Sublime

by Christina Lauren

  He steps closer and then away, making a fist. He seems torn between wanting to come to her and wanting to punch the wall.

  “You fell asleep. And for the first time, I was able to close my eyes and dream. . . . It didn’t even seem that long. I . . . saw this dark trail underwater. I walked to the end, where it was dark and . . . calm. And then I woke up just now.”

  “Well,” he says, picking something up from the corner of the room and placing it on the bed. Her clothes, from that night. She hadn’t even realized she was wearing nothing but underwear. She crosses her arms over her bare chest, suddenly self-conscious. She sees him wince, but he says, “I’m glad you felt supercalm on the black underwater supertrail. I was freaking out, thinking I’d never see you again.”

  “Colin, I’m so—”

  “I have class.”

  • • •

  The walk across campus is excruciating. He won’t talk; he won’t look at her. Worse, he won’t touch her.

  She reaches over, tentatively putting her hand on his, and he pulls back, like he’s surprised all over again by how it feels. She’d hoped her touch would be familiar, comforting even. But maybe the quiet buzz of sensation only reminds him how impermanent she is.

  “I had no idea I would disappear.” Her steps slow, then falter, widening the space between them.

  He exhales slowly before stopping, turning to face her. “I know.”

  Is this how break-ups happen? Someone disappears—literally or metaphorically—and the rhythm is forever ruined? “I would have been a mess if the situation were reversed.”

  He reaches for her but then shoves his hand into his hair. “I’m not trying to be a dick. I seriously thought you were gone for good. I’m just really freaked.”

  Apparently, there will be no comforting touch in this reconciliation, and this thought leaves her overwhelmingly sad. She hates having no answers. She died, she’s back, and she wants to be near him with every particle of her strange body. And still, there is absolutely no meaning to any of it. “I’m here,” she says lamely.

  His eyebrows pull together and his eyes darken a shade. “For how long? I mean, how can we know?”

  Shrugging, she looks past him at the trees rooted so firmly in the frozen ground, at the buildings that have been there for more than a century. Ghosts have haunted the world since the beginning of time, and suddenly, she’s plagued with the desire to know how to do it right.

  Chapter 17 • HIM

  SO SHE WAS JUST . . . BACK? Like, with no explanation of where she’d been?” Jay’s stretched out on his bed, thumbing through an old magazine he found under his pillow. Colin doesn’t look too closely.

  “Yeah. It’s sort of—” His eyes move to the ceiling. “Complicated.”

  “Complicated. Dude, you’re talking to the guy who took two chicks to the formal and managed to get away with it. I think I can keep up.”

  “Jay, this isn’t a joke.”

  With a bored sigh, Jay sits up, throws his feet over the side of the bed, and assesses Colin. “Look, I know this isn’t a joke, okay? And I get that Lucy’s . . . different from other girls. I’ve never seen you dive this deep into anything,” he says, lifting a single brow for emphasis. “I just want to know that you’re okay.”

  “I am,” Colin says. It sounds like a lie, even to him. If he were okay, he would have told Lucy everything, including his role in her murderer being caught. Including the fact that he was the last person to see her alive and couldn’t save her. The superstitious fraction of him feels like he needs to hold some detail back, as if the entire truth would untie the balloon from the cart and he’d be left to watch it drift away.

  “What if she . . . like, what if she went on a bender?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “Or, I don’t know, Col. Like, back to a boyfriend in Portland for a week. I wasn’t kidding when I called her mysterious. Literally no one around here knows her, except you and me. If I said, ‘Lucy who hangs with Colin,’ it’d take anyone else five minutes to remember what she even looks like.”

  Colin stares at him, hoping to burn a hole in Jay’s forehead. “I can handle this.”

  “Are you sure? Because when she was gone, you were flipping out. I know you’ve lost your entire family, but I’ve never seen you like that before. You didn’t talk to me, or Dot, or even Joe. When was the last time you talked to Joe?” When Colin doesn’t answer, Jay presses on. “And I—what if it happens again? You gonna be okay then, too?”

  Colin pushes away from the desk and scrubs his face with his hands. The answer to that is a big, unequivocal NO, but there’s no way he can tell Jay that. “We’re working it out. It won’t happen again. We’re good.”

  This is one of those moments that define why they’re friends. Jay knows Colin is lying his ass off, but he also knows it’s the only way he’s holding it together.

  “See, this is why I don’t do relationships.” Jay makes little quotation marks with his fingers, and Colin rolls his eyes.

  “Sure it is.”

  “All right, then,” Jay says. “Where is the magic elusive spirit girl, anyway?”

  Colin’s head snaps up, and he gapes at him—Jay’s hit awfully close to home—but he’s smacking his gum and flipping through his magazine again. Clueless.

  “She’ll be here any minute.” Colin closes his math book and glances at the clock, trying not to appear as restless as he feels.

  Jay stands and adjusts his baseball cap, walks to the window and back, before resuming his seat on the edge of his bed. He’s as anxious to get out there as Colin is. “We seriously can’t leave until she gets here? I’m bored.”

  Colin shakes his head. “I want her to come along.”

  The night before Lucy came back, the night he almost rode himself into the ground, was the first time Colin felt sane in days, like he’d beaten his anxiety into submission. Some of the stuff he and Jay have done is a bit crazy and a lot dangerous, but it’s always been the case that, on his bike or board, everything blurs at the edges until he’s focused on one thought: breathe. The wilder he is, the safer he feels. It’s a paradox he can live with. It’s just that now he wants Lucy to stay close.

  “It’s a good thing Lucy’s cool or I’d have no choice but to kick your ass,” Jay says. “So where are we going? They put in this killer jump at the track, but last week it was full of Xavier posers, so that’s out.”

  Colin fiddles with the straps on his biking shoes, remembering the night with Lucy at the lake, her legs dangling to the knees in the frozen water. Other than the section near the oak tree, she seems to like water—the pond, the lake, her crazy dream about underwater blackness. “I think the lake’s frozen over. No way will anyone else be down there. You up for some tricks?”

  Jay agrees and heads down to mess around with his bike while Colin searches through the piles of clean laundry for something warmer to wear.

  Lucy materializes at the door, wearing a new stolen uniform. This version has the ugly navy slacks, which is probably why it was easy for her to find and snag: Hardly any of the girls wear them. But her black boots lace almost to her knees, and her hair is piled in a messy heap on top of her head and bound with a bright red ribbon. He has no idea where she found it, but she looks like punk rock trying to go straight. He still can’t get over how relieved he is to see her. The weirdness of having a girlfriend he can barely kiss seems so unimportant compared to the relief he feels at having her back.

  “Not exactly standard attire,” he says, tugging on her white oxford where she’s knotted it just beneath her ribs, mocking the cold air around her.

  Her mouth curls up into a teasing smile. “The administration is free to notice and unofficially expel me.”

  He laughs. Lucy’s been lurking around campus for more than two months—minus the ten days of unexpected vanish—and no teacher really bothers to question her presence, let alone her decidedly non-dress-code boots.

  She glances at his bike shoes hanging
from his free hand. “Where are we headed?”

  “Your favorite place: the lake.”

  “Sure. To . . . ride?” She looks skeptical.

  Grinning, he pulls her with him as he turns to leave. “Trust me; it’ll be fun.”

  Chapter 18 • HER

  LUCY HASN’T BEEN BACK TO the lake for weeks, not since the day Colin walked with her around the entire lakeside trail and she discovered what she now knows is the site of her murder.

  So while Colin and Jay prep their bikes, she wanders off, taking the time to actually look around. Winter has dug its claws into this part of the world, and everything looks at once more barren and also softer. Snow blankets everything, tree branches are softened with white and blue reflected from the glacial water. In her memory, the autumn leaves are flames and her disorienting awakening is a hell long since past.

  She finds where she landed and for some reason is surprised that no traces remain. There’s no girl-shaped bruise in the earth, no chalk outline of a body. She fell, she’s here, and it’s time to carry on.

  Heading back to the lake, she sees Jay and Colin on the ice, zipping around.

  “Wait,” she says. “You’re riding on the lake?”

  “Yeah. It’s frozen,” Colin says, hopping up and down on his bike. The tires squeak against the ice as if in agreement. “Solid.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “Absolutely,” Jay calls.

  Before she can respond, Colin has his hands up, placating. “No, no, honestly, it’s safe. It’s at least three inches thick, and we do it all the time.”

  He clearly expects her to be horrified—anyone hearing this should be horrified—but Lucy isn’t. She’s only curious. Three inches thick doesn’t sound like a lot, and she gives in to the strange high that suddenly tears through her. She almost believes if she looked down at her arms she would see red blood surging through newly solid veins. Sitting on a snowbank at the lakeshore, Lucy watches the two boys trace snakes of tire prints in the thin layer of crunchy snow on the surface.

  She’s never seen Colin like this before. She loves how loose he is, how he lets the bike be hard while he prefers flexibility, molding to its movements, sliding over the pedals and leaning into the force of every sharp turn. He spells her name in the layer of snow over ice, and he hops on his front tire from a soft embankment, landing in a crouch on the pedals.

  “Wanna try?” he calls.

  Shaking her head quickly, she answers, “No.”

  He laughs and pedals over, carefully kissing her cheek. He looks down at her, as if surprised. It feels different here, where it’s snowing and the air is heavy with water on the verge of solidifying. She presses her fingers to her skin when he leaves, pushing the memory of the sensation farther inside.

  Jay spends a while packing snow into a ramp, and they take turns launching from it. The ice creaks when they land where the tire tracks have patterned the lake, and they instinctively shift the angle of their jumps to avoid the spot.

  Despite their care and obvious skill, she looks down, suddenly unable to watch. Instead, she focuses on the way her skin swirls in the strange blue light. Tiny ice crystals land on her arm and then sink in, becoming part of her. Colin bikes over and kisses her again, releasing a puff of steam against her face. It disappears into her cheek.

  “Jump’s ready,” Jay yells from the middle of the lake.

  Colin pedals away from her before turning and taking off hard down the hill and onto the ramp. He flies through the air, his torso twists and arches, and for only a moment, she can see his eyes close in euphoria, can imagine what it would be like to see him make that face closer to her own. His arms flex and his hands squeeze the grips as he recovers and lands. Releasing a loud “Whoop!” he circles back as Jay takes off. Over and over they ride the ramp, and each turn their jumps are more daring, their lands are more solid, and their cheeks glow redder in the frigid air.

  “I’m starving,” Jay yells as he bikes to the lake’s edge and pulls his phone from his pocket to check the time.

  “You’re always starving. Ten more minutes.” Colin pedals to Lucy. “Are you bored?”

  As soon as she shakes her head, he’s off again. But this time, what has to be his twentieth jump, Lucy can tell immediately that he’s crooked—too far to the right—and when he lands, the ice splits open with a deafening crack.

  Water, blue and sharp, bubbles up and across the surface. Colin slips under as if he’s melted into the lake; there’s not even a moment when he gripped anything but his bike handles. It all happens so fast, but the yawning pause after he disappears feels like it lasts a year, and never has the world been more silent.

  He’s gone. Beneath the snow and thick ice. Lucy is screaming and Jay is screaming, digging his arms into the water, reaching wildly for Colin. The first thought hits her like a dark shadow: When he’s dead, will he be able to find her?

  “Colin!” Jay yells, lying flat on the ice and leaning over the jagged hole. He shoves his arms in again and again, feeling for any trace of a body. The ice where he leans groans and cracks, and he scrambles back as Colin appears and punches at the solid surface. Jay tries to grab his hand, but he can’t reach him.

  “GET HIM!” Lucy screams, scrambling closer to the edge. “Jay, get him out. Get him out. Get him out!”

  Jay lunges, but Colin is too far away, now moving beneath the ice in the wrong direction. Lucy shoves him aside and dives in without thought, but the water pushes her up, bobbing her uselessly against the ice. She has no strength against the weight of water that presses into her. Colin falls unconscious, his face eerily blue as he begins to slip away. It makes him look already preserved.

  With a surge of wild strength, she ducks under to grab his sinking hand, pulling his arm close enough that Jay can grab him. He’s screaming so many words at her as he pulls Colin out, but she doesn’t hear any of them because she’s already out and up, running for help.

  She charges down the trail, screaming her head off and intent on heading straight for the kitchen or Joe’s or somewhere where someone can help. She falls in the snow and gets up again, clothes leaden with water that’s quickly turning to ice, and limbs propelled by terror.

  “Luce?”

  It has to be a hallucination. In his voice she hears relief. But it’s impossible because she just left him unconscious and frozen and dying on the lake.

  “Luce, stop!”

  Whipping around, she sees Colin behind her on the trail. Somehow he manages to both smile and apologize with his eyes. “Stop,” he says. “Please.”

  She can’t see through him, can’t blink him away. He’s there, saying her name one more time and waiting for her to respond, hands curled into fists at his sides.

  Relief floods her so rapidly that she’s choking on words, unable to speak. All she can do is turn and run, throw her entire body against his. He catches her, and where he has always been hard and too solid, now he’s simply warm and perfect. His forearms wrap around her back, pulling her to him, and he presses his face into her neck. Not too hot, not too much. Just Colin and the contours of eyes and lips and nose and chin against her skin. She feels him kissing her, feels his mouth open on her throat, his lips tasting her skin before he whispers, “Hi.”

  Strange, but perfect. They feel the same.

  She wants to scream words of relief into the air. Her question, “How did you get out?” comes out shrill, her voice disappearing in a rasp at the end.

  Colin silently bends and kisses where her neck dips into her shoulder. “Where are we?” he whispers, voice heavy with awe. “Is this how it always looks to you?”

  “Where is Jay?” she asks, looking behind him down the trail. Muffled shouting drifts from the lake, and Lucy registers with a leaden clarity that Jay is there, panicking.

  But Colin is here. And dry.

  Understanding seeps into her, slow and thick. His skin is like her skin and it’s warm and soft and familiar. His skin isn’t freezing. Looking back
down the trail again and behind Jay’s crouched body, Lucy can see the top of Colin’s soaking-wet hair and a single unmoving hand against the ice.

  Panic and confusion flood her. “Hey,” she says, tugging at his hair so that he meets her eyes. And it’s then that she finally sees what he sees when he looks at her: His irises swirl, flames licking. Where his used to be amber-dark, honey flecked with gold, now they are molten. He’s afraid, excited, and hopeful.

  And she can see, too, that he knows something is wrong. He knows and he doesn’t care.

  “Just touch me.” He shakes his head, looking around as if caught inside a wholly different world. “Just pretend it’s okay.”

  She nods, lifting herself on her tiptoes to kiss him. Lips press, tongues touch, and then it deepens, finally. The warmth and wet of a real kiss, the vibrating taste of his sounds, and the pressing hunger of Colin finally able to take more. He grows frantic, and a spreading tingle engulfs her skin, flames down her neck and across her chest. She feels the heat in ten pulses in her fingers, ten pulses in her toes. And yet, while his eyes fall closed, hers cannot. She’s simply fascinated with what’s happening. He exhales through his nose and lets out a sound of longing that is so strained and tight, she digs her fingers into his hair, wraps everything that she can around him.

  But it isn’t enough; she’s not strong enough to keep him yet.

  Somehow, in the split second before it happens, she feels it. A small jerk to the back of his ribs, the impact of life being forced back into him. Or of him being forced back to life. And then he’s gone, hurled backward through the air, gasping and choking, propelled by an invisible band around his chest. Lucy is left alone on the trail where, for an achingly perfect moment, he was just like her.

  Chapter 19 • HIM

  THE CHANGE IS SLOW AT first: silence is broken by a rhythmic beep. Darkness gives way to light. Numbness bleeds into pain.