A World Without You (2 page)

I hear her before I see her.
I'm not surprised that she's the only one who bothered to find me after the memorial service.

“Hey, Gwen,” I say, as she plops down beside me.

She gives me a sullen look. She's pissed I left the ceremony. “You're not the only one who misses her, you know.”

“I know.”

She glares at me, but then the fight leaves her. “This was my place first,” she says, her voice softer now. “I'm the one who showed it to Sofía.”

I didn't know that. I'd always sort of thought of the chimney as
my
place on the island. I discovered it my first week here, after doing some research on Berkshire and finding out that the island held one of the oldest remaining houses built by the colonists. My eyes drift to the black-and-bronze plaque adhered to the crumbling bricks near the border of the academy's grounds: R
EMAINS OF THE
C
EDRIC
M
OOREHEADE
H
OUSE.
D
ES
TROYED IN A FIRE IN 1775.
O
RIGINALLY BUILT IN
S
ALEM
IN TH
E 1660S, LIKE THE
I
SAAC
G
OODALE
H
OUSE OF
I
PSWICH
, AND MOVED TO
P
EAR
I
SLAND IN 1692.

“Why'd you come out here?” I ask Gwen.

She flicks her fingers, a burst of flame dancing out. “I like chimneys.”

“Oh. Right.”

I like history, so of course I'd sought the ruins out, but all that was left was the chimney. Still, I like this place for what it used to be—a house built before America was a country—and for what it might have been—someone's dream, someone's birthplace, someone's safe haven. Pear Island hasn't been used for much. In the early days, settlers grazed livestock here. But at some point, a family decided that this island, with its biting flies and harsh winds and terrible weather . . . this island would make a perfect home. The chimney is all that's left of a family. Real people who stood here centuries ago, with lives lost to time.

But Gwen doesn't care about the history. She likes it simply for what it is now. She stares into the blackened center of the chimney, where hundreds of fires must have blazed over the years. Now there's just green moss and a few plants trailing up the center. Gwen cups her palm, rubbing her thumb over air, and a tiny ball of fire appears in the center of her hand. She tosses it toward the grass and plants growing in the chimney, but the ground is too wet and the foliage too young for the flame to catch. A thin wisp of smoke trails up the bricks, then dies.

That's Gwen's power. Pyrokinesis. The ability to make and control fire.

Gwen stares at the smoke. The trees' shadows reach toward us, and the air is damp and cool and slightly salty.

After a long stretch of silence, Gwen speaks. “Harold hates it out here,” she says. “Says there's witches.” She rolls her eyes. “That boy is
crazy
. Like, he doesn't just have problems, he is crazy-crazy.”

Harold talks to the dead. His power is probably stronger than any of ours, but it's also the most useless and will likely drive him over the edge. The Doctor works with him often, trying to help him control his gift and filter out the voices so he can maybe glean some useful information from them.

Gwen stretches her legs in front of her, her eyes still on the chimney. There's an ease to the silence between us. I don't feel like I have to talk; we're both comfortable just being together.

Before I came to Berkshire, I thought I was alone. I have these powers that no one else has. I can control time—well,
control
is a strong word. I can
sometimes
, sort of control time. And sometimes it controls me, throwing me around history until I snap back to where I'm supposed to be. When the episodes first started, I thought something was wrong with me. I didn't know what was happening, so I was scared. Not anymore, though. Not unless I lose control.

I was fifteen the first time I lost control of my power. I was sitting in history class, and my teacher was giving a lecture about the Civil War. She was describing the Battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest battles ever, and she told a story about a little pond near the battlefield that turned red with all the blood from the wounded. She explained to us that the story was a myth, that it probably never really happened, but then I blinked.

And I was there.

Just like that. One minute I was in class, and the next minute
I was at the Battle of Freaking Shiloh in Tennessee, and it was
loud
, it was so loud, and the air was thick like fog and smelled like blood. There were people shouting and guns drawn and cannons firing, and I could see it all. And then I saw the pond. It was just as my teacher described it: small and stained red with blood.

And I don't know what happened next. I guess I just lost it. I started screaming and screaming and screaming, and then I blinked again.

And I was back in class.

Obviously I freaked everyone the hell out. The whole class was staring at me. I was gone so quick no one even noticed, so as far as they knew, I was yelling for no reason. They didn't know that I could still smell the blood and the gunpowder and the death that hung in the air.

After that, I was scared, really scared. What if I got stuck in the past? What if I spent the rest of my life bouncing around time, powerless to stop it?

Instead, Dr. Franklin found me. And I came here. Here, where Gwen can wrap fire around her hands like a glove, where Harold whispers to ghosts and they whisper back, where Ryan can move things with his mind and influence people's thoughts. We all have powers here, except for some of the staff and a few of the tutors. Even Dr. Franklin is one of us. He can heal himself and others, which is ironic because he is literally a doctor, but he's the kind of academic doctor that teaches, not the medical kind. But even with his degrees and experience, he hasn't really been able to help me progress all that much.

“What are you thinking about?” Gwen asks, breaking the silence.

I shrug. It's sort of embarrassing to admit that I don't have much control over my powers. From the moment I arrived at Berkshire, everyone else seemed to advance so much faster than me. And while the Doc is nice, I can tell that he's getting frustrated with my lack of progress.

When the Doctor found me and told my parents about the academy, we were all pretty relieved. I was glad that someone finally understood me, and I kind of hated high school anyway, so it was nice to get a change of scenery. I also liked that the Berk was a boarding school. I mean, I love my parents, but I don't really feel comfortable at home. I never have. To be honest, I think I get along better with my old man now that I'm out of the house. We can tolerate each other when we only have to be in the same building on weekends. Our relationship is built on absence.

It's little wonder that Berkshire has become my real home.

“I wish I knew what she was thinking,” Gwen says, her eyes still fixed on the fireplace. She glances at me, but looks away again. “You know, before.”

I don't want to talk about that, about the day Sofía went missing.

Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. Like sharp, shooting pains.

And my tongue. How weird is that? Thinking about the day Sofía got stuck in the past makes my
tongue
hurt. On the back of my tongue, near my throat, it just
aches
. It feels like that sort of burning dread rising in your throat when you know you need to cry but you just can't.

I open my mouth. I don't know what I'm going to say to Gwen, but it doesn't matter anyway, because in that moment,
she disappears. The cold twilight air is replaced with morning mist and damp dew, and the shadows from the trees suddenly all point away from me.

And I am standing in front of the chimney on the day Sofía disappeared.

My heart thumps,
and I feel like I might throw up. I bend over, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

My powers have been more and more erratic since Sofía disappeared, but they've never brought me back here, to this moment. And I've tried. I've tried to get back so many times.

I gather myself, breathing in the crisp morning air. I may not have meant to snap back to this time, but that doesn't mean I can't use it.

On the day Sofía disappeared, I had gone for a walk by myself. I went north to the gate on the boardwalk and then turned around and was heading back to the school. But I veered closer to the beach and went past the old camp ruins. They're state-owned property, and we're not supposed to hang out there. But that day I ignored the Doctor's rules.

I look around and then up. You'd be surprised how adept you get at using the sun to tell time when you never know when and where you're going to end up. Judging from the position of the
sun, I figure that the past me, the me on a walk about to meet Sofía and screw up her life, is probably near the polio camp ruins.

The abandoned camp is left over from the days before vaccinations, when the sick had to be quarantined. It was built in the '50s for people with polio, but it remained open through the '80s. Now, after years of neglect, it's just a bunch of rotted wooden buildings that look like a haunted summer camp. Berkshire was built when the camp closed, and no one bothers to maintain the abandoned buildings.

I still don't know why I went there that day . . . but I did.

And that's where I saw Sofía.

To be accurate, I saw her shoes first. Bright red, perched on the edge of the remains of a shallow swimming pool at the center of a circle of broken-down buildings. It's nothing but a concrete depression now, no water or anything, and Ryan keeps talking about how it should be turned into a skate ramp, but Dr. Franklin says that's disrespectful.

She was just sitting there, her legs dangling over the edge.

“Hey,” I said.

Sofía didn't respond.

I walked over and sat down next to her, her red shoes between us. It seemed strange that she'd taken her shoes off. The morning was cold, the dew on the blades of grass frozen like crystals. It was no longer quite winter but close enough. I guess Sofía was in denial about the weather.

“What's up?” I asked.

Still, nothing.

And that's when I noticed she was crying.

Not, like, loud, sniffling crying that makes your shoulders hunch and your face hurt. Just quiet tears leaking from her eyes,
trailing down her cheeks, and dripping from her chin. She was so lost in her sadness that I wasn't even sure she was aware of my presence until I touched her cold face, wiping away one of the tears with the pad of my thumb.

“Hey,” I said as gently as I could. “What's wrong?” I moved her shoes so I could scoot closer, but she stood up abruptly, stepping back from the edge of the pool.

“Nothing,” she said, and I knew it wasn't true, but she started walking away, barefoot on the cold, sandy soil. I figured if it meant that much to her not to talk about it, then she could keep her secrets.

Still, I followed her. I knew she wanted to be alone, but there was something about the way she walked, something about the little hiccup sound she made as she wiped away her tears and pretended like they never existed . . . it didn't feel right to abandon her.

Maybe I should have left her alone. Maybe then she wouldn't have gone away.

As she passed by one of the old camp buildings, she whirled around. “You can go back in time, right?”

“Yeah,” I said. I watched her closely. She wasn't acting like herself, but I didn't know how to make it better.

“Can you take other people back?”

I nodded. “Do you want to go back
here
?” I asked, waving my hand toward the abandoned buildings of the polio camp. “It's just a bunch of sick kids.”

She shook her head. “No, not here. But, you know, I think maybe . . . maybe this place wouldn't be so bad.”

“Sick. Kids. Just, like, buckets of sick kids all around being sick. Not my idea of a fun place.”

“You don't understand,” Sofía said. “When you're sick with, like, a terminal illness, something you live with forever, there are very few moments you can forget about it. It's like a lead weight inside your chest, cracking your ribs. Every time you move, you can feel that weight shifting inside of you. But then there are moments when, for whatever reason, the weight goes away. You forget you're sick. I bet this camp was full of those moments. That's what I'd want to see. That's what I want to feel.”

She was right. I didn't understand.

“So where do you want to go?” I asked, still unsure of this wild mood of hers.

Sofía looked off into the distance, toward the ocean and the sun and forever, but she couldn't see any of that. “I want to go somewhere far away.”

She didn't bother explaining any further. She just kept walking. I don't think she was going anywhere in particular, but we headed toward the state park. I thought about running back to get her abandoned red shoes so she wouldn't have to walk on the splintery wood of the boardwalk, but she veered left, where the ground was soft.

I look around me now. Any minute, past-me and past-Sofía will come around the bend and be standing right in front of me, at the chimney. It's where Sofía took me that day, right before she whirled around, her eyes blazing, her long, dark hair whipping back, and said: “Here.”

“Here?”

“Can you take me back to this place? Back when there was just one family on the island, the ones who built this house?”

“It wasn't built here,” I said. “It was built in Salem.”

“Fine, then when the house was moved here. To . . .” She
turned around, her eyes scanning the plaque. “Let's go back to 1692.”

“I . . . um . . .”

“You can do it, right?”

“Yeah,” I said immediately, wanting to impress her, to erase the doubt in her voice. “I've been back further than that. It's just . . . why?”

“I want to go away. I want to be as far away from this world as possible. Take me back further than 1692, I don't care. Let's go to the days when Native Americans were here. Let's go further. Let's go to the dinosaurs.”

All my muscles were tense, and I moved very carefully, like I would if there were a wild animal in front of me. “I've never been that far back before,” I said. I regretted telling her that I could take her back. I wanted to wrap her up in my arms and hold her tight, not fling her through time and space. I didn't realize it then, but a part of me sensed that she was running away, and I didn't want to let her go, even if I was going with her.

“I don't care, I just—” Her voice cracked. “I need to escape.”

I took a deep breath and grabbed both her hands in mine. I didn't know what was wrong with her, but I knew I would do anything to make her happy. As I was holding her, I called up the timestream. I saw it expanding out from the two of us, strings erupting in every direction, each one linked to a different time and place. She couldn't feel it; she didn't react at all as I focused on the date engraved on the chimney, on the house that once contained it, on the island of the past.

And then we were there.

We had been standing among ruins; we were now standing in front of a chimney with bright red bricks streaked with
soot. A roaring fire blazed at the bottom, casting Sofía in an orange-yellow glow and flickering shadows across the wood floor. There were herbs drying in one corner, an iron cauldron bubbling in another. The house smelled . . . warm. It wrapped around us, peaceful and beautiful.

Sofía sighed. In that moment, I think, she was happy.

Then the door behind me flung open, and I could hear a man's deep, accented voice: “Oh my God.”

I started to turn.

Sofía's hands slipped from mine.

And suddenly, like a rubber band breaking, I was snapped back to the present. I gasped for air, my entire body in shock, having been thrown through more than three centuries. My arms and legs trembled, and I fell to the cold ground, my fingers clutching the sharp blades of the long sea grass.

“What happened?” I said.

But there was no answer. Just the ruins of an ancient chimney.

Since then, I've spent every waking moment trying to find a way back to Sofía. But my powers have worked sporadically at best, and never in a way that would be helpful. Now, though . . . now that I'm here, back to the time before she was trapped . . .

I have a chance.

I could save Sofía. I could stop my past self from taking her back, from leaving her stuck in a world that wasn't hers. I've tried so many times to reach this time and place again, and now that I'm here, I can fix it. I can make sure she never ends up in the past, abandoned, trapped where I can't reach her.

I hear voices down the path. It's past-me and Sofía. This is my chance. I can save her.

I stand up straighter, prepared to run to her.

I take one step forward, my voice already rising in my throat, ready to shout a warning . . .

• • •

I'm snapped back to the present.

I feel a cool hand on the back of my neck. “Hey,” Gwen says softly. “You okay? You were gone there for a moment.”

I nod, swallowing. I don't know why I expected this time to be different.

I can't save Sofía. I took her to the past, and I left her there, and I can't bring her back. I've tried and I've tried. Every time I get close to her, time snaps me away again.

She's trapped. And I put her there.