A World Without You

  “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.

  CHAPTER 35

  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 sigh
t.

  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.

  CHAPTER 36

  I don’t know if I’m seeing ghosts like Harold does, or maybe time just jumped around enough to show me Sofía’s dead friend, but I’d like to never have that happen again, please.

  Ryan’s pissed that I’m not focused on the problem at hand: the very real possibility that Berkshire may close. He doesn’t understand that I do care. We’re like a family. A tiny, broken family twisted with weird powers, but a family. I don’t want to see what would happen if we’re broken up. I can’t imagine trying to figure out my powers with anyone other than these guys.

  But time is falling apart around me, and Sofía is still gone.

  • • •

  At night, rather than waste time in the common room, I creep across the carpeted floor toward the last dorm room at the end of the hall. I’ve been to that room many times, but I haven’t been there since I left Sofía in the past. At first, I avoided her bedroom subconsciously, but as time kept moving forward without her, I started to avoid it on purpose, going so far as to take a different route to get to classes just to skip passing her room. That shut door used to be open all the time, spilling out little snippets of her music and the scent of her shampoo and her bright pink lamp that cast an eerie glow in the room. The fact that the door is always shut now just serves as another reminder that Sofía isn’t inside.

  But now, I just want to feel close to her again. Maybe just being in a space that is hers will be enough.

  My hand trembles as I twist the knob to Sofía’s bedroom door. The door creaks open. But before I can even flick the light on, I can tell that something’s wrong.

  Sofía’s room is empty.

  Of course she’s not there, but that’s not what I mean. It’s empty of everything that made it her room. There’s a stripped-down bed against the wall, an unadorned desk, a closet with ten bare hangers. It’s empty of her. Someone has come in and taken away everything that made this room Sofía’s.

  “The hell is going on?” I mutter, turning slowly around the room.

  I cross her room in three quick strides, pressing my hand against a patched coat of paint that doesn’t quite match the rest of the walls. This was where Sofía and Gwen had their first fight. The two girls were very different, but they had bonded over the first few weeks of class. And then they fought about something stupid, I can’t remember what, and Gwen had flashed too hot and accidentally burned a streak in the wall. Sofía had covered the dark spot with a poster so that Gwen wouldn’t get in trouble.

  But the poster’s gone, and the dark spot is covered up. It’s as if Berkshire is trying to make it look like Sofía was never here in the first place.

  There’s a flash of movement near the door, and I spin around. A short, teenaged girl with soot streaked down her body pauses, a look of confusion and shock on her face when she peers inside the room and sees me. I’m equally shocked and confused—not only have I never seen this girl before, but she’s dressed in a full-length black skirt with a black top and a huge white collar. She has a thin white cap on, covering most of her pale brown hair.

  She’s from Salem.

  I lunge for her. “Are you from the past?” I demand. “Have you seen Sofía? A girl—she’s got brown skin and talks differently, like me, and she may have been accused of being a witch.”

  The girl opens her mouth to speak; her face is twisted with fear and revulsion, as if she thinks I’m of the devil.

  I blink.

  And she’s gone.

  Cracks in time. Everywhere I go, the timestream follows, leaking moments and people that pop up in the shadows as reminders that I am not in control.

  I try to get my heart to stop racing from the shock of seeing—and then not seeing—the girl from Salem, when suddenly the door bangs open and Gwen bounces in.

  “What are you doing here?” I ask at the same moment Gwen squeaks in surprise at seeing me.

  “I come here all the time,” Gwen says defensively. “What are you doing here?”

  “I miss Sofía.”

  Gwen’s lips twist up, and for once, she doesn’t have a snarky quip to fire back. Her shoulders slump and her hair sweeps into her face as she looks down, a defeated expression in her eyes.

  “I miss her too,” Gwen says. Her guard is still up, as if she expects that I’ll demand she leave. But this place isn’t Sofía’s, not anymore, and even if it were, I wouldn’t keep Gwen from whatever remained of her.

  “Why do you come here?” I ask.

  Gwen shrugs. “Privacy.”

  “There’s no privacy in your own room?”

  “I like it, okay?” Gwen says, moving past me and plopping down on the empty, bare bed. “I like the big room with no stuff in it.”

  She likes the very thing I hate about this place: the echoing emptiness.

  “Are you going to stay or what?” Gwen asks.

  I shrug.

  “Whatever.”

  Gwen hasn’t really liked me since Sofía and I started dating. I can’t blame her. I took away her best and only friend—or, I didn’t take her away, but I took away time with her. And then I took her to the wrong time. Guilt clangs around inside me like a bell.

  Gwen stands up and flips the mattress over. This is the bed where Sofía slept, although when she slept here, the bed was covered with pale pink-and-green sheets and a quilt her grandmother made.

  And, I’m fairly certain, the underside of her mattress wasn’t covered in long burn marks.

  “People think fire is uncontrollable,” Gwen mutters, kneeling in front of the bed as if in prayer. She flicks her fingers, and sparks shoot up. At first I think she’s remembered her powers, but then I see the Zippo in her hand. “But it’s not. It’s powerful, and power doesn’t like to be contained.”

  She runs the flame in a smooth, even line on the silky mattress material, and it blackens and burns. An acrid stench ri
ses up from the scorching cloth. Even though Gwen’s forgotten her powers of pyrokinesis, she’s remembered her grief. And her love of fire. There are dozens of similar black lines, burn marks, all in a row. Careful, even marks monitored and cultivated. They look like scars.

  I count the marks on the bed.

  One for every night Sofía has been gone.

  CHAPTER 37

  Family Day takes me by surprise.

  I knew it was coming, obviously, but time’s been messing with me lately. During mealtimes, the servers are tailed by a small brown-skinned girl with braids, dressed in clothes from at least ten years ago, who speaks Spanish. When I stare out the window during math, a group of Native Americans stalks through the sea grass. During free time outside, the camp for sick kids is fully occupied in one moment, then an abandoned ruin again in the blink of my eye.

  All around me, time is leaking flashes of history.

  Or—and this is what I fear far, far more—I’m seeing death. They’re ghosts in front of me. Spirits reaching out, accusing me of messing with their pasts.

  Sometimes, all I hope is to see Sofía. But other times, I’m terrified that if I see her, that means she’s already beyond my help, she’s already dead.

  So I am somewhat distracted by the time Family Day rolls around. I skipped breakfast and went to the morning session with Dr. Franklin, and no one was there. It wasn’t until my science teacher, Mr. Glover, walked by and saw me waiting outside the Doc’s door that I finally figured out what day it was.

  I rush outside, where the Doctor has only just noticed I was missing. He kind of fusses over all of us, like in the old movies where the orphans are paraded in front of prospective adoptive parents. Except here it isn’t about being selected to go to a new home, it’s about hoping our own parents are happy enough with us to take us back.

  The parents arrive individually. It seems like forever before anyone shows up, and then, suddenly, everyone’s here. Gwen’s mom is one of the first to arrive, then Harold’s whole family. My parents arrive next, dragging along Phoebe. Only Ryan’s family doesn’t bother to show, but the Doctor makes him stand outside with everyone else, which is actually kind of a mean thing to do.