“Felicia, why are you invading my dreams? I trusted you!”
As upset as I am about the content of Neil’s dream, his accusation forces me to go on the defensive. “I didn’t mean to! It just happened. I swear . . . I’d never . . . I didn’t even know I could do that.”
“I can’t believe it.” Neil gets up and paces the room. He shakes his head and wrings his hands, and he looks everywhere but at me. “Here I was, working up the courage to tell you. But you couldn’t wait. You had to poke around my mind and take it from me.”
Neil’s words slap me out of my stupor, and I sit up, wriggling out from under the blanket. The fact that he’s freaking out this much confirms my suspicions that he has been hiding something big from me. And now I really, really need to know what it is. “Neil, calm down. I’m sorry, okay? I wasn’t trying to pry.”
He stops and twists in my direction, glaring down at me between heavy lids. And for the first time I’m seeing flashes of a Neil who doesn’t want to be with me anymore. This recognition is the scariest and most heartbreaking I’ve ever had.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter. It was only a dream, and you have no control over what you dream.” I say it as much to convince myself as I do to convince him. And then, because I can’t help myself, I say, “Was that Gracie?”
“Yes. That was Gracie.”
His admission stabs me in the chest. Why was he dreaming of Gracie when he was sleeping next to me? A deadly cocktail of anger and mortification flows through me, and I jump up, run through the door, cross the hall, and push into my own room so that I can hurl myself onto my bed.
“Wait!” Neil calls behind me. Chasing me.
“Get out of my room!” Reaching my bed, I whirl around to face Neil, and as I do, my foot catches on something underneath. I kick my leg to free it and accidentally catapult the metal wire and the memory globe it holds straight at Neil. I reach out my arm to deflect it at the same time Neil does, and after a brutal squishing sound, I realize with absolute horror we’ve both touched it. And then we’re sucked in.
thirty-three
AS I EXIT THE AIRPLANE and walk though the terminal, my palms sweat and my heart races. What if Neil didn’t get my text message with my new flight information? What if he did and he decided he didn’t want to come pick me up? We haven’t talked since the phone call in Paris when I practically proposed to him. And his few texts back to me have been short and generic. Maybe I scared him.
When I enter baggage claim, my eyes lock on to Neil. It’s almost like slow motion—the way we run toward each other, the way he hugs me so tightly that he lifts me off the ground.
“I’m so happy you’re back.” He sets me down. His cheeks are flushed and his whole body shakes in excitement.
He grips my hand tightly, interlacing our fingers, and as we wait for my bag to come out on the carousel, he pumps me for details about my trip. When I point out my suitcase, he grabs it with his free hand, pulling me with him. He doesn’t want to break off our contact for a second.
Even in the car he keeps only one hand on the steering wheel. The other rests on my thigh except when he has to shift gears. When we get to my apartment, I thank him for taking a half day off from work to come pick me up.
He looks at me as though I’ve lost my mind. “Of course I came. But I didn’t take off. I went in early.” He deposits my suitcase next to my closest in my room.
“You must be exhausted.” I strip off my sweater and my shoes and hop into bed. “Come take a nap with me.”
We lie side by side facing each other. I take a deep breath and plunge right in with my most burning question. “So, remember our last phone conversation? What do you think about us getting married? I mean, obviously it doesn’t have to be now or anything. But it would solve so much, wouldn’t it? We could live together.”
“Uh . . . do we have to talk about this now?” Neil avoids my gaze.
My heart plummets. I’m starting to think that as clear as it is that he loves me, Neil doesn’t think I’m marriage material and doesn’t want to have to tell me yet. Or maybe he thinks eighteen is too young—it is too young—and that there are infinite women in his future who are better for him than I am. Maybe I have to be much more convincing, even when I’m not all that convinced myself.
I push him onto his back and straddle him, lifting his arms over his head and pinning them down. “Yes. You’re my prisoner, and I have ways of making you talk.”
Neil goes totally still and squeezes his eyes shut. Then his body starts to shudder under me. He’s crying.
Neil has never broken down in front of me like this. Ever. I don’t know how to react. “Neil . . . what’s wrong?”
“I—I’m not good enough for you. You don’t want to marry me. Trust me.”
My head spins. He can’t be serious. “Are you crazy? If anyone’s not good enough, it’s me.”
“I’m not a virgin,” he blurts. His cheeks blaze crimson.
Those words are the last ones I ever expected to hear come out of his mouth, and for a long, terrible moment time stands still.
But then it sinks in, and I roll off him, jump up, and press myself against my bedroom wall. “What do you mean you’re not a virgin?” I screech. My eyes must bug out of my head. My pulse is racing and I might faint. I can’t believe it. All those rules he made about keeping our clothes on. All that bullshit he said about signing the virginity pledge. All that self-control that I hated but admired. He was my example of purity. He’s the one who made me want to be good. But it was based on a lie.
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you. I was ashamed, and I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t understand. Because you gave me a reason to be happy again. You’ve seen everything I am, and you still love me. But you couldn’t do the same for me and show me who you really are. I never needed you to be perfect. I needed you to be real.” I’m so angry, I could punch a hole in a wall.
Neil’s eyes are rimmed in red, but his tears have given way to righteous fury. He gets up and stands opposite me. “Well, now you know the real me. I’m no saint. I’m nobody’s savior. I’m just as fucked up as anyone else.”
I fall back onto my bed. Curl into myself. Close my eyes. “Was it Gracie?” I say in a small voice.
“Yes.” That one word has the power to crush my heart in its fist.
My head and heart are heavy with the weight of the thought of Neil and Gracie having sex. It’s so unimaginable. And I can’t explain it, but for some reason it makes me feel dirty. Like everything he and I did together was a lie.
The room is silent and as cold as winter. As the minutes tick by without either of us daring to speak, I envision snow falling swiftly and burying me alive.
The bed shifts under me. Neil reaches out and brushes my hair behind my ear, but I won’t look at him.
“I’m naked,” he says. And my eyes can’t help to fly open and rove over his body when I hear that. The sheet is strategically placed so I can’t see everything, but I can tell by the bare skin of his hip that he’s telling the truth. “I remember you once thought you had to be naked in order to bare your soul.” His tone is wistful, and my heart hammers in my chest, remembering the day I confessed my sins to him.
“So how did it happen?” I ask grudgingly.
“After Gracie and Nate broke up, the church gossip was that Gracie must have had sex with him and that’s why she didn’t come to services anymore. At school, when she was there, we only saw her alone. The day she came to see me at my house, it was the day after she told Nate she missed her period and she thought she might be pregnant. She didn’t tell me that, though. Nate told me later. She was hysterical and crying, and I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. When she finally calmed down, she asked if we could go to my bedroom. No one else was home at the time, but she wanted privacy. She insisted. And I was still so in awe of her. Even when she closed the door behind us, I didn’t protest. I didn’t think about it
. I was consumed by the improbable fact that Gracie Logan, this older girl, this gorgeous girl, was in my room.” Neil shakes his head at the memory.
He goes on. “She told me that she hated Nate. Everything with him had been a mistake. She had been in love with me all along but hadn’t realized it. I had never felt so dizzy in my life.”
I cough. I’m not sure I want to hear the rest of this story, but I don’t want him to stop telling me either.
He inhales deeply. “She said—and I’ll never forget this—she said ‘Look at me, Neil. I want you to look at me like you always do in church. When you think I’m not watching.’ I was so overwhelmed, but she didn’t seem to care. She pushed me against the wall and kissed me, and I . . .” He stops, the last words mangled by emotion.
He covers his mouth with his fist and squeezes his eyes shut. “I don’t really even know how it happened. One minute we were standing, and the next we were on my bed and . . .”
I hold my breath, bracing myself for the awful details.
“And then it was over. She kissed me and put her clothes back on and left.”
I let out my breath.
“I felt terrible. I mean, it was magical. It was. But it was also wrong. I didn’t know how wrong until the next day. Gracie called me and told me to meet her at the bridge over the creek on Route 4, the one where all the couples go to park. I took my bike. I had to, because I was too young to drive. I wanted so desperately to see her again. I wanted to apologize to her for being so weak. I wanted to ask her to be my girlfriend, as if that would make it less of a sin.”
He’s shaking now, and there are goose bumps on his exposed skin. “When I got there, she was standing on the outside of the guardrail. She was kind of swaying, and I remember thinking that if she weren’t careful, she’d lose her balance. There’d been a lot of rain that spring, so the creek was pretty full, but still, it wasn’t that deep. I was only about twenty yards away from her when she saw me. She opened her mouth and whispered something I couldn’t hear, and then . . . she let herself fall. I screamed and ran toward her, but it was too late.”
“But she didn’t die.” I remember Nate saying that she had come back to town.
“No. When she hit the water, I panicked.” Neil exhales loudly through his nose. “But then she surfaced, and she was laughing. She begged me to jump in too. But I couldn’t. When she waded over to the bank and toweled off, she said that meant I was scared of commitment. Like Nate. The bridge was a test, and I failed. She never did come back to church, and she refused to answer my phone calls. I saw her at school, but we were never alone again. And after she graduated, she went to college in New York. I always wondered if she used me to get back at Nate. But I really loved her.”
I’m so conflicted. My heart goes out to Neil for what he went through, but I can’t reconcile it with the way he always took the moral high ground. “There was nothing wrong with you loving Gracie,” I tell him. “And you shouldn’t feel guilty for having sex with her. It doesn’t make you a bad person.”
He raises his eyebrows slightly, and waits for me to say more.
“What I can’t understand is all your talk about the importance of virginity and waiting until marriage. Is it something you said so they wouldn’t judge you at church?” I’m curious how he’ll answer. “I mean, how can you even sign that pledge if you’re not actually a virgin?”
“I rededicated my virginity.”
“I don’t know what that means. How do you ‘rededicate’ your virginity?”
“I heard a speaker at one of our youth conferences talk about it once.” Neil’s tone is defensive. “And it made sense to me.”
“Okaaaay, so they encourage you to rededicate your virginity?”
“I wouldn’t say they encourage it. It’s not a ‘get out of jail free’ card or anything.” He manages a self-deprecating laugh. “But it’s an option for those of us who messed up. Giving into the sin once doesn’t mean you have to continue to do it.”
“Are you saying that even if Gracie had become your girlfriend, you would have made this rededication pledge? Or did you make it because if you couldn’t have sex with Gracie anymore, then you didn’t want to have sex with anyone?” Every muscle in my body tenses, waiting for his answer.
“It wasn’t like that.”
“I bet you’re still in love with her. I bet that’s the real reason you don’t want to marry me. I’m just a poor substitute for Gracie.”
“I never said I didn’t want to marry you,” he protests. “I said you wouldn’t want to marry me. And look—I was right, wasn’t I?”
“I don’t know, Neil. I really don’t. This is too much for me to process right now. Because guess what? Lying is a sin too.” I turn my back to him and close my eyes. “I think it would be better if you went home.”
“But—”
“Please,” I say wildly. “I need some time alone.”
Neil gathers his clothes, gets dressed, and puts his shoes on. His retreating footsteps are followed by the slamming of my front door. Only then do I allow myself to cry.
thirty-four
THE MEMORY ENDS. When I come back to myself, I’m lying half on top of Neil, half on the floor. I’m too stunned to speak, and for a minute Neil must be too. The next Morati strike can’t be far off. But then Neil pushes me away. Roughly.
“Where the hell did that come from?” He glances from my face to the ruffled bed skirt, and his eyes widen. “You were hiding that memory globe under your bed, weren’t you?”
“I’m not the only one good at hiding things. I confessed all my sins to you, but you kept secrets from me.” Well, not my most recent sins, but that’s a technicality.
“You put the rest of us in danger so you could keep viewing memories. How could you keep evidence to yourself? You might as well be in league with the Morati.”
“You’re wrong. In fact, today I caught one of the Morati. I saw into her true memories, and she’s in custody.”
Neil gets up and paces the room. “But what about the rest of the Morati? You don’t want them to be caught—not when they are supplying you with your memories.”
“That’s not true. I want them to be brought to justice as much as you do.” Even if I am one of them.
Neil laughs bitterly. “Right.” He stalks over to the table the Morati put there. Its intricate filigree makes it stand out from the rest of the furniture in the room. “I think it’s pretty telling that you kept their table.”
“They stole our memories. I just wanted to know what happened between us.” I may not like that Neil lied to me or that he had sex with Gracie, but at least it’s out in the open now. In reality his actual confession hurts less than the fact that he didn’t feel like he could confide in me. Trust is the basis of any relationship. Maybe we grew apart because he wouldn’t trust me and I somehow picked up on it on an unconscious level. Maybe that’s what has been driving me to regain my memories to find out the truth.
“It looks like Nate was right about us breaking up. Does that make you happy?” Neil asks.
“We don’t know that for sure.” I finally stand. “We need to view more.” Once we have the whole picture, we can heal our relationship. We can close the gap between us and truly be together.
Neil shakes his head. “When will it end? When will you understand that what matters is not what happened then but what is happening right now?”
But he tried to hide what happened then. If we hadn’t viewed that memory, then he might never have told me. “Were you ever planning to tell me about Gracie?”
“I can’t talk to you when you’re like this,” Neil says. “I’m going outside for a walk.”
His non-answer is one blow too many. And it fills me with rage. I pull the skep charm out of my shirt with such force, the chain breaks. My whole body buzzes, and I hurl the charm at the wall, aiming for his photo at the center of my collage. The charm falls with a soft thud onto the carpet, but at the same time there’s a metallic scraping so
und as a ripple of energy the size of a Frisbee opens up, obliterating Neil’s photo in a bright light and melting the other photos it touches.
As we watch, the ripple expands outward, the circle of light growing larger, consuming nearly all of my collage.
I gasp and drop my arm. The circle flickers and fades, and then it’s gone. I sprint to the now almost bare wall, run my hands over the surface. It’s hot to the touch, and the ripples have left a circular pattern of grooves, like the ones found at all the Morati’s later bombing sites. My knees wobble and threaten to give out as I try to recall the chain of events that led up to the other bombings after I viewed memories. Each time electricity ran through me right before the energy blasts.
“What the hell was that?” Neil chokes out. He looks at me as if I’ve grown horns and a forked tail, and for all I know, maybe I have.
“Did an electric current hit you just now? Or before? When the other bombs hit?” Before the library bombing, he bent over and clutched his stomach. I’m sure of it.
“No. Why?”
If I am the only one feeling the electricity, then maybe it’s coming from me. Maybe I am the bomb. But I wasn’t anywhere near the other bombing sites, so I don’t know how it’s possible.
“I—I don’t know.” The ripples of energy appeared when I threw the skep charm at the wall. I pick it up off the floor and examine it closely. It’s an ordinary metal charm on an ordinary gold chain. It must be a coincidence. Unless it’s not. When Autumn saw my charm, she thought it was an obol. Megan said obols are what Careers use to travel between levels, and I found out later that they have to use the regulated portals in Areas One and Three. But what if this particular obol can open portals anywhere? If that’s the case, why wasn’t Nate opening portals anywhere he pleased? Or was he? I am so confused.
“Is that your skep charm?” Neil asks, reaching out his hand for it.
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