Текст книги "Sublime"

Автор книги: Christina Lauren

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“You were a local star heading to Harvard before you were killed.”

Lucy has to swallow her fear of the answer in order to push the question out: “If you know I died, why aren’t you surprised to see me?”

Instead of answering, Mrs. Baldwin asks, “When did you come back to Saint Osanna’s?”

“A few weeks ago.” Lucy looks past her, at the kids leaving the building and walking toward the quad, or dorms, or dining hall. “I found classes where the teachers don’t seem to notice me. Why is that?” she asks. “Why is it that nobody sees me?”

“Because they aren’t looking. They don’t need to see you, Lucy.”

“Need to see me? I don’t understand,” Lucy says. Does Colin need to see her? And for what? “So there are others? Here, at the school? Jay said something about Walkers?”

“That’s what some people call them, yes. They walk around the grounds, tied to this place for one reason or another and unable to leave. It’s different for each of them.” Ms. Baldwin begins placing files and stacks of paperwork back into her bag. Apparently their conversation is over.

Panic begins to fill Lucy like a rising tide. “I don’t know why I’m here,” she says quickly. Will Ms. Baldwin report her to the authorities she mentioned? Are there some sort of ghost hunters that will send her back? “It felt right to come here.”

“I know.”

“Do you know why I’m here?” Lucy asks.

“No,” she says. “You’re not the first I’ve seen in my day.”

“Where are the others? The Walkers? Is that what I am?”

Ms. Baldwin doesn’t answer, simply gives a little shake of her head. It’s as if she’s already resigned to the reality that there’s nothing to be done about the problem of Lucy.

“Can I stay here? At Saint Osanna’s?”

The social worker nods. “I don’t think we have a choice. Exorcisms don’t work. Nothing seems to work. We just have to wait for you to vanish.” She blinks away, dropping a pen into her bag and mumbling, “Thankfully, most do.”

Lucy’s chest seizes and she turns to the window, staring out the filmy glass. Vanish? Where would she go? How can she stop it?

Ms. Baldwin pulls her out of her thoughts. “Do you have money?”

Lucy hasn’t had a need for it yet, being confined to the campus and lucky enough to not need food or water. No one in the laundry facilities noticed a ghost girl sneaking out boots and socks and old uniforms. “No.”

Ms. Baldwin reaches for her bag, pulls out an envelope, and removes several twenties. “I doubt anyone would notice, but I don’t want you getting caught taking something. Where are you staying?”

Lucy takes the money and curls it into her fist. It feels warm from the purse and scratchy against her skin. “In a shed.”

Ms. Baldwin nods again as if this is satisfactory. “Does anyone else know about you?”

“A boy.”

The woman laughs and closes her eyes, but it isn’t a happy laugh. It’s an of-course-a-boy-knows laugh. A whydid-I-even-bother-asking laugh.

Ms. Baldwin nods resolutely as she stands. “Take care, honey.” She hitches her purse up and over her round shoulder.

“Thanks.”

Adelaide Baldwin faces her and smiles a little before turning to the door. With her hand on the knob, she pauses, facing away so Lucy can’t see her expression as she says, “The other kids like you? They seem to want to take someone with them. Try not to, Lucy.”

CHAPTER 12 HIM

THIS GIRL, THIS GIRL. SHE HUMS TUNELESSLY along with songs she says she doesn’t remember. She does the craziest things with her hair and uniform, weaving leaves and ribbons into her long braid. She laughs loudly at his jokes when they walk down the hall together and doesn’t seem to care that no one ever notices her. Colin wonders why that is. Jay sees her. A few of the teachers. But that’s it. It’s as if, for them, her face blends into the background. Plain. Generic.

But Colin notices everything.

And these small details—her simple confidence, flirty smile, and infectious laugh—make it impossible for him to stop obsessing about touching her the way he wants to. She’s easy with her affection: a hand on his arm, leaning into his side on a bench. But he’s so fascinated with her, with her thoughts and lips and hands, the easy touches make him increasingly hungry, feeling too small in his skin.

She asks him to walk her around campus and the woods and tell her about growing up in a small town where the prestigious boarding school employs practically everyone.

“People assume I had this traumatic childhood—which I guess I did—but it was mostly me being a crazy townie and doing wild tricks wherever I could. There were so many people here taking care of me, it was impossible to ever feel lost or lonely.”

She smiles up at him, but her eyes are a provocative, sympathetic indigo. He drags his frantic gaze across her face, cataloging every expression. This kind of longing makes him want to roar, to hurl logs and stones, to claim her somehow.

“So, were you always the Kid Whose Parents Died?” she asks.

He laughs at her instinctive recollection of how everyone in this small town has an unofficial title. “I think I used to be. Now I’m the Kid Who Jumped Fifteen Feet to Flat in the Quarry and Didn’t Die. Even Dot heard about that one.”

Shaking her head, she says, “You were crazy to do that,” but her eyes have gone metallic brown, swirling.

“Not you too!”

“Colin. Objectively, that was an insane move.”

“It’s not insane,” he says. “It’s about fear. Everyone has the same abilities physically, at least they can. The difference is I’m not afraid to try.” Colin can remember that stunt better than almost anything: He pulled his bike to the ledge, took a deep breath, and balanced—eyes focused and muscles taut– before jerking the frame up in a hop over the lip. The bike cut a razor path straight down to the boulder, slicing cleanly through the air. Both wheels glanced off the stone in unison before rolling a rocky path down to the base of the quarry. I landed at the bottom next to it. Body: bruised. Arm: broken. “I met you the next day,” he adds. He’d still felt nearly high from the jump, and then she was there: the most gorgeous thing he’d ever seen. This second memory, just as clear.

She hums, brushes her fingers against his, and the tickling current travels up his arm before evaporating. He wants more. He practically aches for her touch. It’s more than hormones. It’s like he’s physically drawn into her space, has to force himself to keep any sort of acceptable distance. He pulls away slowly, forming a fist.

“Wonder what your title was,” he says, distracting himself from the sudden urge he has to drag her down on the trail and cover her body with his. “The Girl with the Snorting Laugh?”

She snorts, and then smacks his arm as if it were his fault. “Maybe.”

“The Girl with the Wicked Eyes?”

“Only to you.” Her dimple makes a cameo appearance.

“Right,” he says, laughing. “The Girl Who Kicked All the Boys’ Asses in Chemistry?”

She starts to answer, grinning, her jaw already pushed out in pride, but she looks at his hands, formed into tight fists at his hips, and her expression straightens. “What’s wrong?”

He shakes out his hands, laughs nervously. “Nothing.”

“Are you upset?”

Colin begins walking again, tilting his head for her to join him. He doesn’t know how to do this, how he’ll ever do this. He likes her. He wants Lucy to be his girlfriend in every way that matters, including the ways that mean he can touch her. The urge to kiss her is becoming suffocating.

“Colin?”

Stopping, he turns back to face her. “What?”

She laughs at his stalling, walking toward him. “What’s wrong?”

“I like you,” he blurts. “A lot.” His heart clenches and then begins pounding manically, and he half wants to turn and run down the trail. Instead, he stands and watches her expression shift from surprise to elation.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. And it’s hard to be so close all the time and not touching,” he admits quietly.

“For me too.” Stretching onto her tiptoes, she whispers, “But I want to try.”

His tongue slips out, sliding over his piercing.

“I think about it,” she says, her breath smelling like rain and petals. “I want to kiss you until you’re dizzy with wanting, too.”

It takes Colin four tries to get a sound past his lips. “You mean you’re dizzy with wanting me?”

She lifts herself up again, and he feels a sensation like lips against his cheek. He turns to her and is met not with her mouth but with her quickly ducked head. Just before he can step back, a little embarrassed and a lot confused, her hand presses against the front of his shirt.

“Wait,” she says. “Just go slow.”

First with his cheek, then with his nose barely touching her lips, he moves closer, hoping that the way she shakes is from anticipation and not something far less pleasant. She tilts her head just enough for him brush his mouth over hers, and his fists curl in restraint at his sides. It’s different; her skin there feels different. Still buzzing energy and the sense that if he pressed too hard she would evaporate, but lips nonetheless: full and smiling and now wet from his. When he comes back again and tastes her, she makes a tiny sound of relief. It’s a sound of lust, of air and fire, and Colin nearly loses himself: grasping, fingers digging. But instead, he pulls back, breaths choppy as he looks down at her.

“Okay, that was a good start.”

“A good start?” she says with a small laugh. “My mind is a giant sieve, but I’m pretty sure that was the best first kiss in the history of this town.”

He gently touches her elbow, carefully urging her to start walking again. The kiss was an enormous step in the right direction and still only a fraction of what he needed from her. Inside his chest, a rope coils tightly, fraying at the knots.

Colin’s cast came off two days ago, and he doesn’t think he’s ever been so grateful to be able to wash dishes. He and Dane finished cleaning the kitchen, and Colin lingers around to keep Dot company. She’s been quiet tonight. No whistling while she cooks, no smacking them with the spatula. Just thoughtful, quiet Dot, and it weirds him out.

“Long day?” he asks. She shrugs. “You know how it is when a storm is on its way.”

“Your barometric knees acting up?”

She scowls at him over her shoulder. “Very funny, smart guy.” When she turns back to the sink, he can see her reflection as she looks out the wide window overlooking the back side of the quad. She looks worried. “It’s sort of like that,” she begins, searching for words. “Something feels off. I’m not sure what.”

Colin swallows hard and busies himself by stacking plates. “Hey, Dot, do you remember a girl named Lucy Gray?”

She pauses as she unties her apron. “Of course. Everyone around here remembers that name.”

“Yeah.” Colin struggles for breath. “So you were here when . . . when it all happened to her?”

“Why’re you asking about something like that?”

He shrugs, taking a heavy sack of flour from her arms and placing it on the counter. “No reason. Some kids were down at the lake, started talking about it at lunch.”

She pins him with a serious expression. “I better not catch you down there.”

“Of course not,” he says. It’s a lie, and as a general rule, he doesn’t lie to Dot. But Colin is always at the lake and figures since it’s the same lie he’s told over and over throughout his life, it counts as only one.

“She was killed,” Dot says finally, watching as he begins sorting clean silverware. Out of the corner of his eye, he can tell she’s got her fist planted on her hip and he can almost hear the ticking sound as her brain works something out. “Do you remember any of it?” she finally asks.

He points a handful of forks at his chest. “Me?”

She nods.

“What? No.”

“She was killed when you were six.”

He lived on campus and had just lost his parents. He remembers so little about that time other than the strange, constant desire to dissolve and float away. “I don’t remember anything about it.”

She nods and turns back around, bracing her hands and looking back out the window. “No, I guess you wouldn’t. You had so much going on around then. It was brutal, Col. Just . . .” Her head drops and she shakes it. “Just awful.”

He doesn’t want to hear her version of the story, but a sick part of him wants to know everything.

“Your parents had died, and you were living at Joe’s. I don’t think you could sleep that night, and Joe was at a meeting with the dorm heads. You were out on the porch playing alone with your little army men.” She turns to look at him and smiles sadly. “You saw him carrying a girl into the woods. You ran and found me. It didn’t save her, but because of you this guy was caught. We had no idea that monster was living right alongside us. And he had killed . . . God, I think he had killed seven other kids.”

Colin stands and bolts from the kitchen, feeling his dinner coming back up.

EXCEPT FOR THE BLURRED-EDGE MEMORIES OF their funeral, Colin has few solid recollections of his parents or the car crash that left them dead on impact and Colin strangely unharmed. Their caskets had been positioned side by side at the front of the church, and the smell of lilies was so strong, it turned his stomach. His dad’s chest had been crushed by the dashboard and the funeral home was forced to reconstruct it: replacing muscle and bone with metal rods and wax. Colin remembers only an angry purple bruise peeking out from beneath the cuff of his dad’s starched white shirt. His mother’s arm had been torn from her body by the seat belt—something he didn’t learn about until years later– and the sleeve of her favorite pink dress was just empty. Like they thought nobody would even notice.

He wondered why anyone would want to see someone they loved like that, skin the wrong color and eyes that would never open again.

That’s not how he wants to remember.

He wants to open his brain, to tear out the ugly pages and replace them with new, happier ones. Ones where moms and dads don’t die and monsters don’t carry girls into the woods in the middle of the night.

He hadn’t felt sick like that again until Lucy. He thought knowing more of her story would be a relief, another missing piece of the puzzle fit perfectly into place. Instead, knowing he was the last person to see her alive has taken blank pages and inked them with horror and gore.

But she’s here now, alive or not, standing across the threshold when he opens his door. Her smile makes the other stuff easier to forget. At least for a few hours. It’s been three days since Dot revealed his role in the events surrounding Lucy’s murder. Each night, whenever he started to tell her, his throat felt like it was closing shut.

Like always, Lucy pulls off her boots and heads straight for his window, reaching out to push back the curtains. It’s been trying to snow all day, and a few small flakes flutter beneath the lamppost to fall slowly to the ground. Even though it’s dark out, the sky is bright, practically glowing, and full of clouds that seem lit from behind.

“No stars tonight.”

“It’s a snow sky,” Lucy says, her nose pressed to the glass. There’s no smudge from where her skin touches the window, no cloud of condensation. “My grandma used to say it looks like someone left the TV on in heaven.” She laughs and then pauses, turning to him. “How did I remember that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s like amnesia victims. Certain things trigger specific memories.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

She turns back to the sky, and he closes his eyes, trying to shut out the pictures that are burned there forever. He wants to tell her more about her death and about his role in it all. But there’s something else, a voice inside his head that repeats itself over and over, telling him it’s a bad idea.

Dot said ghosts come here because they have unfinished business. Maybe that’s why Lucy is here. He knows that should mean something to him, a warning to take this more seriously. He doubts anyone would come back from the dead because they lost a library book or missed sitting in school all day. It would have to be big. To settle a score? Revenge? He shakes that off; Lucy would never hurt him. He knows that. But if anyone has unfinished business, it’s definitely Lucy. What could be more unfinished than having your heart carved out of your chest by a man your parents trusted to keep you safe?

He shivers as Lucy turns to face him.

“Cold?” she asks.

“Nah, just twitchy.”

Lucy closes the distance between them, stopping only when the toes of her socks touch the toes of his. He struggles against what feels like every element in his body conspiring to shift him closer to her. He wants to kiss her again.

It’s so quiet, so hard to believe that there are rooms full of people on the floors both above and below them, on the other sides of these walls. And Lucy is so silent. She doesn’t fidget or cough or seem to constantly be adjusting things the way other girls do. He thinks he can almost hear the snow beginning to fall outside.

But in the absence of all those distractions, there’s something else, something that hangs in the air between them and makes every single one of his senses somehow supernatural. When she reaches up to touch his bottom lip, tracing along the silver ring, it’s as if all the air around them moves with her.

He’s frantic with what he wants from her. Her eyes melt into deep amber. “Kiss me,” she says. “It’s okay.”

He bends to kiss her, barely touching her lips with his. Each kiss is short, careful, punctuated by glances and the quiet murmurings of, “Okay?” and her reply, “Yes.” If he focuses too hard, he starts to wonder whether he’s even touching her. Physically, her kiss is so much less than every kiss he’s had before, but inside, he’s close to erupting. His hands find her waist, her hips, pull her closer.

She shivers, wincing. It’s too much. “Shit. Sorry,” he says.

But she tugs on his shirt and gives him a look of such determination that he bends, laughing a little, and just barely kisses her mouth.

He doesn’t want to be that guy, the one who pushes for more and more and more, because he knows every touch overwhelms her, but he’s dying to know how her skin feels, to see how her hips fit against his. He feels greedy. “I want you to stay.” His eyes hover on her mouth before nervously meeting her gaze.

“Can I?” she asks. “Is Jay gone for the night?”

“I think so.”

She lies back on his bed, and he bends over her, tracing an invisible line from her throat, past her collarbone, before unbuttoning the top three buttons of her shirt. No scar is visible on her skin. No heart beats beneath his fingertips, but something else seems to hum in its place.

Her short kisses melt like sugar against his tongue, and like a gust of wind, she rolls him to his back. He feels the weight of her over his thighs, how her shape pushes against his. Warm, but also somehow not. It’s the most beautiful torture: the shadow of sensation, gone before he even has a chance to process it.

It’s like he’s dreaming. All of the imagery, no actual relief from the way he aches for her.

“Colin . . .”

“Yeah?”

“Take off your shirt.”

He stares at her, seeing no trace of hesitation, and reaches behind his head. His shirt is gone in an instant. Her hands, and the illusion of her weight, press down on his chest; a teasing sensation brings goose bumps to his skin.

But every feeling is gone too fast as he sits beneath her, hesitant to touch for fear of flooding her with too much at once.

She whispers, pressing words against his neck, his ears, his jaw. I like the taste of your skin. You smell like soap and grass and the ocean. Her teeth tease at biting, pulling on the ring in his lip; her hands are everywhere.

His own hands grow desperate then, pulling her shirt from her shoulders, touching her stomach, her chest, grasping and wanting to memorize every curve.

“Too rough,” she gasps on an inhale. He’s afraid she’s trying to hide that he’s hurt her.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says, pushing his hands into his hair. He closes his eyes and pulls, grateful for the solid shape of this known sensation. He hasn’t ridden his bike in days, hasn’t run, hasn’t done anything, and he suddenly feels like a bear trying to carry a crystal; his muscles are going to burst from his skin and take off with this tension. He wonders if this is what people mean when they say almost having something is worse than never having it at all.

Her palm moves along his cheek, vibrating. “Look at me.”

He looks up into eyes the colors of blood and night and sky. Deep reds and blues, streaking indigo.

“You should . . . touch yourself if . . .” She doesn’t even blink. Doesn’t do a single one of those timid-girl things, like fiddling with her hair or covering her face. She just waits, watching.

“You mean . . . ?” He can feel his eyebrows crawling to his hairline. “Myself?”

“Yeah.” And then she smiles. It’s the sweet, dimpled smile that does him in, the way she seems both vulnerable and demanding. It makes the absurdity of it, the ingrained need for covertness, disappear.

He does what she asks, roughly shoving his pants down his hips and closing his eyes only when she whispers his name. It’s quick and familiar, and heat rolls along his skin as he tries to catch his breath. But it wasn’t really what he wanted. She’s watching him, her turbulent eyes never leaving his body. And although they blaze with fascination, he can tell it’s not what she wanted, either.

Colin urges her down into the blankets with him, curling to the side and pulling her back to his front. Her weight shifts between heavy and nothing, pressing and retreating like wind against a pane of glass.

They say good night, and then again, unwilling to let go.

She breathes, he realizes. Her short breaths match the rhythm of his own, and he settles into the comforting pattern. A bittersweet ache pulses deep in his chest. And as sleep begins to drag him under, he can’t fight the fear that the more he needs her, the more impossible it will be for her to stay.

His eyes grow heavy, his muscles grow lax, and he feels himself slip away.

Colin dreams of Lucy in her flower dress and white sandals, her hands clasped on her stomach and lilies all around her.

CHAPTER 14 HER

SHE’S TRYING TO STAY PERFECTLY STILL AS HE falls asleep, listening to the pattern of his breathing. Colin hasn’t biked in days, hasn’t beaten himself up and worn himself out like he used to. Lucy is used to seeing him always moving, almost vibrating with his barely contained vitality. But now, as he approaches sleep, he seems oddly quiet. It gives her the tiniest twinge of unease, even as his arms are tight and strong and his broad chest presses to the curve of her spine.

Colin inhales and mumbles something before his body seems to deflate, growing easy and tired and even warmer somehow. She misses that release, the physical letting go of sleep.

Lucy has been back here for more than two months. Sixty-five sunsets, and tonight is the first time she feels the sensation of drifting to darkness. She assumes people who love to sleep mean that they love this part of it most: the peaceful disengagement.

As she relaxes, she feels like she’s back on the trail, but this time it’s only in her mind and it’s different somehow. She’s underwater. Bubbles rise from her lips as she exhales, and when she looks up, they turn into silvery stars in a violet sky. Reeds become branches, stretching to touch each tiny spot of light. Ahead of her is the same dusty trail, but in the darkness it is a soft brown-black. The surface seems covered in a strange mixture of the lake bottom and tree bark from the earth outside.

The trail doesn’t go on forever as trails sometimes do in dreams. It ends straight ahead, where there is no turn or hill; there is only nothing. A soft blackness. In this world, where ghost girls can walk and touch and laugh, black isn’t a terrifying chasm. It’s just the other side of white.

She keeps walking until she’s not walking anymore; she’s simply moving. Turning left, then right, then left again until she’s back at her trail, waiting. Instinctively, she feels her body curve and press back against Colin one more time just before she lets herself fall into the black.

CHAPTER 15 HIM

HE’S NEVER STAYED OVERNIGHT AT A GIRL’S place, so maybe there’s a strange sense of intruding that he hasn’t yet experienced. But Colin has had girls sneak in and sleep over, and never in any of those nights did they ever up and leave while he slept. Lucy is gone when he wakes up, and even though it’s probably because she was bored to tears, he still feels a little ditched.

From his window, he can see that it snowed sometime during the night. A lot. The sky is heavy and gray, and it’s almost impossible to tell where it ends and the ground begins. He groans when he sees Dot’s garden. He broke his arm the day before he was supposed to clean it out. There are still a few pumpkins scattered around, and the tomato plants are brown and brittle, nearly bowed to the ground beneath the bulk of the snow. Their forgotten fruit stands out in gruesome contrast to the frost-covered vines, like little shriveled hearts draped over a blanket of white.

He goes downstairs to help shovel and salt the walks behind the kitchens, wondering the entire time if Lucy went back to her shed. He has no idea how someone so slight walks in the thick, wet snow. He tries to not think about her stuck somewhere, locked in a step that went too deep, unable to pull her weight out of the drift. For about the millionth time, he wishes he understood what the hell she is. By now he’s sweating, but his fingers feel like ice. The very thing he’s been avoiding—the fear that Lucy could be gone as quickly as she came into his life—presses in on him.

“Hey, stranger,” Dot says.

“Hey,” he answers absently.

“You okay this morning, hon?” she asks as he stomps the

snow from his boots. She’s buried in one of the lower cabinets, digging out a couple of large stockpots. “Sure.” Inside the kitchen, Colin opens cupboard doors and closes them again. He feels like he’s shorted out somehow, and nervous energy courses through his limbs. He’s not scheduled to work today, but somehow being surrounded by the hustle of morning chaos and grumbling employees is more comforting than the silence of his room.

“You seem a little anxious.”

“I’m fine.”

She eyes him skeptically.

Turning away, he starts putting bread into the huge industrial toaster. “Just wondering if I should put out some more salt.” He motions out the window, where white blankets the grass and walkways, drapes every shrub and tree.

“Let the groundskeepers do that stuff.” Dot steps up behind him and pats his shoulder to soften her words. “You’re a sweet kid, you know that?” she says, attempting to smooth his hair. “And you’re so much calmer lately. Haven’t seen you in the infirmary in more than a month.”

“Har-har.” He sits, takes a bite out of his toast. He hadn’t realized it had been that long.

“So either your bike, skateboard, and kayak are all broken, or you’ve found a new girl.” She hovers for a moment before stepping away, but Colin doesn’t bother answering. Now that the knows the truth, he wonders how Dot would react if she saw him with Lucy.

As she continues her morning routine, he listens to the familiar squeak of her shoes on the tile floors and pushes his food around the plate. If he didn’t have breakfast, Dot would bring in the cavalry. But each bite feels like hardened glue settling in his gut.

The minute he’s done, thoughts of doing anything but finding Lucy are out the window. Maybe it’s true that she came here for him, but it’s also now true that he feels a strange shift in the fabric of the sky, as if a weightless girl pulls the entire atmosphere with her when she leaves his room in the middle of the night.

The first thing Colin notices when he reaches Lucy’s field is that the snow is undisturbed. He tells himself it’s fine. He doesn’t even know if Lucy would leave footprints, but somehow he knows she hasn’t been back.

He’s panting by the time he gets to the shed and bursts through the door. The blankets on the old air mattress are smooth and untouched. Lucy’s book sits, undisturbed, on the table, a dried piece of lavender marking the page.

He’s running on adrenaline, and before he realizes it, he’s gripping the handrail and climbing the steps of Ethan Hall. The bell has rung, the halls are empty, and a strange sense of déjà vu washes over him.

He looks in every classroom on the first floor before heading upstairs. In the library, he checks the little alcove near the storage closet where she likes to sneak away and wait for him to finish work.

She’s not there.

Colin checks the bathrooms on the second floor, peeks into each classroom that he passes, the dining hall, and even the janitor’s closet. Nothing.

He texts Jay to meet him near the auditorium. Jay comes whistling down the hall, but the moment he sees Colin, his expression sobers. “Whoa. What’s wrong?”

“Have you seen Lucy?”

“Not since yesterday.”

Colin presses his forehead against the window.

“Col, what—”

“She’s gone.” His voice sounds so hollow and strange, like it belongs to someone else, and his breath fogs up the glass in front of him. “She was with me last night, and when I woke up . . . she was gone.”

“Relax. She’s probably just with—”

“She doesn’t have anyone else.” He meets Jay’s eyes, waiting, wanting him to understand what he’s saying without actually having to say it.

“I think we’re having a moment here,” Jay says, trying to ease Colin’s suffering. It works, and he almost smiles. Then, serious again, Jay adds, “She’s kind of a quirky girl, isn’t she?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“All right, man. Let’s find your Lucy.”

But they don’t find her. When they trudge out to the trail, Jay doesn’t say a word. When they circle the entire lake, he follows in Colin’s wake. When they cut across the snow-covered field and step inside the little shed to find it empty, he doesn’t ask Colin any questions.

Lucy doesn’t come back that night. And when Colin skips school the next morning to wait for her in the shed, she doesn’t show up then, either.

For ten days, he looks. He goes to class, he works when he has to, he finds his way to the trail where she woke up, hoping she’ll be there again. Maybe she’ll walk toward him, wearing her ass-kicking boots and a stolen uniform that’s too big.