“Isis!”
I look over to see Dr. Mernich coming toward me, her flyaway hair even frizzier today.
“M-dawg! What’s going down in crazy town?”
She laughs. “Nothing much, really. All the interesting pranks conducted around here suddenly and mysteriously stopped once you left.”
“Ah, well. What can I say? Poltergeists are fickle. Also, supernatural and imaginary. But mostly fickle.”
“Are you here to visit Sophia?”
“Yeah.”
“You look much better,” she says, looking me up and down. “You sound better.”
“Do I? Because I feel like shit now more than ever.”
“But now you’re feeling it. Not running away from it. That’s a good start. Little steps, remember?”
I nod. “Yeah. I think I’m getting there. I mean, a fancy mind-wipe machine like in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind would be helpful and extremely welcome, but hey, you scientist guys are slow and always out of funds. I forgive you.”
Mernich smiles, but it fades quickly. “Isis? Just between you and me—how is Sophia doing, you think?”
“I dunno. One minute she likes me, the next she hates me, the next she’s crying on me. But she seems like she’s stronger, somehow. She’s focused on the things that really matter to her. And sometimes she tries to be nice.”
“Except when she doesn’t,” Mernich offers.
“Yeah. That.”
Mernich turns my words over and then finally claps me on the shoulder.
“Well, thank you for coming to visit her so often. She really does like you, you know. Deep down. She sees you as a friend and wants you to be happy like she can’t always be.”
“Really?”
“She has a very hard time showing it.” Mernich sighs. “Being terminally ill is the most stressful state a human brain can be in. Your emotions run wild constantly, and it doesn’t help that the tumors are also altering her personality.”
“Yeah. But that’s understandable. None of us can be happy all the time,” I say.
“Yes. But you certainly try more than anyone else, don’t you?”
Her words hit hard. She smiles one last time, then turns and walks down the hall, calling out to another doctor.
I peek into the kids’ ward, but Mira and James are out to lunch in the cafeteria. Sophia’s door is open, and I walk in to see her and Jack, hugging. I back up immediately, but Sophia hears me first and pulls away.
“Isis! Hey!” She runs over and hugs me. It’s a sudden 180 from her behavior the other day, but I’m so happy she’s being nice to me again I let it slide. I look at Jack over her shoulder. He’s expressionless, the slightest frown on his face.
“Hi, sorry, wow. I just barged in here without even knocking first,” I say.
“It’s okay! I’m just glad you’re here. You, and Jack, and me, all together for once. It’s great. Isn’t it?” she asks, turning to Jack. He nods, stiffly, and then locks eyes with me. It’s quick, but it lingers, and reminds me of everything that happened that night in the hotel—how kind he was, how warm. I feel my face burning up and Sophia staring at me.
“I should go,” Jack says suddenly.
“What? Why? Work again?” Sophia tilts her head.
“No. I just don’t want to get in the way of any girl talk.”
“Periods,” I say to Sophia immediately. “Huge, bloody periods.”
“Tampons!” she shouts.
Jack pushes past us and out the door. “I’m going to get something to eat. I’ll be back.”
When he’s gone, Sophia turns to me.
“So? What’s up?”
I’m confused by her sudden cheeriness. For a split second, it was like we were back to how we used to be, before I regained my memory. People say knowledge is power, but in my case, it’s a curse. A curse to lose a friend I’d made during a really hard time. Maybe she’s not in pain today, I muse. Maybe she’s feeling better. Maybe she’s getting better! The surge of hope is instant and half blind, a tiny voice whispering she’ll never get better, no matter how much she deserves to, no matter how unfair life is.
I rummage in my pocket and hold out the silver bracelet with tallulah on it. It jingles faintly in the air, the sudden silence between us deafening. Her blue eyes widen, and she reaches out reverently and takes it. She strokes the name engraved on it with her thumb.
“Tallie,” she whispers.
“I couldn’t bring back…um. The rest of her. I mean, that’s her grave, so that’s where she should stay, you know? That’s where she rests. But I thought you’d like the bracelet.”
Sophia’s quiet for a long time. She traces the bracelet chain over and over. Just as I start to feel awkward for staying, she raises her voice.
“Jack got it for me. After it happened. It’s nice to have it back.”
I try to smile, but it comes out crooked.
“He didn’t know,” she says. “I never told him about her. But that night in the woods spilled the secret in front of everyone. That night—”
Her fist clenches the bracelet, a darkness creeping into her eyes that wasn’t there before.
“He was the only good thing in my life,” she continues. “I would’ve done anything to keep him with me. You understand. You wanted Nameless to stay, too, right?”
I nod slowly. I told her about him, in the softest, most vulnerable moments of my recuperation. Not everything. But enough. Enough to have her link us together in the same way—her and Jack, me and Nameless.
“This bracelet’s been with Tallie for years now,” she continues. “In the ground with her. I couldn’t see her or visit her. And it tore me up every day. But now it’s with me.”
“Now she’s with you,” I offer. Sophia looks up, eyes wet, and flings her arms around my neck.
“Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m sorry for everything I’ve said. Everything I’ve done. Let me make it up to you, okay? I really wanna make it up to you.”
“You don’t have to, actually, I know things have been really hard? And like, your life is hard? So I don’t want to make it extra hard?”
“You won’t be! Avery’s planning the entire party, so I won’t be doing anything stressful. All you have to do is wear something ‘rad,’ or whatever, and come!”
“Uh, historically I haven’t had the greatest experience at Avery’s parties.”
“Neither have I,” she reminds me. “But it’s my birthday party, and she’s promised to behave herself. And I’ll be there, so I’ll keep an eye on her. I’d just like it if you came. Wren’s coming, and so is Jack. And a bunch of other people I was supposed to go to school with, so like, most of your class.”
“Big party?”
“Huge! And there’s a cake, and a DJ, and please, please come!”
Her face is shining in the same way it used to shine when I’d make her laugh, back at the beginning. Back when I first came here.
“Yeah. Yeah, all right. I’ll come.”
Sophia smiles, relief carving her features.
“Great. It’s on the twenty-eighth, up at her house. It’s supposed to start at seven, but you should arrive fashionably late, because the booze is also arriving fashionably late.”
“You know me too well.”
Sophia shakes her head and laughs.
“I thought I did. But, no. No, Isis. I don’t know you at all. You’re the only one. You’re the only one who brought me what I wanted. Not flowers. Not food. Not medicine or pity. You brought me my baby, after everything I did to you and said to you.”
She hugs me again.
“You don’t pretend to be a good person like everyone else. You are one.”
“But I’m the dragon. I’m evil. Jack and I—”
Sophia pulls away and smiles faintly.
“You and Jack are my greatest friends. My only friends. Thank you for sticking around this sick little idiot.”
There’s a moment of quiet, in which all we can hear is t
he shuffling of nurses and patients outside and the faint beeping of distant monitors.
“I like Jack,” I blurt. The words hang there, pushed out by my guilt. Sophia doesn’t miss a beat.
“I like him, too.”
“I think…I think I want to be with him.”
“I want to be with him, too.” Her smile widens. “But I can’t be. Not for much longer, anyway.”
“But the surgery will—”
“I don’t know what the surgery will do. No one does. The future is funny like that. No matter how much we plan and scheme, the tiniest hole in the ship can sink us. So I’ve learned to stop planning. To just…let things happen.”
My mouth won’t say words, tightening into a thin line instead. All of my feelings for Jack, for her, war with each other. Imaginary blood spills. Someone probably loses an arm or five.
“Whatever happens,” Sophia continues, “I want him to be happy. I think that’s what Dr. Mernich means by coming to terms with my own death. It’s not about accepting death. It’s about accepting the lives you’re leaving behind. Accepting their feelings, their wants and needs. At first I hated the idea of that—I wanted everyone to suffer like I was suffering. Avery, Wren. Even Jack. Even you. But now I realize…”
She looks down at the bracelet and smiles.
“Now I realize the only thing I can do is make it easy on all of you.”
“Sophia—”
“Let’s go upstairs.” Sophia grabs my hand suddenly. “To the roof. One last time.”
The wind is gentle today. There are no pigeons, but a few crows perch on the radio antennae above the door. The winter light is pale and washes the world out—all gray roads and white buildings. Sophia sits on the edge of the roof, and I sit with her. We watch the people go in and out of the hospital, bustling about their daily lives. She points to two kids playing on the rusted swing in the recreation area.
“James and Mira look good. Well, better than when they first came.”
James takes a flying leap off one of the swings and Mira chastises him loudly. Sophia laughs.
“James might get out, someday. If he fights it off. But Mira is pretty much like me. When they first came, I was jealous of them. They have parents who visit, parents who love them. I was alone.”
She leans back, stretching her thin arms out.
“I got close to them to try to siphon some of the parental love. It worked, for a while. But then the jealousy got to be too much, and I snapped at them one day. And they haven’t looked at me without being afraid since.”
“It wasn’t your fault—”
“It was my fault,” she says dully. “Mernich helped me see that. I was manipulating my surroundings because I didn’t have any control over my life.”
“Why all the past tense?”
She shoots me a crooked grin. “I’m just talking about past therapy sessions. Don’t get all worried-mom on me.”
I hold my hands up. “All right, officer. You got me.”
“To jail you go,” she orders. “Solitary confinement. No comic books.”
“Alas! How will I discover who Captain America sleeps with next?”
“The internet will scream about it, I’m sure.”
For a while neither of us says anything. The sun starts setting, turning the grays of the world into pink gold.
“Be gentle with him,” Sophia says finally. The way she says “him” means Jack, I can tell that much. “He’s been through a lot because of me. The fact that he doesn’t hate me after all this, after everything I’ve put him through, only makes me love him more. And it only makes me feel more awful.”
“He’s a good guy,” I say. “And so are you.”
“I wish.” She laughs. “But no. I wasn’t a good guy. Not in this life. Maybe in the next. If there is a next life at all. For all my disbelief, I still like to think there is one. Secretly. Does that make me a hypocrite?”
“It makes you human.”
I don’t want to ruin this moment by asking about what Jack did that night, but the shadow of Nameless looms over me, darker in the silence.
“Nameless sent me a picture,” I say. “Of Jack with a baseball bat. It’s bloody. And I can’t help but think—”
“He didn’t do it,” Sophia says instantly.
“What?”
“He didn’t kill that man. He didn’t kill anyone. He chased them off, all of them. One of them just happened to run the wrong way in the dark and fell to his death.”
My lungs feel like they’re frozen. Sophia shakes her head.
“Why is Nameless sending you things?”
I shrug. “I don’t know.”
“It sounds like he wants to torment you.”
“Probably. Knowing him, definitely.”
Sophia inhales. “That night, there was an investigation. We called the police. Well, I didn’t. Wren did. I was busy having a seizure. I was so scared I tripped on a root and slammed my head on a tree. It was a chain reaction—Tallie came out. I couldn’t stop it.”
Her eyes are distant, glassy. Her words sound robotic, as if she’s said this to someone else before.
“They panicked. Wren, Avery, Jack. They were just kids. We were all just kids. I’d kept it a secret from them. Jack called an ambulance. Wren ran. Avery buried Tallie so my grandmother wouldn’t disown me. She was hard-core Catholic. They’d all been to my house and knew that. Jack tried to protect me, until the last. Wren did, too, toward the end. So he doesn’t deserve my hate.”
Sophia kicks her feet against the edge of the roof.
“The paramedics came for me; the police came for the man’s body. I was unconscious the whole time. At the hospital they did a CAT scan and found my tumors, and found out about Tallie. The doctors didn’t tell Grandma about her, because of patient confidentiality and all that. When I woke up, Jack told me what happened, what my life would be from then on.”
She looks to me.
“He blames himself for that man’s death, even if the police ruled it an accident. Avery’s parents paid for major PR work. The papers reported the guys as drunk fishers out on the lake for the weekend, even when the police knew the real reason. The news said Joseph Hernandez just…disappeared. Ran off. Nothing about Avery hiring them. Nothing about how they worked for her parents’ company. After that, the rest of the men moved out of state. Everything was cleaned up by Avery’s parents. It was terrifying, watching the efficiency money could buy.”
“So, Belina,” I start. “Wren took me to see a woman Jack is sending checks to. She was—”
“Joseph’s wife,” Sophia agrees. “And Jack tries to fix everything with money, because it’s the only thing he can do. Because the other wounds are too deep to fix.”
“How do you know about Belina?”
“Wren told me,” she says. “He’s still afraid of me. But texting works wonders for talking to people who can’t look you in the eye. He hasn’t told me how Jack gets the money. Or from whom.”
I’m suddenly very interested in my shoes. The whole night I’d been wondering about is out in the open now. I know what happened. And it’s every bit as terrifying as I thought it would be. Things like this don’t happen to normal people. But they happened, anyway. And I can’t change that.
“Things just happen,” I echo Sophia’s words back at her. “Good or bad.”
“And we live with the consequences,” Sophia agrees. “Or not. Some people decide to die with the consequences, instead.”
“Some people are pretty dumb.”
We watch the sun go down and the moon rise. Each day passes as it always does, in slow, twenty-four-hour increments, but for Sophia, I realize, it must feel like the blink of an eye.
Eventually it gets too cold for us to stay up on the roof, and so we go inside and get hot cocoa from the cafeteria. We talk about the party, what to wear and what music to play. Sophia insists she doesn’t want any presents, save for my presence.
When I finally get home, Mom is filling
out bills at the kitchen table. I hug her from behind, and she turns and laughs.
“What’s the occasion?”
“I realized,” I murmur into her shoulder. “I realized people are fragile. Everything could change in a second. And I don’t—I don’t want to waste time not hugging you or telling you you’re the best mom I could ask for.”
“Oh, honey.” Mom turns and hugs me back. “Are you all right? What brought this on? Is this about Stanford?”
“No. A friend,” I say. “She’s shown me a lot of stuff. About life. And not-life. It’s so short. Life is so short and weird and things keep happening all the time, and I don’t know what to do anymore. I can’t do anything except be me.”
Mom’s hug tightens.
“That’s all you need to do. No matter what you do, I’m here for you, sweetie. Always. You’ll always have me on your side.”
“I know.” I bury my face in her chest and say the words that hold the most truth, the most gratitude. “Thank you.”
I stare at the last email Nameless sent me for what feels like forever. He wants me to suffer. That’s why he keeps doing this. He won’t let me go. He can’t. Not after what he inflicted on me. He wants to feed off the pain as much as he can, while he still can. Just like Leo. But I won’t let him. Life is too short.
Responding would just give him pleasure. I click on the emails and delete them and, for good measure, my email account. I start a new one, the fresh, blank inbox a comfort. I can still start over.
Next year I’ll have to start over, because college demands it. The next step of life demands it.
But I can always, always start over, because I’m here, outside a hospital. Because I’m alive and healthy. Because I won’t let my past chain me down like it has Jack, and Sophia, and Wren, and Avery.
Because I’m not Mom. I’m not Jack. I’m not Sophia. I am not my past.
I’m Isis Blake, and I’m my own future.
Chapter Thirteen