Second Thoughts (31 page)

“You're
crazy.”

I'd forgotten for a moment we were still in a fight, that anything I said would cut deeper than usual. But Amy hadn't. She exploded, sitting up on her bed and spearing me with narrowed eyes that filled with angry tears.
“I'm
crazy? What the hell would you know about it, you and your perfect relationship? Your boyfriend is ready to follow you
anywhere.
You have no idea, Lane.
No idea.”

No idea? Who the hell was
she?
I had
every
idea and then some. Amy was shouting, her words no doubt echoing through the building, and I should have known better. I should have stopped myself and not let her get to me and been the bigger person. Whatever. I should have done a million other things besides what I did next.

“Perfect relationship?!” I shouted back.
“You've
got the perfect relationship and don't even realize it! I'd
love
your new biggest problem—your boyfriend's going to be a few hours' plane ride away. Oh, how tough. You poor thing. At least he's not going to
kill you.
Try dealing with that!”

Amy's sniffling stopped abruptly. “What?”

Oh. Shit. “Nothing. I was just joking.”

“No you weren't.”

“I—”

“You're the worst liar in the world, Lane. Your cheeks give you away every time. What the hell are you talking about? You said
kill you.”

“You're right. I did say that.”

She'd shifted on the bed and sat on the edge, looking at me with a baldly worried expression—completely the opposite of only a few seconds ago. “Someone…someone's. Is someone
threatening
you? What's going on?!”

I was so sick of everything. Of lying, of discretion, of choosing between my
friends
and my heredity and having it be my
heredity
that was winning. Sick of secrets. The only person I trusted more than Amy was Carter, and he was scheduled to kill me.

To hell with it all.

With a sigh, I said, “Are you sitting down?” despite that I was looking right at her. When I realized I was standing, I sat down myself.

Her eyes were wide and dry now. “If I could sit down any more than I am, I get the impression I probably should.
Is
someone threatening you, Lane? Is it—is it
Carter?
Is he…is
that
why you always seem so secret-secret together? Why you, no offense, kind of look like shit lately?”

“No!” I whipped my head back and forth. “It's—No. Carter's not…you'll understand in a second. And no one's threatening me. No, wait. That's not even true. Mandi Worthington”—Amy's eyes narrowed again—“is sort of threatening me, but she—”
doesn't even matter,
I was going to stay, which wasn't just insensitive, it was wrong. Completely, utterly wrong.

It finally dawned on me what Mandi was
really
doing and she did matter. A whole lot. She was ruining Amy's relationship. On purpose.
On purpose
on purpose. Not just because she was a Siren, but because it was also destabilizing me and
our
relationship. Alienating me and my best friend and pushing me toward making a choice. In a flash, I remembered
the art unveiling, pictured the arm around her shoulder and her beaming smile up at her family's old friend.

Jesus. Where did the manipulations end? Everything Brooke had said made sense now.

“Lane? I'm getting scared here. I need you to talk to me.”

“You're right,” I said, looking straight into her pretty brown eyes, which were round with fear but still determined. “I'm so sorry,” is how I started.

And then I told her.

S
HE LISTENED.
I have no idea how long I talked, but it was a long time. By the end, I'd wrapped pieces of my hair around my finger enough times that it was curling. My throat was dry and I wished I had a glass of water. And a shot of something stronger. I was exhausted by the telling, but felt better,
lighter
than I had in…a really long time. Possibly since the day so long ago when I first glimpsed Ashley Thayer's death.

After some creative cursing, some scientific questions I really couldn't answer, and a few assurances that no, I wasn't kidding, she said, “So let me get this straight: Carter Penrose is, somehow, going to kill you, and you're still not only dating him, but sleeping with him on a regular basis. He's either the best lover ever or you're crazy.”

“It can't be both?”

“Yeah, actually, it can totally be both. Wow. This is like…Romeo and Juliet, who I thought were idiots, except
you're
the idiot.”

“Thanks.”

“No, seriously.”

“It's not as simple as leaving him. Besides which, I don't want to.”

“I rest my case.”

I didn't tell her
everything,
not about Senator Astor or Mark Penrose or the specifics of my impending death, but pretty much everything
else. It was a lot to take in, far more than I'd had to deal with, but, “You're really taking this…well. Like, unnaturally well.”

Amy came to sit next to me. “Honestly Lane, I've always known you're different, and this school and Carter were…something else, so. This maybe isn't as surprising as you think. Plus, you forget I'm amazing.”

I looked at her for a moment and then, tentatively, hugged her. When she embraced me back, I told her, “I never forgot.”

“I'm sorry, too,” she replied.

We stayed like that for a while, hanging on to each other and letting the wounds we'd caused heal themselves. After a while I said, “You kind of look like shit lately too, you know.”

Amy drew back and
smiled
at me. Genuinely smiled at me. She did still look pretty bad, what with the crying and confessing and the burdensome story I'd just told her, but her smile was the nicest thing I'd seen in a while. “Yeah, I know. Finally lost ten pounds though! And you know what? I feel better now. I'm
not
crazy. That stupid little Sententia bi—”

“Don't
say it out loud! Jesus, Amy.”

“I say ‘bitch' all the time.”

“We're in enough trouble as it is, if Dr. Stewart ever finds out everything I just told you and she probably will!”

I stared at her until she relented. “Okay, I get it. Don't talk about Fight Club.”

“Thank you.”

“But seriously?” She got up and went to her dresser, picking up her hairbrush to run it slowly through her hair. “I wish you'd told me sooner.”

I sighed. “So do I. But I…hope you understand. Why I didn't. I still shouldn't have.”

“I know. ‘Discretion is the better part of valor' or some shit. Prince Hal was kind of dink, you know? You should get a better motto.”

“It wasn't my choice.”

She brushed her hair a few more times and stopped. “I'm going to bust her pretty little nose.”

“Please don't. Or wait until after graduation.”

“She's probably with my boyfriend right now.”

“I'm sorry.” And I was. I told her how I'd warned him, and Carter had too, as best we could.

“He's such an idiot.”

“He's human.”

She paused to look at me. “Are you?”

“As far as I know. It's just genetics, plus a little bit of help from God or the Universe or whoever.”

We were quiet for a few moments, me toying with the laces of my sneakers I still hadn't taken off and trying to figure out just how much trouble I would get in for this, Amy probably thinking about how gratifying it would feel to break Mandi Worthington's bones. When that got old, Amy grabbed her desk chair and sat backwards on it in front of me.

“Tell me again about the dying, if you would. Because I don't want that to happen.”

I told her how soon it was, and Amy put her fingers to her lips and looked away. After a deep breath she said, “So why don't you just not do whatever it is that's going to make that happen? It must be some kind of accident, right? Cater would never…”

I shook my head. “It's more complex than that.”

“You really think you can…change it?
When
it's happening?”

“We did it once before, over the summer.” I told her the story.

“Really?
When was that?”

“The day we went to the beach.” Her expression told me what a terrible and obvious answer that was. I cleared my throat. “The night we almost…”

She laughed. “Ah ha. That explains the red cheeks. And the very un-Lainey-like recklessness you exhibited. Don't you wish you'd just, you know, done it then?”

No, I didn't wish that, not really. Well, kind of. But mostly: “It wasn't how I wanted it to happen, so, no.”

After another while of sitting next to each other with the comfort we hadn't shared in weeks, Amy broke the silence again. “Lane?”

“Yeah?”

“So you did that to Ferny?” We both looked at the plant, who was denuded to an alarming degree and looked rather pathetic in his corner. Despite the damage I continued to inflict on him, he was still hanging on.

“I'm sorry,” I said for about the thousandth time of the night, though I meant every one of them.

She nodded. “At least that wasn't my fault. I take care of my boy. But I thought maybe he was just…reflecting my mood.” With barely a moment's hesitation, she held out her hand, letting it hang in the space between us. “Try it on me. Your idea. Instead of killing my plant some more and not
really
testing it.”

“Amy—”

“Just do it, Lane. I trust you.”

No matter what she'd said before, she
was
crazy. I didn't trust myself. Her
mind,
maybe her life, was at stake. I'd told her about my theory, even about how her relationship, Mandi's meddling and something Caleb had said, was instrumental in my figuring it out, but I
wasn't
ready to test it. I wasn't sure I—

She interrupted my thinking before I could hyperventilate. “Listen. I get the risks, but you need a human subject and
I trust you.
I
know
you,
too. This is a thing you've never done before. You'll
never
try it unless I make you. Do it.”

She shook her hand at me and I reached forward, grasping her around the wrist, where I could feel her pulse beating behind my fingers. I was shaking, but I held on.

It was the determination in Amy's eyes that did it. Excitement might have been a better word. She
wanted
to be part of this. I could see it. It was easy to forget that she was a genius, and a huge science nerd, and this was her passion. She was about to become a catalyst, Subject 1 in an experiment that had never been attempted before. And because it was Amy, I could
not
fail.

I licked my lips. “Ask me about a secret you'd like to know.
Any
secret.”

She grinned wickedly before asking exactly what I knew she would and I told her.

A second later, I made her forget.

U
nfortunately, it would take more than one Thought to undo all the damage between Amy and Caleb. I wasn't honestly sure they could. Amy was trying again, coming back to herself more every day. But it wasn't something that could happen overnight, and was made more difficult by the restrictions she was still under.

And also by the continued presence of Mandi Worthington. She had no interest in going away, and poor, beleaguered Caleb didn't necessarily want her to. He was under her spell, but worse, he'd fallen out of Amy's. It was a new game I played, keeping Amy away from Mandi with the threat of the Honor Board's warnings my constant refrain.

Spring break came and went, and Amy and Caleb didn't speak the entire time. My roommate was despondent by the time we returned to campus, sinking back into the bitter abyss she'd only recently started to pull herself out of.

“I'm telling him tomorrow,” she announced. She lugged her bag of fresh laundry up the stairs in front of me, with her graduation dress in its garment bag thrown too casually on top of it.

“You can't.”

“This isn't even my secret and it's ruining my life! I'm telling him.”

We argued our way into our room, where I closed the door behind us and rounded on her. I wanted to tell her that one boy wasn't her whole life, but who was I to talk? Instead, I said, “That's not fair.”

“Yeah?” Amy hung her dress in the closet with enough force to remove the wrinkles she'd created on the way from the car. “Well,
life's
not fair! Heard that one?”

I stared at her. “You're kidding me, right?” My life was, as she knew, approaching its possible end.

“Shit.” She looked at her feet and took a deep breath. “I'm sorry. But I
have
to tell him. I can't let it end like this.”

“It's
not over
yet.”

But one way or another, it was about to be.

“L
AINEY,
I'
M SORRY
,” Ms. Kim said. “We have to wrap this up. I have a session with Amanda right now.”

“Oh, this late, huh?” I closed my notebook and capped my pen. “I think we're all set anyway.”

At our dorm meeting, Ms. Kim had told us it was her last year in Marquise and asked if anyone would help her organize an end-of-year-and-goodbye party. I volunteered. Distractions were key to my sanity while I waited for graduation, and Daniel Astor, to arrive.

Amy thought I was crazy, that I should be
doing things
—whatever they were—to prevent what was going to happen, but I didn't want to explain that I couldn't. I needed to confront him, and I needed it to be a surprise,
my
surprise. So I told her I
was
doing things—I was
living,
for as long as I had left.