“Hey, wait.”
She reaches a door, but it’s locked. She tries another beside it. Also locked.
“Lucy, wait,” Colin says. “What are you looking for? You can’t go in there. Those are janitor closets.”
She stops, turning to face him, and he’s looking at her. Really looking, like he wants to capture every detail. When their eyes meet, he makes a strangled sound, narrowing his gaze and leaning closer to look. Her eyes are murky greenbrown; she’s stared at them for hours in an old mirror hoping to remember the girl behind them.
“What?” she asks. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
He shakes his head. “You’re . . .”
“I’m what?” What will he say? What does he see?
He blinks again, slowly, and she realizes it’s just something he does: an unselfconscious, unhurried blink, as if he’s capturing an image of her and developing it on his lids. “Intense,” he murmurs.
With that word, the other man’s voice appears in her head again, an echo from the same intrusive memory, “You have to know how intense this is for me.”
She stumbles back, eyes wide.
“Are you okay?” Colin reaches for her arm, but she’s already turning, hurrying away.
With lips wet and pressed to her ear, he asked, “Are you afraid of dying?”
“Lucy!”
A flash of her reflection in a crisp blade of silver. Breath smelling of coffee and sugar, cigarettes and delight. Cool water lapping near her head. A knife, drowning in her own blood, the feeling of being pried open.
She bursts through the side exit, sucking in a huge gasp of sharp, autumn air.
So that’s who she is. She’s the girl who isn’t alive anymore.
CHAPTER 4 HIM
THERE’S THAT NEW GIRL,” JAY SAYS THROUGH a mouthful of sandwich. Colin follows his gaze and grunts, noncommittal, as Lucy glides across the soccer field. When she’s alone, she’s statuesque, long lines and slim profile. When she gets closer to the other students, she shrinks in on herself: shoulders pulled in, head down.
She reminds him of himself after his parents died and he didn’t and the sadness and guilt felt like a crushing weight under his ribs. He didn’t know how he was supposed to weather it. When people tried to talk to him at first, it made him wish he could turn into air and disperse in a thousand different directions. Lucy carries that same kind of bewildered fragility.
It’s been three days since she showed up in his class, offered the most achingly vulnerable smile he’d ever seen, and then ran away again. Nobody talks to her. Nobody looks at her. She has no books, or even a backpack. She looks at every building as if she’s trying to see through its walls to what lies inside. She always touches the outstretched arm of the statue of Saint Osanna Andreasi as she passes through the darkest corner of the quad, pulling back as if she’s been burned before reaching out to touch it again, carefully. No one ever touches the statue—it’s said to be haunted—but Lucy does. Colin has never seen her with anyone. Lucy doesn’t even go to the same classes every day. She kind of hovers around campus.
He feels like a total stalker for knowing these things when everyone else seems content to let her be. Most new students get a schedule of classes and let the tide carry them. Lucy seems determined to remain disorganized.
At least she looks more peaceful today, as if she’s enjoying the weather before it all goes subzero. It’s still a bit on the cool side, but she never wears a jacket. Thin blue fabric wraps down the length of her arms. How can she be warm enough? She must live off campus, he reasons. Maybe she left her coat at home.
“She seems weird, though,” Jay says. This catches Colin’s attention, and he looks over at Jay, wondering what he means. Two nights now Colin has fallen asleep thinking about Lucy’s mood-ring eyes. Does Jay notice too? “Weird, how?”
Jay shrugs and takes another bite, propping his feet on the wall of the arts building. His dirty sneakers blend into the gray concrete. “She’s been in my English class a few times. Doesn’t talk much.”
“And her eyes, too.”
Glancing at Colin, Jay asks, “Eyes?”
“Never mind. They’re . . . I don’t know. Different.” “Different? Aren’t they, like, brown or something?” Colin mumbles, “Maybe gray,” but his heart is thundering.
He’s pretty sure if he says, “They’re like melted metal,” Jay will actually have a T-shirt made for him with the words I AM A DELICATE POET printed across the chest.
“Brown hair, gray eyes,” Jay says as if reciting the ingredients for average. Colin pauses with his sandwich partway to his lips. He turns to Jay and follows his gaze again, making sure they’re both looking at the same girl. They are.
“Brown?” Colin asks, motioning to where she’s reached the edge of the field. “That girl over there?”
“Uh, yeah,” Jay answers. “The same one you’ve been staring at for the last twenty minutes.”
Lucy’s hair isn’t brown. It’s not even close. Colin watches her again and shivers, pulling his hood up.
Colin wonders if it should freak him out that Jay sees brown hair when he sees almost white-blond. But, with a strange rush of warmth in his limbs, he finds he likes that he sees her differently. It feels strangely surreal, and it occurs to him that this reaction might come from the same part of his brain that turns on when he looks over a cliff and instead of thinking, Back off, he thinks, Pedal faster.
“Amanda said they saw her walking down by the lake,” Jay says.