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 rises 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.