THE WORDS IN FRONT of me on the page of Gatsby kept blurring. The Exempt study hall room was beyond warm again this morning, and my eyes were tired and dried out, like marbles rolled in sand.
The harsh but muffled voices of my parents fighting in their bedroom had continued late into the night. Then, once I’d finally fallen asleep, I’d promptly been sucked into an endless nightmare: I was stuck in a huge house with long, dark corridors of closed doors. And Eli was waiting for me, calling for me, but I couldn’t find him, no matter how many doors I opened. The rooms were always empty.
I’d woken up this morning with my head throbbing and my shoulder muscles aching from the tension of my dream search.
My head, resting in my hand, slipped toward the desk, and it felt like too much effort to lift it. Maybe if I blinked really slowly this would work like a bunch of short naps.
“Jace.”
I jerked, and looked up to see Mr. Sloane holding out a bright green hall pass. He frowned at me. “The library found the reference materials you were looking for, apparently.” He glanced at the pass again. “Research for Gatsby?”
When I squinted at the pass Mr. Sloane was holding up, I was pretty sure the authorizing initials in the bottom corner were a large but messily scrawled TC.
Thera.
I’d been planning to find her today, to apologize again for kissing her. Even if I couldn’t go over to her house anymore, I didn’t want to lose the one person I could talk to because of a dumbass move on my part.
But maybe it wasn’t so bad, not if she was sending passes to me in study hall to get me out.
• • •
It took me a minute to spot Thera across the library. She was on the far side of the oversized main desk, half hidden behind a computer monitor and talking to a senior I vaguely recognized, mainly from her hair. It was bright green and stuck out like a wing on one side and was shaved on the other.
Thera nodded in greeting as I approached the desk.
The senior turned and scowled at me, and the piercings in her eyebrows and the crease of her chin made her that much more imposing. “Get out of here, asshole.”
I stopped.
“He’s okay, Di,” Thera said.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, thanks.”
Di nodded, but the dyed side of hair didn’t move. “I’ll see you at lunch, T.” Then she pushed back from the desk and walked away, taking deliberate care to jar my arm as she passed.
“She’s friendly,” I said to Thera once Di was gone.
“Don’t take it personally,” Thera said with a small smile. “She’s not a big fan of the jocks at this school.”
Is that what I was? Maybe once. But now?
“I wasn’t sure you’d come.” Thera’s gaze flicked from my face to a point over my left shoulder.
“I wasn’t sure you’d want me to,” I said. “I thought maybe you might be mad after yesterday. I’m sorry if I—”
“Oh. No.” Blushing, she dismissed my words with a wave, and then busied herself shuffling through a stack of papers on the desk. “I have something for you here somewhere.” A page slid free and floated to the ground by my feet.
I bent down and scooped it up.
“ ‘Fighting Eminent Domain Abuse: What You Need to Know to Save Your Property,’ ” I said, reading the headline on the printout. “What’s this?”
She studied me for a long second. “It’s nothing,” she said finally. “Not for you. Just a project I’m working on.” She yanked the paper from my hand and stuffed it into an already messy stack. The top sheet was a printout of a search for local lawyers specializing in eminent domain, whatever that was, and beneath that, the edge of another article stuck out: GOVERNMENT SEIZURE OF PRIVATE PROPERTY: A SHORT HISTORY. Thera took her projects seriously, apparently. It all sounded boring to me.
“Here,” she said, sliding a manila folder across to me. “This is for you.”
“Gatsby” was scrawled across the front. “Really?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes at me. “Just open it, okay?”
I flipped it open. The first page was formatted text in tight paragraphs with a heading: NEAR DEATH, EXPLAINED. A few pages after that, TIME AND THE NEAR-DEATH EXPERIENCE.
The words made my skin prickle with unease. I looked up at her in question.
“It’s some personal testimonies, a few articles and book excerpts, and summaries of a couple scientific studies I found online. Not many of those, though, because apparently it’s a controversial area.” Thera shrugged. “And some Wiki shit because that’s practically unavoidable.”
I waited.
She sighed. “Basically, it works out to this: only, like, ten to twenty percent of people who die and come back report any of the traditional ‘symptoms’ of an NDE.”
I frowned. “ND what?”
“Near-death experience,” she elaborated. “Didn’t you do any research?”
No. Because I’d done my best to avoid even thinking about it.
“The bright light, chorus of angels, seeing dead family mem—” She winced, catching herself, and then continued. “The things you were expecting? They don’t happen to everyone. No one knows why. There’s a doctor who thinks it’s got something to do with quantum physics, and your energy transitioning to a different state.” Her voice warmed with excitement now that she was talking science again.
“Other people think it’s because they were already in the process of coming back. Or maybe they don’t remember what they saw,” she said. “No one really knows for sure. There’s a theory that near-death experiences aren’t real, that they’re the result of oxygen deprivation in the brain, but there’s this neurologist who says that can’t be it because the part of the brain that processes images and memories would already have shut down. . . .” She stopped herself, visibly reining in her enthusiasm, though seeing her that way—her cheeks flushed, her hands gesturing rapidly—only made me like her more. I knew that feeling of loving something so much, you wanted every word to convince others to join you.
“All I’m saying is you should check it out.” Thera gestured toward the folder. “Just because you didn’t see what you were expecting doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to see or that you saw nothing.”
How many hours must she have spent gathering this information? And obviously not only printing it out but also reading it and trying to make sense of it for me?
I pictured her in her cozy room upstairs, surrounded by notes and textbooks, scrolling on a laptop for hours.
No one else could even stand to have me talk about it, but she’d done term-paper-level digging into the topic. For me—someone she barely knew and had no cause to help.
I closed the folder and picked it up. “Thank you,” I said, my voice thick with emotion.
Thera flashed a smile that lit up her face. “You’re welcome.”
I stood there for a second, dazzled by her and wanting more. It was a strange, deep yearning that seemed to well up from the same place as the emptiness I normally felt. But I couldn’t do anything about it, not after that impulsive but stupid kiss.
“So, okay, thanks,” I said again lamely. I turned to go.
“Jace.”
I faced her.
Thera hesitated, tucking her hair behind her ear. “About last night. You surprised me, that’s all.” She focused on the stapler, shifting it so that it would be perfectly parallel with the tape dispenser, pink rising in her pale skin. “But I was thinking, if you have time after school, there’s this place I go sometimes when I need to clear my head.” She raised her gaze, and I could read the vulnerability and uncertainty there. “We could go together.”
A stupid grin threatened to spread across my face, and I wanted to shout, Yes! But suddenly, all I could think about was how many people might see us. Thera and me talking now, walking out after school together, getting in her rusted-out car with its distinctive patches of gray primer. And then, wherever this place was, if there were other people around . . .
Someone is always watching.
If my parents found out that I’d been seen with her again, I doubted any explanation would matter. Not after last night.
My silence stretched on for a fraction of a second too long, and Thera’s expression shuttered. “You know what, never mind.”
“Thera, no, I want to. But everything’s really—”
“Complicated.” Her cheeks turned a brick red. “Yeah. Like I said, forget it.” She turned away from me.
“Wait.” I reached over the edge of the desk and caught the sleeve of her hoodie. She seemed to have an endless supply of oversized hoodies.
She pulled free, focusing her attention on rearranging books on a cart.
“It’s not like that,” I said, trying to find the words to explain. “Someone saw me going to your house last night. And my family is going through some stuff right now. My dad thinks any kind of controversy . . .” I clamped my mouth shut, belatedly realizing I’d called her controversial.
“You don’t need to explain,” she said dully. “Trust me.”
A catcall came from behind me, followed by a burst of laughter.
I looked over my shoulder to see Caleb and Matt at a table in the far corner. They were watching us. Or, rather, Thera. Matt had his chair tipped back on two legs and was grinning like an idiot, while Caleb waggled his tongue in the V between his index and middle finger.
Assholes.
As I turned to face Thera again, my mouth open to continue trying to explain, it dawned on me. That could have been me. No, that would have been me. If the accident hadn’t happened, I would have been sitting right next to Matt and Caleb. Laughing.
And they knew nothing about Thera—the real Thera, the science nerd who covered her walls with the bridges she wanted to build, if she could ever get out of this town.
Not that they cared.
But I did. This new version of me did, anyway.
My dad didn’t know Thera, nor did he want to know her. All that mattered to him was what other people thought of her and her mom, and I was beginning to think he felt the same about me and our family. What was left of it.
But Thera wasn’t her mother, any more than I was my dad.
Plus, if I said no to Thera right now, I’d be walking away from the one person who’d helped me, who’d cared even though she was angry with me. And for what? For who? People who didn’t care enough to bother knowing either of us or what we were struggling with.
Forget it.
I leaned on the desk, waiting until Thera looked up from the book cart. “Where do you want to meet?”