Mercy (23 page)

The Framlingham School’s partly to blame — they didn’t tell Port Marie he was a psychopath because it would have looked bad for them. She was one of his students with an extraordinary soprano voice. Sound familiar? He sent her thousands of dirty text messages, even climbed in her bedroom window one night. They found him in the girl’s bed, naked. Her mother took out a restraining order, so he left before the school could sack him and started over. Put around the story that it was the girl stalked him, when all along it was the other way around.’

I frown weakly, losing the train of his words.

Something is different this time. Something happened to me, down there, in the monster’s pit. As we unravelled, I almost felt the point where she ended and I began.

Maybe, if I am displaced another time, and a time after that, I will be able to find that space, that fork in the road, again and again, until I find my true self, standing at the end of it.

And there’s something else. I am leaving, and this 267

time
I know it
.

I have never had warning before, never had certainty.

But this time, I am so sure that I rear up suddenly, like Lazarus, like Frankenstein’s monster, a drowning person grasping at a spar on the ocean.

Ryan pulls back, startled. Still blind, I grab at his shirtfront with what remains of
us
.

‘Tomorrow,’ I whisper, my voice like something carried back on the wind from the afterlife, ‘Carmen may not remember what’s happened. She may not remember
you
, or your parents. She may have no recollection of Jennifer, or even of Lauren, or of her time here before today. You must protect her. See her home safe. Maintain the fiction. Keep me secret. Her future turns on it, and her future is
bright
.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ Ryan says confusedly as he braces me against him.

‘Going,’ I murmur. ‘Into someone else, to
be
someone else. Not here. Not with you.’

I feel that sense of loosening quicken, like sparks flying upward on a cold morning.

‘How do I find you again?’ Ryan says desperately, shaking Carmen, shaking
me
even further free of my moorings.

268

I sigh. ‘You can’t. Could be anywhere, anyone. No time.’

I touch his face with Carmen’s cold fingers. Kiss him once, gently.

‘No! Mercy,’ Ryan cries, crushing
her
closer, not knowing I am already gone. ‘Mercy!’

And I watch from above as Carmen’s breathing evens out in sleep, and find myself falling out of her life, into another …

269

Rebecca Lim is a writer and illustrator based in Melbourne, Australia. She worked as a commercial lawyer for several years before leaving to write full time.

Rebecca is the author of ten other books for children and young adult readers, and her novels have been translated into German, French and Turkish.