Sublime
: Chapter 20

COLIN IS HELD IN THE infirmary the next day, and Lucy walks back through campus, feeling increasingly untethered with each passing step.

Warnings haunt her. Two people now have seen Lucy and reacted as if she were anything but good.

They always take someone with them. Try not to, Lucy.

Go take your haunting somewhere else.

The words, delivered with such certainty, taste all wrong in Lucy’s thoughts. Where would she take Colin even if she could? How could she possibly take her “haunting” somewhere else when she can’t even manage to pass through the school’s iron gates?

She walks away from the buildings, down the long gravel road leading toward the majestic stone buildings. Even out of her sight, they feel just as imposing. Her anchor is this school, these grounds, and—most of all—that boy lying bruised and broken in the infirmary.

Lucy presses her hand to the cold iron gates and then leans forward, resting her forehead there too. Objectively, it’s cold. The cold takes over every inch of her skin, and yet it’s completely without discomfort. No sensation in the world registers above the memory of feeling Colin the day before.

Warm skin, the wet of his lips, and the ache for more in every one of his sounds. Being with Colin like that was how she always hoped it would feel. Being with him in his human body and her ghost one felt like trying to mix fire and ice.

It’s about more than feeling him, though. It’s about the depth of her wanting. She wants him. There’s a small, hollow void, even when she’s right beside him, and it’s because they truly know nothing: not why she’s there, how long she’ll be back, or even why she disappeared two weeks ago. How much time do they have together? Weeks? Months? A year? Is she here only to be near him and enjoy him, or is she here to make up for some sin in her human life?

Footsteps crunch on the gravel on the other side of the gate, and Lucy opens her eyes, taking a surprised step backward when she sees Maggie heading in to work.

“Trying to leave?” Maggie asks, eyes narrowed.

Lucy’s ingrained manners battle with her frustration. She remembers the way the world seemed to snap like a rubber band when she’d tried to walk through the gate and how she ended up right back where she’d started. “I’m guessing you know I can’t.”

Maggie’s laugh comes out sharp. “I was hoping it would be different for you.” She studies Lucy for a beat. “What are you doing out here, girl?”

“I’m thinking,” Lucy answers, defensive. “I’m out for a walk. I’m worried for Colin, and I’m confused.”

“I’m sure you are. Can’t replace it in me to be sympathetic, though.”

Lucy feels a bit like an amnesia victim who has woken to discover she’s committed some great, secret crime. She’d happily avoid being horrible if only someone would tell her how. “Why weren’t you surprised to see me? Everyone else who works here, I mean those who even bother to really look at me, act like I’m something to fear. You basically shooed me out with a broom.”

“I suppose fear is how most people react to seeing a ghost.” Maggie’s answer is so matter of fact that Lucy feels her exasperation boil up inside. But Maggie holds up a hand to keep her from responding. “I was new here when you died. It wasn’t that long ago, girl. Dot, Joe, all of them knew you as a student and still aren’t sure if they believe you’re the same girl. I tried to tell them the first time that ghosts come back to this place, but until you, no one seemed to want to believe me.”

“What ghost was here before?”

“No way,” Maggie says, shaking her head. “I’m not going down that road with you.”

Lucy watches her, seeing a trace of vulnerability beneath the stern surface. “Then at least tell me why we come back.”

This time, Maggie laughs. “I suspect you’re here for that boy. He’s like a magnet for you.”

“Why is that a bad thing?”

Narrowing her eyes, Maggie says, “Don’t know exactly why it’s him you need. I wish I did, Lucy. But you think long and hard about how you felt when you saw Colin lying in the hospital bed. Were you relieved he was safe? Or disappointed you didn’t kill him?”

It’s too much. The nurse has crossed a line, and no matter how much Lucy wants to understand, horror and rage course through her so quickly that she turns, walking toward campus without another word. She doesn’t look back to see, but she’s almost certain she hears the rattling of the gate behind her.

• • •

Kill him? How could Maggie even suggest it? Lucy is the one who pulled Colin from the water, who ran to replace help. Maggie herself admitted that she didn’t know everything, but even knowing something is a lot farther along than where Lucy is. She only knows that she is falling for Colin and will do anything to not disappear again.

• • •

Obviously there have been others who’ve come back. Jay talked about the Walkers. Maggie clearly has stories of her own. And Lucy remembers something Ms. Baldwin said, that people don’t look. That most people don’t need to see. Could it be that simple? Lucy’s spent countless hours watching the students around her—looking for a memory or something familiar—but maybe she’s looking for the wrong thing. Maybe it’s not a thing she should be watching for, but a who.

Without a destination in mind, she continues on, turning this way and that, moving from sidewalk to snow-covered lawn to gravel path and then sidewalk again. Following nothing but the instinctual map that seems to be unfolding in her mind.

She replaces herself beside the statue, running her fingertips down the smooth, extended arm of Saint Osanna. The marble hums beneath her fingers, and Lucy curls her grip more firmly around it, feeling it warm. Somehow she knows there’s life there—of one form or another, even if it’s life in the way she is. If Lucy can return and form a makeshift body out of the elements, why can’t the statue possess a spirit just the same?

Feet crunch through the snow, and she turns, catching Jay as he almost passes her by without noticing.

“Jay.”

He stops, looks over at her vacantly before blinking into awareness. “Hey, rocker chick.”

He walks to her, eyeing the statue skeptically before sitting beside her. Empty seconds tick by before either of them speaks. Finally, Jay asks, “How was he when you left?”

“He seemed fine,” Lucy says, and then reaches up, tucking her hair behind her ears. “I can’t stop thinking about how he could have died.”

Jay is already shaking his head. “You don’t know Colin like I do. Colin is the guy who never questions whether he can or should do something. He just does it. The stuff you saw him doing at the lake was nothing. Last summer, we went skydiving with my dad, and Colin pulled his chute at the last minute and landed easier than any of us. As crazy as it sounds, Colin doesn’t know what dying even means.”

Lucy curls her hands into fists, wanting to ask Jay about every single time Colin has dared to put his life in danger. But she suspects they would be here talking for hours.

“He’s a good guy,” Jay says, turning his face up into the biting wind.

Lucy swears she can feel blood pounding through her veins just thinking about him. “He seems like the best guy.”

Smiling, Jay looks over at her. “Yeah, I guess that’s what I meant.” He pulls his jacket collar up, wincing at the cold. “What are you doing out here?”

She shrugs, shying away from answering and lying to Jay. “Waiting for someone.”

He stands, shoving his hands deep into his pockets and tilting his head toward the dorm. “Clearly you’re a badass, but I’m freezing. I’m going to head back to the room.” He frowns a little, thoughtfully. “Do you live on campus?”

Lucy nods, noncommittal. “I’ll let you know if I hear anything about Colin.”

“Same.”

She watches him walk away, shoulders up and head down, his short strides like tiny stabs aimed at the icy walkways. Lucy feels like there should be more there with Jay, some acknowledgment of the miracle of what happened or reliving of the trauma, but he’s so matter of fact about it all.

She can tell it’s cold out from the way students hunch over into their middles, grip their bags, lean into each other. At the entrance to every building, they rush in toward the warmth of the halls, but Lucy stands out in the wind, fascinated with how it no longer seems to fight her. Instead, she closes her eyes and presses back, determined to stay earthbound. Determined not to disappear or take Colin anywhere. Determined to replace another like her.

Darkness is threatening and it’s started to snow when Lucy looks past the trees and sees two figures pressed into the growing shadows of Ethan Hall. The boys huddle over something held between them. One laughs, and the other reaches up to touch his shoulder.

Lucy freezes.

The way the boy touches his friend is familiar. It’s exactly the way Colin touches her, gently, preceded by a slow approach, as if he’s afraid to startle her with the contact. Narrowing her eyes, she takes in their features. The careful one is tall and broad, athletic in build. His hair blows across a tanned forehead, skin that sees sun every month of the year. Even from this distance, she can see that the other boy, the one he touched, has smooth, unblemished, skin that resembles porcelain in its clarity. Like Lucy, he lacks the small scars and imperfections that are the hallmarks of the living.

He’s like her.

Her mind turns wild at the realization, reaching for the opportunity to understand. She pushes herself forward, walking to them in only a few strides, calling out, “Excuse me!”

When they look up, terrified, and step apart immediately, Lucy realizes her mistake. They are lovers, hiding in the shadows for the privacy of an intimate conversation. Their silence is heavy with the panic of being discovered, and the living boy presses his hands to his face.

But the ghost stares at Lucy, eyes slowly widening. Stepping away from the wall, he moves toward her, wearing a smile.

She stares, unable to look away. He looks completely inhuman, unreal. But she knows she’s never noticed him before. “I didn’t—” she stammers, holding up a shaky hand.

“I’m Henry Moss.” He reaches forward and takes her hand, and it stills in his grip. “You okay there?”

His fingers are warm and feel like smooth glass. Releasing them, Lucy stumbles back a few steps before turning and falling back at the feet of her favorite statue. Her mind reels, wondering how she didn’t think to look before—that there could be another like her, here now.

After a pause, the boys follow to sit on either side of her, and Lucy can feel them exchanging a look over the top of her head, though she can’t begin to imagine what they’re thinking, given the whirlwind of her own thoughts. For a second, she wonders if they can see the surface of her skin rippling with the impact of this discovery.

“This has been the most insane twenty-four hours of my . . . life,” she says, laughing.

“Let’s start with your name,” Henry says, bumping his shoulder gently against hers.

“Lucy.” She looks over at him, searching his face for any sign of life, and can’t see it. There’s no pulse in his throat, no freckles, no scars. Nothing but perfection. He simply looks like he’s been drawn here. “You are like me, aren’t you?”

Henry smiles so widely that his bright blue eyes crinkle at the corners. “I think so.”

“Are there others like us here at Saint Osanna’s?” She hesitates. “Walkers?”

Shaking his head, he murmurs, “I haven’t seen any lately. Never really used that word to describe myself before.”

“Lately? How long have you been here?” She wants to apologize for her rapid-fire questions, but Henry seems entirely unsurprised by her hunger to know these things. She wonders if it’s possible that she’s seen Henry a hundred times in the past few months without having noticed.

“I don’t know. Sometimes I feel like I’ve been here forever. I only really remember being here for the past year and a half.”

“But you’ve heard of the Walkers?”

“I’ve heard stories, sure,” he says, shrugging. “It’s why students are told not to go down to the lake, why this place has such a creepy reputation and Halloween is this huge deal.” He presses a hand to his chest, giving her an indulgent smile. “I just assumed we were misunderstood.”

Lucy allows a small smile to escape before she remembers her biggest fear, and the question comes bubbling up abruptly: “Have you ever vanished?”

He winces sympathetically. “Happened to me a couple of times when I first got here. That was the scariest. But it hasn’t happened again for a while now.” He looks to the boy beside him, confirming, “Maybe a year, Alex?”

“At least a year,” Alex agrees.

“Really?” she asks, curiosity and vibrant hope making her voice come out thick.

Shrugging, Henry says, “I assumed it was kind of an adjustment thing.”

Relief floods her so rapidly that for a pulse she feels unsteady. Her gaze drifts back to Alex. There’s something oddly fascinating about the living boy. Henry doesn’t look quite human to her, but there’s something strange about Alex, too. She feels an eerie pull toward him. It’s different from Colin, of course, but the air around Alex isn’t empty like it is around the other students. Instead, it has almost a hypnotic hum to it.

His skin is sun-kissed, but now that she’s closer, she sees the circles beneath his eyes. And there’s something underneath, an exhaustion in the way he holds himself, bruising that pushes up beneath his skin, stiffness in his movements. It’s almost like Lucy can see through him, to a part that lies deep inside, draining him.

“Lucy, where is your Protected?” Henry asks. Lucy jerks herself back to the conversation. His eyes move over her face as she tries to understand his question.

“My ‘Protected’?”

He grins. “Sorry. It’s how I think of Alex. I mean, where’s the person you came back for?”

“You mean Colin?”

Laughing, he straightens and wipes his hands on his jeans. “I need to start at the beginning with you, don’t I?”

She presses her hands to her cheeks in what she knows to be reflexive movement, a leftover from the long-forgotten days when she would have blushed. “I’m sorry. I’m having a hard time processing some of this. I knew there had been others at one point or another. I just didn’t think I would meet any.”

“Well, partly that’s because you’re here for Colin. I don’t think it’s natural for Guardians to think that much about anyone other than our Protected. But I suspect we’re all over. We’re the kids no one ever remembers. We’re the ones no one misses at the reunion. Even I haven’t noticed you before.”

Because he wasn’t looking, she thinks.

Alex and Henry continue to watch her with the same small and patient smiles while his words hover in the air. She laughs briefly, a soft exhale. “You think we’re Guardians?”

“I do,” Henry says. “And there’s no one here to tell me I’m wrong. I didn’t know anything when I got here. I walked around, aimless. But when I found Alex, being near him didn’t just feel right; it felt critical. As in, when I left him alone, I felt I was doing something wrong.”

“Yes,” Lucy whispers, tingling down to her fingertips.

“I don’t know why he needs me, if it’s because he was sick and I make him healthy, or something else. But in the year since I found him, I feel like I finally have purpose, and lately, I feel stronger every day. Just look at him; he looks so much better, too. Something in his eyes . . . I know I’m doing what I’m here to do.”

Lucy looks to Alex again. Is that what she sees, his illness? She wonders if Henry sees it too. When she looks at Alex, she doesn’t feel quite as hopeful about his condition. She also doesn’t see anything different about his eyes. They’re blue, in the same way that hers are brown. Except to Colin.

“You’re sick?” she asks.

“Acute lymphocytic leukemia,” he says matter-of-factly. “Henry found me the week I was diagnosed.” He glances at Henry before adding, “I’m in remission now.”

“I’m so glad,” Lucy says. “But—who? Who sent us back? Why us? Why Colin and Alex?”

Henry stills her with a hand on her knee. “You’re wasting your time asking questions. I asked them every day for a year, and trust me, no one will drift down from the clouds and give you the welcome pamphlet.”

Lucy envies Henry’s certainty, and maybe the only way she’ll get it is with more time. The thought is both a relief and mildly depressing. “How much do you remember about your life before?”

“Not much,” Henry admits. “I know my name. I know I loved sports because I have brief memories of playing, or watching. But other than a flash here and there—a face, a feeling—it’s pretty blank. Nothing around here looks familiar.”

Lucy remembers waking on the trail and the instinctive way she knew where to replace someone. “So you weren’t a student here?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“We’ve gone through the yearbooks,” Alex offers. “Nothing.”

“Huh.” Lucy pulls at her lip, thinking.

“What’s ‘huh’?” Henry asks, leaning forward to catch her gaze.

“I was a Saint Osanna’s student. I died here. According to an article Colin found, I was killed at the lake. That’s where I woke up. I figured that we had this connection, which explained why I was here for him.”

“Oh. Wow,” Henry says. “I’m so sorry, Lucy.”

“But then what is the connection? Why are we both here? And why can’t we leave?”

Henry and Alex look at each other, each of them shaking their heads. It doesn’t add up. Lucy pulls her sleeves over her hands. She’s not cold, exactly, but a strange creeping sensation spreads up her arms. “How are you so sure about the Guardian thing? Don’t you ever worry you’re . . . bad?”

Henry’s roaring laugh is so surprising, Lucy actually scoots back when it bursts from him. “You think you’d come back to hurt him? Can you even imagine?”

She can’t. She shakes her head, exhaling a slow, anxious breath as she aches to let go of Maggie’s horrible suggestion. “But you’re here and Alex is still sick.” Before Henry can protest, she adds, “And yesterday, Colin fell into a frozen lake and almost died. It’s hard to feel like it’s a coincidence that it was the first time I went along with him. I sort of feel like a bad omen.”

Henry’s expression straightens. “First, Alex might have been sick, but he’s getting better. And that kid who fell in the lake is your Protected?”

She nods. “Yeah, he fell in and . . .” She starts to tell them about the trail, about being able to touch Colin as if they were made of the same thing, but for some reason, she stops. It feels too complicit somehow, as if the accident benefited her too greatly. “And I thought he was going to die,” she says instead.

“But did he?” Henry asks, smiling a secret smile that makes Lucy uneasy, as if the location of the missing puzzle piece is obvious to everyone but her.

“Well, no, but he could have.”

“I’ve heard of him,” Alex says. “We don’t hang out with the same group, but he’s known to be pretty crazy. Hasn’t he broken, like, practically every bone in his body?” He laughs. “No wonder he has you.”

“Well, yes, but—”

“Lucy, stop,” Alex says gently. His hand barely hovers over her arm, a practiced touch. “Colin’s here; he’s safe. Has it occurred to you that maybe you’re the reason he didn’t die?”