Sleeping was out of the question, and the only thing to do was move. I stood up. Went through the wardrobe again. Touched the walls and pulled off the framed paintings on them. Both were of clocks—one melting, one covered in pink and blue glitter. I even went through all the shampoo bottles and the makeup items hidden under the vanity table.
Nothing interesting—until I opened the bedside drawer and looked inside. A single item, white, no bigger than half my thumb. I reached for it—a small mushroom made of what could have been some kind of a stone. It felt like velvet under my fingers, warm velvet.
“Where did you come from?” I asked it, like I expected an actual answer. But with the way things were looking in my life since I woke up here, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the thing spoke. If cats could, why not this?
It didn’t, though. The tiny mushroom was comfortable in the palm of my hand. Almost…familiar. That’s why I took it with me when I sat on the bed again.
The sky outside my windows had started to turn a deep grey with the unrising sun. The clocks on the nightstands said it was six s.b. I knew I should sleep but I was terrified to close my eyes. Just a little longer.
The mushroom helped. I don’t know why it comforted me. The tiny weight against my palm was like a presence. I wasn’tentirelyalone. There was a tiny mushroom made of white stone hidden in my fist.
Such a strange concept.
The only thing I hadn’t looked through yet was my sketchbook, and I wasn’t sure why a part of me was so reluctant to pick it up. I did, though. There was nothing else to do.
I picked up the sketchbook and it was like Iheardthe memories rushing to get to me before they hit some invisible barrier. They were close but unable to reach me just now, and I couldn’t tell you why. It couldn’t be the sketchbook—I was sure it was completely empty because it was new. I hadn’t drawn anything on it since I bought it. That is, that I remembered.
Then I pulled open the cover and saw a heart.
I didn’t usually draw hearts. In fact, I doubted I’d ever drawn a heart before. I was always more interested in recreating living things—people, animals, flowers. Yet here, on the very first page of a new sketchbook I’d bought for the Turning Trials, I’d drawn a large, mechanical heart, the shape of it perfectly symmetrical. The lines were thicker, darker than I usually made them, but they were mine. The shadows, the hard and the soft lines—all of it was mine. I knew it just like I would know my reflection in any mirror.I’ddrawn all these interlocking gears and cogs of all sizes that fit together seamlessly.
“Why?” I asked the sketchbook next. At this rate I was going to start talking to walls soon.
The sketchbook didn’t answer, but each stroke of my pencil on the creamy white page whispered words I couldn’t even begin to understand.
Then I turned the page and stopped breathing altogether.
I’d drawn hair.
Short hair.
Curly hair that I felt against my fingers as my eyes traced the lines and the shadows.
March’s hair, and I’d know it just as if I were looking right at him.
My hand shook as I turned another page. Two hands this time. A bigger hand wrapped around a smaller one that I could barely see.
March’s hand. Undoubtedlyhishand around another.Mine?
Another page, this one almost completely black with shadows. The outline of a man leaning against a wall was clearly visible. Wide shoulders, narrow hips, arms crossed, the face blank, but the outline of that jaw.
March—exactly as he had been leaning against that tree last morning when he followed me outside.
It should have been impossible. I turned the next page and on it was an eye bigger than the palm of my hand. A single eye made of lead, yet Isawthe colors: red and brown and every shade in between.
On the next was the other eye, a different shape, and the eyeball of this one was made out of gears. A mechanical eye.
There were more.
An arm. Smiling lips. Curly hair again.
All twenty drawings some part of March.
Something dripped on the page as if to nudge me, to pull me out of my trance. It was a tear.Mytear. I was crying.
But when I turned another page, I stopped.
The next drawing was of an object about as big as my hand, shaped like a droplet, with gears and strings of metal wrapped around it, caging in this round piece of glass. I knew this because I knew how I drew glass surfaces, and that little ball had something in the very middle. Maybe a spark or some kind of light? I couldn’t be too sure.
