She shut her eyes. The rush of her pulse was dizzying. “What happened to him?”
He didn’t answer. For several long minutes, she sat curled into her pillows and listened to the buzz of the open line. The shadows around her bed blinked up at her.
“Did you know,” Colton finally said, “that goalie pads weigh fifteen pounds per leg?”
She wasn’t entirely sure she’d heard him correctly. “What?”
“Goalie pads,” he repeated. There was a rasp to his words, the edges scraped raw. She wished she could see his face. “Hockey gear. Padded shorts, shin guard, kick boots. Fifteen pounds on each side. That’s thirty pounds of weight, easy. Not to mention the chest protector, neck guard, helmet, and hand mitts. In the end, you’ve got a goalie carrying about fifty extra pounds of equipment on the ice.”
She drew up her covers. “I didn’t know you liked hockey.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh.”
“It’s just that you can’t swim,” he said, “with all that equipment.”
Silence rose up again, dense and somnolent. She thought of the boy in the water, the way he’d clutched at her coat. “Don’t let go.”
“Colton.” Her throat felt dry. “Did he drown? Your brother?”
A pause followed, long enough to be uncomfortable. “Yes.”
Every student at Godbole was there, he’d told her, because they had a brush with death. He’d never told her how he’d almost died, but she knew the rumor—that when Colton Price stepped through worlds, it felt like he was drowning.
She could feel that she was encroaching on something deeply private—was aware that her line of questioning was entirely inappropriate. And yet she had to know.
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Did you drown, too?”
This time, the answer came immediately, lashing out of him like a reflex. “Yes.”
She bit her lip, hard enough to hurt. Impossible. It was impossible. “I told you the story about the boy in the water. About skipping pebbles at Walden Pond. You sat there and listened and you didn’t say a thing.”
A pause followed, barely perceptible. Then, “What’s your favorite flower?”
The sudden change in topic left her spinning out like a top. “What?”
“Your favorite flower,” he repeated. “You said you don’t like roses, but there are over four hundred thousand types of flowering plants.” He spoke in a slur, his words running all together. “It’d be easier if you told me which you liked to save me from having to buy them all.”
“Colton.”
“Mmm, yes?”
Petrie crept into bed, silent on padded paws, and pressed the top of his head into the underside of her chin. Misgiving stole through her. She wanted to tell him to focus. To stop evading the truth. Instead, she asked, “Did you take something?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Why?”
“I have a headache.”
Uneasiness bored into her. Drawing Petrie into her chest, she curled into a ball beneath her covers, staring up at the winking fairy lights until they stretched into streaky starbursts of gold. She thought about Colton alone in his bed on the other side of Boston, about how neatly she’d fit against him back in the hotel. The shadows fell, momentarily quelled, carpeting the floor out of sight. She closed her eyes.
She couldn’t stop herself wishing for him.
