“Did it?”
Nora gives me a tight-lipped, pained smile.
“Some days, I wake up and it feels like that first day all over again. Honestly, it was Paige who pulled me back. I wasn’t really old enough, but she gave me this job. Finn and I were in here all the time when we were kids. She said it’d give me something to do, or focus on, that wasn’t him and his case. She let me talk about him. Tell stories that made it feel like he was still here. And I guess it stopped feeling like I’d disappeared with him.”
“Sometimes,” I say, “I feel like I died on that road, too.”
She falls silent for a moment, and I risk a glance. The hollow canyon in her eyes is almost too painful to look into.
Her smile turns genuine and a little crooked. “But you didn’t. So now what?”
But I didn’t.
Nine
The crash isn’t like inthe movies.
The scenes are always the same. The parents in the front seats are fussing over a map or the navigation, and the kids are yelling or bickering in the back seat. Someone turns, usually the driver, to shush them. The audience sees what the driver doesn’t: a patch of ice or a deer leaping into the road.
Everything slows down. The sound cuts out. Glass hangs in the air and bodies lift gracefully off seats. And then it cuts to black.
When Harper and I crash, there is no warning. We aren’t even talking. She’s singing along to the old CD I found in this car when I got it off the used-car lot. I’m drumming my fingers on the wheel. It’s an entirely unmemorable moment.
Until it isn’t. Until we’re skidding, spinning, crashing through the road barrier.
It’s like every organ is trying to tear out of my body—the drop on a roller coaster times a thousand. I think Harper is screaming, or maybe I am. The stereo is still playing.
Then we hit the bottom of the ditch. It happens in a second, maybe two. So fast, it doesn’t even become reality until everything goes still again. There is no fade to black, no escaping even for a moment. I am awake through it all.
Upside down. I am upside down. Hanging from my seat belt. Pain erupts throughout my body, every kind I can think of. Sharp and stinging, hot and blazing, dull and throbbing. Pain I didn’t even know existed. The kind you can taste. The kind that burns away who you are, who you’ve been, and leaves nothing behind.
The road. The CD. The crunching metal. Impact. The images return to me slowly, but not like my own reality, like a movie I saw a long time ago. Not mine. It can’t be mine.
Beneath me is a sea of glass and dashboard. Blood, too. More blood than I’ve ever seen. It’s darker than I expected. Staining the snow.
We are both bleeding. But I’m the only one moving.
A loud, piercing shriek rings in my ears. It takes a long time to realize the person screaming is me.
And then the lines between memory and dream blur, and the perspective changes, like a camera panning to the side, to outside the car. I am no longer inside but flying above.
A girl stands amid the destruction, wearing a dark blue hospital gown, barefoot in the bloody snow. Her chin lifts, dark brown eyes finding mine. Her hair is a snarl of strawberry blond curls hanging halfway down her torso.
I have seen her before. Not on this stretch of road but somewhere else.
Find me, she says, her voice as thin as the cold wind. Then she lunges toward me with her hands outstretched, crying, and I’m hit with a wave of hot, fiery rage and sharp terror. It rushes over my skin, into every pore, threatening to swallow me whole.Sheis going to swallow me whole.
Find us.
I jerk upward, damp with sweat, my cheeks sticky with tears.
Only a dream. It’s only midnight, so I’ve been asleep less than two hours. Plenty of time for my subconscious to torture me, apparently.
I swing my legs over the end of the bed, sweeping the sweat off my skin and flicking the hair off my forehead.
It takes a few seconds to realize one of the shadows in the room doesn’t belong—it isn’t a shadow at all.
There is a boy standing in the center of my room. The same one I saw in the kitchen.
