“He did. But it was my fault. When I went through, he went in after me. He didn’t even take the time to pull off all his gear.” He opened his eyes, and his gaze was stricken with an old, dull grief. “Maybe if I’d been right there, just under the surface, he’d have been able to grab hold of me and pull me out.”
“You couldn’t have helped that,” she said. “No one chooses to drown.”
His smile didn’t touch his eyes. “I was dying. I could feel it. The pain had stopped. Everything was dark. I couldn’t even see the sun anymore. And then the water around me thinned. A door opened, and I went through it. I left my brother behind to die.”
“Until I found you a week later,” Delaney said, remembering.
“It wasn’t a week for me.” He braided his knuckles tight, as though kneading out an ache. “It was longer. It was endless. It was drowning, over and over, my lungs full of ice. It was dying on repeat, until time ceased to have any meaning. It drew to a standstill. For days. Years. Eons. Until one day, it stopped.”
Her chest ached. “What happened? What changed?”
He peered up at her like he’d only just realized he hadn’t been talking to himself.
“That’s four truths,” he pointed out.
“So give me four truths.”
This time, the small curve of his smile was genuine. “I saw you,” he said. “Standing in front of me with a pebble in your hand.”
***
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Adya said, once Delaney finally managed to put herself together and arrive at the campus’s student center, “but you look different.”
She slid into an empty chair beside Mackenzie, unwinding her scarf as she went. “Different, how?”
“It’s the haircut.” Mackenzie sipped a chocolate milk through a bendy straw and sized her up, one eye pinched shut. “It could be worse, I guess. At least you didn’t give yourself bangs.”
Across the table, Adya set down her fork, annoyed. “It’s not the haircut. Lane, last time I saw you, you looked like you were prepping to play the part of ‘starved Victorian widow’ in the theater department’s fall fete.”
Delaney glowered as she pulled a stale croissant out of her bag. “That’s kind of hurtful, actually.”
“Maybe,” Adya said. “But it’s true. You were all pinched and pale and sweaty before—like you were coming down with a fever.”
Delaney flaked away layers of her croissant, her appetite gone. “And now?”
“I don’t know.” Adya trilled her nails along the aluminum can of her drink. “Now it’s like you’re in high definition, and the rest of us are stuck in low resolution.”
A slow creep of wings began to flutter through her veins. Then came the voice, low and slow.A lepidoptera comes all apart in its chrysalis before emerging into its final form.
She suppressed an unwelcome shudder, her croissant torn neatly in half.
“I think what Adya means to say,” Mackenzie said, eyeballing the mess of bread on the table, “is that you look like you’ve been kissed. And honestly, thank God. It’s been exhausting trying to pretend like you and Colton aren’t dating.”
“That’s not at all what I mean, Mackenzie,” Adya fired back, indignant, “and you know it. Look at her.Look.”
Mackenzie set down her drink and turned to peer at Delaney, inspecting her through a narrowed gaze. Delaney slid a buttery flake of croissant onto her tongue and let it sit there like a communion cracker. She felt a little bit like a glass doll on display.
Not glass, said the voice.Diamond.
“Stop,” Delaney bit out, before she could stop herself.
“Fine,” Mackenzie said, and looked away. “I was only doing what Adya told me to do. Anyway, you look like regular-definition Laney to me. Although I did talk to my mom about your, uh, issue.”
She said it like Delaney was experiencing a mild health inconvenience, and not like Delaney was being chewed up on the inside by something without a name.
“And?”
Mackenzie shrugged. “She didn’t seem all that surprised. Apparently, you’re not the first body-snatcher situation she’s dealt with, which makes me wonder what else she hasn’t told me.”
