As I Wake (16 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Scott
Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Psychology, #Love & Romance, #Cognitive Psychology, #Law & Crime
That I was sent here because of him.
I nod because I don’t want to face Ava’s world—my new world—right now. I want to hide from what I know, what I remember, and what I’ve learned.
I’m here now, and I have to find a way to live with that. To live here.
So I don’t go to school, and spend my days with Jane. She calls in sick to work—“I’ve always wanted to do that,” she says when she gets off the phone after coughing and talking, whispery-raspy about how bad she feels—and we make chocolate chip cookies, which come out burnt; cake, which comes out lopsided; and brownies, which shrivel around the edges but stay liquid and lumpy in the middle.
And it’s fun. We puzzle over the recipes—Jane says she doesn’t cook much, and I tell her I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a recipe before—and try to figure out things like what the difference between baking powder and baking soda is, and how and why we’re supposed to do thing like “sift flour.”
“It’s like another language,” Jane says as we’re eating ice cream for dinner and watching a show about famous people talking about how famous they are. “A recipe can’t tell you to mix flour and sugar together. It has to say you need to fold them in.”
“And then mix, but don’t overmix.”
“Exactly,” she says. “How can you overmix something? And what happens if you do? I didn’t see anything about that. Did you?”
I glance at the kitchen, and then at her. She smiles at me.
I smile back.
It’s nice, being with her. The littlest things make her happy—me asking her what she wanted to be when she was my age (television star, squashed when she got a summer job at a television station and spent three months getting coffee for people), her taking me shopping and me saying, “Why are you standing out there?” when she starts to wait outside a store when I go in.
It’s nice, but at night, every night, I sleep in strange fits and starts, pulled in and out of dreams that aren’t dreams at all. The me that was is still there and remembers more all the time.
I remember:
waiting in line for food with Olivia and Greer, Sophy coming up to us and asking to wait with us, the three of us nodding and smiling. Not relaxing until we were done and she’d said good-bye.
waiting in line for food with Olivia and Greer, Sophy coming up to us and asking to wait with us, the three of us nodding and smiling. Not relaxing until we were done and she’d said good-bye.
I remember:
sitting with Greer in the park, watching her get up and walk over to Olivia when she comes in, smiling. See her sitting, hands clenched, as Sophy sits across from us in a cafeteria and asks how we are. I remember Ethan, shoulders hunched as he walks into training wearing the kind of quilted winter coat that most people have to wait years to get, how he blushes when Sophy whispers something in his ear, turns a painful, shamed red.
sitting with Greer in the park, watching her get up and walk over to Olivia when she comes in, smiling. See her sitting, hands clenched, as Sophy sits across from us in a cafeteria and asks how we are. I remember Ethan, shoulders hunched as he walks into training wearing the kind of quilted winter coat that most people have to wait years to get, how he blushes when Sophy whispers something in his ear, turns a painful, shamed red.
I remember Morgan.
I remember so much, a million moments;
attic, shadowy bar, field of brittle dying grass. His apartment, all windows and light. My own, small and dark, and how I felt seeing him there, in my rooms, my space. How he touched my face lightly, as if I was something delicate. How he touched me, as if I held something he wanted to know. As if I mattered to him.
attic, shadowy bar, field of brittle dying grass. His apartment, all windows and light. My own, small and dark, and how I felt seeing him there, in my rooms, my space. How he touched my face lightly, as if I was something delicate. How he touched me, as if I held something he wanted to know. As if I mattered to him.
As if I was—am—will always be—everything to him.
Three days after Morgan came to me at night, three days after I found out he and Clementine are bound by blood, I am back at the hospital again, having my own blood drawn for some follow-up tests. There is still confusion as to exactly how I lost my memory.
I don’t say that I know why, and neither does Jane. We just head for the fourth floor, for the lab, where we sit in a small room filled with old magazines and wait for a long time before I am beckoned back to sit and have blood drawn out of me, drained into three small tubes.
Afterward, Jane acts as if I am sick, wrapping an arm around me as we leave, asking me if I want anything once, twice.
“I’m fine,” I say and she says, “Ava, the last time you had to give blood you almost passed out. Remember how you had to drink apple juice?”
I don’t, of course, and as soon as she says it I see she knows that too. I see her bite her lip and blink once, hard. I see her think of her Ava.
“I wouldn’t mind some water,” I say, and she smiles at me, and leads me to a drinking fountain like I am made of glass.
In some ways, what she wants from me is enormous and impossible, is about finding someone in me who isn’t there and never will be. But in other ways, her want is so small, so easy to please. And simple enough—pleasant enough—for me to do. It is no hardship to have her looking out for me. To want me to be safe, to be happy.
I only ever remember Morgan wanting me to be happy. Morgan—
I push the thought away, push him away, and drink some water, then swear to Jane I will wait right where I am standing while she goes and gets the car.
“You really will wait right here, won’t you?” she says, sounding surprised.
“Why wouldn’t I? You asked me to.”
“I—thank you,” she says, and touches my hair hesitantly, gently, before she goes.
I close my eyes when she does, wondering if she ever had a chance to touch my hair like that in another place. A different here.
Nothing comes, no swimming memory that swallows me whole.
And when I open my eyes, I see Clementine standing next to the drinking fountain.
“I need to talk to you,” she says. “I—I need your help.”
I stare at her, startled. “What?”
“You heard me,” she says. “I—look, Ava, Morgan has come to see you, hasn’t he?”
“What, you don’t know? I thought you knew everything.”
“Not here,” she says, brittle-voiced. “Has he been to see you or not? I don’t—I don’t know where he is.”
“I don’t either.”
She pales. “He didn’t tell you—of course he didn’t, he’s so intent on you that he’s not thinking,” she says, almost muttering to herself, and then looks at me, fierce-eyed.
“Morgan has to go back,” she says. “If he doesn’t, he’ll vanish. And not just here. He’ll—he’ll be gone everywhere. If you’ve seen him, you’ll—you’ll know what I mean. He’s—”
“Disappearing,” I say, thinking of how the moonlight cut through him when he stood in Ava’s room. How he said
It doesn’t matter
when I asked him about it.
It doesn’t matter
when I asked him about it.
But it did. It does.
“You have seen him,” she says, and for a moment, just a moment, relief is visible on her face.
It terrifies me. Not just because it shows me that Clementine is capable of feeling, but because the thought of Morgan being gone, forever gone—
I don’t want to picture it. I don’ t even want to think about it.
“You don’t want him gone either, do you?” she says. “I see it on your face. Good.”
“Stop it,” I say, angry that she can read me so easily. That all my attempts to forget Morgan have failed. That I don’t want to forget him. “You—you sent me here, you got yourself here, you send him back. I don’t know why you—” I break off, staring at her.
“You can’t,” I say slowly. “You didn’t bring him here, and you can’t send him back, can you?”
She stares right back at me, and then looks away, stares at the water fountain.
“No,” she finally says. “I can’t send him back. I’ve tried but it—it doesn’t work. But you—if you would—”
“What, go back with him and then have you send me right back here? Or kill me to make sure this doesn’t all happen again?”
“No,” she says once more. “No, I wouldn’t—”
I laugh, bitter and sharp, and she leans in toward me, her face pinched with anger. I don’t have to remember that no one laughs at Clementine. I can tell.
“I don’t lie about what I’ll do and what I won’t do,” she says. “If you went back and I sent you here again, he’d just follow you like he has now. And as for you dying—I didn’t kill you because I saw you cared about him and now—well, now I wish I had, but if I did, he’d never—he would only try something even more dangerous, try and mess with time . . .”
She shudders. “So, no, I won’t hurt you. All you have to do is tell him you won’t come back with him. Just . . . just tell him to go. You do that and I’ll find a way to make it so this place is the only one you know.”
“I don’t want anything from you,” I say, my voice shaking with fear and anger. She could—and has—crushed my life so easily. “And I told Morgan I wasn’t gong to leave with him.”
“You have to mean it.”
“I meant—”
“No,” she says. “You didn’t. He—to get here, he had to find you, and he’s bound to you in a way I can’t unravel, that goes all over, across everything. You think about him still, I can see it, and I know he does the same. That he hopes because of it, and waits. He waits, dying, for you. Do you want that for him? Do you want him to die?”
Dying? I’d seen that he was fading, knew he didn’t fit here, and she said he was vanishing, that he’d disappear, but I didn’t—I didn’t want to believe it was so final. So forever. “He wouldn’t—”
“Of course he would,” Clementine snaps. “He was ready to throw his life away for you. I tried to stop it, but I only made things worse. To get here and stay, he’s destroying himself. He . . . he loves you, and I can’t break that. But you—if you find him, tell him he has to go, and mean it, you can. Once he can’t feel what brought him here, once you break that link between you that I—how it goes so far I don’t know. I wish I’d studied it, but I didn’t know about it. But just do this and he’ll go back. He won’t be able to fight it.”
“And he’ll live.”
“Yes,” she says, and I stare at her. He’ll live, but I’ll never see him again. I’ll be here and—
“Look,” Clementine says, and points behind me. I don’t turn and she half smiles, winter cold, at me.
“Jane’s coming,” she says. “If Morgan stays, he dies, and if you go back with him, you know I won’t rest until he’s safe, and he’ll never be safe with you as far as I’m concerned. But here—if you’re here, just you, you can have a life you’d never have, not even with Morgan. You’ll have a real home. You can go to school, to college, have a job you want. You can do—and be—anything here, Ava. Think about that.”
38.
I DO.
Clementine watches Jane and I leave, smiling at Jane’s bristled, “Are you all right?” to me, at her angry stare that Clementine absorbs like it means nothing to her.
On our way to lunch, Jane asks me if I’m all right at least four times. I say, “I’m fine,” each time and think—just for a second—about telling her about Clementine. About everything.
I don’t, but there are those moments—those seconds—where I think about it. When I think of Jane as someone the Ava I am can talk to.
Over sandwiches in a restaurant Jane says I love, decorated with pictures of people that the waitress tells me no one knows when I ask, I do think about being here. Really being here.
I don’t belong here, but I could. This world is brighter, happier, and in it I have choices. My life has not yet gotten as good as it will ever be. My future has not been mapped out by anyone, and won’t be. The choices I make will be mine to make.
I can’t quite picture it, even as part of me yearns for it.
“I think I should go back to school,” I tell Jane, and take another bite of my sandwich. It is as big as both of my fists put together. I can’t believe how easy it is to find food here. How much of it there is.
“That’s great! And maybe you’ll finally think about taking the SATs?”
“I—I have to join them here? But I—this isn’t the same, I thought I wouldn’t—” Oh no, no no, I don’t want to go through the training again, the tests. The questions. The lights in my eyes.
And then, just like that, no sleeping, no eyes flickering shut, I am in another place.
I am remembering.
I am in the bar where Morgan asked me to meet him, and he is there, sitting across from me. We are together. Hidden in a corner, in the dark of the bar—but together.
“What happened today?” I say, careful to keep my voice normal, but I’m worried. The report I read when I came in had only a terse notation covering four hours, “56-412, Search,” and nothing after.
I don’t want to think about how worried I was that Morgan wouldn’t come. That he would be gone, taken away. Disappeared by the SAT.
“Search,” he says. “I lost most of my books, a pair of boots—they fit the person who took them—and all my food coupons.”
“I have food coupons and . . .” And if I give them to him the SAT will know they are mine.
But I’d still do it.
“I’m—it’s gone beyond being listened to now,” he says.
“If anyone sees you with me, or even finds out that we’ve talked—”
“I don’t care,” I say, because I don’t, I don’t care anymore, and he stares at me.
“Ava—”
“I don’t care,” I say again, and it feels so good to say it. I am sick of hiding how he makes me feel, sick of my gray life and listening to him when I would rather be with him. Sick of pretending everything is the same when it isn’t. I know what it’s like to wake up in the morning, every morning, with a smile in my heart.
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