by Cynthia Hand
DEDICATION
For Rod, my dad
Epigraph
He who, from zone to zone,
Guides through the boundless sky thy certain flight,
In the long way that I must tread alone,
Will lead my steps aright.
—William Cullen Bryant
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
1 Welcome to the Farm
2 Band Run
3 White Picket Fence
4 The Labyrinth
5 I Really Want a Cheeseburger
6 Hooking Up
7 Rum and Coke
8 When I Met Your Mother
9 Back, Back, You Fiend
10 Dinner and a Movie
11 One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
12 The Right Road Lost
13 A Sunday School Lesson
14 Abandon All Hope
15 Playing House
16 Clara Lux in Obscuro
17 Two Minutes to Midnight
18 You’ll See Me Again
19 Southbound Train
20 Zombieland
21 Safe and Sound
22 The Prophet
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Other Works
Copyright
Back Ads
About the Publisher
PROLOGUE
The first thing I’m aware of is the dark. Like somebody just shut off the lights. I squint into the inky nothingness, straining to see something, anything, but my eyes don’t adjust. Tentatively I feel with my feet along the floor, which is oddly slanted, as if the room is being tilted downward. I take a step back, and my leg strikes something hard. I stop. Try to regain my balance. Listen.
There are voices, faint voices, from somewhere above.
I don’t know what this vision is about yet, where I am or what I’m supposed to be doing or who I’m hiding from. But I do know this: I’m hiding.
And something terrible has happened.
It’s possible that I’m crying. My nose is running, but I don’t try to wipe at it. I don’t move. I’m scared. I could call the safety of glory, I think, but then they would find me. Instead I draw my hands into fists to stop the trembling. The darkness closes in, encasing me, and for a moment I fight the urge to call glory so hard that my fingernails break the surface of my palms.
Be still, I tell myself. Be quiet.
I let the darkness swallow me whole.
1
WELCOME TO THE FARM
“How you holding up, Clara?”
I jolt back to myself in the middle of my bedroom, a pile of old magazines strewn around my feet, which I must have dropped when the vision hit. My breath is still frozen in my lungs; my muscles tense, as if they are preparing me to run. The light streaming through the window hurts my eyes. I blink at Billy, who leans against the door frame of my bedroom and offers up an understanding smile.
“What’s the matter, kid?” she asks when I don’t answer. “Vision got you down?”
I gulp in a breath. “How did you know?”
“I get them, too. Plus I’ve been hanging around people who have visions for most of my life. I recognize the post-vision face.” She takes me by the shoulders and sits down with me at the edge of my bed. We wait until my breathing quiets. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks.
“There’s not a lot to it yet,” I say. I’ve been having this vision all summer, since Italy with Angela. So far there hasn’t been much to go on but darkness, terror, an oddly slanted floor. “Should I tell you anyway?”
Billy shakes her head. “You can if you want, if it would help you get things off your chest. But visions are personal, for you and you alone, in my opinion.”
I’m relieved she’s so laid-back about it. “How do you do it?” I ask after a minute. “How do you go on living like normal when you know that something bad’s going to happen?”
There’s pain in her smile. She puts her warm brown hand over mine. “You learn to find your happiness, kid,” she says. “You figure out those things that give your life meaning, and you hold on to them. You try to stop worrying about the stuff you can’t control.”
“Easier said than done.” I sigh.
“It takes practice.” She claps a hand on my shoulder, squeezes. “You all right now? Ready to come up swinging?”
I conjure a weak smile. “Yes, ma’am.”
“All right, then, get to work,” she says playfully. I resume packing, which is what I was doing before the vision clobbered me, and Billy grabs a tape gun and starts sealing up the finished boxes. “You know, I helped your mom pack for Stanford, back in the day. 1963. We were roomies, living in San Luis Obispo, a little house by the beach.”
I’m going to miss Billy, I think as she goes on. Most of the time when I look at her, I can’t help but see my mom, not because the two of them look anything alike, outside of being tall and gorgeous, but because, as my mom’s best friend for like the last hundred years, Billy has a million memories like this one about Stanford, funny stories and sad ones, times when Mom got a bad haircut or when she lit the kitchen on fire trying to make bananas flambé or when they were nurses in World War I together and Mom saved a man’s life with nothing but a bobby pin and a rubber band. It’s the next best thing to being with Mom, hanging with Billy. It’s like, for those few minutes, when she’s telling the stories, Mom’s alive again.
“Hey, you okay?” Billy asks.
“Almost done.” I cough to cover the catch in my voice, then fold up the last sweater, lay it in a box, and glance around. Even though I haven’t packed everything, even though I’ve left my posters on the walls and some of my stuff out, my room looks emptied, like I’ve already moved out of this place.
I can’t believe that, after tomorrow, I won’t live here anymore.
“You can come home anytime you like,” Billy says. “Remember that. This is your house. Just call and tell me you’re on your way and I’ll run over and put fresh sheets on the bed.”
She pats my hand and then heads downstairs to load boxes into her truck. She’ll be driving to California tomorrow, too, while Angela’s mom, Anna, and I follow along behind in my car. I go out into the hall. The house is quiet, but it also seems to have some kind of energy, like it’s full of ghosts. I stare at Jeffrey’s closed door. He should be here. He should have already started his junior year at Jackson Hole High School. He should be well into football practice and his disgusting early-morning protein shakes and tons of mismatched stinky gym socks in the laundry basket. I should be able to go to his door right now and knock and hear him say, Go away, but I’d go in anyway, and then he’d look at me from his computer and maybe turn his throbbing music down a notch or two, smirk, and say, Aren’t you gone yet? and maybe I’d think of something smart to fire back, but in the end we’d both know that he would miss me. And I would miss him.
I miss him.
The front door bangs shut downstairs. “You expecting company?” Billy calls up.
I become aware of the sound of a car pulling up in the driveway. “No,” I holler back. “Who is it?”
“It’s for you,” she says.
I book it down the stairs.
“Oh, good,” says Wendy when I open the door. “I was afraid I missed you.”
Instinctively I look around for Tucker, my heart doing a stupid little dance.
“He’s not here,” Wendy says gently. “He, uh …”
Oh. He didn’t want to see me.
I try to smile while something in my chest squeezes painfully. Right, I think. Why would he want to see me? We’re broken up. He’s moving on.
I make myself focus on Wendy. She’
s clutching a cardboard box to her chest like she’s afraid it might float away from her. She shifts from one foot to the other. “What’s up?” I ask.
“I had some of your stuff,” she says. “I’m headed to school tomorrow, and I—I thought you might want it.”
“Thanks. I’m leaving tomorrow, too,” I tell her.
Once, when her brother and I first got together, Wendy told me that if I hurt Tucker, she’d bury me in horse manure. Ever since we broke up, some part of me has been expecting her to show up here with a shovel and bean me over the head with it. Some part of me thinks that maybe I’d deserve it. Yet here she is looking all fragile and hopeful, like she missed me this summer. Like she still wants to be my friend.
“Thanks,” I say again. I smile, reach for the box. She smiles shyly back and hands it over. Inside there are a couple DVDs, magazines, my dog-eared copy of Vampire Academy and a few other books, a pair of dress shoes I loaned her for prom.
“How was Italy?” she asks as I set the box down next to the door. “I got your postcard.”
“It was beautiful.”
“I bet,” she says with an envious sigh. “I’ve always wanted to backpack around Europe. I want to see London, Paris, Vienna….” She smiles. “Hey, how about you show me your pictures? I’d love to see them. If you have time.”
“Um, sure.” I run upstairs to get my laptop, then sit down with her on the living room sofa and cruise through my photos of this summer, her shoulder pressing into mine as we look at pictures of the Coliseum, the Roman arches, the catacombs, Tuscany with its vineyards and rolling hills, Florence, me making that dumb “I’m holding it up” pose at the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
And then up flashes a picture of Angela and Phen at the top of St. Peter’s.
“Wait, go back,” Wendy says as I click past it.
I reluctantly press the back button.
“Who’s that?” she breathes.
I get it. Phen is hot. There’s something magnetic about those brown eyes of his, the manly perfection of his face and all that, but sheesh. Not Wendy, too.
“Just a guy we met in Rome,” I tell Wendy. That’s about as close to the truth as I can come without going into the gory details of Angela and her secret, “swear you won’t tell anybody, Clara” boyfriend. Who is, according to her, a summer thing only. She’s been all “Phen who?” ever since we returned to Wyoming, like she never even met the guy.
“Did I mention that I want to go to Italy?” Wendy says, raising her eyebrows. “Wow.”
“Yeah, there are a lot of hot guys there,” I admit. “Of course, then they become beer-bellied middle-aged men in Armani suits with slicked-back hair who look at you like ‘How you doing?’” I give her my best pervy Italian grin, tilt my chin up, blow an air kiss at her.
She laughs. “Ew.”
I close my laptop, glad to get the subject off Phen. “So, that was Italy.” I pat my stomach. “I gained like five pounds in pasta.”
“Well, you were too skinny before, anyway,” Wendy says.
“Gee, thanks.”
“I hate to be the party pooper, but I should go,” she says. “I’ve got loads to do at home before tomorrow.”
We stand, and I turn to her, instantly choked up at the idea of saying good-bye. “You’re going to do awesome at Washington State and have all kinds of fun and become the best vet ever, but I am so going to miss you,” I say.
Her eyes are misty, too. “We’ll see each other on breaks, right? You can always email me, you know. Don’t be a stranger.”
“I won’t. Promise.”
She hugs me. “Bye, Clara,” she whispers. “Take care.”
When she’s gone, I gather up the box, take it to my room, and close the door. I dump the box out on my bed. There, among the things I loaned Wendy, I find some items from Tucker: a fishing lure that I bought him at a tackle shop in Jackson—his lucky Carrots lure, he called it—a pressed wildflower from one of the wreaths he used to make for my hair, a mixed CD I made him last year, full of songs about cowboys and songs about flying and songs about love, which he listened to a bunch of times even though he must have thought it was corny. He’s giving it all back. I hate how much this hurts me, how much I’m clearly still hanging on to what we had, so I put the stuff all carefully back in the box, and I seal the box with tape and slide it into the shadows at the back of my closet. And say good-bye.
Clara.
I hear the voice in my head, calling my name, before I hear it out loud. I’m standing in the quad at Stanford University, in the midst of more than fifteen hundred teeming freshmen and their parents, but I hear him loud and clear. I push through the crowd, looking for his wavy dark hair, the flash of his green eyes. Then suddenly there’s a break in the people around me and I see him, about twenty feet away, standing with his back to me. As usual. And as usual, it’s like a bell chimes inside me in a kind of recognition.
I cup my hands around my mouth and call, “Christian!”
He turns. We weave toward each other through the crowd. In a flash I’m by his side, grinning up at him, almost laughing because it feels so good to be together again after so long.
“Hey,” he says. He has to talk loudly to be heard over the people around us. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“Yes, fancy that.”
It doesn’t occur to me until right this minute how much I’ve missed him. I was so busy missing other people—my mom, Jeffrey, Tucker, Dad—caught up in all that I was leaving behind. But now … it’s like when part of you stops hurting and suddenly you’re yourself again, healthy and whole, and only then do you understand that you’ve been in pain for a while. I missed his voice in my head, in my ears. I missed his face. His smile.
“I missed you, too,” he says bemusedly, bending to say it next to my ear so I can hear him over the noise.
His warm breath against my neck makes me shiver. I step back awkwardly, suddenly self-conscious. “How was the boonies?” is all I can think to say.
His uncle always takes him into the mountains during the summers, spends the whole time hard-core training, away from the internet and television and any other distractions, and makes him practice calling glory and flying and all other angel-related skills. Christian calls it his “summer internship,” acts like it’s only a step up from army boot camp.
“Same old routine,” he reports. “Walter was even more intense this year, if you can believe that. He had me up at the crack of dawn most days. Worked me like a dog.”
“Why?” I start to ask, then think better of it. What’s he training you for?
His eyes get serious. I’ll tell you later, okay?
“How was Italy?” he asks me out loud, because it’ll look weird to people if we’re standing here facing each other, not saying anything, while we carry out an entire conversation in our heads.
“Interesting,” I say. Which has got to be the understatement of the year.
Angela picks this moment to appear at my side. “Hi, Chris,” she says, lifting her chin in greeting. “How’s it going?”
He gestures at the crowd of excited freshmen milling around us. “I think reality is finally starting to settle in that I’m going here.”
“I know what you mean,” she says. “I needed to pinch myself when we drove down Palm Drive. What dorm are you in?”
“Cedro.”
“Clara and I are both in Roble. I think that’s across campus from you.”
“It is,” he says. “I checked.”
He’s glad that he ended up with a dorm across campus from us, I understand as I look at him. Because he thinks I might not like it if he’s always around, picking the random thoughts out of my brain. He wants to give me some space.
I send him the mental equivalent of a hug, which surprises him.
What was that for? he asks.
“We need bicycles,” Angela’s saying. “This campus is so big. Everybody has bikes.”
Because I’m glad you’re here, I say to Christian.
I’m glad to be here.
I’m glad you’re glad to be here.
We smile.
“Hey, are you two doing the mind-meld thing?” Angela asks, and then, as loudly as she can, she thinks, Because it is so annoying.
Christian gives a surprised laugh. Since when does she talk telepathically?
Since I’ve been teaching her. It was something to do on an eleven-hour flight.
Do you really think that’s a good idea? She’s loud enough as it is…. He’s joking, but I can tell he doesn’t love the thought of Angela being part of our secret conversations. That’s between us. It’s ours.
So far she hasn’t been able to receive, I say to ease his mind. She can only transmit.
So she can speak, but she can’t listen. How appropriate.
Ann-oy-ing, Angela says, folding her arms across her chest and glaring at him.
We both laugh.
“Sorry, Ange.” I sling an arm around her. “Christian and I have a lot of catching up to do.”
A flicker of worry passes over her face, but it’s gone so fast I wonder if I imagined it. “Well, I think it’s rude,” she says.
“Okay, okay. No mind-melding. I get it.”
“At least not until I learn to do it too. Which will be soon. I’ve been practicing,” she says.
“No doubt,” he says.
I catch the laughter in his eyes, bite back a smile. “So, have you met your roommate yet?” I ask him.
He nods. “Charlie. He wants to be a computer programmer. Married to his Xbox. How about you?”
“Her name’s Wan Chen, and she’s premed and extremely serious about it,” I report. “She showed me her schedule today, and it made me feel like a total slacker.”
“Well, you are a total slacker,” Angela points out.
“So true.”
“What about your roommate?” Christian asks Angela. Poor defenseless thing, he adds silently, which makes me snicker.
“I have two roommates—lucky, lucky me,” says Angela. “They’re total blondes.”
“Hey!” I object to her tone on the subject of blondes.
“And they’re complete fuzzies. One’s a communications major—whatever that means—and one is undecided.”
