“Even if he was recovering, I think he was probably happy to be alive, in his bedroom with his hot girlfriend, so I wouldn’t rule out your theory.”
Lucy ducks her head, grinning at her lap. “I guess.”
“But my theory? You feel strongest when you’re on the right path, when you’re doing what you’re supposed to be doing here. Maybe it’s when Colin is happiest, maybe it isn’t. Pick the one moment you felt strongest, most real, and do that again.”
She looks up at the ornate ceiling overhead, painted deep scarlet and gold and decorated with intricate molding. She felt almost solid before Colin chose to go into the lake. Is it wrong, she thinks, to keep this secret from Henry? Wouldn’t he want to know that he could be with Alex like this?
“I mean,” Henry says, breaking into Lucy’s internal debate, “I think I feel stronger every day. And Alex is still in remission. It tells me that whatever I’m doing for him is right.”
That makes up Lucy’s mind for her. She can never tell Henry what she’s letting Colin do in the lake. “Okay.”
“My point is, look at Colin. Watch him. If you do something to make him happy, you should feel that strength inside you build. If the strength is from something else, you’ll notice. I saw your name on some chemistry plaques in the science building,” he says with a wide grin. “Go do some experiments.”
She stands, but decides to start right away. “Henry, what color is my hair?”
He gives her a tilt of his head before breaking into soft laughter. “Not the strangest thing you’ve asked me, but okay, I’ll bite. It’s brown.”
Chapter 30 • HIM
IT’S COLD AS HELL, AND colin cups his Hands around his mouth and breathes, trying to warm them up. The wind whips around the side of the library, chilling him through a thermal, two T-shirts, a beanie, and his favorite jacket. Colin shrinks farther into the warmth of his hood and rocks slightly, forward and back on his skateboard, watching Jay buzz his bike down the long flight of stairs. Huge piles of dirty snow line both sides of the stairway, and the sky looks heavy and swollen, like it’s ready to crack open and fall all around them.
The deicer scattered along the sidewalk pops and crunches beneath Colin’s wheels as he rides over to Jay.
“I thought it was supposed to warm up. Why is it so damn cold?” Jay grumbles.
Colin doesn’t answer, not wanting to think about what will happen when the lake begins to thaw. Instead, he relishes the freezing temperatures, the way each breath burns cold in his lungs, and how the other students rush by, practically sprinting up the stairs to get inside.
“Thank God we’re not at the lake today,” Jay says, teeth chattering. “We’d both be freezing our balls off. Literally.”
Colin laughs. “You’re not the one that ends up naked and wet.”
“Yeah. I’m the one sitting on the side of a frozen lake for an hour while you’re having all the fun.”
Colin snorts at Jay’s use of the word “fun.” Their idea of a good time has never made much sense to anyone else, but with Jay, it seems perfectly normal to characterize jumping into a freezing lake in January as fun.
“Think she’ll want to go again?” Jay adds. “She got up and left kind of suddenly today.”
“No clue.” Colin exhales loudly into the cold, the condensation forming a small cloud in front of him. He remembers how, as kids, he and Jay used to think they were cool and pretend they were puffing on invisible cigarettes. He knows the tiny particles in his breath freeze when they meet the icy air, moving from a gas to a denser liquid and solid state, forming ice crystals before dissolving back into invisible particles. He sort of hates that this reminds him of Lucy, like it’s some giant metaphor for what will happen when the days becomes dry and warm in the spring and there’s nothing left in the air to hold her together. Is it possible she’ll vanish along with the cold?
Jay pops his wheel and leans against the railing. “So that’s it, then? We’re done? Just when we’re getting it down?”
“I don’t know,” Colin answers. “She says she doesn’t want me to, but . . .”
“God, I still can’t believe it worked. I mean, for all of my doubts, have you ever really thought about what you’re doing? You’re having an out-of-body experience and making out with a ghost. Never mind how insane that is. It’s like you’re cheating death, Col. Again! It’s totally awesome.”
“Do not say it like that in front of Lucy,” Colin says. He climbs the stairs and looks out across the quad. He hated that phrase growing up—cheating death—as if he were somehow more life-savvy than his parents and managed to pull an ace out of his sleeve at the last minute, leaving him alive but his parents dead. “I’m not cheating anything. People get into cars every day, get on planes, get into boats. People hike and hang glide and ski down ridiculous mountains. Enough people have done those things and survived that we don’t even think twice when we start the ignition on our car and head out on Route Seven with the drunk and methed-out truckers barreling down there every day. But what if what I’m doing isn’t any more dangerous than skiing a black diamond? You don’t know, Jay. No one does it, so you think it’s wild. Maybe it isn’t.”
Jay is nodding almost the entire time Colin is ranting, and he puts his hands up in the air when he’s done. “I get it. Like, at first I was doing this only because it felt like I never saw you anymore. But now I think it’s cool. Leave it to you to find the fun in freezing your nuts off.”
Colin stands on his board and kicks off the concrete, crouching and jumping upward as he leaps, popping the tail so the board leaves the ground. Even being as sore as he is, there’s that singular moment of being airborne, where his head clears and the rush of adrenaline eclipses the wind in his ears and the cold on his face. His front truck makes contact, grinding the rail, and too soon, his wheels slam into the concrete. Colin weaves as he struggles to land steadily, gripping the handrail to stop from falling.
“Nice,” Jay says, leaning back against the railing.
“Borked the landing.”
“Dude, you were hypothermic yesterday. Cut yourself some slack.”
Colin comes to a stop in front of him. “What you said earlier to Lucy about the devil on my shoulder . . . You know I’m not looking to get hurt, right?”
“I know. What I think is you have bigger balls than the rest of us.”
Colin shakes his head. “No, listen. You know that feeling when you ride down a skinny from twenty feet up? Or look over a fifteen-foot drop to flat and think, ‘Let’s do this’? It only works if you never doubt that you can. Standing over that ice, I feel totally safe.”
“Like you’re in the zone,” Jay says.
“Exactly.”
“But you have to convince Lucy of that.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, hurry it up, you lucky bastard. I don’t have a ghost girl. At least let me live vicariously through you.”
Chapter 31 • HER
COLIN AND JAY ARE NEAR the back of the library, jumping from rails to stairs, when Lucy returns. Colin approaches her slowly, as if she might roar, first inspecting her eyes and then reaching for her hand. “Are you mad?”
“I wasn’t mad.” She pulls his fingers up to kiss them.
“You totally were,” Jay says, coming to a skidding stop next to them. “You just have to trust that we are completely legit. We are adventure experts.”
“Legit?” She shakes her head at him, fighting a smile. “Don’t do that, Jay. You can’t pull off nineties gangster.”
“Ignore him,” Colin says, pressing a hand to Jay’s chest and pushing him away. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I needed to think. I went to talk to Henry.”
“You told him about the lake?”
“No, no,” she assures him quickly. “I wanted to know why I feel different lately. But it doesn’t happen to him. He says he’s always the same.”
Colin’s face falls, but he tries to hide his disappointmen
t. “We’ll figure it out.” He kisses her cheek before turning to watch Jay grind down the stairs again.
In turn, Lucy watches Colin, thinking of what Henry said in the auditorium. She puts her hand on her opposite forearm, feeling the swirling energy beneath. “How do you feel today?”
He glances at her and then back to Jay. “I’m good. I swear. No tingling in my fingers anymore.” He wiggles them playfully in demonstration, but Lucy only feels the tightness in her chest intensify. She’s missing something. She’s missing something and she can’t disappear again.
“And you really do want to go back to the lake?”
He turns to her fully now, eyes bright. “Yeah, I do.”
Lucy squeezes her arm. Nothing. Colin looks hopeful, bordering on giddy, but she basically feels the same: somewhere in between a solid and a gas. In that strange no man’s land on the verge of the sublime. “And it works for you, going into the water alone? Having Jay pull you out?”
“Absolutely.” Colin is practically vibrating with joy now, but Lucy doesn’t register any change in herself. It can’t be tied only to his happiness. There’s something she isn’t getting right.
“Is there a better way to do it?”
“Other than packing my bed with ice and curling up with me?” he says, laughing. “No. This works.”
With him.
The idea sparks a realization so fierce it takes her a moment to see beyond it and into the present, where Colin has looked away again. She came back from the lake to be with him but has been sending him into the water alone. Every time he goes in, she’s stronger. . . . She’s grown stronger so she can help him.
“Do you want me to go into the water with you?”
Her fingers sense the shock of energy surging into place beneath her skin, and she pulls her hand back as if she’s plugged her own fingers into a generator.
Colin reaches for her shoulders, steadying. She remembers the first day, in the dining hall, when she saw him and felt starved for details about his face up close, his voice, the feel of his skin on hers. She’s been staring at his face at a distance for years. The face that is here, right in front of her, bending close and kissing her as if she’s made from blown glass.
“Yeah,” he says. “You would do that?”
“Of course I would.”
“I’d follow you anywhere, Lucy. You just point the way.”
“Then, let’s swim.” She’s convinced she’s smiling with her whole body.
“When? When can we go?”
She pulls away and looks behind Colin to where Jay is very much not looking at what they’re doing. “Jay, you free tomorrow?”
Jay whoops and walks to Colin, bumping fists with him. “I’m in.”
• • •
It’s early, barely dawn. The sky clings weakly to darkness until clouds take their place and begin to drop fluffy snow. Colin and Jay shove peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into their mouths as they do a final check of the supplies.
“Still ready?” Colin asks her, heaving a large duffel over his shoulder.
Lucy nods, unable to open her mouth for fear she’ll admit that she’s never felt this strong or this sure of anything.
By the time they’ve arrived and hiked to the shore, the surface is blinding in the early-morning sunlight, brilliant white broken up by tiny speckles of fallen brown leaves. Colin’s original site of entry, the jagged and thin section of ice in the middle of the lake, shines a brilliant blue, thinner than the ice around it. Now when she sees the sharp edges pointing like arrows to the center, Lucy’s memory of Colin falling in is rewritten as something calm and idyllic. Like a reel of images, she sees him going under, his face relieved instead of terrified. She remembers hearing him call her name on the trail, of the first sensation of solid skin to skin, of the way his eyes begged her to not ruin it by pointing out that something was very wrong.
Their shoes crunch along the surface, and she hears Colin slip on the ice, and both guys laugh behind her. She doesn’t even turn around because she wants in. It’s different now that they’ve decided to go in together. Something heavy pulls inside her chest, a sudden tether to some unseen anchor underwater.
She turns and looks at him here and wonders if it’s true that she lived in the lake for so long. Did she see him? Is that the hunger that takes over every thought? Beneath the blue ice there’s something deeper, a space carved for them. It’s all she can do to not pull him down to the opening with her. Her hands are magnets and his skin is iron and their place together is just below the surface.
While Jay unrolls the foil blanket and unpacks his kit of supplies, Lucy strips down to her underwear, unwilling to waste a single second. Boots, pants, sweater, shirt form a rumpled pile at her feet. Her skin is startlingly white in the sun, iridescent and more opaque than she’s ever seen it.
She looks up at a surprised Colin, his eyes taking in every inch. He stutters a few sounds before fumbling with his own buttons to catch up.
“I’ve never seen you . . . like this,” he says, eyes bright, cheeks flushed.
Lucy glances at the opening to the water and then back at him. “On the count of three?”
• • •
They dive in, arms stretching out into the clear blue water. It presses against every inch of her, cold and silvery. When they dip under a fallen tree, a fluff of moss waves in their wake, releasing a million tiny bubbles to travel the surface. Lucy doesn’t know exactly where she’s going, but she’s pulled toward the deep end of the lake, under the shadows where the ice is thick and dark.
She feels Colin’s fingers brush the skin of her ankle, his hair on her thigh as he pushes to catch up and swim beside her. As she turns her head, she sees him trying to hold his breath. Behind them, his unconscious body floats to the surface.
“Let go,” she says as clearly as if they were on dry land. She takes his hand and pulls him closer. It’s warm in hers, solid and familiar. At the surface, Jay pulls Colin’s body out of the lake. “Jay’s got you out.”
He struggles for a moment, a look of fear passing through his wide eyes as he works to let go of the instinct to breathe. Tugging his arm, she leads him forward, where the deep blue slowly morphs darker and darker, turning into a tunnel of soft black.
“Luce,” Colin whispers from beside her. “Where are we?”
“I don’t know exactly,” she says. And she doesn’t. Even though being back in the lake feels familiar, she realizes she’s never known what this world is. It’s not heaven or hell. It’s not a different universe.
Light shines above, and they both look to the whiteness over them and push up through the crystal-blue water until they break the surface on this strange, other side. It’s unlike anything Lucy has ever seen since her return, but the space is so familiar and tugs at something in the back of her mind, some instinct that she’s finding the world she retreats to when she vanishes.
There’s a brief flash of disappointment: Everything is the same—trees and boulders and the trail—but then Lucy realizes that it’s not at all like the shore they just left.
Instead, it’s a mirror image, a replica of the icy earth aboveground, but it’s so much more. More color, more light, more reflections on every surface. Entering this world feels like stepping into the center of a diamond.
Lucy and Colin climb out of the water onto a shore of sand so crystalline, it glimmers in the indirect sun filtered through the trees. Branches of amber, leaves of a silver green so bright Lucy has to blink away, let her eyes adjust.
Beside her, Colin is silent, and when she looks to him, she registers that he’s watching her reaction, waiting. “There was something different about that world, something perfect,” he’d said. He’s seen this every other time he’s been here, and it’s she who’s forgotten what it’s like, because, until now, she didn’t go under with him.
“You can see this?” she asks, looking up at a sky so blue it almost needs another name. It’s the lake reflected, an entire galaxy
, a massive ocean in a single glimpse of sky.
He nods, taking her hand and pulling her toward the trail. But when she expects him to pull her in the direction of the shed, he surprises her, walking the other way, away from the field and the school buildings and deeper into the woods instead.
Beneath their feet, amber leaves crunch like splinters of precious stone. The snow is mesmerizing, winking back a hundred shades of blue reflected from the lake and sky. It’s like she can see every frozen, glittering crystal that blankets the ground and trees and hills beyond.
Lucy’s memories come back slowly, giving her mind time to adjust the same way her eyes adjusted to the light: first recover. And then see: see the world that must have been her home for the past ten years.
“It’s like a reflection,” she tells Colin, following his lead at a fork in the trail. “Everything up there is down here. Buildings and trees. Even the lake. Like Wonderland.” She points back at the water behind them, looking like a sapphire planted in a bed of quartz.
He must hear the awe in her voice because he stops, turning to face her.
She shifts where she stands. “Except people. I mean, I think I’ve been alone, watching.”
His dark brows pull together, and he whispers, “I hate that.”
Not wanting to worry him, she adds, “I don’t think time passed the same way. I mean, I remember being here, but I don’t feel like I was sitting around, bored out of my mind for the past ten years.” His face relaxes, and she says, “I remember looking up, as if I could see everything through a glass. I think I was waiting. And I remember watching you.”
“Really?”
Nodding, Lucy takes his hand and leads him down the trail this time, feeling a pull to go forward, to keep moving. “I remember watching you on the hill during a winter social. You and Jay swung from a tree branch and jumped down onto the lake.”
Sublime Page 18