“Shut it down,” I said, stepping back from it. I grabbed Reid and Eli each by an arm and pulled them back with me.
Then something came through the black.
I saw it first. It was fast, a streak of blue, and my mind struggled to make sense of it. I wanted to be relieved, because it didn’t look like a body, but somehow deep down, I knew there were worse things than bodies to bring in from other worlds.
Then I realized what I was hearing. Skidding tires and the squeal of worn brakes.
It was a pickup truck, old and faded blue, and not from this world. And now it was flying down the hill, down Highway 101, swerving like no one was in control.
Everything happened in slow motion.
We were only two lanes of highway from the cliffs and the beach, on a hill a quarter mile up from where people and families were laughing and relaxing and enjoying one of their last carefree days of summer.
As the truck barreled through the portal, I saw her.
Janelle.
The red of her bathing suit and matching shorts caught my eye first. She stood down the hill, at the edge of the parking lot, on the cusp of the road. Directly in the truck’s path.
Tanned skin, her brown hair pulled back on top of her head, sneakers on her feet, her cell phone to her ear.
She was talking to someone. It must have been someone important. She was pinching the bridge of her nose, like she always did whenever she was stressed and trying to figure something out, and even though I couldn’t see them, I knew her eyes would be closed. I’d seen her make that face a lot.
Before I could even think through what I was doing, I was running toward her.
When my mind kicked in, it told me what I already knew, what I should have already thought of: I was going to be too late.
So I screamed her name.
She turned toward me and saw the truck. It was almost on top of her.
She threw an arm up in front of her head, like she was bracing for the impact.
Then it hit her.
When I got to her, she was still. Not breathing. One of her eyes was open and red with blood. Her collarbone was jutting up through the skin, and her lower back was bent at the wrong angle. Worse, her head was turned too far to be natural. Her neck had to be broken.
She was dead.
A cold blankness swept through me. I somehow felt both numb and like I’d been ripped in two. I had seen it happen. I could see her in front of me, and I knew it was real, but part of me still rejected it. This couldn’t be real. I’d watched her get hit by the truck, but that was impossible because she was good and I would never hurt her.
I fell by her side, and my hands shook as I reached for her neck.
I stopped thinking. I righted her head, ignoring the wave of nausea that rolled through me at the way it flopped loosely in my hands. I wasn’t going to let this end this way, not a chance.
I could feel the break in her neck, the separation of the vertebrae and spinal cord. I gathered all my strength and funneled it down through my hands and into her, feeling the bones and flesh shift under my fingertips. When things were whole again, I moved my hands to her chest, not letting up with the flow of energy, afraid it would stop if I did. I pushed harder, focusing on her heart, willing it to start beating again.
It didn’t.
I needed more energy. I pulled with everything I had, until I was light-headed and my ears started to ring. Everything I’d ever felt for her, all those complex feelings I didn’t understand and couldn’t put a name to. I forced it through my arms, out of my fingertips, and into her.
“Janelle, please,” I whispered. “Janelle, stay with me.”
I thought of everything I knew about her, everything good about who she was, the things she did, the way she smiled, the sound of her laugh. And I channeled them into her.
I remembered the first moment we met.
I’d fallen through the portal and blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was freezing. Water was everywhere, I was submerged, my head was throbbing, and my arms and legs were too heavy and sluggish to move. I was sinking. I didn’t know how to get to the surface, or which way was up. The salt water stung my eyes, and my insides burned because I needed to breathe. I tried harder to move, but nothing happened, and I needed air. Needed it so badly, my mouth opened, even though there was only water.
Then she saved me. She wrapped an arm around my chest and pulled me up to the surface. I coughed, gasped for air, and vomited all at the same time. I even thrashed out for something solid to grab on to, but she didn’t let go. She held on to me, leaning me against a floating spongy thing, and then I had control of myself.
Soon I could look at her and see that she was an angel. Long dark hair wet and plastered against her face, long eyelashes, chocolate eyes. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Then she turned us, the sun moved behind her, and all I could see was her outline glowing against the blue sky.
I remembered that moment, her saving me, and I held on to that.
She saved me. My fake life was only possible because of her. I couldn’t exist in this world if she didn’t too.
I remembered seeing her at school for the first time. She was playing some weird game I didn’t understand with another girl and two boys on the playground. She was laughing, and the waves of her hair shook behind her. That laugh, that smile, it loosened up the fear knotted inside me, the fear of being alone, because if something that good and pure and happy existed here, it meant there was hope for me.
I recalled every memory of her I could think of: when she walked to school with her brother, ruffling his hair and teasing him; when she swam, in school meets and in the ocean, how she moved through the water like she was part of it; when she ate lunch on campus with a book on her lap; when she sat in the library and tutored underclassmen; when she was in the auditorium for debates. Even the nights when she was on the beach this summer with another guy.
And as I remembered these things, as I tried to put her back together, I realized what it was that I felt for her. It wasn’t just a crush like Eli thought, and it wasn’t even a weird obsession like Reid thought.
I loved her.
It didn’t matter that she didn’t know me or that I had never gotten up the nerve to speak to her. I didn’t need to. What I felt for her, it wasn’t about me. It was just about her. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to smile, whether it was small and sly, a secret smile she was sharing with a friend, or wide and contagious, the kind that turned people’s heads and made them smile too. I wanted her to laugh, the louder the better. I wanted her to feel light, happy, free. I wanted her to have everything good and perfect in this world, and I wanted to shield her from stress and sadness, no matter how small or insignificant.
More than anything, I wanted her to live. Needed her to live.
“Stay with me.” My voice cracked as I said it. I just wasn’t sure my power would be enough. “Janelle, stay with me.”
Then, as if she heard me, her eyes fluttered open, but they were unfocused.
“Hold on, Janelle. Hold on,” I whispered. I pushed her collarbone back through the skin, and set it against the other half. I winced, feeling the two ragged ends scraping together. In the next second they went smooth, as I fused the bones. She still wasn’t breathing.
“I’m sorry. You’re gonna feel this.” Next came her spinal cord. I felt her body go rigid when the connection reestablished.
She coughed blood onto my shirt. Which meant her lungs were working. One of my tears fell onto her neck.
“Ben!” It was Eli calling my name, from the direction of the truck, but I couldn’t look up or see what he wanted. I needed all my focus to fix the damage.
I moved my hand down her arm, healing the cuts she had, and then I slipped my hand under her back, feeling for the second break in her spine. When I touched it, her eyes closed and her body relaxed. She passed out.
Panic seized my chest. There was a chance that this was too much. That w
hat I was doing to her body was too much trauma, too much energy. I could end up hurting her even more or sending her into shock or something. I thought of how she had looked right before the truck hit. Her red bathing suit and shorts, tanned skin, her brown hair pulled back on top of her head, sneakers on her feet, her cell phone to her ear, standing at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the parking lot, on the cusp of the road. Directly in the truck’s path.
“Ben, we gotta go,” Eli said.
This was all my fault. “I’m so sorry,” I said, leaning forward, pressing my lips to her forehead.
She stirred, moving her legs with a pained sigh. I pulled back to see her eyes were open again.
“You’re going to be all right,” I breathed as I sat up. Her brown eyes looked up at me, and I said it again. “You’re going to be all right.” This time I couldn’t help but smile. Exhaustion weighed my body down, making me feel weak and dizzy, but it didn’t matter. She was really going to be okay. She looked whole again, like herself.
I brushed a strand of hair out of her face.
I had put her back together. I saved her life like she had saved mine—for real this time. She wouldn’t ever forget this. I’d be imprinted on her memory the same way she’d been imprinted on mine. Even when I went back home, we would still always be a part of each other’s lives.
Someone grabbed my arm, and I realized how little strength I had left.
“Let’s go!” Reid yelled, and Eli yanked me off the road.
Reid had his bike already, and mine and Eli’s were both lying on their sides. I didn’t have time to ask who brought my bike down or thank them for coming after me, or apologize for breaking the rules we had and the ones we didn’t.
“You okay to get up the hill?” Eli asked, grabbing my bike.
I nodded. I would have to be. We needed to get out of here. I took my bike from him, swung my leg over, and followed Reid, who’d already started up the hill.
Eli followed me, and we caught up to Reid. I felt tempted to turn around and look back, check on Janelle one last time, but I forced myself to keep going. She was alive again; she wasn’t broken. That was the best I could do.
“The guy in the truck?” I said, my voice labored.
Neither of them responded, and I knew what that meant, or I should have. I looked at Eli anyway.
He shook his head.
“Very dead,” Reid said. “Same as the other.”
“And that truck,” Eli added. “Nothing I’ve ever seen before. Definitely not from home.”
Even though I already knew that deep down, hearing it confirmed was worse than getting punched with a lead fist. I wobbled slightly on the bike, head still swimmy and weak from the exertion.
When we reached the top of the hill, the road turned inland, and I turned left down the first side street I could. I didn’t care if Eli and Reid followed me or not, even though I knew they probably would. I rode straight toward the cliffs overlooking the beach, skidded to a stop, and got off the bike.
I didn’t know what to do. I wasn’t sure how everything had managed to go so wrong. We still didn’t have the right answers. We hadn’t been able to keep anything from coming through. Now we had a dead driver who was most certainly not dead when he’d been driving wherever he came from, and we’d killed Janelle. That I brought her back was a miracle, but it didn’t change that fact that everything we’d done today had been wrong. I kicked the bike and sent it skidding a few feet to the left.
“It’s okay,” Eli said. “We can try one more time, we can—”
“No,” I said, cutting him off.
The guy was a mess. He drank too much, got into too many fights, and didn’t care about anything other than getting home. He was also my best friend, and he knew me better than anyone. He heard the finality in my voice, and he nodded. A sign he knew I’d do anything for him. Anything but this.
He didn’t say another word. No outburst, no swearing, nothing. The disappointment hung heavy in the air between us, and he looked out over the ocean.
“We’ll go back to the research,” I said. “We can build a machine, something we can control. I’m not saying we won’t get home. I’m just saying this isn’t the way. There are too many variables, too many consequences.”
“Wait a minute,” Reid said, walking to Eli’s side. “We’re so close. We can’t go back to the machine. We have no chance of making that work!”
I didn’t say anything. I knew what he was getting at. We had been stuck when it came to the machine. We didn’t understand some of his father’s notes, we couldn’t find some of the same materials he’d used, and if we fixed those problems, we still didn’t know how to give the machine enough power to open a wormhole. We also didn’t know how to give it “direction.” The same problem we were having now.
Eli looked at me, and I saw him take a deep breath. He might want to get home more than any of us; he might even want to say Screw it, we didn’t know these people, and this was the price we had to pay.
“Fuck,” he said.
“Eli, come on,” Reid said. “We have to get home.”
He shook his head and looked at Reid. “We’ve also gotta live with ourselves when we get there.”
Reid turned away from us both, lacing his fingers on top of his head. I knew what he was feeling without seeing his face. I’d already faced that realization: After being an immeasurable distance from home for over six years, we’d come within inches of making it back, only to have it yanked away again.
“I’m sorry,” I said. Not just because of the way this had turned out, but because it was my fault we were here.
Eli punched me in the shoulder. Hard. I deserved it and worse. “We’ll get home,” he said. “Just another way.”
I nodded, but I didn’t believe it anymore.
I knew I would keep trying. I would devote my life to it if I had to, not necessarily for me, but for them.
I just wouldn’t tell them I’d lost hope.
Janelle knew I had to leave.
Even though I didn’t want to leave her.
A lot had happened since I’d saved her life.
Too much, it seemed, for just twenty-four days. It felt like we’d lived a lifetime together somewhere in between then and now.
After her accident, she sought me out. I told her the truth. All of it. We found the answers to my questions about the portals. We saved the world, and we lost people close to us along the way.
I fell for her even more. More than I’d thought possible. She fell in love with me, too.
So she understood.
For seven years I had thought about what it must have been like for my parents when I disappeared, when I went into the basement and just never came back. Did they know what happened to me? Did they call the cops? Did they search for me? Had they spent seven years counting the days and waiting for me to walk back through the front door?
For my own sanity, I held on to the hope that I would see them again. My mother’s hazel eyes and my father’s lopsided smile. My too-smart-for-his-own-good big brother and our goofy dog. I needed to see them again, to explain what happened, to tell them what they meant to me.
To apologize for being so careless.
Every day that passed I thought about them and what it would be like to get back home.
But when I finally got there, everything was all wrong.
Home wasn’t anything like I’d imagined.
We came home at night.
For a split second my lungs burned, my skin felt like ice, and then my knees hit concrete, hard. Around me everything was dark, but it didn’t matter, because all I could see was Janelle. The wind moved through her hair, her eyes wet with tears, her hands dark with blood. Her voice echoed in my head: the quiet desperation in the way she said my name before I left her there. I held on to that moment, willed my mind to burn it into my memory. I didn’t want to forget what we’d just been through. I didn’t want to forget even a second that I’d spent with her.
>
It all had just ended in the canyon behind Park Village. Reid was dead. Janelle’s friend Alex was dead. And Eli and I had just left Janelle and portaled home. In the end, what we’d tried so hard to do for seven years happened in an instant.
My throat was tight. My whole body ached. I didn’t want to leave her. I shouldn’t have left her, but I had to.
I pushed to my feet and looked around. We were in the middle of a neighborhood street, surrounded by dark, sleepy houses.
“Where are we?” Eli said as the wind picked up.
I waited. At first I wasn’t sure. Square patches of lawn and small single-family homes were everywhere.
Then I heard the wooden wind chimes.
My chest tightened. That sound. I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed hearing it. I turned around, recognizing the oak tree on my parents’ front lawn. It seemed somehow both bigger and smaller than I had remembered it: a tower outside my bedroom window.
“This is my house,” I said. As my eyes adjusted, I picked out the red bricks around the garage, the white front door, the blue aluminum siding, the black shutters on the windows.
“Holy shit,” Eli said. Then he laughed, reached over, and pulled me into a headlock. “This is your house!” he screamed.
A wave of excitement moved through me. This was my house. Those bricks were the ones I cracked my head against when I was seven. I had stolen Derek’s remote control car, and he wrestled me to get it back. He pushed me and I fell. That front door, we had repainted it white with my dad. The oak tree was the same one I looked out at every night when I went to sleep, the same one I tried to climb. I had hung those wooden wind chimes after making them in school.
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