Title Page
Chapter 1: Eliza, life after death
Chapter 2: Ellie, wednesday, march 16
Chapter 3: Eliza, sirens
Chapter 4: Ellie, wednesday, march 16
Chapter 5: Ellie, wednesday, march 16
Chapter 6: Eliza, there’s no place like home
Chapter 7: Ellie, wednesday, march 16
Chapter 8: Ellie, wednesday, march 16
Chapter 9: Ellie, thursday, march 17
Chapter 10: Eliza, sharing means caring
Chapter 11: Ellie, friday, march 18
Chapter 12: Ellie, friday, march 18
Chapter 13: Ellie, friday, march 18
Chapter 14: Ellie, saturday, march 19
Chapter 15: Ellie, saturday, march 19
Chapter 16: Eliza, buzzing
Chapter 17: Ellie, saturday, march 19
Chapter 18: Ellie, saturday, march 19
Chapter 19: Ellie, saturday, march 19
Chapter 20: Ellie, saturday, march 19
Chapter 21: Eliza, dead trees
Chapter 22: Ellie, saturday, march 19
Chapter 23: Ellie, saturday, march 19
Chapter 24: Ellie, not even dawn on sunday, march 20
Chapter 25: Eliza, reflexes
Chapter 26: Ellie, sunday, march 20
Chapter 27: Ellie, sunday, march 20
Chapter 28: Ellie, wednesday, march 23
Chapter 29: Ellie, wednesday, march 23
Chapter 30: Eliza, the butterfly effect
Chapter 31: Ellie, wednesday, march 23
Chapter 32: Ellie, wednesday, march 23
Chapter 33: Ellie, wednesday, march 23
Chapter 34: Eliza, already dying
Chapter 35: Ellie, wednesday, march 23
Chapter 36: Ellie, friday, march 25
Chapter 37: Ellie, friday, march 25
Chapter 38: Eliza, nine lives
Chapter 39: Ellie, friday, march 25
Chapter 40: Ellie, friday, march 25
Chapter 41: Eliza, sleep
Chapter 42: Ellie, sunday, march 27
Author’s Note
Preview
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
They say it doesn’t hurt when you die.
Dying is easy, comedy is hard.
I know that expression’s about acting, but the fact remains that at some point in human history someone started selling the myth that dying is painless: a slipping-off, a falling-asleep. When I was four years old, my grandmother died and I asked my mom if it hurt and she said no quickly, easily, like the answer was obvious.
I don’t think she even knew that she was lying.
But now I know she was.
I know because I died recently.
So recently, in fact, that my hair is still wet and my teeth are still chattering and there are bruises up and down my sides and across my back.
I don’t think I’ll ever heal. I don’t think dead flesh can heal. But seriously, am I expected to spend the rest of eternity with blue marks dancing up and down the left side of my rib cage, a sick sort of tattoo, a reminder of how much it hurt?
I was never particularly religious, but I did believe in the afterlife. Not in heaven exactly, but I believed that something came after. If it was possible for there to be a present—life on earth and all that—I didn’t really see why there couldn’t be something beyond the present. In physics class last year, when Mr. Wilkins droned on and on about the law of conservation of energy, I’m pretty sure I was the only one who took it as proof of life after death.
The point is, it hurts. Don’t let them tell you any different. Pressure on your lungs, heart pounding so fast it feels like it’s about to burst out of your chest. Your lungs fight for breath, some breath, any breath, just the littlest bit of breath, surely some air can fit around this weight, no nothing, nothing, all oxygen is denied you.
Your body fights to live, live, live, as though it’s been training for this all along.
Your heart is beating harder than it’s ever pounded before, reminding you of your flesh and blood and bones.
Your temperature drops.
Your skin is so cold that it hurts when the wind blows.
Your hair is frozen into sharp little icicles that feel like pinpricks against your face.
You’re suddenly more aware than ever before that the heart is a muscle, because it’s every bit as sore as your legs after a long run, your shoulders after a long swim.
Every heartbeat aches. And then, finally, at last, your pulse slows:
giving up,
giving in,
letting go.
It hurts. Believe me. I know what I’m talking about.
I’m supposed to imagine I’m someplace big.
I try to imagine I’m Julie Andrews flinging her arms open wide on a mountaintop in The Sound of Music. Or Julie Andrews floating over the rooftops of London in Mary Poppins. But I’m not Julie Andrews. I’m Ellie James Sokoloff and I’m about to drown.
Except that technically, my feet are firmly planted on dry ground. Still, I take a deep breath and hold it. Dr. Allen (therapist number two) always said that would only make things worse. Don’t hold your breath! she shouted every time she stuffed me into the closet in her office, which wasn’t an office at all but just a room in the apartment she shared with her husband and kids on the East Side of Manhattan. (Sometimes I’d bump into her kids after a session and I knew they were laughing at my sweat-soaked, tear-stained skin. At the girl who couldn’t even play hide-and-seek without having a panic attack.)
Dr. Allen never understood that I have to hold my breath. My brain—well, part of my brain, the conscious part, the logical part—knows I’m not actually underwater, but my lungs have other ideas. Nothing the logical part of my brain says can convince my lungs that they’re safe.
I never had all those symptoms you read about (and believe me I read it all): the walls closing in, the sensation that the room is getting smaller. That’s what the doctors described to my parents when they explained what my phobia felt like. I’ve given up trying to explain that it’s different for me, that whenever a door closes in a windowless room—an elevator, a closet, a bathroom—my lungs behave like I’m twenty thousand leagues under the sea, with no escape in sight.
I shut my eyes tight and try to visualize a mountaintop, but my mind’s eye is blank. Sweat is pooling on the back of my neck and my heart is pounding so hard that I’m surprised I can even hear it when the front door to our suite opens and closes.
I don’t want my roommate to see me like this. Even though the door to my room is shut and Sam’s never come in without knocking (come to think of it, I’m not sure he’s come in with knocking), I fumble for the knob and burst out of the closet.
Sam shouts out some greeting I don’t really hear because I’m still gasping for breath. Even now, safely in my bedroom, gazing out the enormous window overlooking the ocean, my lungs feel just the slightest bit wet, like if I’m not careful I could still drown from the inside out.
Sam shouts again. “I know you’re in there, I hear you breathing.”
Not breathing. Panting. God, what must Sam think I’m doing in here? If I were a different girl, he’d think I had someone in here with me. But he knows I’m alone, because I’m always alone. I lean back against the closet door, safely shut behind me.
I was ten when Mom started saying, You’re too old for this sort of thing. My brother Wes—half brother, second marriage and all that—was five at the time and never had any of my problems, which I think made Mom feel like this was all my fault, or at least my father’s. She seemed confident that it wasn’t hers now that Wes had proven that she could pr
oduce a perfectly healthy and sane child.
After Dr. Allen there was a man named Dr. Grace, and then a woman who insisted I call her Dr. Laura (even though Laura was her first name), who tried to hypnotize me. When that didn’t work, she suggested acupuncture, but my parents—who didn’t agree on much—agreed that if Eastern medicine was effective, it would have been covered by our health insurance plan.
Sam’s still talking from the other side of the door.
“What?” I manage finally. It comes out like a grunt, my voice several octaves lower than usual. I walk to the mirror above my dresser. My dark brown hair is sticking up around my face, my pale skin dotted with freckles courtesy of the California sunshine. I smooth my straight hair back into a ponytail and wipe away what’s left of my tears. Sam and I have lived in this two-bedroom suite for almost seven months, and he’s never seen me have an attack. So far, no one on this campus has. (Knock wood.)
I open my door and step out into the common area between our bedrooms. Sam’s long dreadlocks are twisted into a messy boy bun. He’s so tall that sometimes I think he keeps his hair long simply because no one can reach up above his shoulders to cut it. Which is absurd. You sit down to get your hair cut, obviously.
When I first saw his name (Sam Whitker) next to mine on the dorm assignments, I assumed that it was Sam as in Samantha, not Sam as in Samuel, which is obviously Sam as in male. But our progressive little school has no problem with coed living arrangements, it’s right there in the catalog. At Ventana Ranch, we believe in gender-neutral dormitories.
There was a form you could fill out requesting single-sex accommodations if you weren’t comfortable with coed living arrangements. (And another form your parents could fill out if they weren’t comfortable with it.) I didn’t fill out that form because I thought that once I got here I would become the laid-back California girl I was always meant to be.
Sam and I were thrown together because a computer spit us out as compatible. Though Sam told me once that he barely even filled out his roommate questionnaire. He assumed everything would work out because he’s the kind of person—smart, handsome, friendly—for whom everything always has. (Sam is the kind of person who never studies but never gets a grade below an A-minus.) So we were randomly paired off like some kind of vicious social experiment or old-school reality show: Find out what happens when a computer matches you up and you stop being polite and start being real.
“Someone is stealing the redwoods,” he says soberly.
“A person can’t steal a redwood tree.” I walk over to our itchy dorm-issue couch and retrieve my laptop. I was in the middle of working on a paper when I decided to take a break to test my claustrophobia by locking myself in the closet. “Redwoods are literally the biggest living things on earth.” I try to imagine someone sneaking a three-hundred-foot tree off campus.
“Not the whole tree, Elizabeth.” I sigh. Sam refuses to call me Ellie like everyone else. Not that anyone calls me much of anything here. “Just the—you know, the knobby, knuckly parts. They’re called burls, technically.” Sam holds out his phone to show me a picture so that I can see what he’s talking about. “I snapped it earlier. One of the trees right next to Hiking Trail C.”
The hiking trails that snake across campus are known by letters: A for the easiest, then B and C and so on. Though all the middle letters are missing. (And you’d think A would be the hardest, since we’re all students here and As are hard to come by.)
I take the phone and peer at Sam’s picture. Someone took an ax and hacked into the side of one of the redwoods, ripping its bark to shreds. I never would’ve thought the word butchered could apply to a tree, but that’s what this is. Pieces of rust-colored bark litter the forest floor like drops of blood. The area is ringed with yellow tape, like the scene of a murder in a movie.
There’s something about seeing a mutilated tree that makes me realize how alive it is. Or was.
I hand Sam his phone back, our fingers almost but not quite touching. (I can’t remember the last time I really touched anyone. When my parents hugged me good-bye at the airport before I flew out here?) “Why would someone do that?”
“You can sell the wood,” Sam explains.
“There’s a black market for wood?”
Sam nods. “Pretty damn lucrative, apparently. I looked it up. It’s called burl-poaching. The older trees are the only ones with burls. People use that part to make fancy coffee tables and clocks. The poaching’s been happening for years, but it’s getting worse lately.” Sam reads from an article on his phone. “The trees in this region are known as coast redwoods. These evergreens include the tallest trees on earth, reaching up to 379 feet. Coast redwoods only grow on a narrow strip of approximately 470 miles in the Pacific Northwest, so their wood is rare and valuable. It’s prized among builders not just for its beauty, but also because it’s lightweight and resistant to decay and fire.” Sam looks up and adds, “Then it says that burl-poaching supposedly got popular among meth-heads looking to make a quick buck.”
I shake my head. The damage that was done to that tree was brutal, but it certainly didn’t look quick. “They think meth-heads are sneaking onto the campus?”
Sam shrugs, sliding his phone back into his pocket. “They don’t know.”
The sound of sirens fills the air.
Sirens. Like in the Odyssey. Calling attention, drawing eyes. They’re coming to find me.
I’ve decided to amend what I said before. It’s possible that dying isn’t painful for everyone. If you’re in a coma and they unplug the machines, it might not hurt because your consciousness is already gone. Or maybe some people really do die in their sleep at a ripe old age after a long and fruitful life.
But to tell you the truth, I don’t think life ever slips out of us peacefully. I think it twists and pulls and rips itself away, as violent as being skinned.
I never imagined my life beyond being a teenager. I don’t mean I was planning this all along. I just never really saw past what was right in front of me.
In kindergarten, I couldn’t see past learning my ABCs to reading actual books.
Third grade, I couldn’t see past my multiplication tables to long division.
And sophomore year, I couldn’t see anything past filling out the application for the Ventana Ranch School in Big Sur.
On some level, I must have understood that I was filling out the application so that I could actually, you know, go there the following year. I just couldn’t see that far, like some kind of psychological nearsightedness.
Did I know all along that I’d die young, like a tragic character from a book they made us read in school? Did I know this was coming for me?
The sirens keep wailing, keening, moaning—bringing students away from their dinners and out of their dorm rooms, wondering what’s going on.
All because of me.
I thought I would get to sleep. But the sirens are keeping me awake. Not that quiet has ever made it easier for me to sleep.
I’ve never slept. I mean, I slept—but not like normal people sleep. Never through the night. Even as a baby, my mom said they tried everything but I still got up and cried every night. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t need to be changed.
I just didn’t sleep.
Once I was old enough for a big-girl bed, I climbed out of it. Crept down the hall to my parents’ room. Stood on my mom’s side of the bed until she woke up. I made her get out of bed and play with me.
At first, she begged me to go back to sleep:
Little girls need sleep to grow up big and strong.
You’ll get sick.
I’ll get sick.
Eventually, she brought me back to my room and sang me lullabies and rocked me back and forth, waiting for my eyelids to grow heavy and close.
After a while, she gave up. Soon, our midnight play sessions became routine.
We were always careful not to wake my dad. Let him sleep, Mom would whisper. He needs his sleep.
More t
han you do? I’d ask.
She never answered.
When I was thirteen, my dad moved to an apartment across the street from a hospital. (On the fourth floor of a twenty-story building, low enough that I could take the stairs instead of the elevator even though it meant his only view was of the building across the street.) I spent the night there three times each week, listening to ambulances speeding to the emergency room. But after a few months, I kind of got used to the noise. Within six months, I was sleeping soundly while strangers below me were born and died and everything in between.
But sirens sound different here. Sirens belong in the city, not on a boarding school campus carved into the middle of the woods.
“Maybe they found the guy,” I suggest.
“What guy?”
“The tree thief,” I answer.
Sam looks out the window and shakes his head. “I don’t think that’s it.”
“Why not?”
“’Cause the Coast Guard just showed up.”
Our campus isn’t just in the middle of the woods; it’s also overlooking the Pacific Ocean. And out of 150 students (75 juniors, 75 seniors), I’m the only one planning to major in English when she gets to college. Literally everyone else is studying the natural sciences. Half of Sam’s classes take place on a boat off the coast of Monterey. He comes home smelling like the ocean.
I didn’t choose this school because of academics anyway. In a way, the school chose me—in an effort to expand their appeal to liberal arts students instead of students who’re only interested in the STEM subjects, they offered a special scholarship for aspiring writers and I won it. I still remember the exact words of my acceptance letter: You will find a supportive community of artists in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I didn’t know I was the only liberal arts student who said yes to their offer. It never occurred to me to say no. I just wanted to get back to California.
The acceptance letter finished with: Come to Big Sur, where you will soar.
I liked the sound of that. Made the place seem positively huge.
When I was little, my parents and I lived in a town called Menlo Park, about two hours north of here. But the summer after first grade, a month after my seventh birthday, my parents got divorced and decided to move back to the East Coast, where they’d both grown up. I’d never actually been to New York before that, not even to visit my grandparents.
R.I.P. Eliza Hart Page 1
