LUCY TAKES A BREATH AND blows it out, her eyes opening to the bright yellow glare of the infirmary hallway.
No voices come from any of the rooms, and panic seizes her immediately; she’s disappeared again.
How long has it been?
She stands, moving silently toward the closest doorway.
When she peeks in the room, she finds Colin asleep on his side. Her relief is a warm, tangible thing. A tangle of tubes dives down underneath the blankets, and only a tuft of hair is visible outside the bundle. She feels like she can finally breathe again, knowing he’s well enough to be here and no longer at the hospital.
Instead of waking him with her cool skin, she sits near his bed and waits.
She promises not to go into the lake again. She promises not to let Colin go in either.
It’s okay, she tells herself. This is what she wanted, for Colin to be safe above everything else. She feels stronger with every deep breath, as if the air simply bypasses her lungs and builds into her, cell by cell.
- • •
“Excuse me?” The words and voice don’t mix; it sounds like courtesy dripping acid.
Lucy looks up to meet the familiar deep brown eyes of Maggie. She can’t imagine the nurse is particularly thrilled to find her here, but the look on her face seems downright angry.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asks in a hiss, glancing at the bed.
“Waiting for him to wake up.”
Maggie looks to Colin’s huddled figure and then back at Lucy as if she were sitting naked in the chair. “Girl, are you out of your mind? That’s not Colin.”
The chair clatters backward as Lucy stands. “Where is he? I left while he was in the hospital but woke up here. I thought—”
“Left?” the nurse asks in an angry hiss, pulling Lucy toward the door. “As in, stepping out for a moment? As in getting some fresh air? Lucy, Colin left that hospital three weeks ago.”
“Three weeks?” she asks, a lead ball of fear crashing through her insides. Maggie nods and moves to pick up the chart at the foot of the stranger’s bed. Her words click into place in Lucy’s head. “What day is it?”
“It’s a Sunday. And he was just here, came by looking for help finding you. That boy had a look on his face like he was going to search under every rock if he had to.” When she shakes her head, Lucy can tell she thinks his effort is wasted. “As if that’d matter. I told him this would happen, that you’d leave without a trace and he’d be left here, trying to pick up the pieces. Your kind ain’t good for nothing but heartbreak. Don’t want us safe and happy. No, you want us on the edge and broken, taking us somewhere we ain’t got no business going. Let’s hope he’s smarter than I was.” Maggie walks out of the room and toward a back office.
“How long ago?” Lucy asks, following, a wave of anger building deep inside her chest.
“I have things to do,” she says over her shoulder. “If you’ll excuse me.”
This time it’s Lucy who reaches out, grabbing Maggie’s arm to stop her. The woman’s eyes widen, and Lucy can tell right away that something is different. Maggie looks from where Lucy grips her—knuckles white, skin solid and warm—up to meet her gaze. “You leave that boy alone.” There’s anger in her voice, but more than that, there’s fear.
Red clouds the edges of Lucy’s vision, and the air moves in waves around the room. Maggie gasps, reaching up just as a small trickle of blood begins to run from her nose.
“How long ago!” Lucy shouts, startling herself.
Maggie pulls herself free, looking frightened and disoriented. “About . . . about a half hour,” she says, staggering on her feet.
Just as quickly as the rage appeared, it’s gone, and Lucy looks down at her own hands, terrified. She reaches toward Maggie. “I’m sorry,” she begins, wanting to help. “I don’t know—”
“Get away from me,” Maggie says, staggering backward before crumpling to the floor. The color has fled from beneath her dark skin, and the bleeding has increased, now running in scarlet rivulets down the front of her teal uniform. She knocks over a small metal table as she falls, sending it and the items on top tumbling loudly to the floor. It’s loud enough to get the attention of the woman in the hallway. She’s wearing her coat and gloves, as if she’d just walked in the door.
“No, no, no, no, no, no,” Lucy says, shrinking back into the shadows and watching as the woman fumbles with her cell phone while trying to help Maggie, who’s lying in a growing puddle of blood.
Nobody even notices Lucy as she stumbles from the room, tripping over a chair in the hallway and sending it skittering across the linoleum.
What’s happening?
- • •
What they say about riding a bike is true. With no money for a cab or a phone call, Lucy steals a bike from outside the infirmary and has no problem remembering how to balance and take off. As she crosses the quad, she realizes she doesn’t even know Colin’s cell number. Her hands shake violently where she grips the handlebars, too afraid for a second glance behind her, to even consider what just happened. She has to get to Colin.
Lucy feels almost winded by the time she reaches the dorm. Two state police cars are parked in the lot, and she sees Dot’s car a few spots down, but Lucy doesn’t risk going to the kitchen to find her, to ask if she’s seen him.
Continuing on, she notices the sidewalks seem busier than usual. Students stand together, trading hushed but anxious voices, and Lucy moves around them, leaning the bike against the side of Ethan Hall. She freezes when she spots the campus security guard standing at the door and talking to a teacher she recognizes. It seems impossible, but her guilty mind races, and she can’t help wondering if he’s looking for her. Lucy feels so alive right now—like every cell is pulsing with a heartbeat of its own—that she worries there’s no way she could hope to sneak by. She feels like an illuminated billboard.
A group of chattering girls approaches the entrance. They move like a school of fish, lost in a torrent of whispered conversations. Lucy tucks herself near the back and must manage to look like she belongs, because soon she’s through the door and racing up the stairs, praying that Colin is in his room. She can hear the music pulsing before she’s even reached the landing.
She runs down the hall, and not waiting to knock, bursts through the door. Jay is sitting at his computer, his head in his hands.
“I heard,” he says, with gentle gravity.
Lucy pulls up short, searching the small room for Colin. “What?”
“He died last night.”
She shakes her head, confused. “Who died last night?”
“Your friend Alex.”
Lucy no longer has legs. They buckle beneath her, and she sits on a pile of laundry as the world starts to spin too fast for her to hold on to any single point. “What?”
“He collapsed last night. He was never in remission; he just didn’t tell anyone.” Jay points to his monitor, to the news article he was reading as she came in, but she’s crawling to the door as dread and sickness and terror wash over her. Fear is freezing her limbs, because if Jay is here and Colin is not . . . Lucy looks down at her arms. She is so solid she can see her skin roll firmly between her fingers as she pinches herself.
My presence is fighting the cancer, helping make him healthy again. And I feel stronger every day.
Kids like you? They always take someone with them. Try not to, Lucy.
“Where’s Colin?” Jay asks, looking behind her. “I’m not sure he knows yet. But maybe, because he’s been camped out at Joe’s and—”
“Jay, I think Colin went to the lake to find me.”
- • •
Jay begins throwing supplies in a bag, shouting for Lucy to wait just a second, to let him call 9-1-1. But she can’t. Every particle of her body propels her out the door and down the stairs, sprinting to where she knows Colin is.
Her chest burns from trudging through the snow at this pace, and looking down as she runs, she sees two sets of footprints, converging. Colin’s and hers. Equally deep. The ice groans in warning beneath her weight, and she slips for the first time, cracking her solid hip on the surface. Closer, closer.
Lucy hates how strong she feels. The only thing keeping her going is that she’s still here. If Colin died, she would vanish, right?
“I’m almost there. Please don’t go looking for me. I’m here.”
At the edge of the ice lies a pile of clothes. Jeans, boots, his favorite blue hoodie. In the water, there are no bubbles, no ripples, no movement. Just blue water that slips into darkness.
Her scream carries through the trees and echoes off the surface of the water. The force of her anguish tears her in two and pulls her down to the brittle, thinning ice.
Every piece finally fits.
I’m no Guardian; I’m a lure.
She feels the streak of hot tears falling down her cheeks—the first ones she’s cried since waking. In the distance, sirens fill the air, the sound ringing in the empty silence of the frozen lake. Closer. Closer.
As she stares at the pile of clothes, they become covered with fluffy flakes of snow. When she looks to the sky, she finds only brilliant blue above. Holding her hands up in front of her, Lucy watches her skin disintegrate into snow and ash and air. She watches as she’s blown into the wind.
