* * *
After Valerie inspects my ankle—badly bruised but not twisted or broken—and fills the three of us with enough hot cocoa to drown a greedy kid in a chocolate factory, I’m sent to nap and to “not catch my death.” Valerie won’t listen to my arguments that I am fine and don’t want to go to sleep at three in the afternoon. She directs Alex to help me to the third floor, and when Nolan makes to follow us, she calls him back with a sharp “Not you, boy. Let the girl get some rest.”
Nolan and I lock eyes as the electricity-restored elevator doors snap our gaze in two, but our new, tenuous bond is still intact, an unbroken twine that extends from his body to mine.
Despite my protests, I fall asleep as soon as my head hits the pillow, the station empty of thought trains and the whales barely on the periphery. I wake hours later to Valerie at my bedside, a bowl of pasta in her hands.
“Hungry?”
I’m famished. My head is pounding from sleeping too long and from the exhaustion of the stormy afternoon. The sliver of sky I can see around the curtains is gray streaked through with pink. The storm has passed and the sun is setting.
“Starving.” I scrunch up into a sitting position against the pillows and shovel the noodles into my mouth, only noticing three bites in that it is filled with mushrooms. I hate mushrooms. But I eat them anyway.
Valerie stands by the bed, her look expectant.
“I’ve closed the shop early,” she says. “Because of the storm.”
“That’s too bad,” I say, not sure why she’s telling me.
She tilts her head. “I don’t think so. How’s your ankle?”
I turn it in a slow circle beneath the quilt. “It’s fine.”
“Hmm,” she murmurs. If I weren’t so busy shoving food in my mouth, I’d wonder why she’s acting strangely.
The bowl is almost empty, and I wonder briefly if my future ought to include competitive eating. I’m scraping the sauce off the side of the bowl with my fork when Valerie says, “You should walk on it a bit so it doesn’t stiffen up overnight.”
“You’re probably right,” I say, swinging my legs from the bed, my ankle protesting with the dullest of cries. “I need to use the restroom anyway.”
“You’ll be wanting these.”
The empty bowl in my hand is suddenly replaced with an ankle brace atop a folded blue dress.
“What’s this for?” I ask suspiciously.
“Oh, I had the brace. It was one of Alex’s from an old sports injury.”
She’s definitely up to something. “Valerie, not the brace. What do I need a dress for if the store is closed? Or if it’s open, for that matter?”
“You ought to shower, get all that lake off your skin and hair. It will make you feel better. And give my old dress a spin. It hasn’t seen anything other than the back corner of my closet for years.”
I wonder if this is what having a mother is like when you’re old enough to care about clothes.
I don’t want my morose thoughts dragging me back to losing Jenna, to my mother, so I say, “Fine. But it’s silly, because I’ll just be taking it right back off to go to sleep.”
“Everything is silly, dear. Life is too brief to be anything else.”
* * *
The hot water feels supernaturally good. I massage shampoo into my scalp until my hair is so sleek my fingers can make squeaky noises against it. There are about ten different jewel-tone bottles of body wash on a copper-colored rack in the corner and I settle on one that smells like vanilla and sugar. It smells a bit like Jenna’s perfume, but I don’t mind.
Jenna was always trying to get me to dress up more. She took me on back-to-school shopping trips at the mall under the guise of going to the big chain bookstore, only to steer me to clothing boutiques.
“Try this one thing,” she would say, before shoving me into a dressing room. “Just the one, I promise.”
She never offered to pinky promise. It would have been a lie. Once she had me trapped in the fitting room, hanger after hanger of gauzy blouses, linen pants, and rompers with lace trim would form a chic barricade on the door, keeping me locked inside. Most of the time, this ended in me throwing a fit until she relented.
“Why do you hate it so much?” she asked once. “The clothes thing?”
She was appeasing me, post-tantrum, by letting me roam the electronics store with the fun gadgets everyone wanted to try but never bought. I slowly put the Bluetooth-compatible race car back on the display shelf to buy myself some time to answer.
It was a multifaceted creature, my hatred of clothes. It had been around since elementary school, when the other girls would have new pink jackets at the beginning of every school year while I was stuck with whatever Mom found in the clearance section. We’d always been lower income. I hated that you could tell by looking at my clothes.
How could I explain to my beautiful, fearless fashionista Jenna that her elegance and grace intimidated the hell out of me? You could put us in the exact same outfit, down to the socks, and she would look like she belonged while I would look like a kid trying on her wealthy cousin’s clothes. The Williamses always looked like a family in a catalog, even on the rare occasion you glimpsed them in their pajamas, all silken pants and button-up tops. They were willing to include me in their catalog spread, they wanted to, but it felt like another line that shouldn’t be crossed.
And when I looked at Jenna’s chosen outfit of the day—a ruffled red miniskirt and off-the-shoulder blue-and-white-striped top paired with strappy sandals—I wanted to cry.
“It’s not who I get to be,” I finally told her. “Maybe later it will, but right now it just feels … fake.”
Jenna didn’t miss a beat. “So? Fake it until you make it, right?”
“No,” I say. “No, it … it feels dishonest. Like I’m tricking people into thinking I’m something I’m not.”
But when I emerge from the shower and slip Valerie’s blue dress over my head, my hair wet and slicked back behind my ears, I feel more like myself than I have in weeks. I don’t feel fake when I tie the gossamer ribbon around my waist into a bow, even though the torso sags slightly and the dress hits oddly between ankle brace and knee.
I feel clean and whole, despite the stress of the day still pinging inside of me like a smoke detector whose batteries are running low. But with so much new information to process, the ache of Jenna is lessening, and with each retreat of misery’s hold on my heart, my head, I can breathe a little easier.
I can breathe easier, until I remember Nolan’s hands on my face.
A deep breath shakes away his imprint on my skin as I reenter the guest room, ignoring my ankle’s whining, to do a tiny twirl of gratitude for Valerie …
Who isn’t there.
I thought she would be waiting for me, to inspect me in my dress and fawn over my health. Some fairy godmother. Though she did straighten the bedsheets and take away the pasta bowl. Maybe she went down to the store.
But she’s not in the café, at least not the part I can see from the elevator. I walk behind the counter and look into the attached kitchen. Nothing.
I lean over the bannister and look to the floor below. The store is deserted, the bell above the door unmoving and the fireplace cold and barren. No sign of her.
My ankle throbs dully after my short journey, but, as if summoned, I move to the end of the hallway. The lights are on in the last room and I understand instantly why I’ve been put in this dress and the store closed early.
The bond, as thick as rope now and loosened with sleep, pulls tighter as I near Nolan and the Orman room.
When I step into the dim lantern light, I pretend I’m stepping into the real Orman. I am Emmeline. My hands morph into hers, smaller and chubbier, the right thumb bearing a ring made entirely of sap from the sacred ash tree of Orman. But instead of reaching for an enchanted snow globe or a bejeweled sword, as Emmeline would, I reach to wake the sleeping prince from his slumber.
I look down at N
. E. Endsley and Nolan Endsley, both sleeping within the same body. He is half curled on the center of the embroidered compass, using his sweatshirt as a pillow, his hat dislodged to reveal hair still wet from showering. A tiny bit of drool is pooling at the corner of his mouth. I wonder who will present himself upon such an abrupt awakening—N. E. or Nolan—as I lean forward and gently shove his shoulder.
At first, he is no one, like everyone is no one when they first wake. There is a moment between sleep and waking where anything can happen and it feels like a person might be wiped clean, their entire life rewritten almost by accident. The boy blinks once, twice, and immediately he is N. E. Endsley, as his eyes settle on my person but not my face. His arms tense into action as he jerks himself up to sitting, legs outstretched. But when he sees it’s me, Nolan peeps out from behind the vulnerable author wrapped in the aggressive shell, and the writer who created worlds between his hands blurs into the boy who is scared of water.
“Hi,” I say softly.
“Hello, Amelia.”
My name on his lips yanks the thread between us, and rather than resist, I lower myself to the ground beside him.
“How is…” He trails off, waving his hand at my ankle.
“It’s not too bad,” I say. “I’ll have to cancel the rock climbing plans I have for this weekend, but that’s fine. Those can be rescheduled.”
“Did you have rock climbing plans?”
“No.” I laugh. He doesn’t smile, but his lips twitch like he considered it.
“Well…” He rakes a hand through his hair and, realizing it’s still wet, runs his hand over the rug to dry it.
“Is Wally here?” I ask, throwing him a line. “He seemed no worse for wear earlier.”
“He’s at home with Alex, the cretin. He’s fine.”
“Good,” I say. “That he’s okay, I mean.”
“Yeah.”
We both look anywhere but at each other, a clock downstairs ticking away our silence.
If I was framing us in a camera lens, I would cut one of us out completely to spare the viewer secondhand embarrassment.
“Was there something else?” I finally ask. “Why are you sleeping here?”
We both watch his palm trail over the rug.
“In Orman,” he says without looking up, “the Old Laws dictate that when someone saves you, you owe them your life until the debt is repaid.”
I blink. “I know. I’ve read them.”
He waits half a beat. “So?”
“So?”
His hand stops moving, and we look at each other, searching.
“How would you have me pay my debt?”
My first thought is of Jenna—of asking what was said in their short encounter, the 101st edition, how she comforted him, all of it.
But asking him would be a betrayal, a queen decapitating her knight as he bows to do her bidding. To ask Nolan Endsley to articulate a traitorously human moment so soon after the lake would be taking advantage. And I want him to want to tell me.
Asking about Jenna could sever the new tie between us, which makes my heart ache to even consider.
I laugh off his offer, give him an out. “I didn’t save your life; I saved Wally’s.”
Nolan does not want an out.
“He isn’t equipped to pay back a life debt, so, as his keeper, I’ll act on his behalf.”
I look away first, dropping Nolan’s intense stare to reach down and pluck at the rug fringe dangerously close to where his hand rests. His pinky stretches the slightest bit toward my fingers, like he’s fighting the draw of a magnet and losing.
“I thought you didn’t believe in magic,” I say.
“I don’t.”
“Then what’s with the adherence to the Old Laws?”
“The Old Laws are more of an honor code than a magic system. All worlds—fictional or otherwise—must have morals.”
“How noble,” I mutter.
If he doesn’t want to drop the subject, he must have something in mind … something he’s willing to offer.
“What do you suggest?” I ask outright.
I’m caught in his stare again when he says, “Val said you haven’t picked up a single book since you got here. Why?”
I am startled—that she noticed, that she mentioned it to Nolan, that he cares—but I try to hide it. “I’ve barely been here a full day. Besides, you can’t answer a question with a question.”
“I just did.” His lips quirk but quickly flatten into a somber line. He manipulates the thread between us, pulling to test its strength. “I can answer for you, if you’d like.”
I snort. “Good luck with that. May the odds be ever in your favor.”
“It’s Jenna,” he says. “Her death. You feel guilty, like you shouldn’t enjoy anything you both shared, because it’s dishonoring her memory.”
“How do you know what we shared?”
“You were at the festival, weren’t you?” Nolan is expressionless as he lays me bare for our mutual examination.
All I wanted, less than a month ago, was to be in the same crowded room as N. E. Endsley. In an alternate universe, that’s what I’d get. He’d show up at the festival but never meet Jenna. He would sign my book (maybe), nod politely (doubtful) as I tried to express my every thought about Orman in the span of one minute (definitely), and it would be over.
I’m having a hard time reconciling myself to this universe without Jenna, and an even harder time acknowledging that this is probably the only universe where Nolan’s hand reaches forward and holds mine. In all the universes where I meet Nolan Endsley, Jenna is not there, and I don’t know how to feel about it.
“I’ve had something similar happen,” Nolan says carefully, oblivious to my musings. “But it was with music, not books.”
I swallow. “Did it ever go away?”
“Eventually,” Nolan says. “Or rather, I got through it. One day I decided I was going to listen to music even if it killed me, and it didn’t. I managed.”
The air kicks on overhead, the sound of it whooshing through the vents filling the room with an almost round noise, another layer of the cocoon we’re weaving between us.
“It is different, though,” Nolan says. “The music isn’t the same as it was before.”
“How is it different?”
Nolan turns my hand over, tracing the lines of my palm like he’s deciphering my future.
“The melancholy is harder to ignore.” He’s nearly whispering. “And the happy parts, the full orchestral crescendos I used to love, sometimes make me feel more sad than happy. I think it has to do with the spectrum of emotion. Everyone tells you that you will feel more as you get older and experience life or whatever, but I think it’s actually less, you know? Like, we start out here”—he drops my hand and spaces his own a shoulder width apart—“but the more that happens to us, the more we realize all of our emotions are connected. They feed off each other.” He brings his palms closer together. “Even the good things, the big things that make you feel alive, only make you feel that way because you’ve experienced the bad things. Because you know that you won’t always be on this planet. It’s not a completely sad thought, because there’s nothing else you would rather be doing, but it’s not happy, because you wish you could go on feeling this way forever.”
His palms touch as he looks at me expectantly.
I bite back a smile. “All that to say there are more sad parts in the music now? You really are a writer if it took you that long to explain something so simple.”
Nolan laughs for the first time since I’ve met him, a surprised bark that jumps from shelf to shelf in this circular room.
The heaviness of the moment broken, I shift my legs to adjust my ankle. We sit in comfortable silence. Nolan is the one to break it.
“Amelia?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I read to you?”
A month ago, this would have been a dream come true. A month ago, I would have sold a kidney to fund
such a venture, to sit alongside N. E. Endsley and have him read to me in a magical bookstore that feels like every reader’s dream come true.
But maybe he’s right about emotions getting squished together, because I’m thinking that Jenna is still dead. And I have nothing left of her except her oddly specific ten-year plan that does not include Nolan Endsley sitting beside me, smelling of soap and pine trees and making me wonder if maybe there isn’t more to life than anyone could possibly plan for. Even Jenna.
“I can read on my own, thanks,” I say, the words scratchy in my throat. I do my best to play it off as a joke. “I’ve been doing it since I was five.”
He leans forward, inching his legs closer until we are almost touching.
“Please?” His breath stirs a few wispy hairs into my eye and I blink them away.
“Why?”
“To repay my debt.”
Does he mean for our lips to be this close?
“You don’t owe me anything,” I whisper. “Really.”
“Call it a gift, then.”
Nolan doesn’t wait for my answer. He stands up and shakes out his legs as he turns toward the shelves. With the darkness enfolding us like a warm blanket, and the waking world as far away as the line where the waters of Lake Michigan meet the sky, I feel infinite and safe and reckless all at once, and so I don’t flinch when Nolan asks, “Any requests?”
Alex’s warning of friends not fans hisses through my head, and I swallow down my answer, but what I want must be written across my face, because Nolan turns to pull one of his books from its snug place on the shelf.
“This one?” he asks, watching me carefully. And before I have a chance to respond, he adds, “It’s okay if this is what you want.”
“It is,” I say.
He licks his fingers—a habit I abhor but find fitting for him—and flips through as he folds back onto the floor.
He inhales to begin reading, but instead says, “At the risk of sounding cheesy, I think it’s appropriate to start in the middle, if that’s fine with you. Since that’s what we’re doing.”
Amelia Unabridged Page 13
