“See, this is why I don’t do relationships.” Jay makes little quotation marks with his fingers, and Colin rolls his eyes. “Sure it is.” “All right, then,” Jay says. “Where is the magic elusive spirit girl, anyway?”
Colin’s head snaps up, and he gapes at him—Jay’s hit awfully close to home—but he’s smacking his gum and flipping through his magazine again. Clueless. “She’ll be here any minute.” Colin closes his math book and glances at the clock, trying not to appear as restless as he feels.
Jay stands and adjusts his baseball cap, walks to the window and back, before resuming his seat on the edge of his bed. He’s as anxious to get out there as Colin is. “We seriously can’t leave until she gets here? I’m bored.”
Colin shakes his head. “I want her to come along.” The night before Lucy came back, the night he almost rode himself into the ground, was the first time Colin felt sane in days, like he’d beaten his anxiety into submission.
Some of the stuff he and Jay have done is a bit crazy and a lot dangerous, but it’s always been the case that, on his bike or board, everything blurs at the edges until he’s focused on one thought: breathe. The wilder he is, the safer he feels. It’s a paradox he can live with. It’s just that now he wants Lucy to stay close.
“It’s a good thing Lucy’s cool or I’d have no choice but to kick your ass,” Jay says. “So where are we going? They put in this killer jump at the track, but last week it was full of Xavier posers, so that’s out.”
Colin fiddles with the straps on his biking shoes, remembering the night with Lucy at the lake, her legs dangling to the knees in the frozen water. Other than the section near the oak tree, she seems to like water—the pond, the lake, her crazy dream about underwater blackness. “I think the lake’s frozen over. No way will anyone else be down there. You up for some tricks?”
Jay agrees and heads down to mess around with his bike while Colin searches through the piles of clean laundry for something warmer to wear.
Lucy materializes at the door, wearing a new stolen uniform. This version has the ugly navy slacks, which is probably why it was easy for her to find and snag: Hardly any of the girls wear them. But her black boots lace almost to her knees, and her hair is piled in a messy heap on top of her head and bound with a bright red ribbon. He has no idea where she found it, but she looks like punk rock trying to go straight. He still can’t get over how relieved he is to see her. The weirdness of having a girlfriend he can barely kiss seems so unimportant compared to the relief he feels at having her back.
“Not exactly standard attire,” he says, tugging on her white oxford where she’s knotted it just beneath her ribs, mocking the cold air around her.
Her mouth curls up into a teasing smile. “The administration is free to notice and unofficially expel me.”
He laughs. Lucy’s been lurking around campus for more than two months—minus the ten days of unexpected vanish—and no teacher really bothers to question her presence, let alone her decidedly non-dress-code boots.
She glances at his bike shoes hanging from his free hand.
“Where are we headed?”
“Your favorite place: the lake.”
“Sure. To . . . ride?” She looks skeptical.
Grinning, he pulls her with him as he turns to leave. “Trust me; it’ll be fun.”
CHAPTER 18 HER
LUCY HASN’T BEEN BACK TO THE LAKE FOR weeks, not since the day Colin walked with her around the entire lakeside trail and she discovered what she now knows is the site of her murder. So while Colin and Jay prep their bikes, she wanders off, taking the time to actually look around. Winter has dug its claws into this part of the world, and everything looks at once more barren and also softer. Snow blankets everything, tree branches are softened with white and blue reflected from the glacial water. In her memory, the autumn leaves are flames and her disorienting awakening is a hell long since past.
She finds where she landed and for some reason is surprised that no traces remain. There’s no girl-shaped bruise in the earth, no chalk outline of a body. She fell, she’s here, and it’s time to carry on.
Heading back to the lake, she sees Jay and Colin on the ice, zipping around.
“Wait,” she says. “You’re riding on the lake?”
“Yeah. It’s frozen,” Colin says, hopping up and down on his bike. The tires squeak against the ice as if in agreement. “Solid.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Absolutely,” Jay calls.
Before she can respond, Colin has his hands up, placating. “No, no, honestly, it’s safe. It’s at least three inches thick, and we do it all the time.”
He clearly expects her to be horrified—anyone hearing this should be horrified—but Lucy isn’t. She’s only curious. Three inches thick doesn’t sound like a lot, and she gives in to the strange high that suddenly tears through her. She almost believes if she looked down at her arms she would see red blood surging through newly solid veins. Sitting on a snowbank at the lakeshore, Lucy watches the two boys trace snakes of tire prints in the thin layer of crunchy snow on the surface.
She’s never seen Colin like this before. She loves how loose he is, how he lets the bike be hard while he prefers flexibility, molding to its movements, sliding over the pedals and leaning into the force of every sharp turn. He spells her name in the layer of snow over ice, and he hops on his front tire from a soft embankment, landing in a crouch on the pedals.
“Wanna try?” he calls.
Shaking her head quickly, she answers, “No.”
He laughs and pedals over, carefully kissing her cheek. He looks down at her, as if surprised. It feels different here, where it’s snowing and the air is heavy with water on the verge of solidifying. She presses her fingers to her skin when he leaves, pushing the memory of the sensation farther inside.