by Emily Henry
Remy looked stricken. His mouth twisted. His voice was hoarse. “I thought you remembered.”
“There’s a video,” I managed. “Levi got footage before the battery died, and we saw the—the thing, made of light, and the way it shocked us. All of us,” I added, almost defensively.
What it did to you.
Remy’s eyes darkened. He turned away from me, gathering himself. I reached for his elbow, and another static shock jolted down my arm.
The white furled across my vision and the not-quite-pain-but-definitely-sensation scorched through my head. As if through glass, I heard Remy swear and jerk away from me, and when the light faded, he was standing a few feet away, breathing hard, gripping his elbow.
His eyes were still fearful and glassy, but somehow unsurprised. “Try to remember, Franny,” he begged in that same throaty gravel. “We weren’t unconscious, not totally, and if it’s all starting to come back to me, it’s only a matter of time before the others remember. You need to know what you want to do before that. We need to have a plan.”
A knot caught in my throat.
I didn’t want to remember.
All I wanted was to forget. If you couldn’t control life, you could at least remove yourself from it, never experience its pain too deeply. That was the only way to survive.
But Remy was staring at me, his dark hair fluttering in the breeze, and he was afraid, and I couldn’t look away.
“The first blast,” he rasped. “When it hit me, it was like . . . like something twice my size was squeezing through me. My whole body wanted to come apart, but that thing wouldn’t let it.”
White light. The afterimage of pain. Cold, invigorating. Like the first crush of the ocean tide on your shins. And all those voices, thousands—no, millions—distilled into something like music, trying to soothe me.
“Relax,” they seem to say. “Relax your body.”
Remy pushed on through shivers: “On the one hand, it felt like eternity. But on the other, it was over in a second. I couldn’t move, or even think about moving. It was like I wasn’t in my body, or like—the connection between my brain and my body had been unplugged.” He ran his hand through his hair. “All I could do was feel the light, and if I focused on it, it hurt, but then my mind would start to wander, and there’d be nothing: nothing but white. Like a dream. Or anesthesia, blurring everything out.”
My stomach roiled.
Yes, my mind said. Exactly like that.
Like those hours had been recorded in our minds in the most jumbled, drunken fashion, and piecing the bits back together would be nearly impossible.
“There’s a lot I don’t remember until the end.” Remy shook his head, trying to choose his next words. “The being got fainter with each pulse. Like all that energy that was hitting us was leaching off its body, draining it. But it didn’t disappear, Franny. I was conscious enough to see it didn’t burn out.”
His voice was low and odd. “It started to move. And I promise, Franny, that as soon as I saw where it was going, I woke up.” He was talking more quickly now, his words tumbling out, hoarse and wet. “I promise, I was trying to get there first, but the blasts kept hitting me, and I couldn’t take a single step.”
My pulse quickened. The sweat on the back of my neck went cold.
The white light spread out behind my eyes, and nausea rolled through my stomach like laundry caught in a spin cycle.
I knew what he was going to say next.
Maybe I was starting to remember, or maybe my brain had worked out what the worst thing would be—what would scare me to say to Remy more than anything else—and so I knew he was going to say it to me.
“It went into you, Franny,” Remy choked. “That thing went into you, and that’s when it all stopped.”
NINE
THE MEMORY FRAGMENTS. THE electric shocks.
The television going staticky?
My phone malfunctioning?
The computer glitching?
I started to pace, like the thing inside me—THE THING INSIDE ME???—was a burrito I could walk off. Droog trotted along behind me, crying, agitated.
My stomach twitched. I gasped, bent over by a sudden shot of pain through my ribs. I caught myself against the propane tank, coughing again, dry heaving, like I could vomit the thing up. The ground swayed, and when I looked up, the trees multiplied, drifting apart then back together, hundreds of pendulums swinging in opposite directions.
A numbness spread through me. The woods, the dead grass beyond, my ramshackle brick house spearing the night sky all looked more like a two-dimensional set than an actual place.
This can’t be happening, my brain decided, and my body believed it.
I’d felt something similar that day at the hospital, when the doctor had finally come out to the waiting room and pulled us into the hallway where the other families couldn’t see.
I hadn’t cried, or screamed. Because it couldn’t be happening.
And when Mom slumped onto her knees and buried her face in her hands, it should have scared me, shaken me to my core, but that couldn’t be happening either.
Remy touched my elbow. “We’ll figure it out, Franny. You’ll be okay. I won’t let you not be.”
It was so Remy to lie to me like that, to pretend he could protect me. In my mind I heard Arthur giving me the harsh truth: You need to figure it out. No one else will. You’re the only one who will take care of yourself, Franny.
“We just need some kind of plan,” Remy went on. I blinked, trying to make out his face, but the fake world stayed fuzzy and unfocused. “When the others find out, everyone’s going to have an opinion, so I need to know, Franny: What do you want to do?”
The others.
Sofía would say I should tell my dad and go to the hospital immediately. Nick would tell me you couldn’t trust doctors not to experiment on me, and that meanwhile, all of Splendor would be gossiping about how I thought aliens were trying to communicate with me. Levi would try to convince Remy and Arthur to put off college to focus on the full-length documentary about me for Netflix, and Arthur . . .
Arthur would probably split in half trying to decide whether to buy (or have Nick steal) practical anti-alien gadgets for me or just convince me to help him blow the secrets of Area 51 wide open in spectacular fashion.
As for me, I had no idea what to do. I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I needed to not think about this.
Arthur’s obsession, the sheriff’s questions, the missing wreckage (not taken by the alien, not if the alien was in me), and the white light and Cheryl Kelly’s red blazer and the video going viral and—
One solid, crystalline thought rose through my mind, like a glowing pin dropped in the middle of an otherwise illegible map.
“The video,” I said.
“The video?”
“Levi put it online. It’s sort of gone viral.”
Remy pulled a face. “Are you kidding? He has to take that down, Fran! What if my dad sees it? Or the St. Jameses, or people from the energy company or—”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll tell him. But, Remy, someone commented on it and said he’d seen one of those things too. Twenty years ago.”
Remy’s eyebrows shot up. “Twenty years ago?” Tentative excitement crossed his face. “That’s great!”
Great seemed extreme. It was a lead, and not necessarily a good one.
“Twenty years and this guy’s still alive,” Remy said. “So whatever it did to him, it doesn’t sound like it . . . hurt him.”
He was going to say killed and we both knew it. We had no reason to think the thing—if YouTube user CitizenOfTheBlack-Mailbox had even really seen one—hadn’t maimed him or made him sick, or even that it wouldn’t kill him, eventually. We didn’t even have a reason to think the thing had entered him, like it had done to me.
But it was a start.
As long as it was real.
“He left an e-mail address,” I told Remy. “I’ll contact him as soon as I get home.”
He nodded. “And what about the others?”
“We don’t tell them.”
Remy gave me a dubious look.
“Not yet.”
Arthur was two weeks out from finally getting out of this town, and already this whole thing was threatening to suck him back in, and Sofía would tell her parents, who would tell my dad, who was just about the last person equipped to handle this.
“Just until I figure things out,” I said. “I mean, like you said, they might start remembering, but for now there’s nothing anyone can do.”
Remy grimaced. “You could go to a doctor. You don’t need to tell them what happened—just get a physical, and make sure this thing isn’t hurting you.”
And what if it is? I wanted to say. You think a dose of penicillin will kill something from another planet?
But I didn’t need to worry Remy more, and I didn’t need to think about things I couldn’t change, and I didn’t need to go to a doctor, for about a million reasons ranging from the fact that we had no insurance and hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills for Mark’s care to the creeping sensation whenever I remembered the comment on Levi’s video:
DELETE THIS IMMEDIATELY. THEY ARE WATCHING!
“Fran?” Remy said.
“No doctors yet either.”
He studied me for a moment then turned and leaned into the propane tank. I slumped against it too, and Droog sat at our feet, watching shadows dart through the mangy trees that separated the tracks from our field.
We just stood, listening to the conversation of the blissfully untroubled cicadas. They lived, they sang, they died. That was pretty much how it was for us too, so why did it seem so much harder than that?
“You know my problem?” Remy said finally.
“You’re tired of being objectified for your beautiful hair?” I said.
Remy set his elbows on the tank and leaned back to smile at me sidelong. “Well, yeah. Just once, I’d like to be objectified for my body. But the other thing is, even though I know better, I just can’t stop waiting for things to go back to normal. When I was a kid and my mom died. When the accident happened and my dad got hurt. And now this. It’s like I’m always waiting for things to stabilize, but they don’t.”
I studied him. “You’re having them again? The dreams?”
He averted his gaze.
Like all of us, there were things Remy didn’t talk about. But that first summer, we’d confided in each other our darkest, most miserable thoughts. We’d sat on these train tracks, though usually farther down, and we’d whispered back and forth, sharing our secrets only once, letting them disappear as soon as they were said, never to be spoken of again.
My mom can’t look at me, I told him.
I don’t remember my mother’s voice, Remy whispered.
My dad doesn’t sleep anymore.
Sometimes I wake up screaming. I see the accident. I see the beam fall on my dad’s leg.
Once, only once, I whispered, so quietly the words cut in and out: If it had been me, I don’t think she would have left them.
Every time my dad goes to work, Remy whispered back, I think he’s going to die.
The nightmares had started when Remy was six, after his mom’s aneurysm. Sometimes he dreamt about her ghost. Other times, he dreamt she was alive, and when he remembered she wasn’t, her skin withered, leaving behind her skeleton. He dreamt she had fallen off a cliff and was trying to hold on, begging him to save her. He’d wake up screaming, soaked in sweat.
His dad took him to therapy. For a few years, the dreams backed off. Then came the accident.
The sheriff had been doling out speeding tickets and traffic violations at another Splendor two-way-stop-turned-death-trap up the road from the mill when he got the call.
He’d been the first one on the scene, before paramedics and fire trucks.
He’d seen the smoke and the ash and heard the screams, and he hadn’t had any backup or even a fire extinguisher.
He’d had nothing, and he’d run into the building. A beam had collapsed on his leg, broke it in three places, and burned his skin badly.
After a year of physical therapy, he could jog, but with horrible pain. Another one of Remy’s whispered secrets: the box of prescription painkillers he’d found in the lockbox under the sheriff’s bed.
That his dad, who’d once loved a gin martini, had cut out alcohol to counterbalance the damage all those meds would do to his organs.
It was one of the angry embers burning in my gut, that in real life that was what being a hero looked like. That every day, Sheriff Nakamura woke with pain in his leg and an itch behind his teeth and a whole lot of people he’d loved and lost, not to mention a son who screamed himself awake.
That Remy was too brave or selfless to ask his dad to quit, and instead spent his life waiting for the world to try to take something else from him, even while promising his friends the impossible, that he would protect them.
Sometimes the anger was too much. Sometimes I thought that if you peeled back my skin, that would be all that was there: a burning red hate for this world and what it did to people callously, every second, every day.
Remy hadn’t mentioned the dreams in easily two years.
The crash was doing the same thing to him that it was doing to me: dredging up everything we’d finally found hidden shelves for.
“Your dad’s okay,” I said, touching his hand on the tank. “He’s safe. This isn’t going to hurt him.”
Remy scrunched his eyes shut and threaded his fingers through mine. When he opened his eyes again, I could tell how little he’d slept. There were bags under his eyes, and his left eyelid twitched.
“They’re different this time,” he murmured. “The dreams.”
“Different?”
“More . . . real, I guess.” He shook his head. “I’m even seeing them when I’m awake. Whenever I zone out it’s like . . . God, I’m sorry. It’s stupid for me to even complain about this.”
“Remy.” I squeezed his hand. I didn’t know how to comfort him. It wasn’t something I did, for anyone. I wished I could be more like him, make promises and believe I could keep them.
His dark eyes lifted to mine.
“The stress is messing with all of us,” I said. “No one’s sleeping well. Levi got this Gary Busey–shaped bruise sleepwalking, and last time I saw Nick, he was practically raving about a tunnel of pianos.”
The corner of Remy’s mouth ticked into a faint smile. “Normal.”
“Exceptionally.”
He let out a breath and pushed off the propane tank, releasing my hand. “You’re right. I’m sure it’s stress, but everything’s going to be all right. I need to just chill.” He glanced up the tracks. “I should get back. If my dad realizes I’m gone, he’ll probably go straight for an arrest this time. You’re sure you’re okay? I mean, as much as you can be?”
I nodded, perhaps too emphatically. “I’ll e-mail that guy and figure this out.”
Remy pulled me into another tight hug, and I closed my eyes and sank into it. Who knew the next time I would get to hug him, or anyone? Probably not until Splendor’s next natural disaster. I should savor this while I could.
“You still have your walkie-talkie?” Remy mumbled into my head. I nodded, and he stepped back. “Let me know what you find out. Actually, just keep me posted in general. I mean it, Fran. Please.”
I smiled weakly. “Sure.”
“I love you, you know,” he said.
My heart leapt.
Arthur and I didn’t even say that to each other, but just as with their hugging, Remy and Levi tossed the phrase around like it was free c
andy in a parade. Often when it landed, it felt more like a grenade than a miniature Snickers.
Explosive, dangerous, overwhelming.
I also craved it, wanted to hear it again as soon as it faded, wished I knew how to pick it apart so I could understand what it meant.
I never knew what to say back. Of course I loved Remy. Sometimes I even wondered if I was in love with him, or if there was even a difference. Sometimes I thought he wondered too, but not enough to interfere with his revolving door of short-term relationships with the girls the rest of us never met, except in the school hallways.
Either way, whether I just loved Remy or I love-loved him, opening yourself up like that backfired.
I’d learned from the accident that people, even the ones you love, are temporary.
Case in point: In two weeks, the two people I’d let the deepest into my life would be leaving Splendor.
“You too,” I finally said.
Remy smiled and rolled his eyes, gave Droog one last ruffle of the ears. “I know.” Then he grabbed his bike and turned back down the tracks.
I wanted to pretend it was any other sticky August night, that we’d met here for the rush of sneaking out and nothing had happened in that field on Jenkins Lane.
But before I could do that, I had to e-mail CitizenOfThe-BlackMailbox and figure out how to get rid of this . . . this—I couldn’t finish the thought; if I did, I’d panic.
I climbed onto my bike and pedaled back to the house, already drafting my e-mail to CitizenOfTheBlackMailbox in my head.
As soon as we hit the clearing, Droog started straining again. I barely managed to make it to the shed without her pulling me off my bike, and as soon as I disembarked, she jerked her leash free and took off full tilt back toward the fence.
Shit.
I flicked the bike’s headlight off and ran after her, hissing as quietly yet forcefully as I could, “Droog! Get back here!”
She was old, starting to go blind. I hadn’t seen her run like she was chasing something in years, and my stomach twisted as I watched her cut through the grass toward the barbed wire fence separating our property from his.