A World Without You

  “No.” My voice is quiet but certain. “It was you.” When I meet his eyes, it’s obvious he still doesn’t understand. “We were on the road trip, remember? In Colorado. And Dad wanted to ‘take us off the beaten path,’ so he drove us to this really scary, winding road. It wasn’t even a real road; it was for loggers or something. Mom wouldn’t look out the window, and she held on to that bar on the side of the door.”

  “Oh yeah,” Bo says, a smile playing on his face. That trip had been our last family vacation. Driving and camping had been fun when we were younger, but we were both in high school then, and it was annoying to have to share the car charger with everyone and hope my phone’s signal lasted in the woods.

  “And then Dad stopped the car and told me to drive.”

  I still remember the crisp, cold air and the scent of evergreens when Dad and I swapped places in the car. I was fifteen at the time, so it wasn’t technically legal, but the road probably wasn’t technically legal either, and no one was around. Just us and the mountains and the trees. Mom had been nervous, but I was excited—my first time behind the steering wheel. But as soon as I got in the driver’s seat, I sort of freaked out. Not on the outside, of course, but my brain was screaming in panic.

  “It was so scary,” I mused. “I mean, the mountain’s edge on one side and trees on the other. The whole time, I kept thinking, ‘If I go just a little bit to the left or the right, I’ll crash the car and kill us all. I am going to kill my whole family.’”

  Bo snorts. “You were going, like, two miles an hour.”

  “I was not!”

  “You were. I could have walked faster.”

  “Whatever. And Dad was yelling—”

  “He was telling you to speed up—”

  “And Mom was telling me to use the brake—”

  “Because she’s a scaredy-cat—”

  “And I was swerving all over the road—”

  “Again, you were barely moving at all—”

  “And do you remember what you said?”

  I want him to know that this moment was really important to me. I remember it so vividly. I had been leaning forward, half my body over the steering wheel, trying to look as closely at the road as I could, squinting at the little bit of gravel just in front of the car. “You have to look further out,” Bo had said from the backseat. “You can’t look right in front of the car.” And then, I don’t know, I just got it. I understood. I needed to focus on the distance; I needed to see where I was going.

  But Bo just shrugs now. He doesn’t remember.

  “Anyway . . . thanks,” I say. I step out of his room, my foot landing on the gouge in the hardwood floor.

  • • •

  I take Bo’s plate back to the kitchen. On the stairs as I head back to my room, I get a text from Jenny. I keep my eyes on the screen as I pass Bo’s room again, not willing to make eye contact and conversation a second time.

  What’s up? Jenny texts.

  Nothing. I step into my room and close the door firmly. Bo’s here.

  I’ve always been jealous, Jenny types, that you have a brother.

  LOL, not this one.

  No, you don’t understand. The words come fast and furious across my screen. You just don’t get how weird it is to be an only child. It would be so much better to have a brother or a sister or something. You have no idea how good you have it.

  I turn off my phone, ignoring the buzzes as more texts arrive. Jenny is the one with no idea. Because the reality is? She may want a brother, but she doesn’t want Bo. She just doesn’t understand. I mean, I know she’s heard me complain about him, but she thinks it’s like the movies when two siblings fight and then eventually bond and become besties. But that sort of thing is just as fake as the idea that taking off your glasses and putting on some eyeliner is all it takes to change from the class freak to a hottie. The truth is, sometimes siblings have nothing in common but blood. Sometimes you just know that the concept of a BFF brother is not applicable to your family.

  Sometimes you stay up late at night, thinking things that make you feel like a heartless monster, wishing for something different and then feeling sick with guilt because you know what the cost of “different” would be.

  Jenny doesn’t want this life. There’s a difference between having no siblings and having a broken one.

  • • •

  An hour later, my door opens without warning, and I jump from my bed, expecting to shout at Mom. That’s our silent rule—I will be the daughter they need, but I get my privacy.

  But it’s not Mom, it’s Bo. He glances at me, then quickly away, avoiding my eyes and sticking closely to the wall as he creeps around my furniture. He makes his way to my desk and unplugs my laptop, tucking it under his arm.

  “You could have asked!” I shout after him.

  But he walks out of the room as if he hasn’t even heard me.

  CHAPTER 44

  Sometimes they notice me, sometimes they don’t. I wonder if I’m fading in and out of existence, or if they are.

  • • •

  Sofía once told me that she found a red Moleskine notebook among her mother’s possessions after she died. The first twenty or so pages were filled with her chicken scratch, but the rest were blank.

  Sofía had sat there, in the middle of the bedroom her mother retreated to when her father drank too much, surrounded by her clothes and the smell of her perfume, and she read every single page.

  Her mother had started the book the day she took a pregnancy test and realized she was going to have another child. More than half the written pages were about her hopes and her fears for Sofía while she was growing in her belly. She poured her heart into those pages, whispering in writing that was barely legible her wish that Sofía would be another girl, that she would grow up strong and courageous, far more so than her mother had ever been.

  The rest of the written pages were from after Sofía was born. More and more time passes between each entry. Some of the entries were angry—at Sofía, at her father, at the life her mother struggled with. But some of them were far kinder. These entries were written in pencil, hardly leaving a mark on the page, as if her mother was so certain the good days would not last that she left herself an easy way to erase the marks should they prove untrue.

  Sofía said that when she found the notebook, she cried—for the first time since the accident, she cried. And she held that book close to her heart, upset not just because of what the pages held, but because of all the pages that held nothing at all. Most of the book was blank. Although Sofía’s mother started writing in the notebook before Sofía was born, somewhere between giving birth to her little sister, raising three daughters, living with Sofía’s father, and everything else life threw at her, she just . . . quit. Maybe she forgot. Maybe she ran out of things to say. But either way, the blank pages would remain forever empty.

  Since I can’t access the timestream and I’m stuck at home, I’ve been writing in an old notebook. Sometimes, instead of jotting down ideas of ways to get everything back to normal, I just write about Sofía. Or to Sofía. And sometimes the blank pages stare at me, waiting, and I don’t know if they’ll stay blank forever or if they’ll become something more.

  My words would give them meaning, but there’s a meaning behind blank pages too.

  • • •

  I got Pheebs’s laptop. If I can’t figure out the past through the timestream, maybe I can figure out more from the USB drive.

  For the most part, the recorded sessions are a weird hybrid between what I know happened and what doesn’t make sense. It’s all talk. Talk, talk, talk. No powers.

  I don’t know if it was the officials who tampered with the videos, but whoever did it did a good job. Any outsider watching these would have no idea that each session with the Doctor was a group lesson about controlling our powers. Gwen’s fi
res are either missing altogether or they’re the result of matches or lighters that the Doctor jumps up quickly to confiscate. Rather than travel through time, I just stare blankly ahead. When Ryan uses his telepathy, it simply looks like he’s throwing something.

  And Sofía is always visible.

  I watch her, mostly. Sometimes I can line up my memory with the way she appears on-screen. The moments in sessions when she’d turn invisible are altered so that she just grows very still and withdrawn, sometimes hiding behind her hair.

  I like to think I’ve been a good student. I always paid attention during the Doctor’s sessions, and I’ve always wanted to have control over my powers, to not be such a liability.

  But now I’m watching her instead of Dr. Franklin. I’m looking at the moments that made her go invisible. There are times during the Doctor’s sessions when it’s like a gun blast going off; Sofía flinches visibly, and then that weird sort of stillness washes over her, indicating that she went transparent in real life.

  It happens when Dr. Franklin talks about the way we react to things that make us anxious, about how our first instincts in moments of fear or pressure may not be our best ones. It happens when Harold talks to his ghosts loudly, in a way that overtakes the session and the Doctor has to escort him out. It happens when Ryan sits too close to Sofía or pays her too much attention.

  It happens when the Doctor talks about family. He likes talking about family and the way it defines us, and every time, Sofía goes invisible.

  CHAPTER 45

  The videos cycle quickly, one into another, cutting on and off at the very beginning and end of each session. Except one.

  I sit up straighter in bed. I vaguely remember this day, when Ryan had tried to strengthen his telepathy and mind-control powers. He was still developing them—he was much better at telekinesis then, but not all the mind stuff. The screen shows Ryan in full meltdown mode as he stands and screams at everyone, but in real life he just lost control of his power. We were all sitting there as he was experimenting, trying to implant an idea inside of us. The Doctor had started with something innocuous: Make us all think about wanting to eat an apple. At first it worked. In fact, the Doctor had a basket of apples, and we all stood up to get one, even though we’d just had breakfast. But as we ate the apples under Ryan’s influence, they turned bitter in our mouths. He lost control not just of his own mind but of ours as well.

  I gag thinking about it now. For me, the apple turned to dust. Sofía said hers became slimy and filled with worms, so soft she could squish the rotten insides in her hand. Whatever Harold saw of his apple made him scream and throw it across the room, nearly breaking the office window.

  It got worse after that. It wasn’t just the apple inside our heads, twisted and gross, it was Ryan’s entire mind. His whole mentality poured into our brains, taking over, erasing us, flashing us with memories we didn’t want to see, things Ryan had experienced that none of us knew: his mother, an actress, who could barely remember his name; his father, a director, who hated his mother for cheating on him and took it out on his son. A parade of nannies, each increasingly incompetent, except for one when he was twelve, who hurt him in ways none of us could ever have imagined.

  It was too much. To have ourselves in our bodies but also Ryan, to feel everything he felt coating our brains like black mold. By the end of the session, we were all clutching our heads and crying, and the Doctor had to use his healing power on each of us just to get us off the floor.

  Except Ryan. The Doctor couldn’t heal Ryan, because the memories he lived with, the thoughts inside his head—those were all his own. The Doctor couldn’t take them away.

  Maybe that’s why Ryan worked so hard to advance his telepathy and control his own mind. Maybe with that control, he could block part of himself off, the part that poisoned us all when we touched it.

  In the video, though, that whole session plays out much differently. Basically, we all just talk, and then Ryan breaks down, crying—actually crying, I’d never seen him do that before—and spends the rest of the session confessing his darkest secrets, telling us about a nanny who abused him, parents who neglected him. We’re disturbed, obviously, even the Doctor, but we didn’t have those feelings literally pressed into our brains, and at the end of the session, we all leave.

  Except Ryan. The Doc calls his name.

  “Yeah?” Ryan asks sullenly.

  “Come on back in, buddy,” he says. “I want to ask you some things.”

  Ryan plops back down in one of the blue plastic chairs, and the Doc pulls up another one so he can face him.

  “What?” Ryan asks, an edge to his voice.

  “I wanted to thank you for opening up to us today,” Dr. Franklin says.

  Ryan shrugs.

  “And I also want to say that when you’re ready, we could go to the police with some of this information. It’s not right, the way the adults in your life have treated you. You understand that, yes? In fact, it’s criminal, particularly what your nanny did. We could press charges . . .”

  He stops when he notices Ryan laughing.

  “Oh my God, really? Really?” Ryan says, his eyes lighting up with glee. “I thought I laid it on too thick, honestly, but you really bought all that, didn’t you? Hook, line, and sinker.”

  The Doctor leans away, his eyes narrowing. “You made all that up today?” he asks. “Ryan, I’m deeply disappointed in you.”

  Ryan shrugs. “I just wanted to see if I could make you guys believe me. And I could. Good to know.”

  “Trust, once broken, is hard to establish again,” Dr. Franklin says.

  Ryan slumps in his chair. “I just wanted to have a little fun.”

  “Making up a story about being abused as a child is not ‘fun,’ Ryan.”

  “It is for me.”

  The Doctor glowers, but Ryan continues. “Look, I’m bored, okay? Bored. I don’t belong here. Locked up with these crazies.”

  “No one here is ‘crazy,’” Dr. Franklin says. “Berkshire Academy is for the emotionally and behaviorally disturbed.”

  “Whatever. They don’t tell you everything. They’re crazy. Which, to be fair, is sometimes amusing. I wonder if I can use that for my benefit. It’d be neat to make Harold believe his ‘ghosts’ are real. Or maybe make Gwen burn this whole place down.”

  “Gwen’s been responding very well to her therapy,” Dr. Franklin says.

  Ryan snorts. “I bet I could make her do it.”

  “Why?” The Doctor is trying very hard to keep his face straight, to be the kind, patient listener, but I can see there’s disgust in his eyes.

  “It’d be fun,” Ryan says. “To see what I could do. To make them all fail. If I had a lighter, I’d give it to Gwen right now, and I’d make the little pyro burn this whole school down.”

  “You could cause serious damage, Ryan. Your lies and manipulation aren’t just words. People could get hurt, even die.”

  Ryan shrugs.

  Dr. Franklin leans over, moving his face so that he meets Ryan’s gaze. “Ryan,” he says in a very serious tone, “your manipulation seriously concerns me. I need to know that you understand the difference between right and wrong.”

  He talks for a while more, but my eyes are glued on Ryan’s face. This is not a side of him I’ve ever seen before. Or have I?

  “Do you?” Dr. Franklin asks him.

  “Do I what?” Ryan’s eyes shift to the wall, as if the wood grain holds more entertainment than this conversation.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying? Do you feel like you know the difference between right and wrong?”

  “Yeah,” Ryan says, pushing up from his chair and heading to the door. “Of course I do.”

  But there’s a difference between knowing what’s right and wrong and actually acting on it.

  The Doctor stares at the door for a long
moment, and he looks torn about whether or not to chase Ryan down. In the end, he gets up and moves toward the video recorder, about to turn it off. For a moment, I see the Doctor’s face close up. This had been an evening session, just before a weekend, and Dr. Franklin carries the weight of the entire week on his face. There is so much about these videos that’s fake—everything that happened in them, really—but that look on his face, that’s real. His eyes are still on the door, but I can see the crinkles in the corner, the way his brow furrows down, the cracks in his usual cheerful facade. He’s showing exhaustion—a moment of defeat. He reaches for the door, his mouth already opening to call Ryan back.

  Before he can, though, the door opens. His face tightens with anxiety as he turns, expecting to see one of us again. Instead, it’s the unit leaders for the rest of the school, as well as a few of the teachers. Ms. Grantham is carrying a plate of cupcakes, and Mr. Glover has three bottles of wine in his arms, and the rest of the unit leaders burst inside, all singing “Happy Birthday” to him.

  I had no idea that day had been the Doc’s birthday. From the look on his face, it seems like the Doctor himself didn’t realize it. But it’s kind of nice to see all that worry melt away as he blows out a candle on the biggest cupcake.

  The other unit leaders spread out in the chairs we’d been sitting in. It’s so weird to see the leaders acting like . . . I don’t know, like people. I’m used to them bossing us around, not laughing and joking and smushing cupcakes in their mouths and getting a little tipsy on wine.

  The party doesn’t last long, but Ms. Grantham is the last to leave. She lingers on purpose, finding excuses to clean up dropped napkins from the floor or help put away the chairs, until she’s the last person in the room. Dr. Franklin looks at her, and there’s a question and there’s hope drawing them closer, wrapping around them like strings. Before they do anything, though, Dr. Franklin reaches over and cuts off the video feed.

  CHAPTER 46

  Phoebe