As I Wake (18 page)
Authors: Elizabeth Scott
Tags: #Fantasy, #Fiction, #General, #Juvenile Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Psychology, #Love & Romance, #Cognitive Psychology, #Law & Crime
That was—is—everything.
Morgan talked to me like I was his equal. Like we were the same. Like I mattered, and past the first rush of him knowing I was listening and him seeing it, wanting to understand it, wanting to be inside it, subvert it, he saw me. He could have come once, twice, and left. But he kept coming back.
He came back for me.
Then—and now.
“Ava?” he says, but it’s not him, it’s Ethan, and we are still in school, still in this bright shiny world of plenty. I am here, I have this life now, in this place, and Morgan—
Morgan will die if he stays. If I don’t make him go.
The bell rings, stopping whatever Ethan was going to say, and I avoid him and Greer and Olivia and Sophy for the rest of the day, thinking of Morgan.
Thinking of what I have to do.
That night, I lie awake in Ava’s bed until the stars are high and bright in the sky. And then I get up and walk downstairs just like I did that first night. I walk outside, onto the road, just like I did that first night.
But I don’t wonder where I am. I don’t wonder who I am. I know that—I know all of it now, or at least know enough to understand what I have to do.
“Morgan,” I say, barely a whisper because I don’t want to break the silence, the night, I don’t want—
“Ava,” he says, and I close my eyes.
I don’t want to do what I’m going to, but I have to do it. I don’t—I would rather stay here, alone with only my memories than have him die. I can’t—
I can’t bear the thought of that. I can’t—he can’t die because of me.
I open my eyes.
I look at him.
41.
MORGAN LOOKS LIKE A GHOST
, the dark only highlighting what was hinted at when I saw him before. He’s faded around the edges, as if his face and hair and arms and legs have been smoothed into the air around him. As if he’s being erased.
, the dark only highlighting what was hinted at when I saw him before. He’s faded around the edges, as if his face and hair and arms and legs have been smoothed into the air around him. As if he’s being erased.
“It’s not as bad as it looks,” he says, and smiles at me, a wry twist of his mouth that I remember. That I love. I want to think
loved
, but it isn’t past. It isn’t gone. My heart still knows him.
loved
, but it isn’t past. It isn’t gone. My heart still knows him.
I would know him anywhere. Would love him anywhere. And in the world I knew, the one we lived in, the one I remember, he might have told me the truth of who his family was one day. He might have made the choice to tell me.
He might not have. I don’t know. I can’t know. I’ll never know, but now I understand why Morgan didn’t tell me. I understand his fear. I feel it.
Now I have to make my own choice and it’s—
I don’t want to make it. I don’t want him to go.
I take a deep breath, then another. It still hurts, deep down in my chest, in my heart, when I speak.
“You can’t stay here,” I say.
“But you’re here,” he says, as if that’s all that matters, as if I don’t see what’s happening to him. As if he doesn’t want to see it.
“Do you . . . do you know who told Clementine about me? Who sent her to find me when you and I—?” I say and then stop, because I know the answer. I see it in the ghostly shimmer that marks where solid skin of his shoulders should be.
I see it because he’s here.
“No,” he says. “I’ve asked her, but she says she’ll only tell me after I go back. When I can’t—when I won’t be here. I wish . . . if I could do it again, I’d tell you about her, I swear. If I had, you wouldn’t be here.”
He shoves his hands in his pockets and blows out a breath. “You might not have wanted to be with me but I—at least you would still be there. I can’t . . . I can’t live in a world that doesn’t have you in it. I don’t want to live—”
“Stop,” I say, my whole body shaking. “I’m not—no one is worth this, what you’re doing.”
“Ava—”
“I wouldn’t do it for you,” I say, and the words come out strong and clear, echo into the night. Sound almost true, even though they aren’t.
“You have,” he says. “You could have turned me in a dozen times or more, starting from the first time we met, but you didn’t. You wanted to be with me. I wanted—I want—to be with you. This place—I see the beauty in it. The warmth. But I can’t feel it, and I don’t . . . even if I could fit in here, I wouldn’t want to. It’s not—it’s not home. Don’t you feel that too?”
I shake my head but I do feel it, I have felt it with every breath I’ve taken since I woke up in a bed I didn’t know, found myself in a place where I belonged but was not—and can never be—from.
“Liar,” he says, and when I look at him, he’s grinning, a smile I know, that makes my blood sing inside me, every beat of my heart reminding me of what I know. What I remember. How the only happiness I’ve ever known—the only real happiness—was with him.
I look at him, and he is so pale. So close to disappearing. To death. He would die for me.
And he will, if he stays.
“I don’t—it’s not easy for me here,” I say, careful to keep my voice steady. To not show how much each word costs me. “But I could fit in. I could be something more than I ever was before. Be someone. I know you’re sorry about everything, and I—we—lived in a place where trust wasn’t easily given. I understand why you didn’t tell me about Clementine, I do, but I don’t—I don’t want to go back. I don’t want you.”
He stares at me, and his eyes are full of memories I know, that we share. The world we lived in and more and more and more beyond. Forever. Always.
His eyes are full of love, and I see, finally, that he didn’t tell me about Clementine because he didn’t think he had a choice. He knew who I was, he knew where I’d been, where I’d come from. He’d known I’d see Clementine’s power and be afraid. So he made his choice, and when it sent me here, he came.
He loved me—loves me—enough to be here now. He came, waiting and hoping for me to remember my life, remember him. He came here, hoping I’d understand.
He’s dying just to say he is sorry.
“Go home,” I say, my voice sharp, and I want him to, I do, because I don’t want him to die. Not ever and not—not over me. Not because of me.
“Come with me,” he says softly, and takes a step toward me. When he touches my hands I know I should pull away but I can’t. Just this once, just for this moment, let me—
I can see my hands through his.
I pull mine away, curl my fingers into my palms, digging my nails into my skin. Force myself to look at him.
“No,” I say. “I’m here and if we go back, Clementine will—she’ll still be there. We won’t be safe, not ever. What we had is . . . it’s gone.”
“Gone?” he says. “We’re forever, Ava. Don’t you remember how we both saw—”
“Stop,” I say, but my voice is shaking.
“If we go back, it would be different. I know it would be. I would do anything—”
I take a deep breath. I close my heart.
It hurts.
“Then listen to me,” I say. “I can have—I do have a future here. A real one. Go back and let me—let me have that.”
He looks away from me then, stares at the road I saw when I woke up and didn’t know where I was.
“This is what you want? Where you want to be?”
“It’s where I am,” I say. “I can’t live in my memories anymore. I can’t—I don’t want you haunting me.”
“Ava,” he says, and I shake my head, saying “no” without words because if he says anything else I will break, I will beg him to stay, or I will go with him, and I do not want to be that weak.
I don’t want him to die. I don’t want to go back and have this happen once more.
I don’t think I’m strong enough to send him away again.
I never knew what love was until Morgan, and he shouldn’t die for that. Loving Morgan means letting him go. Love—real love—can’t be defined. It just is.
It just lives in your heart, like he lives in mine.
“Go,” I say, and this time, finally, I mean it. I want Morgan to live more than anything else. I want it more than the pain of my own heart, breaking.
“You—you mean it,” he says, and his voice is barely a stunned, broken whisper.
I don’t have to say yes. I just walk away from him. I walk back to Jane’s house. To the room that is mine now. To the life that waits for me.
I think I hear him say my name, once, but I don’t look back. I keep walking.
Inside Ava’s room—my room, now, I have to think my room—I climb into bed. I close my eyes. All I see is him.
I get up and walk over to the window. I look out at the road.
It’s empty now.
“Morgan,” I say, a whisper, and then again, louder. “Morgan.”
There is no answer, and I know there won’t be anymore.
Morgan is gone. He’ll be safe now. He’ll live.
I’ll never see him again.
I don’t cry. I can’t. It hurts too much, and I’m afraid that if I start, I’ll never stop.
42.
MORGAN IS GONE,
and now Clementine is too.
and now Clementine is too.
Jane is the one who tells me, says she heard Clementine moved away two nights after I told Morgan to go.
“Moved?” I say, and Jane nods.
“Apparently she called the hospital and said she’d bought a home in some retirement community out West, and was leaving right away.” She pauses for a moment. “Is she—is she gone for real? Back to where—?”
I nod. Neither of us finish Jane’s sentence, say “Where she was from.” Where I used to be.
“Did you—did you see her before she went?” Jane says after a long moment, and I look at her.
“I heard you . . . you went out the other night,” she says. “And when you came back you looked . . .”
She stops then, and I know why. I’d looked nothing like her Ava then. I’d looked broken in a way she doesn’t understand.
“I didn’t see her,” I say.
Jane nods, and tentatively reaches for me, touching her hands to mine. “Are you . . . are you all right?”
No. A thousand, a million, a billion times no.
But I am here, and Jane—I don’t remember this Jane, but I remember another one and Clementine knew what she was doing when she sent me here. I feel a connection to Jane. I had a mother, once, briefly, and it was Jane. And now, here, she’s in my life. Wants to be with me.
“I’m fine,” I tell her, and am rewarded with a happy smile, with Jane’s joy. And it—it doesn’t make me into the Ava that was here but it—I like seeing Jane happy.
I like knowing I can do that.
It could be enough, maybe, or at least a start, but the problem is that at night I tumble into dreams that aren’t dreams at all. I tumble into memories and wake up aching for a dying world and a quiet, cold life that offered me nothing but sitting in a still room.
I wake up and think of Morgan, who is gone.
Who I sent away.
I like Jane, I do, but I am tired of her Ava’s life, of the routine of school and friends who say and do things that are beyond my understanding. I am tired of watching Greer and wondering why she doesn’t see what is obvious, wonder why she can’t see happiness waiting for her with Olivia.
I am tired of Sophy and how her barely hidden rage makes my skin crawl. I am sure she did something that led Jane’s Ava to harm now, but I cannot figure out how she did it.
I’m not worried about stopping it, though. This Sophy is nothing like the one I remember, wears her longing for power so strongly I am surprised no one else sees it. But then, this place is so much about how things look, and not how they are.
Morgan would be nothing here, would be seen and ranked as “average” by Greer and Olivia, would disappear into the school, the world that is supposed to be mine. No one would see the sly humor in his eyes, his smile. No one would see that he watches the world and understands it even as he can see past it.
No one would notice the freckles sprinkled across his face, dotting his nose and his cheeks, and want to kiss them like I do.
Did. I did. I don’t want to do that anymore.
I can’t.
That night, I lie in Ava’s bed and look out her window. There is a gap between the top of her curtains and the glass, a gap where the stars shine through. I lie there and watch them.
I am used to not sleeping now. I was used to it before only I don’t—won’t—ever wake up to see Morgan and—
Push it away, push it away. He is safe now, and so am I.
I yawn and feel my eyes grow heavy. I roll onto my side and close my eyes. I pretend Morgan’s face is not all I see as I drift off to sleep, but it is.
I think it always will be.
43.
WAKE UP.
I do, gasping, but for once I’m not in a dream that’s a memory, I’m here, in this place, but I feel—
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