Chapter 17: : Chapter 17

SO SHE WAS JUST . . . BACK? Like, with no explanation of where she’d been?” Jay’s stretched out on his bed, thumbing through an old magazine he found under his pillow. Colin doesn’t look too closely.

“Yeah. It’s sort of—” His eyes move to the ceiling. “Complicated.”

“Complicated. Dude, you’re talking to the guy who took two chicks to the formal and managed to get away with it. I think I can keep up.”

“Jay, this isn’t a joke.”

With a bored sigh, Jay sits up, throws his feet over the side of the bed, and assesses Colin. “Look, I know this isn’t a joke, okay? And I get that Lucy’s . . . different from other girls. I’ve never seen you dive this deep into anything,” he says, lifting a single brow for emphasis. “I just want to know that you’re okay.”

“I am,” Colin says. It sounds like a lie, even to him. If he were okay, he would have told Lucy everything, including his role in her murderer being caught. Including the fact that he was the last person to see her alive and couldn’t save her. The superstitious fraction of him feels like he needs to hold some detail back, as if the entire truth would untie the balloon from the cart and he’d be left to watch it drift away.

“What if she . . . like, what if she went on a bender?”

“She didn’t.”

“Or, I don’t know, Col. Like, back to a boyfriend in Portland for a week. I wasn’t kidding when I called her mysterious. Literally no one around here knows her, except you and me. If I said, ‘Lucy who hangs with Colin,’ it’d take anyone else five minutes to remember what she even looks like.”

Colin stares at him, hoping to burn a hole in Jay’s forehead. “I can handle this.”

“Are you sure? Because when she was gone, you were flipping out. I know you’ve lost your entire family, but I’ve never seen you like that before. You didn’t talk to me, or Dot, or even Joe. When was the last time you talked to Joe?” When Colin doesn’t answer, Jay presses on. “And I—what if it happens again? You gonna be okay then, too?”

Colin pushes away from the desk and scrubs his face with his hands. The answer to that is a big, unequivocal NO, but there’s no way he can tell Jay that. “We’re working it out. It won’t happen again. We’re good.”

This is one of those moments that define why they’re friends. Jay knows Colin is lying his ass off, but he also knows it’s the only way he’s holding it together.

“See, this is why I don’t do relationships.” Jay makes little quotation marks with his fingers, and Colin rolls his eyes.

“Sure it is.”

“All right, then,” Jay says. “Where is the magic elusive spirit girl, anyway?”

Colin’s head snaps up, and he gapes at him—Jay’s hit awfully close to home—but he’s smacking his gum and flipping through his magazine again. Clueless.

“She’ll be here any minute.” Colin closes his math book and glances at the clock, trying not to appear as restless as he feels.

Jay stands and adjusts his baseball cap, walks to the window and back, before resuming his seat on the edge of his bed. He’s as anxious to get out there as Colin is. “We seriously can’t leave until she gets here? I’m bored.”

Colin shakes his head. “I want her to come along.”

The night before Lucy came back, the night he almost rode himself into the ground, was the first time Colin felt sane in days, like he’d beaten his anxiety into submission. Some of the stuff he and Jay have done is a bit crazy and a lot dangerous, but it’s always been the case that, on his bike or board, everything blurs at the edges until he’s focused on one thought: breathe. The wilder he is, the safer he feels. It’s a paradox he can live with. It’s just that now he wants Lucy to stay close.

“It’s a good thing Lucy’s cool or I’d have no choice but to kick your ass,” Jay says. “So where are we going? They put in this killer jump at the track, but last week it was full of Xavier posers, so that’s out.”

Colin fiddles with the straps on his biking shoes, remembering the night with Lucy at the lake, her legs dangling to the knees in the frozen water. Other than the section near the oak tree, she seems to like water—the pond, the lake, her crazy dream about underwater blackness. “I think the lake’s frozen over. No way will anyone else be down there. You up for some tricks?”

Jay agrees and heads down to mess around with his bike while Colin searches through the piles of clean laundry for something warmer to wear.

Lucy materializes at the door, wearing a new stolen uniform. This version has the ugly navy slacks, which is probably why it was easy for her to find and snag: Hardly any of the girls wear them. But her black boots lace almost to her knees, and her hair is piled in a messy heap on top of her head and bound with a bright red ribbon. He has no idea where she found it, but she looks like punk rock trying to go straight. He still can’t get over how relieved he is to see her. The weirdness of having a girlfriend he can barely kiss seems so unimportant compared to the relief he feels at having her back.

“Not exactly standard attire,” he says, tugging on her white oxford where she’s knotted it just beneath her ribs, mocking the cold air around her.

Her mouth curls up into a teasing smile. “The administration is free to notice and unofficially expel me.”

He laughs. Lucy’s been lurking around campus for more than two months—minus the ten days of unexpected vanish—and no teacher really bothers to question her presence, let alone her decidedly non-dress-code boots.

She glances at his bike shoes hanging from his free hand. “Where are we headed?”

“Your favorite place: the lake.”

“Sure. To . . . ride?” She looks skeptical.

Grinning, he pulls her with him as he turns to leave. “Trust me; it’ll be fun.”