Tether (4 page)

I felt so guilty. I wanted to crawl under the nearest table, shut my eyes, and wait for closing time. Instead, I ignored her question and waited for her to answer mine.

“I’m not thirsty,” Gina said. “Please sit down. You’re making me nervous, hovering like that.”

“I can’t sit. I’m working.”

“You’re
working
?” Her voice rose, and heads started to turn. “Now you’re working, but six weeks ago you decided to
elope
with Grant Davis without telling anyone, not even
me
?”

“Please stop,” I begged. People were staring, and soon the whispers would start. It happened all the time. They knew who I was, what I looked like. When I disappeared, my yearbook picture was in the papers and on the nightly news. A well-meaning group of neighbors took it upon themselves to plaster the city with
MISSING
posters. At least once a day now, we got a table of gawkers who wanted to observe me in the wild; they nursed sodas, taking advantage of the free refills while they speculated about where I went and why.

The restaurant staff tried to protect me, but they couldn’t shield me from the people who would approach me on the street or knock on my front door to ask insanely personal questions. Reporters went through our trash and interrogated my classmates. They chased my seventy-eight-year-old
grandfather down the street with cameras and microphones. The elopement story had satisfied the idle gossips, but the truly curious hadn’t given up yet, and I felt their eyes on me everywhere, all the time. That was why I was in therapy—not to talk about what I’d been through, because obviously I couldn’t, but to find a way of coping with the scrutiny. Sometimes I thought I was making progress; other times—like now—I wondered why I even bothered.

“What happened to you?” Gina asked. “You seem so sad.”

I twisted the fabric of my apron so tight around my fingers that they began to throb. “You just don’t get it.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t. But I want to. Talk to me, Sasha. I feel like I don’t even know you anymore.”

“Maybe you don’t.” I turned and ran to the kitchen, ripping my apron off as I slammed through the swinging door. Johnny glared when he saw me.

“What are you doing in here? We have customers!”

“I’m going home,” I told him, dumping my apron on the counter.
Poor Gina,
I thought. Six weeks ago I would
never
have turned my back on her like that or pushed her away when she was trying to help me. Gina wasn’t the only person who felt as if she didn’t know me anymore. Sometimes I didn’t even recognize myself.

“Your shift’s not over.”

“I don’t care.” I knew that if I stayed I’d end up telling Gina everything, just so I didn’t have to carry around my secret any longer. The restaurant felt so small and threatening. I had to get out of there. “Nikki can cover for me. I have to go.”

I left without waiting for Johnny’s response. He could fire me the next day or not, I didn’t care. The air outside was thick and humid, but there was a cool breeze coming off Lake Michigan. I took it into my lungs and tried to calm down.

“Everything is fine,” I said, as if speaking the words out loud would make them true. My voice quavered, and I felt like I was going to pass out, but I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other.

“Everything is fine, everything is fine, everything is fine,” I repeated, until the words were gibberish, strings of letters that meant less than nothing at all.

I trudged through the neighborhood, past brownstones and playgrounds and storefronts that were as familiar to me as my own name, but no matter how hard I tried to connect, to conjure up happy memories and imagine a brighter future, none of it felt right. It was like a story I was trying to tell myself, a lie I couldn’t bring myself to believe. When I crossed Fifty-Third Street, my house came into view. The shabby Victorian, with its cheerful cornflower-blue shutters and wide wrap-around porch, was the only place on Earth I felt safe now. It was home, or as close to it as I could manage in this world.

I passed the mailbox without stopping, figuring Granddad would’ve already gotten the mail, but then I remembered he’d gone to St. Louis for a conference and wouldn’t be back for a couple of days. Something made me pause halfway up the porch steps and double back. I opened the mailbox with a mixture of dread and excitement, unsure of what I expected to find but certain that something was waiting for me.

On top of a neat stack of letters, circulars from the neighborhood grocery co-op, and catalogs full of things neither Granddad nor I would ever buy was a little white origami star.

I grabbed it and left the rest of the mail behind, running into the house and letting the door slam behind me. My hands shook as I pounded up the stairs, shedding my bag and shoes along the way. I barreled into my room and flung myself down on the bed, closing my eyes.

Let it be from him,
I begged the universe.
Please, please,
please,
let it be from him.

One of the last things I saw before I went flying through the tandem was Thomas being shot. A month had passed since that night. Grant kept telling me, in a tone of voice that was supposed to be somber but came out sounding hopeful, that Thomas was probably dead. I guess he thought if I kept hoping Thomas was alive, I’d never move on or find a way to be happy with the life I was born into. But I didn’t have any intention of doing either.

I peeled the star open slowly and took a deep breath. The note read:

And that was all.

“Where’d you get this?” Grant asked, handing the note back to me. I could tell he hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours and he’d been wearing the same clothes for days. There were dark half-moons under his eyes, and he was fidgeting with his watch, compulsively opening and closing the clasp. I covered his hand with mine to make him stop, then pulled away. Most of the time, I tried not to touch him. It just made things too unbearably weird.

“It was in my mailbox when I got home.” I squinted into the distance, over the tops of the trees and buildings across the narrow strip of grass. When I’d finally returned his call, Grant had asked me to meet him in the park down the street from his house. We were sitting on the swing set in the playground. The late-evening sun glinted off car hoods; the streetlamps were starting to flicker on. If we were in Aurora, ribbons of swirling green light would already be visible in the sky, but this was just another normal night on Earth, and all I could see were clouds.

“Who’s it from?” Grant looked at me, and I held my breath for a beat, forgetting again, for a moment, that he wasn’t Thomas. I swallowed hard and shifted away from him.

“I don’t know. But whoever it is must have a way of communicating with the other side.” I stared at him.

“You think it was me? Yeah, right, Sasha.” Grant ran his fingers through his hair; he was letting it grow long, which was decidedly un-Thomaslike. I’d been building a mental list of differences between the two of them, but every time I looked at Grant, my heart lurched. I kept hoping it would stop, but it never did. Maybe it never would. Thomas was a piece of glass buried deep beneath my skin—painful but impossible to remove.

“If I can see through my analog’s eyes, it stands to reason that you can, too.”

“Just because you want that to be true doesn’t mean it is,” Grant said. I sighed, because I knew he was right. For whatever reason, my ability to see through Juliana’s eyes was unique. Dr. Moss, a physicist I met in Aurora, said I owed the strength of my bond with Juliana to the fact that my father was born in Aurora. That revelation had turned my whole life upside down—it was as if I had lost my parents all over again, and with them, the person I’d always believed myself to be. Thomas wasn’t the only reason I felt out of place on Earth; I was half Auroran, and his world was my world, too, in a way. I wasn’t done with it yet, and after getting that note, I knew it wasn’t done with me.

“I have to find out who sent this,” I told Grant. “I have to know if it’s true.”

“And then what?” He narrowed his eyes at me.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not stupid, you know.” Grant shoved his hands into his pockets and hung his head, deliberately not meeting my gaze. It reminded me of how he’d been in the Farnham prison cell: defeated, the high school god brought to his knees. The experience was written on his face in scars only I could see.
When he spoke, his voice shook, and it was obvious he felt that I’d betrayed him somehow. “You’ve been looking for a way back since the day we came home.”

“So?”

“So?”
He shook his head. “You’re unbelievable. Don’t you remember what happened over there? What they did to us? We were kidnapped. We were
held hostage.
Are you seriously going to waltz right back into that world because of some guy?”

“Hey!” I snapped. I’d put up with enough of his crap. No matter what lies we’d told, we weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend—we weren’t even
friends.
Aurora was the only thing knitting us together. I didn’t owe him an explanation. “You don’t know everything that happened to me over there. Don’t pretend you do.”

“I wish he had died,” Grant said, clenching his fists so tight his knuckles turned white. “Maybe then I wouldn’t have to constantly look over my shoulder, wondering when they’re coming back for me.”

“Screw you, Grant,” I spat out. It made me so
angry,
looking at him, completely fine, whole and intact and doing
nothing,
while Thomas suffered on the other side of the tandem. Even if Thomas was alive, alive wasn’t
okay;
it wasn’t
free.
How could Grant say he wished Thomas were dead? Juliana tried to steal my life, but I would never want her to be hurt or killed. “It’s your fault it happened in the first place!”

“I knew it,” Grant said, gritting his teeth, as if he was holding himself back from saying something much worse. “You do blame me.”

“He was going to send you back! If you hadn’t lost your temper and hit him, we would’ve been on Earth by the time Lucas and Juliana got there, and Thomas wouldn’t have gotten hurt!” I’d never straight up accused him of that before. It
always seemed like a waste of breath: making him feel guilty wouldn’t change anything. But if he was going to start whipping blame around, I wasn’t going to give him a free pass.

“How the hell was I supposed to know that?”

I kneaded my temples. He had a point. “You weren’t.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, but it was hard to tell if he meant it.

“No, I’m sorry,” I insisted. “I’m sorry you’re afraid—”

“I’m not afraid,” he lied.

“I’m sorry you had to go through what you went through. But you don’t get to tell me what to do, or what to think, or what to want.”

“What happened wasn’t even a little bit your fault,” Grant said. “Even I know that.”

“I was the one they needed,” I reminded him. “You were just the door into my life, and you suffered because of it, and I’m sorry. If I could go back and change it, I would.”

“Would you really?”

I hesitated. “No.”

“Then maybe you do owe me an apology.” He sighed. “Look, I get that you think it’s none of my business, and maybe it isn’t. I’m not exactly an expert on being happy. I just don’t think—There’s nothing for you over there. You’re from
Earth.
This is where you belong.”

“It doesn’t feel like I belong here,” I confessed. “Not right now. There are a lot of things I don’t have figured out, but I’m sure about that.” We kept having the same fight over and over again, and I was exhausted. All Grant wanted was to forget, to pretend it had never happened. Knowing that made me want to hold on to the memories even tighter. “Come on, I’ll walk you home.” It made me nervous to think of Grant wandering around the neighborhood after dark. I always worried he’d do something reckless.

Grant looked around the deserted park. “This is where it happened, you know. He was waiting for me. He stepped out from behind that tree, and he looked exactly like me, right down to the clothes he was wearing. I thought I was hallucinating. You know what the funny part is?”

“What?”

“He looked as scared as I felt.”

It wasn’t funny at all. Meeting your analog is like an electric shock. It cuts right down to the core of you like a spear through your chest and awakens a part of you that you never knew existed, something deep and ancient and true. It’s terrible and wonderful all at once, unnatural and so very right. That person is you, but also not you; it takes a while for our brains to comprehend the paradox, and even longer to believe it. By then, the damage might already be done.

“Grant,” I said, suddenly remembering the reason we were there in the first place. “Why did you call me?”

Grant cleared his throat. “I’m moving.”

“
Moving?
Moving where?”

“My dad offered to let me live with him,” he said. “For the rest of the summer.”

“And after that?”

He shrugged. “We’ll see how it goes.”

“But Los Angeles is so far away.” Grant wouldn’t stay in touch. When you’re running from something, you’re not supposed to look back. Cutting ties would be easy for him. He was dying to do it. He just hadn’t been able to work up the nerve until now.