by Lexa Hillyer
But most of all, she knows, she is crying for Joy.
27
Zoe’s blond head hovers like an alien sun just to the side of Joy’s bunk bed. I can’t sleep, she’s whispering. And then she climbs up the ladder and they’re lying side by side, giggling in the darkness.
Dimly, Joy hears the sound of machines beeping. She turns her head slightly, trying to breathe in the smell of the night. Outside, the cool, clear lake goes on forever, deep and glacial. Giddy laughter echoes off the trees.
She sucks in oxygen, its tubes leaving a familiar plastic, sticky feeling on her face. The sound of it is like the shush of the lake itself, lapping at the rocks. And now Joy is standing in the shallow water near the footbridge, the moon casting violet ripples on the surface. Ryder is facing her, looking into her eyes, touching her, kissing her and kissing her. Love wasn’t so hard to find after all, once she stopped running from it.
And now she’s holding Tali and Luce’s hands, leaping past the tire swing, over the cliffs, as though flying.
She is flying.
Joy wakes up and must immediately close her eyes again against the bright florescent hospital lights above her. She opens them once more and blinks. She feels dizzy and nauseated. Until she remembers: The water. The laughter. Her friends. Her past.
When she snuck out the other night, yanking the oxygen cords from her face and stripping out of her hospital gown, changing shakily into her jeans and boots, then slipping the car keys from her mom’s purse while she went to get dinner (her parents had been taking turns staying the night), Joy had expected one evening of escape, a chance to bury all the memories and say good-bye.
She had gotten so much more than that.
“Oh good. You’re awake,” says a voice.
It takes effort for Joy to turn her head—she’s so tired—but she does, and sees George Townsend, her nurse, taking her vitals. “Boy George,” she says. “How long have I been out?” Her lungs hurt when she breathes, but she tries to ignore it.
He smiles at her. “It’s good to have you back. You shouldn’t have run off like that. You know you need your beauty sleep.”
He leans over and sticks a needle into her arm. She hopes it’ll make the breathing easier.
“What time is it?” she asks. Through the window, the sun appears to be setting.
“About seven. Your dad’s napping and your mom is on the phone. Visiting hours are over, but we’ve made an exception. You’ve got friends here who have been asking to see you,” he says, removing a tray from below her bed. “Oh, and you got a phone call from someone.”
“A call?”
“Kid named Doug,” he says, shrugging. “Dialed the main line. Said he got the number on a cruise or something.”
“From the Cruz,” she fills in.
“You know him? Let me find the message,” says George, rummaging through a pile of notes in one of his long scrubs pockets. “There he is. Doug Ryder. Gina wrote down his number, just in case.” He puts the note down next to her bed. “Should I tell your friends they can come in now?”
“Actually,” Joy says, her breath coming short. “Could I . . . could I have a phone? I want to make this call first.”
“Ooo-ooh,” George says in a singsong voice. “I get it. No problem, sweetie. I’m on it.”
Joy smiles, plastic tubes crinkling against her cheeks. “Don’t be a dork, George,” she says.
Moments later, he appears with a phone, saying, “I’ll tell them to come in a few, okay?”
She nods. It’s a little easier than speaking. “Thanks, BG,” she says to his back as he leaves the room.
It seems like the phone rings forever—a concept Joy now believes is fully possible. If she thought hell were a real thing, she’d be sure it was an unanswered call. But in this moment that seems to stretch infinitely in two directions, she has all the time in the world to wait for his voice, which comes, at last, like a wave breaking. “Hello?”
“Hey, Ryder.”
There’s a pause. “Is this Joy? From camp?”
She smiles. “The very same.”
He takes in a breath. There’s another pause—a long one. Finally he says, “How? How did you find it?”
“You taught it to me,” she answers.
“No, I didn’t,” he protests. “I would remember. I’ve never shown anyone those lyrics before.”
“I memorized them,” she says simply.
Another pause. “I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it at all, but . . . Joy?”
“Yeah?”
“I don’t even know how you got ahold of it and I know we never got to know each other that well at camp, and I’m sorry about that. But . . . I just can’t believe it.”
“Can’t believe . . . what?” she asks, her words flowing out of her with only the slightest effort.
“How good my song sounded in your voice,” he says. “It’s incredible. I had no idea this song was any good until I played your recording. It popped up in my email this morning kind of like a miracle. I’d forgotten I even wrote it.”
She finds her hand is clutching the phone hard, her breathing is more painful. She wants him to remember. She wants it to have been real. She thinks of his lyrics:
Now I climb another wall,
Look out from another height,
Trying to remember it all
Scared that I just might.
But it’s clear, oh so clear
You’ll never be here
Because every day, a little more
You disappear, you disappear, you disappear.
“Joy? Are you still there?” he asks quietly.
“Still here.”
“I thought you’d disappeared,” he says, practically a whisper. “Are you okay? I saw you fall at the reunion. The ambulance came . . . I know you’re still in the hospital, but they wouldn’t tell me anything.”
There’s too much to say, and every word hurts. So she settles on the most important thing. “I will be okay, Ryder.”
He lets out a breath. “Maybe we could . . . maybe when you’re feeling better, we could, I don’t know, hang out. Get to know each other. Maybe play some music together. If you want, that is.”
Something between laughter and tears is happening inside her right now, but she’s not sure she has the strength to get it out. She nods, though he can’t see her. She manages: “That would be really nice.”
“Okay, then,” he says. “It’s settled.” Just like he said when they were rock climbing. In the past. In the dream. In the memory. In the future. In the summer days that existed completely outside of time, where Joy found herself again. Where they found each other.
“Good-bye, Doug,” she says.
“Good-bye, Joy,” he says.
It would be so easy to close her eyes again. So easy to go back to the dreams, or the memories—not that it matters which. She tries to convince herself that she doesn’t hate this place. Here at MCCP, just ten minutes south of Portland, everything is black and white. Everything is long Latinate words that should belong on one of Luce’s SAT study spreadsheets, not in her medical files. Peripheral primitive neuroectodermal tumors. Such ugly words, for such ugly things. Unbelievable how our own bones, our own cells, can betray us. Inexplicable. Unfair. And in her case, unavoidable, no matter how hard she has tried to run from it for two whole years.
But her friends are here—gathered together like the four elements, to see her. While she waits for them, Joy tries to decide who would be which element. Luce, the swimmer and always the organized, reliable one would likely be water. Zo would be earth—steady, loyal, grounded . . . and often covered in actual mud. Then there’s Tali—impatient, hot-tempered, constantly blowing things out of proportion. Also, she’s a runner and can travel faster than any of the rest of them, even if, sometimes, she carelessly destroy
s things in her path. Yup, definitely fire.
So that leaves wind for Joy. Which kind of works: sometimes gentle, sometimes fierce. Check. Usually a little bit invisible, except in the way that she affects others, bringing them together and then letting them scatter again. Check. Sometimes, when the music’s right, causing them to dance, like leaves. At least, that’s how it used to be.
Wind.
Touching everything.
Just passing through.
They come through the doorway in a noisy jumble, their voices dissolving the silence. In that moment, Joy can breathe again. The ache in her bones, in her whole body, seems distant, easy to tune out—just faint white noise, fading into the background.
“So serious,” Joy says with a smile, because if she doesn’t make a joke, she might cry. Tali has her arms folded across her chest and is picking at the elbow of her purposefully shredded off-the-shoulder sweater. Luce looks pale and shocked, dark bags beneath her eyes. Zoe looks as though she was just yanked from bed only moments ago.
This is why she didn’t want them to know for so long. This is why she never told them.
“Come on,” she says, trying to make her voice louder, firmer. “Get it together, people. Who’s here to cheer up who?”
“Whom,” Luce corrects automatically. And then she’s smiling, too.
Relief washes through Joy’s chest. “I’m so happy you guys came,” she says. “I had . . . the most bizarre dream. We all went back in time—back to our last summer at Camp OK. It was . . . it was so real.”
Zoe shakes her head. “I had that dream, too,” she says.
Tali and Luce look at each other, and then back at Joy. “I think we all did,” Tali says carefully.
“Whatever happened to us,” Luce says, “we all felt it. It was real.”
Joy blinks. Somehow she already knew that this was true—that the four of them must have been given a miracle: a second chance, one golden bubble of opportunity to go back and try again. And maybe one version of the past wasn’t better than the other—maybe that isn’t the point.
After all, she’s still dying.
Maybe the only thing that really stuck from their trip back in time is inside them now, just a spark, evidence that there’s more to this world than everyone else thinks. Maybe that’s what forever really means.
“Just promise me you guys will . . . hold up your end of the bargain, then,” Joy says, each word coming out slow and labored now. But it’s too important not to say.
“Our end of the bargain?” Zoe repeats.
Joy nods. “What we wrote . . . on the photo-booth wall.”
Tali takes a deep breath. “That we would all be friends forever?”
Joy lets out a breath and smiles. “Promise.”
She sees a tear streaking down Tali’s cheek, bringing with it a dark trail of mascara, but Joy no longer has it in her to tell her to stop, to tell her it will all be okay. Even better than okay—fantastic. It’s what she always used to say.
Zoe leans down and hugs her gently. “Of course we promise,” she whispers.
Luce leans in, too, taking Joy’s hand. “You can fight this, Joy,” Luce says, serious, like she’s coaching her on a difficult SAT question. “I know you can do this. It’s going to be all right.”
Zoe is crying now, too. Joy wants to hug her, to make her feel better, to fold her into her side on the narrow hospital bed. But she is so tired. Movement is too hard. So she lets the girls cry, lets them hug her, lets them try to dry their own eyes on the backs of their sleeves. Inexplicably—despite everything—Joy feels oddly, wildly happy.
This was all she wanted. To feel whole again.
And then, the weirdest thing happens. As her friends pull away to give her some space, she sees the sun.
They’re standing on the Okahatchee soccer field, breaking from a huddle. I’ll sneak off after the second relay, Zoe is saying. I’ll take the path through the woods, Tali responds. And I’ll stay on lookout, then meet you at the Stevens, Luce says with an official nod.
Behind their heads, the trees are swaying, sunlight breaking through the leaves at the edge of the field where the woods begin, making white spots in Joy’s vision. Shadows and light, dancing across her skin. She can feel the warmth of the sun and closes her eyes, watching the shapes behind her eyelids grow brighter and brighter into just white.
This is forever, the light says. She smiles, realizing there was never any proof of it, just this feeling, just this truth.
EPILOGUE
ONE WEEK LATER
Zoe hunches forward and switches off the car radio. At the funeral, there was a lot of music—Doug Ryder played his guitar, and several girls from Joy’s old choir sang a hymn. Right now, she just wants silence.
She keeps picturing the ashes, Joan and Allen standing at the end of the pier and sprinkling them out over the lake. It’s only the first day of September, but a light breeze already stirs in the mountains, and at that moment, it seemed to pick up, causing the ashes to lift on a gust and separate, blending with water and sky, becoming nothing.
As her car rises up over the hill on Ossipee Trail, Zoe passes the ENTERING LIBERTY, NEW HAMPSHIRE sign and shakes her head. She and Cal have always joked that they should print the sign on both sides—because it’s even truer when you’re leaving town. And she will be leaving, for college, in precisely seventeen hours. She can’t quite believe it, but all her bags are packed and her mom even requested tomorrow morning’s shift off to take her to breakfast before the drive.
She catches a glimpse of her face in the rearview mirror—she looks like she hasn’t slept all week, which is basically true. There’s smudged mascara under her eyes, which are tinged red at the edges. She has gone through so many emotions in just a few days—sorrow, anger, confusion, guilt—that she feels exhausted somehow, like a wrung-out towel.
Zoe fumbles with her cell phone, taking a breath before dialing. As she looks through her windshield at the town she has known all her life—the spire of a church poking up over the next hill; ski shops directed at the tourists who head through here to North Conway, currently closed for the season; Mr. Jenklow returning his lawnmower to the shed at the side of School Road—a sense of calm settles in. She knows, without knowing how she knows, that wherever Joy is, wherever her soul has gone, she’s going to be okay now. Even better than okay.
Calvin answers on the third ring. “Zobo.” His voice is restrained, like he’s not sure what tone to take. What tone do you take with the girl you were friends with all through high school and then who you dated, briefly, and who broke up with you out of nowhere, and then whose best friend died less than a week later?
“Hey, Cal.”
“My mom wants to know if you’re still coming over for lasagna tonight. She’s planning a big good-bye feast for both of us, so you won’t want to disappoint her.” But she knows what he really means—that even though they broke up, they’ll always be friends. That he’d be disappointed if they didn’t get one last chance to say good-bye before leaving town.
Zoe smiles. “Yeah, of course I’m coming.”
There’s a pause. “I would ask you how your day was,” Cal starts, “but that just seems sort of . . . wrong.”
Zoe sighs. “Sometime I will tell you all about it. After I even figure out how I feel.”
“Any time, Zo. So, I’ll see you in, like, an hour?” he says.
“Actually, I was calling because there’s . . . something I wanted to say . . . to tell you . . . before I come over tonight.”
“Okay, shoot,” Cal says, and she can hear him bracing himself, though what could be worse than telling him she didn’t feel the way he did?
And so she tells him: about her, about the secret she has been pressing down inside for so long she almost didn’t know it was there. She tells him that she likes girls. How Ellis—maddening, elusi
ve Ellis—made her see it finally, though it felt like she was the last person to know. She wasn’t being used, or messed with. Or maybe she was. It doesn’t matter. She was the one who couldn’t admit that she actually wanted it, actually liked it. More than liked it. It had been a taste of freedom.
Hopefully only her first.
She hasn’t really had any practice saying the words, so they come out jumbled and awkward, and during the brief silence that follows, she’s sure she has somehow said it wrong, that she failed to explain what she really means, that she has made things even more confusing between them.
Finally, she hears Cal let out a breath. “All right,” he says slowly. “So . . . that’s it?”
“Wait, you have no reaction? You aren’t, like, shocked or mad or something?”
“Why would I be mad? Look, Zo, you’ve been one of my closest friends for the last few years. This doesn’t change that. It’s not like you’re telling me there is no spoon,” he says with a small laugh.
“Oh, the Matrix is very real, Cal,” Zoe replies, feeling a nervous smile creep onto her face. “Spoons are just an illusion.”
“Then what have I been eating my soup with?”
She laughs, surprised by how good it feels. “Your brain?”
Now it’s Cal’s turn to laugh. “That’s disgusting.” He sighs. “But . . . thank you.”
“For what?” Zoe says, with a new sense of relief. Over the hills, the sun is still shining high, turning a faint peachy orange as evening eases in.
“For telling me.” He pauses. “At least I know you didn’t dump me because you secretly hate my taste in music or think my feet are gross.”
“Your feet are gross.”
“I’ll ignore that. And now that all that’s out of the way, we can move on to discussing the mix I’m making for your drive tomorrow. I thought I would start off with something more indie and then move toward pop hits to represent your journey into the—”
