“Nice,” Jay says, leaning back against the railing.
“Borked the landing.”
“Dude, you were hypothermic yesterday. Cut yourself some slack.”
Colin comes to a stop in front of him. “What you said earlier to Lucy about the devil on my shoulder . . . You know I’m not looking to get hurt, right?”
“I know. What I think is you have bigger balls than the rest of us.”
Colin shakes his head. “No, listen. You know that feeling when you ride down a skinny from twenty feet up? Or look over a fifteen-foot drop to flat and think, ‘Let’s do this’? It only works if you never doubt that you can. Standing over that ice, I feel totally safe.”
“Like you’re in the zone,” Jay says.
“Exactly.”
“But you have to convince Lucy of that.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, hurry it up, you lucky bastard. I don’t have a ghost girl. At least let me live vicariously through you.”
CHAPTER 31 HER
COLIN AND JAY ARE NEAR THE BACK OF THE library, jumping from rails to stairs, when Lucy returns. Colin approaches her slowly, as if she might roar, first inspecting her eyes and then reaching for her hand. “Are you mad?”
“I wasn’t mad.” She pulls his fingers up to kiss them.
“You totally were,” Jay says, coming to a skidding stop next to them. “You just have to trust that we are completely legit. We are adventure experts.”
“Legit?” She shakes her head at him, fighting a smile. “Don’t do that, Jay. You can’t pull off nineties gangster.”
“Ignore him,” Colin says, pressing a hand to Jay’s chest and pushing him away. “I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I needed to think. I went to talk to Henry.”
“You told him about the lake?”
“No, no,” she assures him quickly. “I wanted to know why I feel different lately. But it doesn’t happen to him. He says he’s always the same.”
Colin’s face falls, but he tries to hide his disappointment. “We’ll figure it out.” He kisses her cheek before turning to watch Jay grind down the stairs again.
In turn, Lucy watches Colin, thinking of what Henry said in the auditorium. She puts her hand on her opposite forearm, feeling the swirling energy beneath. “How do you feel today?”
He glances at her and then back to Jay. “I’m good. I swear. No tingling in my fingers anymore.” He wiggles them playfully in demonstration, but Lucy only feels the tightness in her chest intensify. She’s missing something. She’s missing something and she can’t disappear again.
“And you really do want to go back to the lake?”
He turns to her fully now, eyes bright. “Yeah, I do.”
Lucy squeezes her arm. Nothing. Colin looks hopeful, bordering on giddy, but she basically feels the same: somewhere in between a solid and a gas. In that strange no man’s land on the verge of the sublime. “And it works for you, going into the water alone? Having Jay pull you out?”
“Absolutely.” Colin is practically vibrating with joy now, but Lucy doesn’t register any change in herself. It can’t be tied only to his happiness. There’s something she isn’t getting right. “Is there a better way to do it?”
“Other than packing my bed with ice and curling up with me?” he says, laughing. “No. This works.”
With him.
The idea sparks a realization so fierce it takes her a moment to see beyond it and into the present, where Colin has looked away again. She came back from the lake to be with him but has been sending him into the water alone. Every time he goes in, she’s stronger. . . . She’s grown stronger so she can help him.
“Do you want me to go into the water with you?”
Her fingers sense the shock of energy surging into place beneath her skin, and she pulls her hand back as if she’s plugged her own fingers into a generator.
Colin reaches for her shoulders, steadying. She remembers the first day, in the dining hall, when she saw him and felt starving for details about his face up close, his voice, the feel of his skin on hers. She’s been staring at his face at a distance for years. The face that is here, right in front of her, bending close and kissing her as if she’s made from blown glass.
“Yeah,” he says. “You would do that?”
“Of course I would.”
“I’d follow you anywhere, Lucy. You just point the way.”
“Then, let’s swim.” She’s convinced she’s smiling with her whole body.
“When? When can we go?”
She pulls away and looks behind Colin to where Jay is very much not looking at what they’re doing. “Jay, you free tomorrow?”
Jay whoops and walks to Colin, bumping fists with him. “I’m in.”
It’s early, barely dawn. The sky clings weakly to darkness until clouds take their place and begin to drop fluffy snow. Colin and Jay shove peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into their mouths as they do a final check of the supplies.
“Still ready?” Colin asks her, heaving a large duffel over his shoulder.
Lucy nods, unable to open her mouth for fear she’ll admit that she’s never felt this strong or this sure of anything
By the time they’ve arrived and hiked to the shore, the surface is blinding in the early-morning sunlight, brilliant white broken up by tiny speckles of fallen brown leaves. Colin’s original site of entry, the jagged and thin section of ice in the middle of the lake, shines a brilliant blue, thinner than the ice around it. Now when she sees the sharp edges pointing like arrows to the center, Lucy’s memory of Colin falling in is rewritten as something calm and idyllic. Like a reel of images, she sees him going under, his face relieved instead of terrified. She remembers hearing him call her name on the trail, of the first sensation of solid skin to skin, of the way his eyes begged her to not ruin it by pointing out that something was very wrong.