“I was . . .” I mumbled. “It’s just—flashes.”
Sadie gave a muted sigh. “We were skiing,” she prompted.
“Skiing?” I blinked twice, but this time, the room didn’t change. “You mean—you and Mom and me?”
“I know. Jaye Stuart participating in a sport?” Sadie shook her head. “Blue moons colliding. Snowballs piling up in hell.”
It must have been the grogginess filling my body, because I almost broke the rule. “But we haven’t gone skiing since—”
“I know.” Sadie cut me off just in time. “Mom and I just thought it would be nice. Good memories. You know.”
I had to fight to keep the disbelief off my face.
Good memories? Mom and Sadie shushing happily off on their skis. Me wobbling, stiff and terrified, on the learner’s slope, whining about the cold, my sore ankles, the steepness of the hills. Dad’s teasing smile turning embarrassed. Then tight. Then angry. I remembered one trip—I must have been eight or nine—when he grabbed me by the arm and shoved me down the incline while I screamed and cried and strangers stared at us. At the bottom of the bunny hill, Dad leaned close and hissed at me through clenched teeth, “You’re not even trying,” before gliding away, leaving me alone. I’d spent the rest of that trip—and every ski trip afterward—waddling up and down the grounds near the lodge, trying to look like I had just finished a great run, or like I was just about to head out on another, practicing my lies for Dad. I did the learner’s slope four times, I’d say, hoping my frostbitten cheeks would be enough evidence. I tried. Really.
“I hated those trips,” I told Sadie.
“Well, there may have been bribery involved, but you’ll have to ask Mom about that.”
I scraped the memories away. “So, we were skiing. And then?”
“There was an accident.” Now Sadie looked at my cheek instead of my eyes. “You hit a tree.”
“And that’s why I don’t ski.” My right cheek tingled. In fact, the entire right side of my face felt tender and hot, like it had when we were little and Sadie accidentally bashed me in the eye with a Little League bat. I raised a hand to touch it, but taped tubes and needles jerked my arm back. “Wait.” The sparkling whiteness and fog and bloody roses were piling up again. “I hit a tree?”
“You were unconscious for a while.” Sadie rearranged one of the tubes I’d pulled out of place. “There’s a fracture in your skull. But the doctors don’t think it’s too serious. There’s no bleeding in your brain or anything.”
The words—skull, fracture, bleeding in the brain—seemed to belong to someone else. Someplace else. They slithered out of my reach. I closed my eyes, hoping Sadie wouldn’t see how lost I was.
Her voice had been so bland. So factual. So well-rehearsed.
“Sadie . . .” My throat burned. “Have you told me all of this before?”
“Have I told you?” There was a pause. Too long. “Yes. More than once.”
I kept my eyes closed. “I don’t remember.”
“But this is the first time you’ve asked me if I’ve told you before,” said Sadie. “That’s probably a good sign.”
“I don’t remember any of it.”
“The nurses say that’s totally normal. They say people with head injuries do all kinds of things they don’t remember afterward. Especially when they’re on painkillers. Some of them hit people, some of them shout things, some pull the needles out of their arms and run out of their rooms in their little flapping hospital dresses.” Sadie’s voice changed, and I could tell that she was smiling. “I guess you sat up in bed the other day and recited Juliet’s whole ‘Wherefore art thou Romeo’ speech at the top of your lungs.”
“I did?” I opened my eyes. “I didn’t even know I knew that speech.”
Sadie’s grin widened. “Apparently the entire wing could hear you.”
I laughed. It was just a short laugh, but it made my chest throb like I’d been punched. It took a few seconds before I could speak again. “So . . . how did they say I was?”
“Oh my god.” Sadie threw her head back. “You are such a drama queen.”
Her words worked their way through the fog. The other day, you sat up in bed . . .
“Sadie,” I began, “how long have I been in here?”
Sadie’s smile vanished. She craned back slightly, like she wanted to get out of my reach. “For the record, you’ve never asked me that before either.” She straightened the tubes taped to my arm again, even though they didn’t need straightening. She didn’t look at me when she answered. “It’s been six days.”
“. . . Six days?” Panic flash-froze my insides. “How—what have I been doing here for six days?”
“Resting,” said Sadie flatly.
“But I can’t—” My lungs had crystalized. The words came out with a wheeze. “Six days? I can’t even remember them.”
“That’s because you’ve been resting.”
Oh my god. Six days. Six days. My thoughts ripped apart, flying in all directions. Some flew to my mother. Where is she? Is she all right? Some flew to the play. What have I already missed? Has Mr. Hall given my role away? Has Pierce even noticed that I’m gone? And some flew backward, to that hole in the snow, the whiteness filling up with blood-red roses. Six days. How could I not remember any of it? Would I forget all of this in another few minutes, and only remember to ask again on day twelve? Day twenty? Day four hundred?
“Oh my god, Sadie.” I reached for the bed’s plastic railing. “I have to get out of here.”
“Nobody wants you here. Believe me.”
“No.” I tried to sit up. The bones of my spine seemed to have fused, and the best I could manage was to roll onto my left elbow. The tubes in my other arm pulled. Somewhere nearby, a high-pitched alarm began to beep. “I need to get out of here. Mom must be—”
“Jaye, hang on.” Sadie darted around the bed and gripped my shoulders. “You can’t just—”
I writhed upright. My ribs dug through my chest like spears. A tube in my elbow snapped free. The white walls. The machines. The beeping. “I need to get out of here.”
“Jaye, just let me get the nurse. It’s going to be—”
“No,” I said, in my most forceful voice, even though it made my throat sting. I lurched sideways, managing to swing one leg out of the bed. Sadie tried to push me back. An alarm began to blare. “I’m getting out of here.”
The door flew open. A nurse in blue scrubs strode toward the bed.
Our mother hurried after her.
Something had happened to her face. Mom usually looks a decade younger than she is—she always has that yoga glow, and her face and voice are like raw silk, smooth and soft, with a little natural waver in the fiber. But now she looked twenty years older. I could tell she hadn’t been eating. She hadn’t washed her hair in days, either. Tight lines curved around her mouth, like wires cutting into the skin.
I’d seen her this way once before.
She had to get out of here too.
“Mom—” The nurse pushed me back onto the bed, repeating my name. I tried to shove her hands away. “Mom, I’m fine. I just need to get out.” I fought back the desperation. “Make them let me out.”
Mom grabbed Sadie’s arm. “What happened?” I heard her whisper.
“She was asking how long she’d been here, and when I told her—”
“No. Mom, I’m all right. I swear.” The walls. The smell. The beeping and wheezing machines clustered around Dad’s narrow white bed. My head was going to explode. “Let’s get out of here. Please.”
“Jaye . . .” The nurse adjusted something in my arm. “Hang on, Jaye. Just stay with me . . .”
The room smeared. Shadows climbed the walls like fast-growing vines.
“Jaye, can you hear me?”
In the row of vinyl chairs beneath the wind
ow, William Shakespeare sat, staring back at me.
His eyes were deep blue. A slip of yellow light glittered on his hoop earring. Keeping his eyes on me, he placed one finger against his lips.
And then the room turned inside out.
CHAPTER 2
I was early to auditions for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I’m usually late for everything. Family dinners. Classes. Detentions for being late to those classes. But I was not going to be late for this.
After the final bell on audition day, I stayed at school until the 5:00 start time, wandering the halls and mumbling to myself like a crazy person. Preparing a monologue from Shakespeare had seemed kind of like wearing the T-shirt of the band you’re about to see, so I picked Roxanne’s speech from Cyrano de Bergerac instead—the one where she tricks the friar into marrying her to the man she actually loves. I’d memorized it weeks ahead of time, etching the words onto my brain until they were almost like breathing. I’d practiced in the mirror. In the shower. In our echoing, cobwebby basement. Now I practiced a few last times as I paced around the nearly empty school halls.
At a quarter to five, I pushed through the scarred door that leads to the backstage hallway. No one had turned the stage lights on yet, so the air around me was dark and thick. I took a deep breath. The hallway always smells like house paint, sawdust, cold cream, and ancient clothes. It should be an ugly smell, but it’s my favorite smell in the world. If there was a perfume that smelled like the backstage, I’d wear it. A burst of energy shot up through my legs, straightened my spine, zinged into my lungs. Mr. Hall calls it electrification. The feeling of being ready to step onstage and shine.
I strode through the dimness and threw open the greenroom door, letting out a blast of light. Then I almost jumped backward.
Pierce Caplan stood in the middle of the greenroom.
My first thought was that he must have gotten lost on the way to the gym. Or that maybe he was here as part of some team prank, stealing stage makeup or old prom dresses for a freshman hazing ritual. But he was holding the audition sign-in sheet and clipboard. A ballpoint pen was in his hand.
His back was to me. I got one good look at his T-shirt, the shape of his muscular shoulders, the waves of his dark blond hair. Everything about him was a disorienting mix of familiar and unfamiliar, like a house you’ve visited a thousand times, but that’s now occupied by strangers.
He turned around.
Pierce didn’t look surprised to see me. He didn’t look happy, either. Or unhappy. He just gave me a smooth half smile, said “Hey, Stuart,” and turned back to the clipboard.
The electricity inside me blew out like a fuse. My head went dim. Roxanne’s speech vanished. All that was left was the shape of Pierce’s back. Dad’s arm wrapped around his shoulders.
“Oh,” I said, like a moron. “Hi.”
Pierce’s pen whispered across the sign-in sheet. He held the clipboard out to me.
“What are you doing here?” The words shot out before I could decide how to say them. They came with an edge. A little sharp, a little shaky.
Pierce’s eyebrows went up. “Auditioning.”
“But—why?” Still too sharp. “Don’t you have—I don’t know—whatever sport they play in winter? Hockey, or curling, or something?”
“Swim team,” Pierce supplied. There was a tiny smile in the corner of his mouth—but maybe it was just left over from the earlier one. “I quit. Coach Black will be pissed when he finds out, but he’ll just have to deal with it.”
“So . . . what are you doing here?” I smoothed my voice. Firm. Cool. More like his. “You’ve never done any plays.”
Pierce looked straight at me for a moment. His eyes were the hazel I remembered, but his jaw was squarer, and his chin was a different shape. I wanted to reach out and re-form them, like Play-Doh. And then I would wad his whole face into a ball and smash it down into its little yellow tub.
“Actually,” he said, “I’m here because of you.”
I felt the firmness waver. “Because of me?”
“Yeah. It’s my last chance to get to do this. You know, before graduation, and going off to college. Being an adult with no time for fun stuff.”
What was he talking about? Electric moths spiraled from my stomach up into my brain. I fought not to let them flicker across my face. Was this an apology? Was this the start of an explanation for the way he’d unsnarled himself from all of our lives?
I hardened my face again. “What does continuing to age have to do with me?”
“Arsenic and Old Lace,” said Pierce.
Now I must have looked like someone had just yanked a hair out of my nose. I blinked at him. “What?”
“The play, last spring.” His lips curved into a smile. “You were great.”
I hadn’t seen that smile—that full-on, genuine smile—in so long. Not aimed at me, anyway. The hardness started to melt. I even felt my cheeks go hot. Damn it. I looked down at the laces of my high black boots.
“Oh,” I managed. “Thanks.” So, he’d seen me dressed up as a batty old lady, complete with poodle wig and body pads. Oh god. I hoped he knew they were body pads.
“I thought, ‘I’ve got to try that at least once in my life.’” Pierce went on. “So here I am.”
“Oh,” I said again. And then I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Everything was either too big or too small. “Well . . . break a leg,” I finally blurted. “That’s what us theater freaks say.”
“Yeah. You too, Stuart.”
He gave me another flicker of a smile. Then he brushed past me, close enough that I could smell the sharp minty-ness of his skin, and stepped out through the greenroom door.
“When the cast list was posted, and I saw that the two of us would be playing Titania and Oberon, it seemed like life was making some kind of giant joke.” I cleared my gravelly throat. “That this guy who went from being my oldest friend to being some fashion-model stranger was going to be with me every day, pretending to be my husband . . . Ugh. He’s like a walking knot of memories.” I clenched my fist, and the needle in my arm twinged. “I hated him for a while. Hated him. He probably hated me too. I probably remind him of all the same things.” I shrugged at the damp girl sitting at the foot of the hospital bed. “I mean, he tells me that he’s doing it all because of me. But then, after they post the cast list—nothing. He doesn’t even say ‘congratulations,’ or ‘this is weird,’ or ‘this is great.’ Nothing.”
Ophelia rearranged the bouquet of tongue depressors in her lap. “I know how that goes,” she said. “One minute he’s flirting with you, the next minute he ignores you. He’s one way when you’re alone and another way when anyone else is listening. It’s exhausting.”
“Exactly.”
Ophelia straightened a fold of her muddy skirt. “Hamlet was always visiting me, giving me little gifts. I was sure he felt something. But . . . my father said . . .” Ophelia’s face went suddenly blank. She sniffed at the tongue depressors, her eyes far away and glassy. “No, no . . .” she sang softly. “He is dead, go to thy deathbed. He never will come again.”
She tucked a tongue depressor behind her ear. Her eyes flicked to me. She leaned closer, and I could smell river water, mud and rotting leaves and dead things, even through the hospital antiseptic.
“Don’t let them know what you see.” Her breath was dewy against my face. Then she sat back and picked through the tongue depressor bouquet again. “Here’s a daisy,” she announced. “I would give you some violets, but they withered all when our father died.” She held out the wooden stick to me. “Jell-O?”
The room dissolved from gray to white. I closed my eyes, the ache in my head twisting tighter. When I opened them again, Sadie sat at the foot of my bed. She waved a small spoon in front of my face.
“Come on,” she prompted. “It’s red flavor. The hospital’
s signature dessert. Open up.”
I parted my lips just enough for the spoon to slide in. My skull ached in places I’d never known could ache. Every movement I made cranked the pain higher.
Sadie shoveled in the Jell-O. Its sweetness made the roof of my mouth vibrate.
“Where did she go?” I mumbled through the mouthful.
“Mom? She’s right outside, talking to the doctor.”
“No. I mean . . .” I looked past my sister. The rest of the room was empty. There were no damp splotches on the white sheets. Ophelia’s words trickled through me again. Don’t let them know what you see.
Because they’ll think you’re insane, I filled in. And they would be right. Because you’re taking advice from Ophelia.
“Sadie, is Mom okay?”
“Not really,” said Sadie. “But she will be. When you are.”
“Just—” I glanced at the closed door. “She looks bad. Please watch out for her.”
Sadie nodded briskly. “I am. I promise.” She carved another red scoop out of the cup. “You know,” she said, in a brighter, falser tone, “one of my earliest memories is of feeding you.” She lifted the bite toward my mouth. “I think I was three, so you must have been one and a half. You were in the high chair. I was feeding you pureed pears, and you had this slimy goop all over your face, but you were so happy. You would laugh each time you took a bite, like pear goop was the best thing in the world.” She patted my chin with a napkin. “Still a drooler.”
Behind her, the door swung open. A doctor in a white coat strode inside. Mom followed him like a small, sweatsuited shadow. Her gray eyes were bloodshot. Her hair still looked unwashed.
Before the door could swing shut again, a thin blond man dressed entirely in black slipped in after her.
Hamlet was back. Fantastic.
Mom and the doctor flanked my bed. They were already in the middle of a conversation. I didn’t recognize the doctor, who was tall and bony, with thick eyebrows. I kept my eyes fixed on his face, but it was hard to focus on his words. Especially when Hamlet tiptoed around the bed and grinned at me over my sister’s shoulder.