• • •
Lucy’s grateful for the short days of winter. Sunset is at 6:08, and at 6:30 Colin is opening the dormitory door to silently let her in.
“Did you eat?” she asks once they’re in his room, door closed, music playing in the background. Jay has come in and left again, letting Lucy and Colin reconnect in relative peace.
He nods, studying her as he sometimes does, as if he can unlock her secrets with the pressure of his attention. “Dot brought me about five meals.”
Only now does it occur to Lucy that Colin could be sick, like Alex, that maybe that’s what they have in common and why each of them has attracted a ghost. But though Colin looks and feels different to her than other people, she doesn’t see the same underlying exhaustion she saw in Alex. There’s no illness draining the life from him right before her eyes. If anything, even in his weakened state, Colin seems more resilient. The air around him pulses with life. “Are you tired?” she asks, fidgeting.
“No. I feel like I’ve slept the last two days away.” He sits down on the edge of his mattress, pulling the heavy brown comforter up and over his shoulders. “And I can’t stop thinking about the lake.”
“I keep seeing you falling through. And then on the trail . . .” She tries to temper the longing in her voice, but her skin hums with the memory of what came after.
He blinks away and looks out the window. Fat snowflakes gather on his windowsill. “If I didn’t die, but I could touch you, then you must be somewhere in between too.”
“I have no idea.” She moves closer but keeps some space between them when he shivers slightly. “I don’t think I’m the only one like me at Saint Osanna’s.”
Colin turns to look at her, his face shadowed in the dark room. Bluish marks sweep heavily under his eyes, but she can see interest bloom across his expression. His lips curl into a half smile. She tells him about looking for others and finally finding Henry and Alex.
“They’re like us. Henry died too, and is back.”
Colin’s brow furrows, and a hundred reactions cross his features before he says simply, “And the other guy, Alex, is . . . me in this scenario?”
“Yeah, they’re together.”
“Alex Broderick? Tall, blond kid?” Colin asks, and Lucy nods. “He’s gay?”
“Do you know him?” she asks.
“Well, I don’t know him know him, but I’ve seen him around. He used to play lacrosse and stuff before he got sick. Cancer, I think.”
“Leukemia. I guess that’s when he found Henry, right after he was diagnosed.”
Colin shifts under the blankets, eyes growing heavy.
“So I’ve wondered, if I’m a ghost, then how do I move things, wear clothes, touch you? But if I’m mostly solid, how do I know I’m not some form of demon instead? Who sent me here?”
Colin nods beside her.
She tells him about how long Henry has been here, about how with Alex being sick, Henry is sure that he was sent back for him. “I’ve always felt like my heart was taken from my body, but it somehow ended up in you. I think Henry kind of feels the same way, like he’s keeping Alex safe.”
“I’m glad,” he says, leaning to kiss her cheek. “I’ve always felt safe with you. I wonder if ghosts like you are everywhere, protecting people.”
“You’re not surprised?”
“Why would I be?” he mumbles, already drifting off.
Lucy turns and looks out the window, for the first time realizing that she is the only one who is surprised by any of this.
• • •
In the middle of the night, Colin pushes the heating pads off his chest and legs and climbs out of bed. He wraps himself in about four sweaters, twitching with constant shivering. His desk chair creaks as he sits down and begins typing. It’s 2:14 in the morning.
“What are you doing?”
“Looking stuff up,” he mumbles.
“What stuff?”
“Spirit stuff. Dying.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
He scratches the back of his neck and throws her an apologetic glance over his shoulder. “Not yet. Sorry.”
She lies back to stare at his ceiling, at the tiny solar system she likes to imagine Colin meticulously sticking in place everywhere he’s lived. “You okay?”
He grunts in affirmation, and she rolls over, wishing he would come closer. She’s had a taste of what he must have felt when she was gone, and here in the dark, with him so far away, she feels a strange itch to talk some more about what he felt on the trail and what he thinks happened. It feels like a tight spring has been lodged in her chest, uncoiling slowly upward.
“Do you know how many people have had near-death experiences?” he asks, oblivious to her anxiety.
“How many?”
“Thousands. More than thousands. Most of the stuff written about it is religious. But not all. Some people think that near-death experiences are a form of hallucination, but since I know you felt everything too, we know I wasn’t hallucinating.”
She rolls back over, forcing a lighter tone. “Are you cruising around NearDeath.org?”
“No,” he says without humor. “Seriously, Luce. So many people have almost died or actually died, and seen things or experienced things like I did, and these people are fine. There’s even a Journal of Near-Death Studies. There’s a Near Death Experience Research Organization. Like, science.”
“Pseudoscience.”
“Lucy, that makes you pseudoscience.”
“I’m not near dead, Colin. I’m dead dead.”
He ignores her, and she listens to the sound of his fingers on the keyboard. They don’t seem to be cooperating, and he swears repeatedly under his breath. “You’re neither dead nor alive,” he counters. “You’ve been sent back. Or, maybe your mind has separated from your original body and has figured out a way to come back as my Guardian. And I can be like you; we know that now.”
“Not easily,” she says, growing strangely full of excited energy. She stands, feeling like she wants to take off running. “And probably not again.”
“I felt you, Luce. You felt me, too. And not in a maddening too-much-too-little way.” His tone makes the vibrations inside her grow. There’s a steely determination there she hasn’t heard before. “Are you telling me you didn’t like it?”
She’s silent, unable to speak past the strange humming in her chest. She did feel him, and he felt better than anything.
“This one guy had the same thing happen,” he continues. “Fell in a lake, hypothermia, saw the world in a way he’d never seen it before. The whole thing.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah, and he’s on this message board saying he did it again, because he wanted to know that what he saw was real.”
“You need to recover,” she says. “You’re not seriously thinking about this as a good thing, are you?”
The answering silence fills the room like rushing water. She walks closer and leans over him, reading the message board posts over his shoulder. There are thousands of entries. He follows a link and creates a user name and password.
She bends and kisses his jaw, his neck, hoping to distract him, but she can feel him grow tense under her touch.
“You need to sleep.”
“In a minute. I want to join this site.”
“I think this goes against Guardian protocol.” She tries to keep her voice light, but the words come out stiff and formal. She doesn’t want to police Colin’s activity. Even more, she doesn’t understand this strange hyperactivity that has overtaken her. “This website creeps me out,” she says instead.
He laughs at this, at the ghost girl being afraid of ghosts. “This one guy sees hypothermia almost like an extreme sport. Because of the way your cellular activity slows, brain death is the very last thing. This guy on here, ColdSport, thinks it can be done in a way that challenges the system, like biking up a big hill or running a marathon.”
He’s serious. She looks at the forum he
’s logged into. There are three user names that take up most of the posts. Three crazy people out there preaching to their own tiny crazy choir. She slips her hands inside his sweaters, along his skin. “Colin, stop.”
His skin is fever hot, and he shivers beneath her palms. Standing, he reluctantly follows her back to his bed, but her mind is reeling. When he finally falls asleep, she slips over to his desk, hovers on his chair, and focuses intently on pressing each key on his keyboard to enter her search.
She finds hundreds of stories, but shuts down the computer when she registers that none of them sound like what happened at the lake.
Chapter 22 • HIM
THE SILENCE IS LIKE A thick curtain between them. Colin washes dishes as best he can and hands them, through the invisible film of discomfort, to Dot, who dries and puts them away.
“You’re awfully quiet,” he says, digging his hands into the warm, sudsy water. They’re better today: fingers less stiff, his grip steadier.
“So are you,” she shoots back.
He drops the baking sheet he was scrubbing and turns to look at her. “Christ, Dot. Just say whatever it is that you’re thinking.”
“Are you going to tell me about this Lucy?”
Colin groans, turning away and looking out the window. He’s been expecting this ever since Dot heard the name “Lucy” at the hospital. Dot remembers Lucy’s murder as clearly as if it happened yesterday, but as far as he knows, Dot’s never seen him with her. For all she knows, it’s just another girl.
“She’s a girl in my class,” he says, returning to the dishes.
“I’ve seen her, you know. She looks a lot like a girl named Lucy who went here years ago. In fact,” Dot says, stepping closer, “she looks a lot like the dead girl you asked about a few weeks back.”
Colin stares at his hands in the water. They’re shaking now, but it has nothing to do with having gone into the lake.
“I told you, I always heard the stories,” Dot whispers, her voice trembling. “Different people insisting they’d seen a girl at the lake, the man in uniform sitting on a bench, or a man walking around campus, sweeping the walkway. Maggie swore up and down for years that this place was haunted. But, Lucy . . . being such a part of your world . . .”
Colin turns to her, eyes pleading. “Dot, do you remember when you told me and Jay that there are things we don’t understand in this world?”
Dot nods, eyes wide.
“And do you remember when you promised me I wasn’t crazy? Do you believe what you told me?”
She laughs, reaching up to put a soft hand on his cheek. “I do.”
“So can you trust me?”
Shaking her head the tiniest bit, she whispers, “I don’t know. It just doesn’t feel right.”
“It doesn’t feel right because you don’t understand it, not because it’s wrong,” he says. “For the first time in my life, I feel like I know what I want.” Looking back and forth between her eyes, Colin can see that Dot is going to give him more leash than she’s ever given him before.
Her eyes fill with tears, and she offers him a half smile. “Just feels like I never see you anymore.”
Colin shifts where he stands, his eyes boring into the soapy water. “Been busier than normal. School . . . friends,” he says, swallowing down the guilt that blooms in his chest.
The silence stretches on before Dot sets her towel aside, reaching over to place her hand on his forearm. “Promise me you won’t do anything dangerous.”
When he nods, Colin realizes he’s made a promise he has no intention of keeping.
• • •
Colin is accustomed to being the center of attention. He’s competed in bike races and trials competitions practically since he could walk. He’s crazy tall; he’s never been shy. And when his parents died, no one gave him a minute alone for years.
But the attention he’s getting today is all wrong. Two news vans are parked on campus, and the reporters camped inside try to ask him questions before Joe calls security. His classmates are hysterical; some are insisting it was the ghost of the lake that made him fall in. Others eye him like he’s some kind of mythical creature. Everyone wants to touch him. Teachers seem shaken, and there’s a mandatory assembly on winter safety in the gym. He feels the pressure of every pair of eyes, watching to make sure he’s okay, that his arms work, his gait is steady, that he’s making sense. The words “tragedy,” “close call,” and “fences” are being thrown around.
Here’s the thing: It wasn’t a tragedy. It wasn’t a close call. If they build a fence around that lake, he’ll tear the motherfucker down. He wants to go back. He wants to know that what he saw was real, that the way Lucy felt wasn’t his imagination. The minutes with Lucy in that world felt better than any crazy trick, more visceral than anything else happening around him. His body might have been dying, but he felt alive. Really alive.
He knows that should scare him, but it doesn’t.
• • •
“Oh. My. God. Colin!” a voice screeches behind him, and reflexively, he ducks his head, anticipating the set of claws that will run up his neck and into his hair.
Amanda grips his head and digs in her nails as she pulls him into a hug. “I heard you died for like an hour!”
“I didn’t die.”
“I have been freaking out, Colin. Freaking. Out.”
“Sorry,” he says, extracting himself from her clutches. Of course, Lucy chooses this exact moment to drift down the hall and settle beside him. She glances at Colin, then at Amanda, but where he expects raised eyebrows, he gets only an amused smirk.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey.” He smiles at her, eyes lingering on her lips until she smiles outright. “That’s better.”
Amanda ignores Lucy. “Shelby called me last night and told me what happened. And, oh my God, I totally flipped out. Like, what if you had died? What if you had died, Colin? We would have been completely fli—”
“Amanda, have you met Lucy?” He interrupts, hoping she comes up for air. He’s embarrassed both for Amanda’s lack of manners and the Past-Colin who actually had sex with this girl.
Amanda regards Lucy as if she’s never seen her before. “Hey,” she says, uninterested, before turning back to Colin. “Did it hurt? Did you get all hot? And undress?”
He lifts an eyebrow in the way that Lucy likes and feels her slide closer.
“I didn’t undress,” he says.
Amanda has the gall to look disappointed. “Oh, good. I hear a lot of people do that when they’re hyperthermic.”
“Hypo,” he mutters.
“I was getting there,” Lucy says, grinning up at him. “Just didn’t have enough time.”
Colin feigns shock, pressing his fingertips to his rounded lips. Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Amanda working up to something. She fills with an inhale, pulling together irritation and outrage and trying to coat it in indifference. “You were there?”
Lucy nods mildly at Amanda and stretches to kiss his jaw. “See you later.”
He waves, cursing Lucy under his breath for leaving him alone with his ex-girlfriend, though he can’t exactly blame her for not wanting to stay. With perfect timing, Amanda’s roommate approaches, wearing a sympathetic smile.
“Hey, Colin,” she says. “How are you?”
“I’m fine,” he answers, for the thousandth time today. But this time, he doesn’t mind as much. He’s always liked Liz. He owes her big-time for the damage control she managed after his breakup with Amanda. “How are you?”
“Good,” she says simply. And right when Colin expects her to move on, she adds, “I had a cousin who fell through the ice. Up in Newfoundland.”
He nods, disappointed and already disengaged. He’s heard a variation of this story about half as many times today as he’s answered the obligatory “How are you?” What follows will be the predictable: You’re lucky you made it out alive. He was never the same again. She lost her left thumb, had permanent
nerve damage in her face.
But he should have known Liz would break the mold. “He was unconscious on the ice for hours and lived.”
“What?” Amanda forgotten, he steps closer to Liz, surprising her so much she steps back into the wall.
“He fell in and managed to climb out, but it was four hours before he was found with no detectable pulse. At least, that’s what they guessed.”
“And he’s a vegetable?”
“No, that’s the weirdest part,” she says, smiling in a strange way that makes his skin hum. “He’s totally fine.”
• • •
By the end of the day, Colin is practically vibrating to talk to Lucy. It’s only when he sees her headed toward him and away from a mass of students walking to the trail, bundled up in holiday-themed scarves and hats, that he remembers tonight is the Winter Social.
“Where is everyone going?” Lucy asks once she reaches him, turning to watch the migration.
“The upperclassmen have this evil thing called Winter Social every year before the holiday. Everyone except us townies gets nostalgic and weepy over being separated for two whole weeks. The seniors decorate the overlook above the lake and—”
“Our lake?”
He looks down at her and smiles at the possessive bite to her voice. “Yeah. But don’t worry. They don’t venture down to the lake itself. Nobody does,” he adds, hoping she hears the same in his. “They decorate the area on the hill above it and play horrible pop music, and everyone makes out with everyone else, and then people start fighting because they’ve snuck in alcohol, so it turns into a giant drama.”
Lucy grins. “Sounds fun.”
“It’s a social at a boarding school. So, basically, you hang out with the same people, just half a mile away from where you usually hang out.”
Ignoring him, she says, “And it’s about time you took me on a date.”
“Trust me, Lucy. It’s not your thing.”
“How would you know?” Her grin turns seductive. “Being near the lake and kissing you sounds like my thing.”
He finds himself unable to argue with that reasoning.
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