“I’m serious.”
“Me too.”
“Maybe we can shift into some dimension that shows us how to make you human again,” he says. “With more practice.” She gives him her best what-on-earth-are-you-talkingabout look. “I don’t think we’ll be doing any more interdimensional Colin travel. I worry you’ve used up your last ticket.”
He shakes his head, immediately riled up, and although her mind worries, her heart feels a silent, electric thrill. Something inside her begins beating. And it’s this that worries her: If she’s his Guardian, why does it feel so good that he’s falling apart?
Lucy’s never seen Jay rattled before. At least, that’s what she assumes is going on at lunch when he’s silent and fidgety. His usually piercing eyes are focused on his shoes, where he doodles with a black marker over older doodles. The fresh black ink stands out against the faded now-gray.
Over “ grenouille,” he writes “eau.” Over “papillon” he writes “froid.” Almost as an afterthought he adds CHAUD, in capital letters above it all.
Frog and butterfly become cold water, then hot. She digs in her thoughts for more words in French but is greeted by only a vast expanse of gray. She can’t puzzle out her memories, how they seem to be vaulted inside until they get the smallest nudge and then spill forward. She wonders what other things will tumble out when prodded. Maybe something to explain where she goes when she’s gone and what kind of Guardian lets her Protected dive into a frozen lake over and over just so she can touch him.
“I didn’t know you took French,” she says. Beside her, Colin is buried in a book about the acute effects of hypothermia.
“I don’t,” Jay says defensively, as if he’s been caught somehow. As if he’s the one who should be explaining himself.
They’re an awkward threesome, with a secret the size of the Pacific Ocean between them, carrying on with their normal lives in the strange world of private school. Sneakers squeak on the asphalt of the basketball court in the distance. A short, chubby kid makes three baskets in a row from the three-point line. Lucy wants to ask Jay how he knows the French word for frog if he doesn’t take French, but it also seems like the most inconsequential question she could ask after everything that happened this last weekend. “Are you okay, Jay?”
“My mom is French,” he says instead of answering.
“So that explains grenouille,” she says, and he grins, correcting her pronunciation under his breath. “But it doesn’t explain why you’re nonverbal today. Are you freaked out?”
His shrug is loose and slow. Jay is jerky and twitchy; the shrug is a decidedly non-Jay gesture. “Just thinking.” He reaches for a magazine inside his bag. The front is creased and covered in scribbled notes, drawings, and watermarks. The pages are dog-eared and torn on the edges, DIRT RAG emblazoned across the top in jagged green lettering.
“Jay,” Lucy begins, unsure of his mood and how to best phrase her thoughts. She looks over at Colin, satisfied that he’s sufficiently distracted. “Don’t either of you have that voice in your head saying that what you’re doing is crazy?”
“I do,” he says, then nods toward Colin. “He never has.”
Of course Colin picks that exact moment to look up from his book. “I never have what?”
“The self-preservation instinct. You never turn back from a hill or a jump. I’ve never seen you look at something and say, ‘I shouldn’t try that.’ It doesn’t mean you always land it, but you always try. You have no good angel on your shoulder.” Bending to his magazine, Jay adds quietly, “Only the devil.”
Colin laughs, and it feels like a fist squeezes Lucy’s heart.
Jay continues. “I can’t believe it went like it did at the lake.”
“How so?” Colin asks carefully.
Lucy starts to compile an apology to Jay, shifting words in her head to make the best, simplest statement, so he understands that she appreciates what he did more than he knows. She considers adding they would never ask it of him again, but the words feel slippery in her thoughts.
But instead of explaining his concern, Jay gives Colin a slow-growing smile. “It worked. I mean, look at you. You’re fine. It’s crazy that we can actually do this, and I’m over here just tripping out about it. I don’t know why more people don’t try. Makes me want to try.”
Already nodding, Colin sweeps into the conversation, and the two of them are off a mile a minute, and although Lucy knows she should be worried, everything inside her surges with relief. Apparently, jumping in a frozen lake is like any other extreme sport. You think you’re going to die, but what you get is the adrenaline rush of your life.
She hates her reaction, hates her calm. She hates how much she wants Colin in the lake. She hates not understanding.
So Lucy can’t listen to their fascinated planning; it feels too much like condoning their insanity. Instead, she pats Colin’s leg as she stands, telling him she’s going for a walk. Despite her internal struggle, she feels strength wrapping solidly around her bones, her muscles zip with vitality at the simple thought of seeing Colin go underwater, of meeting him on their trail. She wants to hide this strange, bounding strength from him but knows she can’t walk far enough to hide it from herself.
Was it because she died near the lake? Is that the connection for them? Maybe if she understood what happened to the other Guardians on campus, she’d know more about why she was back and why she can take Colin to her world. Colin’s little sister died on the school road, and her mother drove them all over a bridge, possibly trying to find her. Now that Colin knows how to find Lucy’s world, could it be different for them? Could they manage this strange balance in the world above and the one below? Where did Henry die, and is that where he goes when he’s gone?
In the library, Lucy searches the archives for any information about Henry Moss. The name shows up in several places: for a dentist in Atlanta, a high school football star in Augusta. And then a story about a twenty-two-year-old college student from Billings killed by a hunter’s stray bullet while hiking deep in the woods of Saint O’s campus. Leaning back in her chair, she stares at the picture of Henry before he died, smiling at the camera with his trademark wide grin.