A World Without You (16 page)

I stare at the pages
of my calendar.

I lost so much time.

Time that I could have spent working to save Sofía.

But I was selfish. I stole my night with her, and somehow time's been stealing itself back.

My mind feels like it's splintering. Save Sofía. Stop the officials. Can Dr. Franklin be trusted? What is happening?

I clutch my head, bending over my bed and pressing my face against my cool pillow. Too much time has passed. The officials aren't just going away. Sofía isn't just coming back.

It's all falling apart.

An abrupt, violent feeling cracks inside me, at my core, the way cold glass shatters when boiling water is thrown on it. The timestream flashes in front of me, stuttering in and out of existence, the threads ripped up like grass being whirled around in a hurricane. I reach for it—hoping to calm it, maybe, or just find a way to calm myself in it—and a noise like radio static
vibrates all the way into my bones. Reality feels jagged in my hand. I stumble off my bed, staggering to find steady ground, and—

I fall into a different time.

I haven't gone somewhere I had zero control over in ages, and this is the first time the timestream has ever acted like this, like it was made of sound and fury and little else. It felt like a television turned on to a scrambled channel inside my head.

I blink in the bright daylight, trying to figure out where I am.
When
I am. It's definitely not Berkshire, and it's sometime in the afternoon, I think . . . and I know this place. It's not somewhere I'd
elect
to go, but at least it's familiar. I'm on the grassy lawn just in front of my parents' house. Judging from the temperature, I'd guess it's springtime—although I can't tell the year. The sweet scent of Mom's cherry tree fills the air, and a few pale petals float by.

The front door opens. I drop immediately to the ground, crouching between the bushes and the bricks of the front porch. Girls' voices fill the space, one of them definitely my sister's. I'm not sure where in time I am. Is this the past or the future? The house doesn't look much different, and Phoebe sounds like herself, so it's possible that this is today. Or a month ago. Or next year. It's impossible to tell.

As the girls—two of them, plus Phoebe—settle onto the porch, I move carefully under the steps, out of sight. I can hear them walking across the wooden planks, the squeak of the front porch swing, and I pray they stay where they are. If they come down to the yard and look directly at the steps, they'll definitely see me.

If I'm seen, it might cause trouble, so it's best if I figure
out what's going on first. The timestream won't let me create a paradox or conflict with my own timeline—that's been made abundantly clear—but the static-filled stutter that brought me here was
not
normal.

Maybe something's wrong with time. I can't afford to screw things up until I know what's going on.

The dirt under the porch is cool and damp, and spiders creep along the undersides of the wooden boards, but I ignore them, my heart racing. Whatever's happening now, I shouldn't be here. But time has put me here for a reason.

The girls start chatting, and I finally recognize them. Jenny and Rosemarie, two of Phoebe's best friends, are occupying the big porch swing that my father brought home from our grandmother's house after she died. They're barely skimming their toes along the wooden planks of the porch, just moving the bench seat of the swing enough for the chain to squeal in protest.

Phoebe sits down at the top step, her bright pink socks parallel with my eyes.

“I think I'm going to try to do a foreign-exchange program,” Phoebe says suddenly.

“You mean, like, some kid from Africa or China or some other country is going to share a room with you?” Rosemarie asks.

“You do realize that Africa is not a country, right?” Jenny tells her, leaning over the swing so that Rosemarie can see her arched brow.

“Yeah, it is.”

“It's a continent.”

“No,” Phoebe says. “I mean I think I'm going to be the one to go to Africa or China or something.”

Rosemarie and Jenny both stop swinging. “What?!” Jenny says at the same time Rosemarie exclaims, “Why?”

“I just . . . I want to get away.” Phoebe says in a distant voice, as if she can already envision herself in Africa or China or something.

I feel like I'm spying, and I hate it. But why does Pheebs want to leave? Is something wrong? I scoot around under the porch, trying to see her better, but her face is hidden from me.

Phoebe leans back over the porch, looking toward her friends. “I mean, I want to explore. See the world. All that stuff.”

“There's the class trip to Europe,” Jenny points out.

“Yeah, I know,” Phoebe says. “That's a backup plan. I don't care where I go, really—I just want to go.”

“I don't.” Rosemarie kicks her feet, making the swing go higher. Jenny wasn't ready and nearly falls off.

“I might one day. In college, maybe.” Jenny grabs the chain, stilling the swing. Rosemarie glares at her.

Phoebe wraps her arms around her knees. She looks very small from my vantage point, like a wounded animal or a forgotten child.

“What did your parents say?” Jenny asks quietly. Rosemarie puts her feet down, making the swing stop completely.

After a moment, Phoebe says, “I haven't told them.”

“With your brother already gone—”

“He's not dead.” Phoebe cuts Jenny off. “And besides, they probably wouldn't even notice I was gone.”

“Well, I think it's brave,” Rosemarie says when Jenny opens
her mouth again. “You're really brave, Pheebs. You're not scared of anything.”

“Everyone's scared of spiders,” Jenny says, trying to make a joke.

But Phoebe's not. I remember when we first moved into this house, when I was seven and Phoebe was five. It's a really old house, and our parents had to practically gut it to remodel it, but they were too poor to do it all at the same time, so they went room by room. Phoebe and I had to take turns sharing a room while each of our bedrooms was remodeled. One day, just as we were going to bed, a giant spider—a huge furry thing that made my heart race and my stomach churn—landed directly on Phoebe's head, its legs dancing across the fine strands of her hair.

I had grinned, expecting my sister to freak out when I told her there was a spider on her, but instead she just dipped her head, shook her hair out, and looked at the thing when it fell from her to her pillow. She reached out and poked it with one stubby finger, and the spider scurried away.

“I'm not scared of spiders,” Phoebe says, but there is no triumph in her voice.

“It's not spiders for me; it's snakes,” Rosemarie says with a shudder. “My daddy ran over one when he was taking me to band practice today, and ohmahgah, it was so gross. Its body was still—” Rosemarie twists up her arms, her face scrunched in disgust.

“I'm not scared of snakes either.”

Rosemarie leans over, the porch swing squeaking. “Then what are you scared of, show-off?”

I lean forward too, curious as to what my little sister is
frightened of. Probably something stupid—if she's not scared of spiders or snakes, maybe she hates butterflies.

Or maybe it's me. I'm the freak of the family, I'm the one who's not in control. I'd forgotten all about taking her to see the Titanic and getting her injured. Maybe I've done that before. Maybe she's scared of me showing up in her life, dragging her off to a different time and place and leaving her there.

Like I did with Sofía.

“I'm scared of Capgras delusion,” Phoebe says.

“What?” Jenny asks.

Phoebe turns around, leaning her back against one of the wooden columns of the porch. “Capgras delusion. It's when you wake up one day and you think someone you love isn't real. Like, maybe you think that person is actually a robot, not a human. Or a doppelgänger. Or whatever. But you look at this person that you love, that you have always loved, and instead of seeing him, you see someone else. Something snaps inside of you, and what you thought was real doesn't feel real anymore. So you look at this person you love and you feel like he's just . . . gone, replaced by this weak imitation.”

“That's crazy,” Rosemarie says.

“That's the point,” Phoebe says, her voice rising. “And it can just happen one day, to anyone. No one knows the cause. There's no cure. One day everything's fine, and the next day everything you thought was true feels fake. You spend the rest of your life believing—
really believing
—that the person you were in love with is gone and you're stuck with this replacement.”

“I'd leave him,” Jenny says. “Maybe he
was
a doppelgänger. Maybe I fell into a horror movie or something.”

“Some people do. Some people just walk away from their
families and never go back. And some people live with it, basically faking their love for the rest of their lives. And then some people start to think that the only way to get back the person they loved is to kill the fake person.”

All three girls are silent for a moment.

Phoebe stands suddenly, her footsteps clattering down the stairs to the front yard. I scurry into the shadows, but it will do no good—there isn't enough darkness here to hide me. Pheebs turns, her eyes scanning high, looking for her friends still on the porch, but then she hesitates, her gaze drifting toward me—

And then the timestream violently yanks me back to my own world, my own bedroom, my own time.

More time has passed.
I checked the calendar. Each sheet marked in my own special code.

I've lost three days.

Three days gone, replaced by just a moment of time at my parents' house, spying on my little sister.

Three more days gone, and Sofía's not back. I'm getting worse. I'm way,
way
out of control.

But if I can't control the timestream, I can't control anything. I can't save Sofía. I can't even save myself. Is this what a supernova feels like? Melting down from the core, destroying everything close to it.

I have never felt so helpless in my life. It feels like the entire world is crumbling around me, and no one even notices me trying to save it.

This all reminds me of something Sofía once told me. About the first time she saw someone die. She was at a pool party for a
friend's quinceañera. Everything was loud: the music, the conversations, the kids splashing in the water.

Everything was loud, except for Carlos Estrada.

No one noticed. There was a large group there, playing and shouting, and the soccer team was on one side of the pool having a water fight. And Carlos—he just sort of bobbed there in the deep end for a bit, and then he went under the water. And he didn't come back up. Not until his mother dove into the water with all her clothes on and dragged his body from the pool.

“That's the thing that stayed with me,” Sofía said quietly, after she described his blue lips and his skin that was cold to the touch. “You always think that drowning is loud. In the movies, if someone drowns they scream, they churn the water. Everyone notices a drowning person in the movies.”

Sofía looked down, and I thought she was crying, but when she looked up at me again, I realized her eyes were dry.

“Real drowning is quiet. It doesn't announce itself. It just . . . it just happens. And then you're gone.”

I didn't understand what she was saying before, but now I think I do. We're all drowning here, and no one's noticing a damn thing.

There's a fire in the fireplace.

That shouldn't be odd. But it is.

How did I get here?

I tilt my head, watching the red flames lick at the soot-stained stones.

Not soot. Rain. Rain-drenched stones.

Because the fireplace isn't in a house.

Blink
. Yes, it is.

Blink.
No. It's not. This fireplace is a ruin, crumbling and unusable, the last place I saw Sofía. It's not filled with fire, it's filled with dirt and rainwater, and I am standing outside, staring at the place where a house was hundreds of years ago.

But when I blink again, the house is there.

Time is stuttering. The timestream is breaking. With just a blink of my eyes, I'm thrown into the past, then back into the present.

Or maybe it's not the timestream that's breaking. Maybe it's just me.

“Bo?” a voice calls.

I'm not sure if the voice is coming from across the field or across time. But then I see Harold walking up the path toward me.

“What brings you out here?” he asks, as if it's perfectly natural for me to be standing in front of the ruins in the pissing rain.

“Something's wrong,” I say.

“Yes,” Harold replies.

Just yes. Like, obviously, something's wrong.

He twirls an old iron key in his hand.

“Where'd you get that?” I ask, staring at it.

Harold's eyebrows raise, one of the few times he's actually let emotion show on his face. “You gave it to me,” he says. “Just now.”

Time is stuttering all around me. I'm not even in control of myself.

“Do you see it too?” I whisper, almost hoping. “The way everything's out of sync?” Out of the corner of my eye, I see the sun rise and set and rise and set in quick succession, but when I close my eyes and force myself to breathe, time slows to normal again.

“I never see,” Harold says calmly. “I only hear.”

Time isn't stuttering for him—just me. Only me.

“I hate the voices, and I love them, and sometimes I think they're killing me,” Harold says. He turns toward Berkshire and starts walking away, not looking back once to see if I'm following or not. I am following him, though. I don't remember how I got to the ruins or what I was doing, but I should get back to
the academy. I don't want to get Dr. Franklin in more trouble, even if he's forgotten who I really am . . . who he really is.

“My dads,” Harold says, still walking, still not caring if I'm listening or not, “they say that everyone has a jar of darkness inside of them. Everyone. When we're born, the lid is tight on the jar. That's why babies are happy. But as time goes on, sometimes the jar opens a little, and darkness gets inside of us. We can close the jar sometimes, and sometimes we can't.”

He stops now and finally looks at me.

“I think my jar is broken. Or I think I don't have a jar, just the darkness.”

I have no clue what to say to that.

“Sofía had the darkness in her too.”

“No she didn't,” I say, the words coming out angry and loud. The rain is falling harder now, and my feet are sinking in the mud.

Harold cocks his head. He doesn't seem defensive, just curious about my response. “She did,” he said. “We talked about it. She was my friend. My only friend here.”

“I'm your friend,” I say, but I know it's not really true. I've been nice to him, at least nicer than Ryan has, but that doesn't mean we're friends.

“I feel the darkness inside me like a creature curled up in my chest, breathing smoke and fire. It is always there. It weighs on me. It's not contained by anything but my own skin. Sometimes it sleeps. Sometimes it doesn't.”

“Maybe we shouldn't talk about these things in front of the officials,” I say warily. “Let's keep this between us, buddy.”

“Only Sofía was willing to talk about the darkness,” Harold says. “That's why she was my friend. You have it too, you know.”

I don't know what he's talking about.

“The darkness, I mean. You have it. But yours is in a jar, and sometimes the lid is on, and sometimes it isn't.” Harold turns and starts strolling back to the Berk as the rain beats down harder on us. “Gwen hates her jar. She keeps the lid on as tight as she can. Ryan's the opposite. I think he smashed his jar on purpose. He loves the darkness.”

“You know,” I say, “you're really weird.”

“Yes,” Harold replies. “That's what they all say.” There is quiet defeat in his voice, and acceptance.

“Even the voices you talk to?” I cringe. That was a low blow and a jerk thing to say.

“Yes,” Harold says, completely serious.

As we start up the steps to Berkshire, I grab Harold's arm. “I'm sorry, dude,” I say. “I could have been more of a friend to you. I've been so wrapped up in my own life that I just ignore you, and that's not cool.”

Harold doesn't really show any emotion. He just looks at me. “The voices I hear—they're not all bad. You're not all bad either.”

“Thanks, man.” We start back up. “So where do those voices come from, anyway?”

“The darkness.”

“Even the good ones?”

“Even those.”

Ryan is waiting for us inside the foyer. “God, you idiots look awful,” he says.

Harold ignores him, walking up the stairs and straight back to his room. Ryan grabs my arm. “Listen, man. The officials are packing up. They're leaving in a few days, before break, at least.
Don't screw this up, okay? Try to keep the crazy to a minimum. Harold's bad enough.”

“I can't wait until spring break,” I say.

“I can.” Ryan looks angry at the thought of going back home. He might not be looking forward to the break, but I need it. I need to get away from here. Everything's cracking up.
I'm
cracking up. I need to get away from the officials. They're pulling at reality like it's clay they can shape in their hands, and I can't keep up with their version of truth.

“How are you holding up?” I ask Ryan.

“Eh.”

“I mean, with your powers. Are you having trouble holding on to them here too?”

Ryan tosses a pen into the air, and it falls back down into his hand, gravity working perfectly. “You tell me,” he says. So, yes. His telekinesis, at least, is off.

He stares at me curiously, his eyes losing focus as he considers the implications of what I've said. There's a flicker of movement behind him, and my attention shifts over Ryan's left shoulder to the second-floor landing.

Someone is standing in the middle of the landing, dripping water all over the plush red carpet. This boy isn't wet like Harold and I are—our clothes sticking to us, puddles on the floor. No, this boy is
soaking
, water streaming off him, making rivulets in the carpet. His hair hangs in clumps, and water pours from his arms as if he has two hoses hidden under his shirtsleeves.

“Who . . . ?” I start to ask.

Ryan notices the look on my face and turns, trying to find out what I'm seeing.

The boy on the landing looks right at me, and I can see the red lines in his eyes, as if he's been crying. His skin is brown, his hair is black, his eyes a golden hazel color. He looks . . . familiar, and yet I know I've never seen him before in my life, past or present.

“What are you . . . ?” Ryan starts to ask. “Oh shit.” He grabs me and pulls me under the stairs, out of sight.

A moment later, I hear voices—the officials.

“I'm not saying Dr. Franklin is incompetent,” Dr. Rivers says. “I just think he's in over his head with these students.”

“The idea is nice,” Mr. Minh replies. “Help these kids out in an isolated area, focus them on their issues while maintaining an environment of education. It's worked before.”

“But it's not working
here
.” Dr. Rivers sighs. “The case of Sofía Muniz aside, there are issues that Berkshire Academy must address to pass board approval . . .”

Mr. Minh laughs. “Oh, I think it's clear the board won't be approving Berkshire. This whole place will be shut down.”

Dr. Rivers says something Ryan and I can't hear, and soon they walk away.

“Did you hear that?” Ryan asks.

“Did you see that?” I snap back. How could the officials be standing
right there
and not notice the boy and the water? I run up the stairs, but the boy isn't there. There's no sign of him, not even a drop of water on the red carpet. Just Harold's muddy footprints, and now my own.

“Bo, focus,” Ryan demands. “They're trying to shut down the Berk.”

But who was the boy? He seemed so familiar.

“Where will we go?” Ryan continues. “I can't go back home.
This is what I knew would happen from the start. This is why I've been trying to keep them out of here.”

He reminded me of . . . of Sofía. He looked a little like her.

Ryan starts pacing. “There are other schools, I suppose. But I like
this one
. I don't want to leave. My parents have had their eye on military school for far too long.”

And then it hits me. I know who the wet boy was, why he appeared to me.

“I'll call my father. He's an asshole, but he probably has connections to whatever board the officials were talking about. He can probably put in a good word . . . make a donation . . . something . . .”

It was little drowned Carlos Estrada.