Touching the Surface

by Sabatini, Kimberly

  I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. David was lying on a twin bed, curled up in the fetal position. He was half wrapped in and half cuddling a ratty-looking blue cotton blanket.

  His room was nothing like I expected. It was a living book of memories, one layer of decoration and talisman tacked on top of another. At the very top of the room, pressed up against the ceiling, was a wallpaper border of airplanes. As I examined it closer, I saw that the blanket that David was clinging to had matching aeronautics on it.

  The room was like a giant scrapbook of a boy’s life. Airplanes, robots, baseball paraphernalia, music posters. On the desk and bookcase were da Vinci models and anatomy books stacked in piles. This was the room of a child with dreams. Every inch of the place seemed to tell the story of a boy who was nothing like the hard-hearted man I’d encountered.

  I couldn’t reconcile it and it scared me a little. David must’ve created all these items and brought them into his room. Everyone did it to a certain degree. If you were bored while sitting out by the dock, you could simply create a book to read. Then, when the sun went down and it got dark during the very best chapter, a book light would appear. Rarely did anyone erase his or her creations. They just brought them home and dropped them in their rooms or passed them on to someone else. Then, once they’d left the Obmil, their belongings left too. Anything that wasn’t consciously connected to a remaining soul disappeared along with its creator.

  David’s room felt different than creating when a need arose. It was like he was deliber); font-style: normal; font-weight: g beforeately reconstructing his childhood, collecting objects to fill an emotional void. Were they memories or wishes?

  Quietly I pushed the door open further. David was making soft whispered sounds that I couldn’t make out, so I leaned closer.

  “What are you doing, Elliot?”

  The voice behind me was soft, but it was magnified by the adrenaline already coursing through my body. I whipped around, swallowing a high-pitched squeal of fright.

  “Oh crap, Freddie, you scared me to death.” I clutched my heart, trying to keep it in my chest. “Well, I guess it’s impossible to actually scare me to death.” I rambled through my nervousness, unable to stop myself from babbling. “I know it’s silly, but I keep forgetting that I’m not alive anymore.”

  “What makes you think you’re not alive?” asked Freddie. He leaned his broom against the wall and tucked his hands into the pockets of his overalls.

  His unexpected question made me freeze in place while my mind raced. I sucked in a deep breath to give myself a moment, inhaling the scent of root beer.

  “Well, I guess I would consider myself not alive because I just died recently. Although . . .” Something was scratching at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t get a clear picture of what it was. I moved closer to Freddie, magnetized by his words.

  “Yes, there usually is more to think about under the surface.” He nodded at the layers of papers, posters, and art scotch-taped to David’s walls. “Scratch that surface and there’s typically another layer below it. Makes easy explanations a little bit more complicated, huh?” He pulled his fingers out of his frayed pocket and cupped an antique silver pocket watch.

  He flipped it open and gazed at the face.

  “Time. Now, time, Elliot, is a very interesting thing to think about.” Freddie snapped the watch closed and tucked it back into his pocket.

  Before I could say or ask another thing, David began to stir behind me. I’d almost forgotten he was there.

  “Freddie?” David’s voice was sandpaper.

  “You want to know what he’s doing, huh?” Freddie stared at me, unruffled by David’s ascent into awareness.

  I looked back at David, who seemed to be close to waking up. The clock ticking in the background was forcing my breathing into a rapid rhythm. I wanted to hear what Freddie knew, but I didn’t want to get caught here. I didn’t want David to figure out that I’d seen him. But seen him doing what? Having some kind of emotional breakdown? I wiped the sweat from my palms onto my pants, and decided to be risky. I was already one up on that curious cat, being dead and all already.

  “Yes. I want to know what he’s doing,” I said. I sidled closer.

  “Can’t rightly say for sure, but maybe he’s remembering.”

  “Remembering what? He can’t Delve. He’s not a Third Timer. He works here,” I said, trying to get it all out before I had to flee. My heart accelerated as David became more alert.

  “I can only guess at the things I don’t understand, but I can tell you what I do know.” Freddie placed a steady hand on my shoulder. “We have a choice. We always have a choice and we can pick again any time we want to.”

  “What’s that me a weird sensationg beforean?”

  “You gotta go. You know he wouldn’t like knowing that you saw him in the middle of his choices.” Freddie pushed me away from the door.

  It felt as if I’d stepped farther away from some important piece of knowledge, rather than closer. I glanced back over my shoulder, my feet pointing down the hall but my mind glued to the intrigue of the moment.

  “Remember you were saying something about not being alive because you had died?” Freddie’s voice reached out to me.

  I nodded.

  “Well, I think David isn’t alive, but it’s got nothing to do with the fact that he died.”

  “Fred? That you?” David’s words filtered up out of the depths of wherever he had been.

  Freddie went inside and closed the door behind him, releasing me. I ran through the halls and launched myself out the front doors of the Haven, my mind whirling with what had just been dumped in my lap. Every time I thought I was beginning to make sense of the afterlife, something else popped up to muddy the waters.

  I was never going to make it before the end of Workshop. Mel was going to be worse than angry, she was going to be disappointed. And then there was Oliver. I pictured myself lost in one of his hugs and couldn’t imagine a place I’d feel safer right now.

  Wait. If everyone was at Workshop, why wasn’t David running his group? Where was his group? Where was Julia? Maybe she really was available to hang out with Trevor. My stomach tightened because the truth was, I hadn’t been expecting that, even though I’d run my big mouth about it. I’d left him at the pond because I was mentally exhausted, but things were even worse now. Emotions shot around inside me like Pop Rocks followed by a gulp of soda: repulsion and attraction bouncing together in a hyperactive dance.

  It didn’t take me long to reach the Delving School because I tromped along at a pace that kept time with my busy mind. When I got to Mel’s room I couldn’t hear anything so I pushed the door open quietly. Trevor was relaxed in the Delving chair and the rest of the room had on their headsets and were just as submerged as Trevor was. That’s when I realized Julia was in the room, curled up like a kitten on a giant pillow near Trevor. I couldn’t believe that he’d actually gone searching for her, that she’d had the nerve to come back to Mel’s Workshop. She had no business knowing about my past. I headed across the room toward her, not sure what I was going to do when I reached her, then growled at my own stupidity. The moment I crossed the threshold, I could feel myself sinking to the floor as Trevor’s Delve dictated my life once again.

  • • •

  The good news, if you can call it that, was that I hadn’t missed much. Trevor must’ve just fallen into his Delve. He was staring at the Elliot from his past. From the look of horror on her—my—face, it appeared everyone would get to see exactly what Trevor would do if he met the girl who’d killed his brother.

  “What?” The word left his mouth in slow motion, but the rest of him stayed eerily still. I watched Elliot shrink under his gaze.

  “I . . .” She had to clear her throat to make the words come out. “I killed your brother.” She shuffled her feet and I thought that she was going to run, but piece of informationasuinstead she dropped to her knees, bowing her head. She appeared sacrificial.
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  “You? You killed my brother? You’re the unidentified teenage girl under protection? It was you who ran my mother off the road and killed Oliver?”

  He took a step closer, towering over Elliot kneeling on the ground.

  “Answer me.” The words were too quiet. A hurricane was about to hit land.

  Elliot lifted her head to look Trevor in the face. Her face was shadowed, fragile. Her response darted out between barely parted lips.

  “Yes.”

  Trevor raised his hand, searching for something to destroy. I flinched, but the old Elliot never batted an eye. She watched him in a detached way, like his hand was a natural side effect that she wasn’t surprised to see. His anger was an extension of the r question? I

  15

  optical

  illusion

  Still in Trevor’s Delve, I saw myself close up, sitting on the bench, the grave marker">“Yes.”, changed my mind for Oliver. I could almost feel the length of my leg pressed up against Trevor’s. It was a different day. Elliot was wearing another outfit, sure, but I didn’t need a wardrobe change to know that this wasn’t the same moment I’d just left. The biggest indicator of time having passed was my face. I still appeared tense, close to breaking into a million pieces, but there was a subtle change behind the surface.

  Of course, I couldn’t see Trevor because I was in his Delve, and when he suddenly turned his head, Elliot was no longer in the picture either. As he began to speak, he looked down into his cupped hands, his forearms propped on his thighs. It appeared as if he was trying to give his words a place to land so they wouldn’t scatter.

  “You were brave, Elliot, telling me about you and Oliver.”

  His leg brushed up against Elliot’s as it moved up and down, as if to discharge whatever excess emotion he was feeling.

  “I watched you kneeling there, telling me how you killed Oliver and destroyed my family. I wanted to rip you limb from limb. I came close.”

  A crow cawed in agreement.

  “That’s when I saw you, really saw you for the first time. I didn’t intend to look at you, it just happened. It was like those pictures, you know, those optical illusions. You can gaze at them forever and see only one thing. Then when you relax your eyes for just a moment, another picture magically appears. The funny thing with that kind of visual trick is that it’s really hard to go back to seeing the original picture once you’ve seen the new one.” He sighed. “I realized instantaneously that there wasn’t a thing I could do to you that you hadn’t already done to yourself. You were already gone, a shell of a person. You stared me in the face and I knew. You wanted the hate and the rage that I was providing. You wanted punishment.”

  He didn’t face me, so I couldn’t see myself either, but I could hear my soft sobs and almost feel my shoulder pushing up against him in time with my tears.

  After a few minutes Trevor said, “I’ll be honest, in that first moment that I backed off, I only did it because I hated you so much. I couldn’t give you anything that you wanted. It was empo class="TX" ai

  16

  the things

  we

  don’t see

  My mind was swimming as I pulled my head up off the floor. My fingers bumped into someone close by. I rolled over onto my stomach, meeting Oliver eye-to-eye on the floor. He had a smudge on the tip of his nose, perhaps from working with Freddie. I reached out to brush away the imperfection and then changed my mind at the last minute. He was almost too beautiful. The streak of dirt grounded him, made his connection to me much easier to believe. My hand was still stalled in front of his nose, so Oliver threaded his fingers through mine, connecting us.

  “Keeping watch?”

  “Haven’t seen you all day. I missed you.” He brushed back a lock of hair that was hanging over my eye.

  Like a child waking up from a deep sleep, I remembered where I was and who was in the room. Oliver steadied me by the elbow on my way to my feet. The first person I saw was Mel. There were worry lines etched on her forehead and it made me uncomfortable. I wrenched my neck toward the Delving chair, but Trevor was gone.

  “Elliot?” I turned around. Julia was standing behind me, nibbling on an apple. I’d forgotten she was there. Everything had fallen out of my head except Oliver and Trevor. Julia hitched her thumb toward the door. “He ran out right after the Delve.”

  “Seems he’s pretty good at storming off.” Oliver said it like it was a casual observation, but his right eye twitched ever so slightly.

  “He’s mad at me. I hurt his feelings earlier this morning. We’d been Delving.” I sounded guilty, as if we’d spent the whole time doing something illicit. I felt bad saying it in front of Oliver, but then I thought of Julia entangled in Trevor’s arms and felt a little thrill to hear her soft intake of breath.

  “We were sitting around waiting,” Oliver said. “Lily had already come out of her Delve by the time Trevor and Julia got here.”

  Color infused my cheeks. I hadn’t been present for one of Lily’s Delves yet. Talk about being self-centered. I bit my lip and looked at Lily. “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay._it had changed my mind” She gave a little nod of her head and I was floored by how gracious she was. It was hard to believe that someone like her would be a Third Timer, lumped in with a screwup like me.

  I focused on Julia. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

  Julia had demolished her apple and moved on to a chunk of cheddar cheese. She swallowed. “Oh, David had a scheduling conflict. He canceled our Workshop, and when I ran into Trevor in the hall, he asked me to join him.”

  I searched for signs that his fingers had been threaded through her hair again, but who could tell with her helter-skelter curls? I was inundated with dark feelings.

  Mel jumped in. “We were delighted to have you join us today, Julia.” She hugged her around the shoulders, practically lifting Julia off her feet.

  Julia gave me a shy smile and kept nibbling. I didn’t understand her intentions. I smiled back anyway. It was an automatic response to her sunshine. She was like Tinkerbell with a tapeworm. I wasn’t hungry for food; I just wanted things to be the way they’d always been between us. Then I really thought about why she was in this Workshop. “Maybe you’re delighted, but I’m not.” I said it to Mel but glared at Julia.

  “But—but you said you wanted me in Workshop with you.”

  “You didn’t show up for me.”

  “Maybe she did,” Oliver said.

  Oh, no. I couldn’t believe it. Now he was taking her side. What did she have? A freaking magic wand? “Maybe you’re being a little naive,” I fired off at Oliver, sick and tired of this whole gallant knight thing that was going on. Oliver looked stunned. I reached for him, thinking to explain myself, but before my fingers could find their target . . .

  • • •

  We were in a dance studio. Julia’s Delve. I could see her warming up in the mirror. She was sitting on the floor, stretching her limbs like a contortionist. She wore mismatched leg warmers that added bulk to her legs and a wraparound sweater over her outfit. Her usual mop of curls was piled into a pom-pom at the top of her head. Watching her, it didn’t surprise me that she was a dancer. Now that I thought about it, she was always gliding from one place to another, silent and graceful. I drank in the sight of her as she twisted and moved her muscles. I’d been curious as to what her life was like—without me.

  “I’ve got a great idea!”

  Who? I wanted to look around but of course I couldn’t. Julia’s nose was resting into her toes and she wasn’t looking up, so I had no idea who was talking. Complete frustration.

  “You came up with a possible song?” Julia said, her voice muffled in her fuzzy leg warmers.

  “No . . . I came up with the perfect song.” Julia’s head shot up. Through the mirror, she connected with a girl who was visually her polar opposite. The girl was dark haired with olive skin, but it wasn’t just that. She had curves. Voluptuous was the word that came to mind
. It was funny because I might not have thought that if I’d seen her walking down the street, but as a dancer, she was unusual. to be your Passenger the ObmilhibI

  “Come on, Becks.” Julia stopped stretching and hopped to her feet. I could see them both now, as they stood shoulder to shoulder in the mirrored wall.

  “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. It’s so perfect for us.” Becks bounced up and down on her toes. Julia whirled around to face her.

  “Just tell me!” She grabbed Becks by the shoulders and pretended to shake her. “Please, tell me.”

  “Well . . .” Becks teased. You could tell she enjoyed the suspense.

  “Becca!” Julia said.

  Becks scowled and looked like she couldn’t decide whether to be pissed or to cry. She sucked in a deep breath. “I’ll tell—just promise not to call me that.” She shivered. “You know how I hate it.”

  “And you know how I hate it when you keep me dangling.” Julia’s whine was interrupted by Becks’s giggle.

  Know what I hated? I loathed the fact that they were friends. That should have been me. Would have been me, if things hadn’t gotten so screwed up at the Basin.

  Becks grabbed Julia’s hands and they plopped down on the floor. She flashed Julia a high-wattage smile. “It’s the perfect song—not overdone like the one we talked about. The other one is funnier, but in this one they’re still best friends, just like us.”

  My stomach lurched and I didn’t know if it was from watching them be so familiar and close with each other, or if it had to do with the sudden shift in the Delve. Time flying forward like the fanning of pages.

  Whoa . . .

  One minute I was watching the face of BFF-stealer Becks and the next minute I was kissing some guy. Only—too weird—because it wasn’t my Delve, I couldn’t pick up on any of the emotion or physically feel what was going on. I was in the dark, stuck and smashed up against some guy.

  Julia’s eyes were closed so I couldn’t even see the guy she was sucking face with. For all I knew, he wasn’t even cute and had bad breath. I decided I needed to do something like count sheep to distract myself—God knows how long this was going to go on. Then I imagined how much worse it must be for Oliver to be in this Delve and couldn’t stop myself from laughing. If only Trevor were still around.