“Let me make a suggestion,” Professor Whitfield said. “I told you Mountain State has an outdoor education program. The guiding companies hire a lot of our students. Why don’t I enroll you—as Audie—in some of those classes? Then you can participate in some of the activities and go out on job interviews—”
“It’s all taking too long!” Halli said. “I don’t want to have to go to school. I don’t want to take some algebra test just so I can leave town. I have more experience in the mountains than probably half of those guides I talked to today. And forget about the mountains—I could probably crew a two-person boat as well as anyone else, and help someone sail around the world. Why should I have to stay here and rot away? Help me, Professor!”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “Look, Halli, I understand your frustration—”
“Do you? What if I told you you had to sit in a room day after day and wait for someone else to decide whether you can leave and go live your life? I didn’t ask for this. You and Audie—”
“Saved your life,” Professor Whitfield interjected. “Remember that.”
“Did you?” Halli returned. “I thought the two of you were fairly sure that isn’t the case. If I’m really dead, Professor, then I want my freedom. I should be able to start over here and rebuild whatever I can. I’m asking you to help me. Please.”
Halli had a hitch in her voice. It was the first time Professor Whitfield had seen her this discouraged. And this desperate. Maybe he didn’t realize what life was like for her. He’d been so busy trying to dig himself out of the hole he and Albert found themselves in.
“Let me make a few calls,” Professor Whitfield said. “I can’t promise anything, but maybe I could get you on as an assistant of some kind. Then once you have your foot in the door, you can show them what you know.
“But you have to be Audie,” he added. “I’m sorry, but that’s just a practicality. It won’t be so bad,” he said, looking at Halli’s disappointed face. “You can be great in both physics and outdoor guiding. We’ll figure it out. I promise. Okay? I’ll help you—Albert and I both will. Whatever it takes.”
“Whatever it takes,” Halli muttered under her breath.
“And don’t forget,” the professor said. “You’re assuming this is permanent. I don’t assume that. In fact, I’m hoping that when you come here next weekend—you are coming here, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Audie’s mother isn’t happy about it, but she said we can come.”
“Good. Perfect,” the professor said. “So once you’re here, we’ll spend as much time as we can coming up with some answers. Okay? So don’t give up.”
Halli ended the call and then lay back on my bed. The day had worn her down. She wasn’t used to that. Even after long, grueling days in the wilderness, she always seemed to have energy to spare. But dealing with life in my universe was exhausting in other ways.
Rule number 1: Sleep enough.
Fine, then. If she couldn’t do anything useful for herself at the moment, she might as well take Ginny’s advice. Maybe everything would become clearer once she rested.
Maybe.
Stop. Look at the map. Look at terrain around us. Are we lost?
Yes, Ginny, I’m lost. Now what am I supposed to do?
52
“Hi.” Jake saw my eyes open. He leaned over and kissed me warmly on the cheek.
I looked around the room. We were alone. And my head gave off a dull ache.
Which was good news, as far as I was concerned. It meant no one had turned back on the pain meds.
“What time is it?”
“Around two.”
“Afternoon?”
Jake nodded. “I talked to your parents a while ago.”
“Great,” I answered sarcastically. The dull thud in my head seemed to amp up a little.
“They want you to come home.”
It took me a moment to process that. I might be drug-free, but I still felt a little groggy from the nap.
“Come…home? What home?”
“Their home,” Jake said, as if it were obvious.
“When?” I still wasn’t exactly tracking the conversation.
“As soon as they release you. Your mother is sending one of the planes.”
“Oh.” I blinked my eyes hard a few times, hoping that might reset my brain. It didn’t really help.
“Dr. Rios told them she might let you out as early as next week. They’ll have a nurse waiting at the house to help take care of you.”
Something about all of that sounded really bad. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
But then I remembered: Halli didn’t live with them. Halli had never lived with them. “Home” wasn’t on their private island, it was in the house Halli had inherited from Ginny. The one in Colorado.
But there was something else—someone else. Mrs. Scott. I knew I didn’t remember everything about her visit, but she’d said something that mattered. Something I wanted to ask her about. And she had invited me to stay with her. I was sure of it.
“I’m not ready to leave here,” I told Jake. “I mean London—not the hospital. I’m definitely ready to leave the hospital. But I have to stay here.”
Why did I feel so slow-headed? So loopy? Like it was an effort to think of the right words. Something wasn’t right…
Jake squeezed my hand. “You’re tired,” he said. “We can talk about this later.” He stood up and kissed me again, this time on the forehead. That felt strange, too.
He hadn’t tried to kiss me on the lips. Not even once.
Maybe Jake didn’t like me anymore. Not that I cared, but I did, sort of. It seemed like the kind of thing I should know. Maybe Bertrise was right. Maybe he liked Sarah.
“Do you like Sarah?”
“What?”
“Do you like Sarah? I think you like her.”
Jake stared at me, his expression laced with concern. “Halli, you know I love you. Only you.”
“It’s just that you seem to like her—”
My tongue felt thick. My brain did, too. I’ve never had a drop of alcohol in my life, but right at that moment I felt drunk. Something was definitely wrong.
Jake noticed it, too. He reached up and pushed the button above my bed. He held on to my hand while the room started to move. I couldn’t watch it anymore. It kept spinning.
“Halli? Halli—”
And then the colors burst inside my head.
53
Saturday morning. Halli wasn’t a superstitious person, but she wasn’t above following a ritual that seemed to work.
And since the last time she’d seen me—or really, felt me, heard me, there inside that same body and brain—was the Saturday before, it made sense to try to duplicate all the same conditions.
So she wore the same clothes. Wore the same sneakers, even though she’d bought new ones in the meantime. Left the house as close to the time she thought she’d left it before. Bent over to retie one of the shoes. Then took her first step toward setting off on a run.
Nothing.
She backed up, leaned over, untied and retied that shoe, then took a big leap forward, as if maybe she hadn’t emphasized it enough before, hadn’t been dramatic enough.
Still nothing.
So. There it was. That had been the last thing she thought she could try.
Now she really knew.
No use waiting, no use pretending anymore. She was free to think only of herself.
It was sad, really, she thought as she jogged along. The morning was beautiful, crisp, the body she’d inherited felt alive and well—Halli couldn’t help but feel sorry for me in that moment. Sorry that I wouldn’t ever get to feel what it was like to be me anymore.
It was the same kind of regret she’d had for me just a few days before.
She had been gathering up her things at the end of the physics class when Mr. Dobosh called to her.
“Audie, do you have a minute?”
Halli felt a moment of discomfo
rt. She’d been getting along pretty well in my classes with her polite I don’t knows, but maybe Mr. Dobosh was about to make an issue of it. And then she’d have to deal with that somehow.
“Is everything all right?” he asked her.
“Yes,” she said. “Of course.” She stood relaxed and confident and gave him one of her standard smiles.
“I only ask because...you seem less than engaged in class lately.”
“I’ve had a lot on my mind,” Halli answered truthfully.
Mr. Dobosh smiled. “Well, maybe this will help.”
He handed her a sealed envelope.
“What it is?” Halli asked.
“My letter of recommendation for your Columbia application.”
I had been waiting for that letter. You hate to bug people when they’re doing you a favor, but I wondered whether Mr. Dobosh had forgotten. If it had been me in that body right then, I would have gone crazy with appreciation.
But Halli simply accepted the letter and gave him a polite thank you.
“You can read it,” he said. “I expect you will anyway.”
“Thank you,” Halli said again, then turned to go.
“I really think you’re an exceptional student,” Mr. Dobosh told her. “I’ve said that in the letter, but I think you should hear it directly from me. You may be one of the brightest students I’ve had in a long time.”
This time Halli’s smile was genuine. Because she liked hearing such a warm compliment for me. It made her feel good on my behalf. And it made her like Mr. Dobosh.
“Thank you, sir,” she said. “That’s very kind of you.” I’ll be sure to pass it along if I ever see Audie again.
She could imagine how I would have felt if I had heard it. And it made her feel sorry for me. Sorry that I was missing out on some of the pleasures of my own actual life.
She knew it probably wasn’t any easier for me than for it was for her. In fact, she guessed she was probably doing better, simply because she’d been trained to deal with harsh circumstances.
But she hoped that the life I was living instead had its compensations: plenty of money so I never had to worry about that; a big friendly dog to keep me company; the kind of freedom and independence I probably never felt before with a mother and all those teachers breathing down my neck.
Little did she know that at that moment I would have been happy living her life, my life—anyone’s life.
Because what life I still had seemed to be hanging by a thread.
54
It was different this time. Different from when I tried to save Halli.
When I threw myself in front of that avalanche, I ended up in some kind of holding pattern. In some strange, formless, timeless mush that held me in between my former life and this one. I couldn’t have said whether I was dead or alive or being reborn. I just was. And also wasn’t, at the same time.
But now, I definitely was. I knew there was a me in here, and I wanted to save her and protect her and not let her slip away.
But I could feel myself losing the grip.
I know they were working hard, up there in the light, in the hard physical world where my body—and face it, it was my body now, I’d been in it long enough there wasn’t any use in pretending anymore—lay pale and limp on the bed. I knew Dr. Rios with all her brain power and her science understood the practicalities of a life on the edge of blinking out. She might not understand the cause, but she could see the effect: me unconscious, unresponsive, seemingly beyond her powers to revive me. My heart still beat strong, my brain made waves along her graph—but I, the I inside the body, was somehow gone.
Where? I wish I knew.
In time, I followed the thread back. Like a bungee cord reaching the end of its tension, then snapping back with incredible force. I gasped and sat up and started screaming my head off.
Because the pain in my head seemed worth that.
Dr. Rios shouted out orders to the nurses, had them drug me, sedate me, do anything to calm me down. Jake looked ashen white. He stood in the corner of the room staring at me, watching me try to press all the agony out of my head, and as the nurses pulled my hands away, held my arms down, I could imagine then how things had looked to Jake as he rode with me to the hospital a week before and then sat desperate and worried by my bedside until the day I finally woke up.
For all his faults—and really, isn’t the main one just jealousy? Is that so much of a crime when you’re in love with someone? I couldn’t blame him for loving Halli Markham—the real Halli Markham. I only wished he had really met her. I think she would have liked him—despite any faults, I admire him for being brave. Because I couldn’t have stayed in that room with me if I didn’t have to. Not for one minute, not the way I was.
And luckily I didn’t have to. Because with the heavy dose of pain medication and sedatives they pumped into me, the world, blessedly, went black.
55
“So, are you ready?” Albert asked Halli.
“No.” She had changed out of her sweaty running clothes and taken a long, hot shower. Now she finally faced the conversation she knew she’d have to have. But since her mind was firmly made up, saying no was easy.
“I’m not taking the test,” she told Albert.
“You mean...not today?”
“Right,” she said. “Not today.”
She didn’t feel compelled to tell him the full answer, which was, “Never.”
Not everyone needs to know what you think, Ginny once explained to Halli after they’d finished being interviewed by a reporter who asked a lot of personal questions. Halli was used to it, and was also used to being as honest as possible. If someone asked her a question, she somehow felt bound to answer it.
But she’d listened to Ginny give short answers or no answers to some of the reporter’s more probing questions: What did Ginny think about her fellow explorer, Mr. Manning? Did she think he fell to his death because he was careless, or because the conditions on the mountain were too dangerous? Did she think he was a skilled mountaineer? Had she talked to his widow yet?
Ginny had no trouble just sitting and looking at the reporter and saying nothing. When he didn’t get an answer, he went on to his next question, and the one after that. Finally Ginny said, “We’re done.” Then she and Halli got up to leave.
“Miss Markham?” the reporter called out to Halli. “Did you know Mr. Manning? Did you like him?”
“He was...nice,” Halli said, even though the truth was she thought the man was an arrogant bully. But it wouldn’t look very good for her to say that.
“Not everyone needs to know what you think,” Ginny told her as they continued walking. “Remember that. Your thoughts are completely your own, and they are as private as you want them to be. You never have to tell a person a single thing about yourself, or what you think or feel, if you don’t want to. Do you understand?”
“It’s just so hard when they ask us questions—”
“They can ask,” Ginny said. “Anyone can ask away all day long. But you are the owner of your thoughts. Only you decide whether to give them away.”
“So...maybe some time next week, then?” Albert asked. “We can really do it any time. It’s just the practice test. You can take the real one whenever you’re ready.”
“Right,” Halli said. “Great. I’ll let you know.”
Then she ended the call.
And went back to searching the Internet for the information she needed to help her plan her escape.
56
By 4:00, Halli had some solid ideas. Enough of them that she finally felt she could see her way in front of her—at least the next several important steps—instead of wandering so much in the dark.
So when Lydia called to ask if she was getting ready yet, Halli actually didn’t mind taking a break.
“Not yet,” she said.
“Not even a shower?”
“Not yet.”
“Well, get in there!” Lydia said. “I’m coming over in
an hour. I don’t care what you say, I’m doing your hair and makeup. You can thank me later.”
Halli didn’t feel like arguing. And another hot shower sounded like a great idea. She’d been hunched over my laptop for far too long, and needed to loosen her muscles.
But first she needed another run. In part for the exercise, but more important because she needed to run a certain errand. After that she could be in and out of the shower in ten minutes, dressed in five. How long would it take to get ready for something that only involved a dress and simple shoes? It wasn’t as if she were suiting up to climb Everest.
“Shouldn’t you be getting ready?” my mom asked when she saw Halli head for the door dressed in shorts and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
“I will,” Halli said, then took off before she had to hear any more. Why did everyone in my life think they could boss me around? She didn’t know how I could stand it.
She was in such a better mood than that morning. Progress did that for her. Planning and mapping did that for her. She felt the tension leave her body, felt the smile relax onto her face. She could do this. Would do this. A fresh start and a whole new world waiting for her to explore it.
She jumped in the shower at quarter to five, had her hair towel-dried by five-till, and wore the long blue sleeveless dress by 5:00 sharp. She took a lot of satisfaction in that. In being right.
And in doing things her way.
When Lydia arrived, she took a long, critical look, then told Halli, “Take off the dress.”
“Why?”
“I don’t want to get makeup on it.”
“I told you, I’m not wearing any makeup.”
“Come on, Audie, be serious.”
“I happen to like this face,” Halli told her. “Just as it is.”
Which, when I think about it, is one of the nicest compliments anyone has ever paid me.
Lydia rolled her eyes and shook her head. But she didn’t press it.
“And you’re going out like that? With your hair all wet?”
“It will dry. We don’t have to be there for a while.”
Parallelogram Omnibus Edition Page 65
