Sublime
: Chapter 21

THIS TIME, WHEN LUCY WALKS back across campus, she barely registers that the howling wind no longer throws her across the path. Long strands of her hair whip around her face, and she pulls it back absently, lost in Alex and Henry’s words.

Guardian.

He almost died.

But did he?

She doesn’t think Colin has any idea how big a story this has been around school, and when Mr. Velasquez’s car pulls up in front of the dorm, it seems like the entire student body is camped outside. Colin looks pale and weak when he climbs out and walks to the front door, the headmaster pushing back the surge of whispering bodies to create a path forward. Lucy backs away from where she’s standing near the pond and sits on the bench where she first told Colin she died. She wishes she had even one drop of Henry’s certainty, because if she chooses not to believe him, then she’s every bit as lost as she was before.

• • •

Lucy’s grateful for the short days of winter. Sunset is at 6:08, and at 6:30 Colin is opening the dormitory door to silently let her in.

“Did you eat?” she asks once they’re in his room, door closed, music playing in the background. Jay has come in and left again, letting Lucy and Colin reconnect in relative peace.

He nods, studying her as he sometimes does, as if he can unlock her secrets with the pressure of his attention. “Dot brought me about five meals.”

Only now does it occur to Lucy that Colin could be sick, like Alex, that maybe that’s what they have in common and why each of them has attracted a ghost. But though Colin looks and feels different to her than other people, she doesn’t see the same underlying exhaustion she saw in Alex. There’s no illness draining the life from him right before her eyes. If anything, even in his weakened state, Colin seems more resilient. The air around him pulses with life. “Are you tired?” she asks, fidgeting.

“No. I feel like I’ve slept the last two days away.” He sits down on the edge of his mattress, pulling the heavy brown comforter up and over his shoulders. “And I can’t stop thinking about the lake.”

“I keep seeing you falling through. And then on the trail . . .” She tries to temper the longing in her voice, but her skin hums with the memory of what came after.

He blinks away and looks out the window. Fat snowflakes gather on his windowsill. “If I didn’t die, but I could touch you, then you must be somewhere in between too.”

“I have no idea.” She moves closer but keeps some space between them when he shivers slightly. “I don’t think I’m the only one like me at Saint Osanna’s.”

Colin turns to look at her, his face shadowed in the dark room. Bluish marks sweep heavily under his eyes, but she can see interest bloom across his expression. His lips curl into a half smile. She tells him about looking for others and finally replaceing Henry and Alex.

“They’re like us. Henry died too, and is back.”

Colin’s brow furrows, and a hundred reactions cross his features before he says simply, “And the other guy, Alex, is . . . me in this scenario?”

“Yeah, they’re together.”

“Alex Broderick? Tall, blond kid?” Colin asks, and Lucy nods. “He’s gay?”

“Do you know him?” she asks.

“Well, I don’t know him know him, but I’ve seen him around. He used to play lacrosse and stuff before he got sick. Cancer, I think.”

“Leukemia. I guess that’s when he found Henry, right after he was diagnosed.”

Colin shifts under the blankets, eyes growing heavy.

“So I’ve wondered, if I’m a ghost, then how do I move things, wear clothes, touch you? But if I’m mostly solid, how do I know I’m not some form of demon instead? Who sent me here?”

Colin nods beside her.

She tells him about how long Henry has been here, about how with Alex being sick, Henry is sure that he was sent back for him. “I’ve always felt like my heart was taken from my body, but it somehow ended up in you. I think Henry kind of feels the same way, like he’s keeping Alex safe.”

“I’m glad,” he says, leaning to kiss her cheek. “I’ve always felt safe with you. I wonder if ghosts like you are everywhere, protecting people.”

“You’re not surprised?”

“Why would I be?” he mumbles, already drifting off.

Lucy turns and looks out the window, for the first time realizing that she is the only one who is surprised by any of this.

• • •

In the middle of the night, Colin pushes the heating pads off his chest and legs and climbs out of bed. He wraps himself in about four sweaters, twitching with constant shivering. His desk chair creaks as he sits down and begins typing. It’s 2:14 in the morning.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking stuff up,” he mumbles.

“What stuff?”

“Spirit stuff. Dying.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

He scratches the back of his neck and throws her an apologetic glance over his shoulder. “Not yet. Sorry.”

She lies back to stare at his ceiling, at the tiny solar system she likes to imagine Colin meticulously sticking in place everywhere he’s lived. “You okay?”

He grunts in affirmation, and she rolls over, wishing he would come closer. She’s had a taste of what he must have felt when she was gone, and here in the dark, with him so far away, she feels a strange itch to talk some more about what he felt on the trail and what he thinks happened. It feels like a tight spring has been lodged in her chest, uncoiling slowly upward.

“Do you know how many people have had near-death experiences?” he asks, oblivious to her anxiety.

“How many?”

“Thousands. More than thousands. Most of the stuff written about it is religious. But not all. Some people think that near-death experiences are a form of hallucination, but since I know you felt everything too, we know I wasn’t hallucinating.”

She rolls back over, forcing a lighter tone. “Are you cruising around NearDeath.org?”

“No,” he says without humor. “Seriously, Luce. So many people have almost died or actually died, and seen things or experienced things like I did, and these people are fine. There’s even a Journal of Near-Death Studies. There’s a Near Death Experience Research Organization. Like, science.”

“Pseudoscience.”

“Lucy, that makes you pseudoscience.”

“I’m not near dead, Colin. I’m dead dead.”

He ignores her, and she listens to the sound of his fingers on the keyboard. They don’t seem to be cooperating, and he swears repeatedly under his breath. “You’re neither dead nor alive,” he counters. “You’ve been sent back. Or, maybe your mind has separated from your original body and has figured out a way to come back as my Guardian. And I can be like you; we know that now.”

“Not easily,” she says, growing strangely full of excited energy. She stands, feeling like she wants to take off running. “And probably not again.”

“I felt you, Luce. You felt me, too. And not in a maddening too-much-too-little way.” His tone makes the vibrations inside her grow. There’s a steely determination there she hasn’t heard before. “Are you telling me you didn’t like it?”

She’s silent, unable to speak past the strange humming in her chest. She did feel him, and he felt better than anything.

“This one guy had the same thing happen,” he continues. “Fell in a lake, hypothermia, saw the world in a way he’d never seen it before. The whole thing.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah, and he’s on this message board saying he did it again, because he wanted to know that what he saw was real.”

“You need to recover,” she says. “You’re not seriously thinking about this as a good thing, are you?”

The answering silence fills the room like rushing water. She walks closer and leans over him, reading the message board posts over his shoulder. There are thousands of entries. He follows a link and creates a user name and password.

She bends and kisses his jaw, his neck, hoping to distract him, but she can feel him grow tense under her touch.

“You need to sleep.”

“In a minute. I want to join this site.”

“I think this goes against Guardian protocol.” She tries to keep her voice light, but the words come out stiff and formal. She doesn’t want to police Colin’s activity. Even more, she doesn’t understand this strange hyperactivity that has overtaken her. “This website creeps me out,” she says instead.

He laughs at this, at the ghost girl being afraid of ghosts. “This one guy sees hypothermia almost like an extreme sport. Because of the way your cellular activity slows, brain death is the very last thing. This guy on here, ColdSport, thinks it can be done in a way that challenges the system, like biking up a big hill or running a marathon.”

He’s serious. She looks at the forum he’s logged into. There are three user names that take up most of the posts. Three crazy people out there preaching to their own tiny crazy choir. She slips her hands inside his sweaters, along his skin. “Colin, stop.”

His skin is fever hot, and he shivers beneath her palms. Standing, he reluctantly follows her back to his bed, but her mind is reeling. When he finally falls asleep, she slips over to his desk, hovers on his chair, and focuses intently on pressing each key on his keyboard to enter her search.

She replaces hundreds of stories, but shuts down the computer when she registers that none of them sound like what happened at the lake.