn’t Miss Proctor.

This woman is short and squat, settled in a chair to the side of the desk, her eyes focused on a stack of papers in front of her. Her blue suit is the color of the springtime sky of Lucy’s memory, and it feels incongruous with the dark, shadowed office and the woman’s bulky, shapeless form.

The woman looks up, watching Lucy walk from the door to the chair.

“Hi,” she says finally. “I’m Lucy?”

“I’m Adelaide Baldwin.” The woman’s voice is softer and more sultry than her appearance would ever suggest.

“Hi,” Lucy says again.

“I’m the head of counseling services at Saint Osanna’s.” Ms. Baldwin sets some papers on the desk beside her and clasps her hands in her lap. “You’ve flown under the radar here, it seems.” She pauses. When Lucy offers no explanation, she continues. “I like to check in with the faculty every month or two, to find out if we have anyone . . . anything different on campus. This morning Ms. Polzweski mentioned that she’d seen a girl around school who she didn’t believe was enrolled. We generally like to handle these issues internally before bringing in any authorities.”

Lucy feels as if a brick has caught in her throat. “Oh,” she whispers.

“Where are your parents?”

Lucy doesn’t have an answer. She can feel Ms. Baldwin’s eyes on her as she fidgets with a magnetic paper clip bowl on the desk in front of her. It’s strange to be alone with someone other than Colin and be the object of such careful scrutiny.

“Lucy, look at me.” Lucy looks up at the woman, meeting eyes filled with concern. “Oh, honey.”

Something like hope unfurls inside Lucy when she registers that there are no secrets between them and that somehow Adelaide Baldwin knows Lucy isn’t any ordinary student walking into this office. Lucy plays with the hem of her sleeve, asking, “You know who I am?” She suspects that with this question, she has irrevocably shifted the conversation away from something official and related to enrolling her, to something unofficial and related to keeping her hidden.