Intrinsical (23 page)

“
Yara, please listen.”

“
No, you are going to try to make me feel better and I refuse to let myself feel that way.” I realized I was having a tantrum of sorts, but I couldn’t bring myself to care.

“
Oh, you refuse, do you?” He queried with slight amusement. Suddenly Brent was in my thoughts.

You can’t shut me out. You’ll hear what I have to say. It’s normal to feel that way.

My eyes popped open and I dropped my hands to my side. “Do you really think so?”

“
I’m very aware of your emotions. You love her. I know you don’t want her to forget you— but even more than that, you want her to be okay.”

“
I do?” I looked at him with relief, knowing I couldn’t hide things from him. I hoped he wasn’t just telling me what I wanted to hear.

His eyes communicated with complete honesty the truth of what he said. “You do.” He made sure I was walking beside him as he headed back toward Cherie. “If you don’t go and see her while you can, it will haunt you for the rest of your . . . existence. I don’t think I could bear that. Remember that your pain is mine now, too.” We were at the fire escape again. “For both of us, please go see her.”

I turned toward Brent. “Aren’t you coming?”

“
Nah. I’ll give you some privacy. Besides I can always watch the repeat tonight in your thoughts.”

He turned toward the groves with a quiet whistle. As he walked, I felt some sort of sadness in him that I hadn’t noticed before. Part of me felt the need to go to him and comfort him the same way he had for me since I died. A small ache formed in my stomach as I stood watching him, hearing his tune carried toward me on the wind. I hadn’t been this far from him since my death and I missed him. The string that connected us was stretching further than ever and it hurt me; I needed to be closer to him. I took a step down the stairs and at that moment he turned back toward me.

My hazel eyes found his brown ones. Suddenly, even though he was more than thirty feet away, I could feel Brent’s hand lightly caress my cheek. I looked at him from across the distance separating us; he hadn’t moved an inch. He was watching me with his thumbs still casually resting in the pockets of his pants. Only the intense look in his eyes betrayed that he was doing anything besides just standing there.

Could he really touch me from so far away?
In awe, I raised my unsteady hand to my face where I could still feel his gentle, lingering touch. Our fingers intertwined for a second, and I smiled at Brent, enjoying the sheer impossibility of the moment. His touch was so tender, so caring that I felt my face flush.

Brent sensed my blush and I detangled our hands in confusion. I looked away, befuddled at the stirring of emotions arising in me. He was still watching me as I cleared my throat and looked up at him again.

He looked different, more content, wearing a calm smile as he whispered, “Go.” Bewildered by the moment, I nodded. He turned away, whistling again, a song that sounded much happier than it had before.

The connection between Brent and me was stretched taut, causing me a twinge of bearable pain. I turned back toward her window and paused, preparing myself. Taking a deep breath I climbed through.

The room was stripped bare of both Cherie’s belongings and mine. I took in the complete emptiness of my former room with an overwhelming feeling of having been blotted out. It was like I had never been there, my time at Pendrell totally erased like the click of a delete button. Without our personal items, the room was as stark and bleak as my mood.

I scooted myself onto my old desk, feeling completely insignificant. The faint scent of Cherie’s perfume still lingered, but all other traces of our time here were gone. My hand brushed the bare wall beside me, and I smiled as I the felt tiny holes where I had tacked up pictures and the sticky remnants of hot glue that I had used to hang up posters, proof that I had once been here.

Brent slinked through the window, leaning on the its edge. “I was worried . . . you felt so sad. I can go,” Brent said, half crawling back out.

“
Please don’t.” I crossed my feet, the point of my heel scratching the top of the opposite foot. I patted the small space beside me on my desk. Brent backed in next to me and reached over taking my hand in his. His thumb tickled the inside of my palm and I laid my head on his shoulder. His other arm snaked around me, holding me tightly; I had never felt more protected.

He didn’t make empty promises or cliché remarks like, “It’ll be okay.” He didn’t say anything, and that was what I needed, just someone to be there. I snuggled in closer to him, my head so close that my eyelashes stroked the bare skin on his neck. Brent swallowed hard, dropping his arm from around me and stood up, striding across the room.

The inside of my cheek was feeling raw from my constant chewing. “Do you think she changed schools?”

“
Maybe she changed rooms,” Brent suggested, flicking the room lights off and on.

My thoughts spun out of control.
Is she okay? If she switched schools, will I ever see her again? And my family, had they come to the school and I missed them? Will I ever get to see them again? I’m alone. I’m going to be alone forever.

All the grief, pain, and anger I had been repressing hit like a tidal wave. I felt knocked off my feet, awash in a current that pushed, pulled, and spun me around like a feather, drowning me in an emotional flood I couldn’t swim through. The room tilted and veered like a carnival ride leaving me gasping for air as my chest constricted. I doubled over, clasping my knees. “I . . . I . . . can’t breathe . . .”

Brent was beside me again, caressing my back, whispering in my ear, “You aren’t alone, Yara. I’m with you. Breathe with me.”

I tried, but small, desperate gulps were all I could manage. Brent pulled me close, holding my head to his chest. “Let’s try that again. Breathe.” He radiated calm, sharing it with me, battling the grief that attacked me with his touch like an antidote that soaked in through my skin. My ribcage shuddered as I forced my breathing to slow, Brent helping me gain control.

“
Good,” he said, pressing a kiss to my temple. “Good.”

“
I waited too long to say good-bye. Now it’s too late.” Tears welled up in my eyes again, then watered down my cheeks, down my nose and onto Brent’s white shirt.

“
Shh . . . shh,” he soothed running his hands through my hair, massaging my scalp. “It’s never too late. Did I tell you I said goodbye to Steve? It wasn’t the ending I wanted either. Steve was ticked at me because the hijacker pretending to be me picked a fight with him. It’s hard to say your goodbyes when your friend is cursing your name. He doesn’t even know I’m gone. Still, it helped.”

“
I just wish I hadn’t been such a coward and done it before.” The purple fabric of my dress flowed around my feet as I tucked my legs beside me. “I knew the world would go on without me, but I didn’t know it would be so soon.”

“
It has to,” Brent informed me, winding one of my curls around his finger. “Look, there’s something there.” My eyes followed the thrust of his chin toward the ceiling. There spelled out, in glow-inthe-dark stickers, the number 774.

I jumped to my feet so fast I felt a little dizzy, or maybe I was just giddy. “That’s her room number. She’s still here. She left it for me in case I came back as a ghost to tell me how to find her.” I grabbed Brent’s hand, pulling him up. “Let’s go see her right now!”

****

After climbing to the seventh floor, we quickly found the right room. Brent opened the door but let me stick my head in first to make sure she was decent.

“
She isn’t here,” I said glumly, motioning for him to come in.

“
Was she always this messy?” Brent asked, taking in the paper-littered floor and the wall adorned with pictures of students surrounded by hastily written Post-It notes.

“
Not to this degree . . . not unless there’s some project that she’s urgently working on.” I took the time to look at her wall and realized there was actually an order to the chaos. It looked like a timeline, the older-looking portraits to the left and Phil Lawson’s to the right. My own face was below his with a sticky note question mark attached. I climbed up on her bed to examine the first two pictures on the left, stacked one on top of the other. The first, a pale, freckled, red-haired boy was labeled Dennis Parker. The other was olive-skinned with beautiful green eyes. The name “Weld” under his picture had me reaching out to grab Brent’s hand. “That’s T.J. Weld.”

Brent had been examining the papers piled on Cherie’s bed and shrugged, not looking up. “Who?”

“
He was the writer of the article that led me to astral project.” I looked closely at his name and gasped. “The T stands for Thomas. Could it be the same person?”

That got Brent’s attention, and he stood up, coming beside me, examining all the little notes Cherie had scribbled under their names. “He’s one of the two original victims of the curse.” Brent clicked his tongue. “He is the curse.”

“
Does he look familiar?” I asked

“
No.” Brent started tracing the curse down its thirty victims. Brent’s fingers gently stroked the image of his brother Neal. His eyes shot back to the picture of Thomas. “So that’s what the guy looks like, huh?” Brent snorted. “No wonder he ditched his body.”

I gave him a small grin as I thought through some of the new information. “Why would the ghost want me to be able to astral project?”

“
Well, it already knew you could see it—or, at least, could stop it. Maybe it guessed you’d be able to project, too. You’re a lot more vulnerable to it that way.”

“
Maybe.”

“
Then I kept trying to contact you. You’re being a Waker must have made you that much more important to silence.” Brent punched the wall. “You’re welcome for that final nail in your coffin.”

“
It isn’t your fault, Brent. I was a target from day one.”

“
Yeah, the day you saved my life,” Brent growled, throwing up his hands and scattering the messy piles of paper into the air. They cascaded around us like snow.

“
I’m not the only one with a temper, huh?” I asked. Brent scowled at me. “None of this was your fault, Brent.”

“
Sure,” he mumbled, reading more of Cherie’s notes about Thomas. “It says he had been diagnosed with cancer right before he died. And his best friend Dennis died in the fire with him. They were usually a trio but their other friend, Henry wasn’t with them that night. He was the one who reported them missing.”

“
How did they die?”

“
You don’t know?” I shook my head and he continued. “They died in the fire . . . in the old pool house.”

“
The curse started there?” I shuddered, remembering how horrible I had felt in that room. Then another piece of information caught my eye. “Henry was the next person to die.” I tapped my fingers against the wall knowing that piece of information was important but not understanding why. “Why every two years?” Brent shook his head. “Did your brother act any different before he died?”

“
Well, he never came home. He always had projects and stuff; we had to come here to see him. The last time he came home, a couple years before his death, he seemed skittish and left some journals in his room that he didn’t want to keep in his dorm room anymore. They’re the ones that had all the information about the Clutch.”

“
So he didn’t come home for two years. Isn’t that strange?”

Brent smirked at me. “You’re new to prep school, but no, that isn’t unusual. Not until that college acceptance letter comes in the mail.”

“
Oh. Why wouldn’t the guy posing as your brother come home or take off to a different country or something?”

“
Maybe he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to control the body? Maybe he knew he couldn’t really fool us?”

“
Or,” I proposed as a thought popped into my head. “What if he can’t leave campus either? Thomas said he was a prisoner like us.”

Brent nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.” He started snapping his fingers as his mental gears started to grind. “Yeah, and people eventually have to leave school. He’d need a new body if . . .” Brent didn’t finish his sentence, trying to piece things together.

I inhaled slowly and smiled, Cherie’s perfume heady in the room. I had been so excited about finding her and then so caught up in her notes, I hadn’t noticed her signature scent at first. The significance of her perfume faded as the sound of feet in the hallway had my fingers clasping tightly together in anticipation until they continued past her door. The corners of my mouth drooped.

I turned my attention back to Brent to quiet my disappointment. “Did your parents worry about sending you here after your brother . . . died?”

Brent laughed without humor, staring out the window. “No, they wanted me gone. I got in the way.” Brent held up a hand against my forthcoming denial and apology. “They love me, but they’re busy with their own lives. A good college was just an excuse to send me here. To ease their conscience, they have me meet with a therapist every few months though.”