Jay looks back as Colin approaches, smirking at him over his shoulder. “About time you got here, slacker,” he says. “You missed the world’s most painful calculus class. I could practically hear my brain bleeding.”
Colin nods his chin in greeting, lifting his cast. “I think I’d have preferred calc over this.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure.” Jay’s latest conquest reluctantly leaves as he and Colin walk into the classroom. Students continue to file in around them, and Colin drops his bag at a desk inside, bending to dig for his assignment.
“So you were right,” Jay says, motioning to the cast. “Broken?”
“Yeah.” As quickly as he can with one functioning arm, Colin finds his paper and stuffs everything else back in the bag.
“Joe and Dot read you the riot act?” Jay’s been at Saint Osanna’s as long as Colin has—since kindergarten—and knows just as well that Dot has never appreciated the two boys’ particular thirst for adventure.
Colin looks at him pointedly. “Dot did.”
Jay straightens. “Did she ground your fun money?”
“Yeah. And I’m restricted to school property indefinitely. Thank God you took my bike to your parents’ house last night or she’d probably take that, too.”
“Brutal.”
Colin hums in agreement and hands his assignment to the teacher. What kills him the most is that this ride wasn’t even that dangerous. A week ago he jumped from the lip of the quarry onto a boulder at the base and came home without a scratch. But yesterday he couldn’t land even a rookie jump without wiping out.
“Hood off, Colin,” Mrs. Polzweski says. He pushes it off and shoves his hair back from his eyes as they move to their desks.
Just as the second bell rings, she walks in. The girl from the dining hall. Colin hasn’t seen her in a week, and he hasn’t been able to stop thinking about what she said just before she ran out the door.
I think I’m here for you.
Who says shit like that? He’d tried to call after her, but she was gone before the words dissolved in the air in front of him.
She slips through the noisy room and takes the seat in the row next to his, moving her eyes to him and then quickly away. Her arms are empty, no books or paper, no backpack. A few people watch her sit down, but she moves so fluidly, she seems to already have joined the rhythm of the room.
“If you can’t ride for a whole month, we’re going to need a plan,” Jay whispers. “No way can you be stuck inside that long. You’ll go insane.”
Colin hums, distracted. It’s crazy; the girl seems otherworldly, almost as if a faint sheen of light surrounds the exposed skin on her arms. Her white-blond hair has been brushed free of leaves, and she has these badass black boots laced to her knees with a French-blue oxford tucked into the navy uniform skirt. Her lips are full and red, her eyes lined with thick lashes. She looks like she could rip through the wool of his trousers with only a dirty word. As if feeling him watching, she pulls her legs farther under the desk, her arms closer against her body.
Jay pokes Colin right above his cast. “You’re not going to let that little cast stop you from having fun, are you?”
He pulls his eyes from the girl to look at Jay. “Are you kidding me? There’s tons of other ways to get in trouble without leaving the grounds.”
Jay grins and bumps Colin’s good fist.
Mrs. Polzweski organizes her stack of papers at her desk, ignoring the flurry of hushed activity: books being opened, pages turning, and students grumbling, the occasional cough, a pencil being sharpened somewhere. The girl sits, staring ahead, looking like she’s trying as hard as she can to not be noticed.
Where has she been?
In the periphery, Colin sees her thin fingers reach for a pencil that someone has left on the desk. She turns it over and over in her hand, as if the movement requires practice, examining it like she suspects it’s a magic wand.
Colin doesn’t think he’s ever seen such light hair before. When she tilts her head slightly, inspecting the pencil, her hair catches a dusty sunbeam, making it seem almost translucent. The strands twist and spill over shoulders that are hunched forward and wrapped in a shirt that’s too bulky for someone so delicate. She looks like a shadow of a girl. A shadow wearing a cap of sunshine.
As if she can feel him staring, she turns, an involuntary smile lifting the corner of her mouth. Her dimple makes him think of giggled pleas, mischievous promises, and the taste of sugar on his tongue. Gunmetal eyes meet his, and the color is alive, churning like an angry ocean, pulling him in.
He lets himself drown.
Chapter 3 • HER
THE ONLY PERSON LOOKING AT her is the same boy whose face has haunted her all week, with wild dark hair that needs to be cut, an arm in a new cast, and eyes that pierce her, amber and fierce.
“Hi,” she rasps, tucking away her smile. Her voice is rough because this is the first time she’s used it in six days. The first time she used it since she spoke to him and then burst from the dining room, intending to run into town to find the police and tell them she needed help. She could get only as far as a hulking metal campus gate a half mile down the gravelly road. Each of the three times she tried to escape, one step past the gate put her right back on the trail where she woke up, as if she’d stepped into a skipping song.
The boy’s gaze narrows and slips across her cheeks, over her nose, pauses at her mouth. He blinks once, slowly, then again. “Where did you go?”
Nowhere, she thinks, envisioning the empty shed she found in the middle of a barren field beside the school. It was as deserted as her memory bank, after all, and seemed the perfect home for a girl who has no name, no past.
After being inexplicably drawn to this school building every morning for a week, she finally grew brave enough to steal a uniform, walk inside, and sit down.
“You disappeared,” he says.
She shifts in her seat, glancing at his mouth. “I know. I wasn’t quite sure how to follow up my stunning opening line.”
Laughing, he says, “Here,” and pushes his open textbook closer to her.
She blinks, the phantom trace of a pulse racing inside her throat at the way his eyes move over her face, the way he purses his lips slightly before smiling.
“Thanks,” she says. “But I’m okay. I can just listen.”
He shrugs, but doesn’t move away. “I think we’re covering the history of labor-management relations today. Wouldn’t want you to miss out on the full experience.”
The girl isn’t sure what to do with his attention. She suspects, from the way her skin seems to be aching to move closer to him, that he’s the reason she’s drawn here every morning, just as she found herself in the dining hall that first day. But he seems so sweet, almost too open, like she’s a strip of paper dragged through poisoned honey and this perfect boy flies innocently around her. How good can a girl be when she doesn’t need to eat or sleep and keeps finding herself snapped back to school grounds every time she tries to leave?
He continues to stare, and she shifts her hair over her shoulder, lowering it like a curtain between them.
“Colin?” It’s a woman’s voice, clear and authoritative.
The pressure of his gaze on her lifts. “Sorry, Mrs. Polzweski,” he says.
Now that the girl knows his name, she wants to whisper it over and over.
“Who are you, honey?” the teacher asks.
The room is a vast bubble, silent and pulsing with expectation, and the girl realizes this Ms. Polzweski is speaking to her.
But with the question hanging in the air, a man’s voice speaks in the girl’s mind.
“I bet you didn’t know your name means light,” he whispered, lips too close to her ear.
“I did know,” she wanted to say, but the hand on her throat made it hard to even draw breath.
“Lucia,” she remembers in a gasp. “My name is Lucy.”
The teacher hums in acknowledgment. “Lucy, are you new?”
Something inside Lucy stirs at the sound of someone else saying her name. For a heavy moment, she feels real, as if she’s a balloon and someone has finally weighted her to the ground. Maybe a girl with a name won’t float off into the sky.
Lucy nods, and a phantom heat burns across her cheek where Colin’s gaze settles again.
“You’re not on my roll, Lucy. Can you go to the office to check in?”
“Sorry,” Lucy says, fighting panic. “I just started today.”
Ms. Polzweski smiles. “You need to make sure to pick up your add card. I’ll sign it.”
Lucy nods again and slips away, wanting to disappear like a shadow into black.
• • •
Lucy knew she’d be told to go, but she doesn’t even know where the office is and isn’t quite ready to brave the outdoors and the winds that weigh more than she does. And here her feet seem grounded anyway, keeping her from leaving. She sits at the end of the hall, knees to chest, waiting for the next tug of instinct to pull her up and forward.
A door opens and closes shut with a quiet click.
“Lucy?” It’s one of the only two voices in this world that she’s connected to a name—Colin—and it’s hesitant and deep and quiet. It cuts straight down the hall, and his lanky figure moves just as smoothly, straight to her. “Hey. Do you need help finding the office?”
She shakes her head, wishing she had something to gather to take with her so she could look purposeful and less like a lost girl sitting on the floor. Instead, she stands and turns, watching the lines of wood flooring weave a path in front of her as she walks away. She knows how it would go, anyway: He would walk with her, notice how she fights the wind, ask if she’s okay. And how would she respond? I don’t know. I only remembered my name five minutes ago.
“Hey, wait.”
She reaches a door, but it’s locked. She tries another beside it. Also locked.
“Lucy, wait,” Colin says. “What are you looking for? You can’t go in there. Those are janitor closets.”
She stops, turning to face him, and he’s looking at her. Really looking, like he wants to capture every detail. When their eyes meet, he makes a strangled sound, narrowing his gaze and leaning closer to look. Her eyes are murky green-brown; she’s stared at them for hours in an old mirror, hoping to remember the girl behind them.
“What?” she asks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He shakes his head. “You’re . . .”
“I’m what?” What will he say? What does he see?
He blinks again, slowly, and she realizes it’s just something he does: an unselfconscious, unhurried blink, as if he’s capturing an image of her and developing it on his lids.
“Intense,” he murmurs.
With that word, the other man’s voice appears in her head again, an echo from the same intrusive memory. “You have to know how intense this is for me.”
She stumbles back, eyes wide.
“Are you okay?” Colin reaches for her arm, but she’s already turning, hurrying away.
With lips wet and pressed to her ear, he asked, “Are you afraid of dying?”
“Lucy!”
A flash of her reflection in a crisp blade of silver. Breath smelling of coffee and sugar, cigarettes and delight. Cool water lapping near her head. A knife, drowning in her own blood, the feeling of being pried open.
She bursts through the side exit, sucking in a huge gasp of sharp, autumn air.
So that’s who she is. She’s the girl who isn’t alive anymore.
Chapter 4 • HIM
THERE’S THAT NEW GIRL,” JAY says through a mouthful of sandwich.
Colin follows his gaze and grunts, noncommittal, as Lucy glides across the soccer field. When she’s alone, she’s statuesque, long lines and slim profile. When she gets closer to the other students, she shrinks in on herself: shoulders pulled in, head down.
She reminds him of himself after his parents died and he didn’t and the sadness and guilt felt like a crushing weight under his ribs. He didn’t know how he was supposed to weather it. When people tried to talk to him at first, it made him wish he could turn into air and disperse in a thousand different directions. Lucy carries that same kind of bewildered fragility.
It’s been three days since she showed up in his class, offered the most achingly vulnerable smile he’d ever seen, and then ran away again. Nobody talks to her. Nobody looks at her. She has no books, or even a backpack. She looks at every building as if she’s trying to see through its walls to what lies inside. She always touches the outstretched arm of the statue of Saint Osanna Andreasi as she passes through the darkest corner of the quad, pulling back as if she’s been burned before reaching out to touch it again, carefully. No one ever touches the statue—it’s said to be haunted—but Lucy does. Colin has never seen her with anyone. Lucy doesn’t even go to the same classes every day. She kind of hovers around campus.
He feels like a total stalker for knowing these things when everyone else seems content to let her be. Most new students get a schedule of classes and let the tide carry them. Lucy seems determined to remain disorganized.
At least she looks more peaceful today, as if she’s enjoying the weather before it all goes subzero. It’s still a bit on the cool side, but she never wears a jacket. Thin blue fabric wraps down the length of her arms. How can she be warm enough? She must live off campus, he reasons. Maybe she left her coat at home.
“She seems weird, though,” Jay says.
This catches Colin’s attention, and he looks over at Jay, wondering what he means. Two nights now Colin has fallen asleep thinking about Lucy’s mood-ring eyes. Does Jay notice too? “Weird, how?”
Jay shrugs and takes another bite, propping his feet on the wall of the arts building. His dirty sneakers blend into the gray concrete. “She’s been in my English class a few times. Doesn’t talk much.”
“And her eyes, too.”
Glancing at Colin, Jay asks, “Eyes?”
“Never mind. They’re . . . I don’t know. Different.”
“Different? Aren’t they, like, brown or something?”
Colin mumbles, “Maybe gray,” but his heart is thundering. He’s pretty sure if he says, “They’re like melted metal,” Jay will actually have a T-shirt made for him with the words I AM A DELICATE POET printed across the chest.
“Brown hair, gray eyes,” Jay says as if reciting the ingredients for average. Colin pauses with his sandwich partway to his lips. He turns to Jay and follows his gaze again, making sure they’re both looking at the same girl. They are.
“Brown?” Colin asks, motioning to where she’s reached the edge of the field. “That girl over there?”
“Uh, yeah,” Jay answers. “The same one you’ve been staring at for the last twenty minutes.”
Lucy’s hair isn’t brown. It’s not even close. Colin watches her again and shivers, pulling his hood up.
Colin wonders if it should freak him out that Jay sees brown hair when he sees almost white-blond. But, with a strange rush of warmth in his limbs, he finds he likes that he sees her differently. It feels strangely surreal, and it occurs to him that this reaction might come from the same part of his brain that turns on when he looks over a cliff and instead of thinking, Back off, he thinks, Pedal faster.
“Amanda said they saw her walking down by the lake,” Jay says.
“The lake?”
“Yeah. She’s new; wouldn’t know the stories, would she?”
Colin nods. “No, she wouldn’t know any of that.”
The stories are as old as the buildings here: Walkers out in daylight, wandering lost and confused. A man in military uniform sitting on the bench near the lake. A girl vanishing between two trees. Sometimes a student will claim a Walker tried to talk to them or, worse, grab them. But it’s all ghost stories, a legend built on the morbid history of the school. The Catholic institution was built on grounds where deceased children of settlers were buried before the survivors made t
heir long trek through the mountains, but in the first week the school was open, two more kids died in a fire that burned down the chapel. For years, students claimed to see the two lost children standing by the newly erected statue of Saint Osanna, or sitting in a pew in the rebuilt chapel. The legend lived on, and over time, the population of Walkers grew in the students’ collective imagination.
It’s a morbid history, Colin knows, and the students keep the stories alive because it makes the school interesting and makes them sound brave. But even though everyone swears they don’t believe the Walkers exist, only stoners and drunk kids given a dare on Halloween hang at the lake or deep in the woods. Or dumbasses like him and Jay, who are doing shit they don’t want to get busted for. Of course Amanda would be the one to have seen Lucy there.
Jay pulls his feet from the wall. “You like her.”
Colin bends and ties shoelaces that don’t need tying.
“It’s cool if you like her. She’s not ugly or anything, but she’s . . . I don’t know. Quiet.” Jay takes a long pull from his water bottle. “Which isn’t always a bad thing. Amanda would never shut up. God. Was she always talking when you guys were—”
“Dude.” Colin doesn’t want to think about another girl while he’s watching Lucy. It feels wrong, like comparing a river stone to a ruby.
“She totally was,” Jay guesses, and makes a yapping gesture with his hand. “Oh, Colin, Colin, Colin,” he gasps in a high, breathy voice.
Colin doesn’t reply, choosing instead to shove a handful of chips in his mouth. Jay actually does a fairly good Amanda impersonation.
“Have you talked to her?” Jay asks.
“Amanda?”
“New girl.”
Colin shrugs and wipes his palms on his jeans. “Once or twice. Last time I tried, she ran away.”
“That’s because you’re a dick,” Jay says with a punch to his arm. “A nice dick. But still a dick.”
Colin pauses before balling up his garbage and tossing it into the trash. “You called me a nice dick.”
Jay winks at him, but two seconds later punches his good arm again. “So are you going to talk to her, or what?”
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