Sublime

by Christina Lauren

  “Like a demon. Or a ghoul. Or . . . something whose face melts,” Joe mumbles.

  “Everything’s okay now,” Colin reassures his godfather. Joe has been rambling about demons for almost an hour. “It’s the morphine.”

  The door from the hallway opens and Maggie comes in, carrying fresh bandages and a glass of water. She’s barely in her thirties but has the wisdom of a much older woman. It shows in the deep set of her frown and the persistent worry lines on her forehead.

  “How’s he doing?” she asks Colin.

  “Still going on about a face-melting demon, but he seems better.”

  Maggie hums, lips tight, and pulls the sheet down to check Joe’s bandage. “We should take this one to the hospital, to be sure.”

  “I’m fine,” Joe growls, suddenly coherent. “We’re not driving two hours for something you can do better here.”

  “I can stitch you up, but this is deep. You’ll have a nasty scar.”

  “I’m staying put. Don’t have anyone to impress with my flawless skin.”

  “Chicks dig scars,” Colin says, and ducks when Maggie pretends to smack his arm.

  Joe groans when Maggie peels away the blood-soaked bandage. Colin looks away, wincing. The cut is deep, but clean now, and Colin swears he saw a hint of bone. Maggie shoos him to the other side of the room while she stitches Joe up. His stomach turns at seeing Joe like this: obviously old, vulnerable.

  “Get out of here, kid,” Maggie says, lifting her chin toward the door. “You’re green.”

  “I’ve . . . never seen him like this.”

  “Mm-hmm. And how do you think he felt seeing you worse off more times than any of us can count?”

  Colin knows she’s right. He can remember being here or in the hospital after a nasty crash on his bike, with several broken ribs and a huge gash on his scalp. He’d wondered at the time if he were going to die. It seemed so matter of fact to him: Either he would, or he wouldn’t. It was simple. He never considered how they might feel to lose him.

  “Go on. Get some sleep. I got this,” Maggie says.

  Colin looks at the man on the bed. “You good, Joe?”

  Joe grunts as Maggie ties off a stitch. “I’ll be back to work tomorrow,” he says.

  The nurse laughs. “The hell you will.”

  • • •

  Colin is startled awake when Jay returns to the dorm room. Dim light from the hall slips across the walls and is gone just as quickly.

  “You’d better be alone,” Colin says into his pillow. It’s been a crazy day, and the last thing he wants to deal with tonight is one of Jay’s girlfriends sneaking into their room. If caught, all three of them would get demerits.

  “I’m alone. Dude, I’m so tired.”

  Colin hears the rustle of fabric, Jay swearing as he trips, and the muffled clunk of keys and shoes hitting the rug. The mattress across the room creaks as he collapses on his bed. He moans something and rolls onto his stomach.

  Jay’s breathing evens out, and Colin opens an eye, trying to see the clock next to the bed. It’s four in the morning, somehow both too early and too late to easily guess where Jay’s been.

  “Where were you?” he asks. Jay doesn’t answer and he asks again, louder, reaching with his good arm and throwing an empty water bottle toward Jay’s side of the room.

  Jay startles, lifting his head slightly before dropping it down again. “I’m sleeping, man.”

  “Shelby?” Colin asks.

  “Nah, she’s such a scene queen. Not to mention insane.”

  Colin rolls his eyes and adds a snort so Jay hears his scorn even if he can’t see it. All the girls Jay dates are insane.

  “How’s Joe?”

  “His leg’s pretty cut up,” Colin says, scrubbing his face. “But otherwise he seemed okay when I left.”

  “He’s, like, seven thousand years old,” Jay says. “And nothing keeps Joe down. Not even his whole fucking porch collapsing with him on it.”

  “He’s seventy-two,” Colin grumbles. “And he’s lucky. Half an inch to the left and he could have bled to death.”

  Jay answers this with the appropriate weight of silence. Sometimes, when the planets align, even he realizes when a smart-ass comment is unnecessary.

  “Oh,” he says with more enthusiasm. “I saw your girl.”

  “What?”

  “Lucy. I saw her on my way here. She was sitting in front of Ethan Hall. I asked her if she needed help, but she said no.”

  “First of all, she’s not my girl—”

  Jay groans into his pillow.

  “Trust me,” Colin counters, opening his eyes to stare at the ceiling, wide-awake now. Scattered above him are glow-in-the-dark stars and a model of the solar system. His dad made it for him before he died, and it’s followed Colin to every bedroom he’s ever had. He sighs, rubbing his hands over his face again and wondering who this strange girl is and why in the hell she was sitting outside alone at four in the morning. “She told me to leave her alone.”

  “Christ.” Jay groans. “It’s like you know nothing about women. They all say shit like that, Col. They have to. It’s, like, hardwired into their brains or something. They say that stuff to feel less guilty about wanting us to jump their bones. I thought everybody knew that.”

  “That’s the kind of reasoning that will earn you a cell mate ironically named Tiny,” Colin says.

  “If I’m wrong, then why did I get laid last night and you were here with a pile of laundry and your hand?”

  “I think that has less to do with me and more to do with the poor choices being made by the female students at Saint O’s.”

  “Ah, right,” Jay says thickly, already half asleep. He falls silent, and eventually his breaths even out. Inside, Colin is a tornado, unable to stop thinking about Lucy and why she might be sitting outside in the cold.

  On that first day, she said she was here for him, and although he doesn’t understand what that means . . . maybe part of him does. Clearly she looks different to Colin than she does to Jay, and it’s hard to pretend that doesn’t mean something. In fact, he’s trying his best to ignore the caveman-asshole feeling he gets when he thinks that she’s somehow his, but she’s the one who put it out there, planting the idea like a tiny dark seed inside him.

  And now he can’t sleep. Great. Careful not to wake Jay, he grabs two hoodies and slips out of the room.

  • • •

  Lucy is exactly where Jay said she was, sitting on a bench in front of Ethan Hall with her back to Colin, facing the pond. In the low light, the water looks strangely inviting, smooth and dark and calm enough to make the moon and thousands of stars come see their reflections. Mist curls along the edges, like fingers luring its victims into the frigid blackness.

  With a deep breath, he closes the distance between them.

  “Hey,” she says, without turning to see him.

  “Hey.”

  Finally, she peeks at him out of the corner of her eye. “What are you doing up?” she asks. Her voice is always so raspy, like she doesn’t use it much.

  “Couldn’t sleep. What about you?” As expected, she doesn’t answer, so he places the sweatshirt on the bench next to her. “Jay said he saw you out here. I thought you might be cold.” She’s still wearing the plain blue oxford, and no way is it warm enough.

  “Is that why you came out here?”

  “Maybe.” He rubs his hands together, blowing into them, and glances over at her.

  “How is Mr. Velasquez?”

  Colin wants to burst out in song he’s so happy she’s speaking to him. “He’s going to be okay. By the time I left, he was back to his old self, insisting he could work from bed if Maggie would let him. I’m pretty sure Dot will be in the infirmary forcing food on him every twenty minutes.”

  Lucy stares at the pond for several beats, and Colin wonders if they’ve gone back to the silent game until she says, “Dot is your boss, right? You seem close to her.”

  “She is my b
oss.” He smiles at her tentative efforts at making conversation. “But she’s always been kind of like a grandmother to me.”

  “So, your kind-of-grandmother runs the kitchen and the headmaster is your godfather?”

  “God-fahhthaahhh,” Colin says in his best Brando, but Lucy only gives him an indulgent tiny-dimpled smile. “My parents died when I was little. They were teachers here and were close to Dot and Joe, who was a history teacher at the time. Dot hired me in the kitchen when I was fourteen, but she’s been feeding me since I was five. I try and hang out with her as much as I can—like help her out on baking nights and stuff.”

  “I’m sorry your parents died.”

  He nods once. His stomach tightens, and he hopes they can move on from this topic. He doesn’t want to think about his mother’s spiral into psychosis, or the accident, or any of it. Almost everyone here knows the story, and he’s grateful he never really has to tell it.

  “And you’ve lived here since you were five?”

  “We moved from New Hampshire when my parents got jobs here. They died when I was six, and I lived with Joe until I moved to the dorms freshman year.” He bends so he can see her face more clearly. “What about you? Does your family live in town? I thought you were a commuter, but . . .” He trails off, and her silence rings back to him.

  “Colin . . . ,” she says finally.

  Hearing her say his name does things to him. It gets him thinking of ways to make her say it again, and louder.

  She looks up at him. “About what I said yesterday . . .”

  “You mean the part where you asked me to stay away and here I am, finding you in the middle of the night?”

  “No, not that.” She sighs, tilting her head up to stare at the sky. “I’m glad you’re here.”

  Well, that’s the complete opposite of what he’d expected. This girl is about as hard to read as a Cyrillic text. “Okay . . . ?”

  The amount of attention she’s giving the stars makes him wonder if she’s trying to count them. Does she see something there that he can’t?

  “I shouldn’t have said what I said yesterday. I want you around me. It’s just that I don’t think you should want to be around me.” She takes a deep breath, like she’s readying herself for a hard admission. “And now I sound crazy.”

  He laughs. She totally does. “A little.”

  “But I guess what I’m going to say is kind of crazy.”

  He stares at her, focusing on the way her teeth rake across her bottom lip. He already knows there’s something different about her. And there’s most definitely something strange about them. It’s not until he’s here, in this moment, that he realizes how much he’s resisted thinking about how weird everything has been. After his mother’s breakdown and the resulting death of both of his parents, he’d learned how to guard his mind so carefully, never lingering too long on his morbid history or—eventually—anything even mildly worrisome. The idea that there might really be something strange about Saint O’s always struck Colin as legend, a way to make new kids behave, to lure the thin stream of tourists to the town nearby in the summer. But there’s something paradoxical about sitting with an odd stranger at night next to a foggy pond that makes you see things more clearly.

  Even so, his body fights the clarity. Colin can feel his thoughts clouding, letting go, as if he’s supposed to not care how strange it seems. This time, he pushes back, listening instead to the rational side of his brain and sliding away from her the tiniest bit. He’s always known Lucy wasn’t a normal girl. Her hair is blond to him, not brown. She never seems cold; she never seems to eat. She’s so . . . different. And when her eyes meet his and they are a slow, grinding, anxious gray—filled with metal and ice, worry and hope, and wholly unlike anything Colin has ever imagined before—he wonders for a flash if Lucy is even real.

  Chapter 7 • HER

  HER THROAT IS TIGHT, ALMOST as if invisible hands strangle down the words inside her. But it isn’t some strange, supernatural force urging her to keep her death a secret. It’s fear, plain and simple.

  Her murder—the blood and death and unanswered screams—is the sharpest memory of her life. She has no idea how much time has passed since she died, or whether anyone in this town was alive when it happened. A boy she kissed? A favorite teacher? Her parents? But after the week of wandering the grounds, of not knowing her name or who bought her the shoes on her feet, of feeling a rising panic stirred up by the sheer emptiness inside, knowing something about her life—even that it’s over—was a bittersweet relief.

  But whereas the human rules are always so straightforward—priority number one: stay alive—rules after death are a complete mystery. Was she somehow responsible for what happened to Joe? It feels that way. Worry fills her hollow chest with an icy chill at the thought that she could hurt someone without meaning to.

  Now one thing is for sure: The only thing keeping her from being completely alone in this world is the nervous boy sitting next to her. And she does have a story to tell. It might be short and unreal and full of holes, but she can’t keep it from him much longer. The question is whether he’ll want to have anything to do with her once he hears.

  “Lucy?” Colin asks, ducking to reclaim eye contact. “I didn’t mean to make you feel like you have to talk. You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.”

  “No, I’m putting the words together.” She smiles weakly at him. Swallowing down her apprehension, she begins. “I woke up by the lake a few weeks ago.” She points behind them, over her shoulder. “The day I saw you? I had only just stumbled off the trail.”

  His first reaction is silence, and it reverberates dully between them. She chances a look at his profile; he’s squinting as if translating the words in his head. “Sorry. I don’t know what you mean,” he says finally. “You fell asleep out there? In the woods?”

  “I appeared there,” she says. “I don’t know if I fell from the sky, or materialized out of thin air, or if I’d been sleeping there for a hundred years or a day. I woke up with no memories, no belongings, nothing.”

  “Really?” he asks, his voice high-pitched and shaky. He meets her eyes then, studying. She sees his expression cloud with something. Anxiety, maybe fear.

  “Please don’t be scared,” she whispers. “I’m not going to hurt you.” At least, I don’t think I am. She slips her hands into her lap, as if they might be capable of something she hasn’t yet discovered.

  He shifts back, his angular jaw clenched tight, and it’s clear in his expression the thought hadn’t occurred to him until she’d said it.

  She shakes her head. “Sorry, I’m not doing a good job explaining. See, I think I know why I don’t remember anything and why it’s hard to pick things up and why I don’t need food or sleep or—your sweatshirt.” She looks up at him, waiting for him to say something, but he doesn’t. Licking her lips, her eyes pulsing with anxiety, she says, “I’m pretty sure I’m dead.”

  Chapter 8 • HIM

  COLIN STARES AT HER, PART confused, part horrified. “Okay?” he says, eyebrows slowly rising. Half of his mouth tilts in an unsure smile. This can’t be happening. It can’t. “Dead, huh?”

  He blinks, pressing his hands to his eyes. He’s officially lost his mind.

  “Yeah.” She stands and walks a few steps toward the pond.

  Colin watches her as she gazes at her reflection and wonders if a dead girl would even have one. “So, when you said you’re here for me, you mean, you came back from the dead for me?”

  He can see her nod even though she faces away from him. “That’s what I mean.”

  Dread, heavy and cold, settles between his ribs. No, please no. “But if you’re dead, how can you open doors, or”—he points to the sweatshirt in her arms—“hold my hoodie, or even wear the school uniform?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. I’m pretty sure I look the same. Still tall and knobby. But I’m less clumsy.” She looks over her shoulder and smiles at him sadly, then turns away
again. “But I think I feel different, less solid, less . . .” She trails off, shaking her head. “Just less. I remember dying, but I’m here. That’s all I can tell you.”

  Her long white-blond hair reaches the bottom hem of her blue shirt, and she looks so eerily beautiful in front of the pond with the perfectly sliced half-moon directly overhead. Suddenly the idea that he’s losing his mind doesn’t seem so impossible. Colin wonders if Lucy is even really here.

  “Lucy, what color is your hair?”

  She turns, a confused smile on her face. “Brown . . . ?”

  With this, he drops his head into his hands and groans.

  Lucy walks over, sitting beside him on the bench. “Why did you ask me that?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  She reaches out and takes his hand, but he immediately drops it, shooting up from the bench and wiping his palms on his thighs. “What the hell?”

  His hand tingles where it touched hers, the sensation slowly fading into buzzing warmth. She felt like static, like charged particles in the shape of a girl. Colin stares at her and then puffs his cheeks out as he exhales.

  “What is going on?” he murmurs, looking beyond her and up at the sky. He’s suddenly remembering every burnout kid that’s come back from the woods with a story about something they saw. How his mom used to talk about . . . God, he can’t start thinking about that. The idea that Lucy is a Walker is impossible. The idea that Walkers are real is even more impossible. But either scenario makes him nearly choke with panic. Because if Walkers aren’t real, then he is insane. And if they are real . . . then maybe his mother wasn’t crazy after all.

  And right now, in every other way, he feels sane. He does. He remembered to grab a jacket before he came outside; he’s wearing shoes. He thinks he’s speaking coherently. When he looks around, he doesn’t see anything amiss—no spiders crawling up his body or stars weaving in the sky. Just a brown-haired girl who looks blond to him, says she’s a ghost, and feels like static heat.

  That’s it. He’s insane.