HOLLY BLACK
Wake up. Wake up. You have to wake up.
I want to say that I never meant for it to happen, but I never ever mean for it to happen and it always does happen and I keep on doing it, so what does that say about me? Mother told me that keeping going when other folks don’t is the difference between them that succeed in this world and them that lie down in a ditch to die, but I don’t know if I can keep going if you’re not with me.
Remember when we dreamed about each other? When you were only a little girl, you dreamed that I came into your room and got into bed with you and pressed my mouth against your neck. And I dreamed it too—the exact same thing, waking up in your room, not sure how I got there and climbing into bed with you. I remember how warm and lovely it was right up until you started screaming. That has to mean something. That has to mean that our souls were destined for one another, that fate wants us to be something more to each other than—
WAKE UP.
Wakeupwakeupwakeupwakeup.
Even if you wake up and hate me.
And yes, I admit it, Mother has a scam. Your father suspected as much in the end and your uncle too. They were right—right about everything, except how much we really were friends, best friends just like we swore, just like we smeared in blood on one another’s dirty palms, just like we whispered against one another’s skin. But it’s true that Mother does get into car accidents in front of rich families with daughters about my age. Usually fathers and daughters on their own. The accidents aren’t the easiest to plan—she has to find a park where she knows the family goes for walks in early summer evenings. (We grow overheated and lethargic when the sun is high in the sky, so Mother knows our best performances will be at night.) Then she has to arrange to have the car break down suddenly—with an engine fire if possible, conjured with sleight of hand and a little spilled gasoline.
I should add that these are never her cars. She borrows them or steals them and, as you might guess, abandons them once I am securely in the hands of my new family.
But things will be different now. It will be just the two of us and we’ll make up new games. We’ll be sisters, just like any two girls with the same blood in their veins. We’ll be sisters and more than sisters. We’ll run through museums, mocking and applauding, until the security guards chase us. We’ll pretend to be statues on the street and scare people by moving. We’ll be bold and brave and do things no one has thought of before and we’ll do them always together.
I’ll make a deal with you, how about that? I’ll tell you the rest of it. Everything, Laura. The ugly parts too. And in return you’ll get up, won’t you, sleepyhead? I will tempt you with coffee and bagels and my own mouth on yours, breathing you back to life.
So here it is, all the truth:
The plan is supposed to play out exactly like it did, except for the ending. Immediately after the car accident, Mother always springs out in great distress, pointing to the father of the family, just as she did to your father: “Help me, sir, please, my child is still in the car! I don’t know what to do! No, no ambulance. Just help me get her some air.”
She says that once people are singled out of a crowd, they almost always do what they’re asked. Isn’t that odd? It’s like magic, like how people thought that if a witch knew your name, she could make you do whatever she wanted.
If only that were true, I’d make you wake up.
My part in the plan is to go very limp when I’m picked up, and then seem to awaken at the ministrations of father and daughter. I am to blink up into their eyes and charm them with my pliant and sweet nature. I am so very grateful! Mother is so very beautiful! She weeps a single crystal tear! Then Mother has to deal with something about the car and oh—your apartment or house or villa or chalet is so close by that you want to take her dear daughter there? Well, how kind and unexpected!
They never see Mother again. She comes back for me eventually, but by then I’m creeping away like a thief in the night.
It usually goes just as it did with your family:
• First, I explain that I don’t know her cell phone number. It’s a new cell phone, her last one was stolen and she changed the number. I cry prettily over how stupid I am. (You might think me vain to say this, but I practice; real crying is so often ugly.)
• I am very charming. Again, please don’t think me vain; I have had a long time to become charming. I can speak to your father in French and I have perfect manners. I always wash the dishes after dinner. I remain poised on the brink of adolescence; I will never reach thirteen. On the first night, I faint dramatically, so as to show I was dealing bravely with my pain. The fainting embarrasses me very much. I forget myself and speak more French as I come around, half in a delirium. Everyone likes a little blonde girl with wide eyes begging their pardon en français.
• When your family begins to press about my family, I drop hints of an overbearing and very rich European father and a nasty divorce.
• Just as everyone is sure Mother has abandoned me entirely, she calls. She’s in the hospital and she’s so very sorry to inconvenience the family. She should be out soon, but she’s not supposed to use her phone and if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, could I stay there tonight and maybe tomorrow? Your father shouldn’t agree, but he does. When he puts down the phone, he’s embarrassed he’s agreed, but he has.
• Then, finally, days later, my mysterious European father calls. Mother is irresponsible and dangerous, he says, and his daughter has made such a fast friend in yours that it would be a shame to part them. He offers a decent chunk of money (five thousand dollars!) to let me stay for the rest of the summer. Otherwise, he will send me a plane ticket and I can fly home by myself—I’m certainly old enough and so what if flying frightens me. (Father’s role has been acted out by a variety of players and his exact country of origin changes with the accent that each person can fake the best.)
It doesn’t work every time, but you’d be surprised how often it does. Fathers raising little girls on their own are away a lot and they don’t like their daughters to be all by themselves in their vast apartments. They trust their staff, but not like they trust the aristocratic and slightly naïve daughter of a rich European. And it’s summer after all, hot sticky summer, when all the rules are different.
Remember how it was when I came home with you? I rode up in your building’s chrome elevator, watching your face reflected in the metal. You were so incredibly beautiful that I think I lost my heart to you in that moment. Your windblown tangle of honey-dark hair and eyes the color of tree sap, liquid and luminous, made me feel faint wanting only to be closer to you, to press my clammy hand in yours. You saw me looking and smiled a tiny smile. It felt like passing notes right under the nose of the teacher.
When we got to your apartment, with big windows looking down on the park and air-conditioning so cold that the hairs rose on your arms, you took me right to your room. I sat on your bed, pretending to still be weak from the accident, leaning my head against the comforter and inhaling the smell of you, of strawberry shampoo and Hello Kitty perfume. You docked your iPod and played a song I had never heard before, one with a girl wailing about the wretchedness of her love. I asked about the books on your shelves, ones I’d never seen before, about black holes, astrophysics, and one by Carl Sagan called The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark that made me shudder with the dread of discovery.
“I want to see space someday,” you said. “It’s the last great mystery, other than what’s at the bottom of the ocean. Either way, I’m going to wear a suit like Iron Man’s and see things no one has ever seen before.”
See, I remember it word for word. I remember everything.
“I think there are mysteries everywhere,” I told you. “If you’re looking for them.”
You snorted, but you didn’t look displeased. “Like what?”
“I’ll show you,” I promised. “Tomorrow.”
“It better not be one of those mysteries like ‘why do people sneeze when they’re exposed to a burst of sunlight?’ ”
“Is that true?” I asked, fascinated, my bragging forgotten.
Your father ordered in Thai food and we ate it at the raw-edged Nakashima dining table next to the wall of windows. I never have much appetite, so I pushed my pad thai around and listened to you and your father talk. He was quiet, but unexpectedly funny in the way only quiet people can be and too polite to ask me all the questions I could see swimming in his eyes. But you asked me about what pets I had, whether there were horses at my private school, what Broadway shows Mother and I had seen, what books I loved, what television shows I watched and whether there were different shows in Europe that were better than American television. I talked and talked and talked. When I looked out at the city, sparkling in the early evening, my heart swelled with giddy joy.
Then I cleared the table and washed the dishes, over your protests, slumping to the floor just as I was about to put down the drying cloth. It was a really good performance. You let me lie down in your bed and rested next to me, taking my temperature by pressing your wrist to my brow, like some grown-up must have once done for you. Then you read to me, softly, from a book of fairy tales that you said were silly, but good for the sick. I didn’t tell you that I didn’t think they were silly at all. Later that night, my mother called and charmed your father with her distress.
The next day, I said I had to go out to get a few things, but really I went to a storage unit in Midtown and brought back my own clothes in Bergdorf shopping bags.
And from then, everything was perfect. Lying in front of the big flat-screen, watching cartoons in the mornings; giggling over adding powdered cocoa to the milk in our cereal; passing gum back and forth by blowing huge bubbles and pressing them together until they stuck and one of us took the whole thing, tasting each other’s spit in our mouths. Walking through the park with iced coffees, pressing the cups against one another’s bare skin to surprise one of us into a shriek; trying on counterfeit McQueen scarves and short plastic skirts on Canal Street; and meeting up with your friends to see movies in deliciously cold theaters where we shared slushies that stained our mouths ruby red.
And then your cousin Bertha got sick and died within a week of her first symptom. I bet you’re thinking about that, thinking about how I’d go down to her apartment on the eleventh floor on Wednesdays to watch that show about aliens that you thought was stupid. I bet you’re thinking about how it was a Thursday morning when she collapsed.
I know what you’re thinking, but let me explain.
Have you ever felt that when you were around a particular someone you were smarter and funnier and more beautiful? That all your charm and her charm ricocheted back and forth until it amplified itself to almost impossible heights? That’s what it’s like. Both of you are radiant, glowing with it. Her cheeks are rosy and her eyes are bright as flames. No one could resist her and I can’t either. The thought of being without her is painful, impossible.
At the sound of her voice, you come alive. You feel it like the cresting of some dark wave out at sea. Her heart leaps and yours leaps with it. Then she’s gone.
They die so fast sometimes. An afternoon of giggling. A weekend of sleepovers and secrets. A night of whispered confessions.
But could you really give up feeling that way? Could you give up the giddy joy of being so in tune with another that you can finish one another’s thoughts? Could you give up being understood and being surprised and being made into a wholly finer version of yourself?
And you don’t understand that when they’re fading, when they’re sick, I don’t feel smug or pleased, I feel panicked. I feel like I am being left behind by the one person in the world I would most hate to lose.
And in that moment, they see me for what I am and despise me.
After Bertha died, things were different. Your aunt spent hours crying to your father, pacing the room, raving about how she had brought this on herself. How your uncle’s work was dangerous and that it had always been only a matter of time before they struck at him. He was flying in from Chicago for the funeral, although your aunt told him that his daughter’s memory would be best served if he stayed away.
I asked you what she meant once, but you said you didn’t know.
I think you lied about that, but I don’t blame you. You probably didn’t want to scare me. You probably thought that your aunt was being silly and that I was superstitious enough to believe it.
I should have seen the danger, but I was too busy being tangled up in your world, listening to your sorrows and making your joys my own.
Remember that museum exhibit about vampires? It was at the very beginning of my stay, when we were still tentative with one another. How it made us laugh! They had the original cape that Bela Lugosi wore on the set of Dracula and the flowing gray nightgown dresses of his brides. There was a picture of his house in the Hollywood Hills with bright pink bougainvillea spilling down one side and his chihuahuas, which he called the Children of the Night. Then there was the picture of the dashing Lord Byron and the tale of how, after he broke his friend Polidori’s heart, Polidori modeled the villainous Lord Ruthven in his book, The Vampyre, after the poet.
“Do you think they did it?” you asked.
“Did it? You mean Lord Byron and Polidori?” I asked. Lord Byron was handsome enough, but whatever magnetism had caused lover after lover to drown in his eyes was missing in the stillness of the portrait. His lip could not rise ever so slightly, tempting you to believe that you could cause him to truly smile if only you worked hard enough at it. “Maybe. Or maybe Polidori just pined away, loving Byron from afar.”
“Have you ever been in love?” you asked me. Do you remember that?
“Yes,” I told you. And I was. Of course I was. I still am.
“Did you tell the person?” You were watching me, as though my answer mattered.
“I’m shy,” I said.
“You should leave a note,” you advised me. “Can you imagine if Polidori left a note for Byron: I LIIIIIIIKE YOU. IF YOU LIKE ME, CHECK THE BOX AND PASS NOTE TO SHELLEY.”
I felt light-headed. You dragged me on.
Then we saw a series of photos with cards explaining how certain chemicals found in certain soils preserve a corpse and can even give it the appearance of life, how hair and nails grew after death, and how, at one time, people who suffered from something called catalepsy were accidentally buried alive. They’d seem dead, but they could still see and hear everything. Sometimes they’d start moving in their coffins, trying to scrabble their way out before the tons of dirt above crashed down and suffocated them. It was awful, awful, awful. We walked past the drawings illustrating the bloody and broken nails of those bodies. Then more drawings, these of how some dead were buried upside down, so the newly animated corpse would dig itself deeper into the earth instead of climbing out of its grave.
Thinking about a vampire tunneling deeper and deeper, I felt as though I could no longer breathe. It was too easy to think of dirt surrounding me on all sides, pressing down on my chest, cold and heavy. I sank to the floor of the exhibit and you had to sit there beside me while I explained in my own tangled way.
Then you took me to the bathroom and made me sit on the sink and press damp paper towels against my neck until I felt better.
You promised me that when I died, you would make sure my parents cremated me. You would insist that I should have what I wanted, you said fiercely, as passionate as I have ever heard you. I would never wake up alone and afraid, choking on grave dirt—not if you had anything to do with it.
I didn’t have the heart to tell you that it was not fear that had made me weak and mewling, but memory.
On the way out, we stopped at the gift shop. You pointed and laughed at the fake widow’s peaks, the contact lenses that turned eyes red, and the glitter body gel. We picked out twin amulets with tiny crystals forming the shape of eyes. They were supposed to protect us from evil. I loved to see it sparkling at the hollow of your throat. I wanted to believe in it, to believe it could really protect you from me, but three days after Bertha died and two days before her funeral, you fell ill.
“There is a sharp pain here,” you told the doctor, touching just above the small swell of your breast. “I had a dream where a great catlike creature crouched over me, so I must be feverish. I feel so cold that my teeth are chattering. But I’m not nearly as sick as Millcara.”
I lay beside you on the bed, sick with fear, sick with dread and with remorse, playing sick as I always did and hating myself for it. I blinked up at the doctor. “I’ll be fine. Just please help Laura.”
The doctor laughed at our devotion to one another. I decided that I hated him.
I heard him whispering to your father that it might be psychoemotional distress of some sort, but since the two of them had the same symptoms he was going to order an EKG, just to be sure there was no infection of the lining of the heart. And later, I heard your father on the phone with Mother, asking her about insurance cards and telling her that he was so sorry not to have taken better care of me.
And we missed the funeral, of course, lying in your bed, watching Wizards of Waverly Place on television. You had come to the part of your illness where you were constantly thirsty. You drank gallons of orange juice, big bottles of Pellegrino, one after the other, mugs of tea, and glasses and glasses of water right from the unfiltered tap. You said you could taste the metal of the pipes in it and the minerals and the darting of the little killifishes in the river it came from.
“Wouldn’t that be amazing if it was true, Millcara?” you wanted to know. “If I could really taste the past? If I could taste the dust on the moon and know everything there was to know about it—or if I could really take a bite from the sun and lick the rings of Saturn? Did you know that black holes sing? They do. So if it’s possible to hear the universe then maybe it’s possible to taste it too.” Your eyes shone with fever.
That was when I made my decision. There would never be anyone like you again. You must not die.
I waited until after midnight, when you were asleep, and snuck out, a jacket over my pajamas and flip-flops on my feet. I loitered around an apartment lobby across town, until a girl came down to get her mail. I asked her if she was bored. She said she was. I told her I knew a game. She followed me to the stairway, where I eventually left her.
When I got back to your apartment, I tried to creep in, but your father was awake, sitting at the kitchen table with your uncle. His leather duffel was on the floor and they had a bottle of some amber liquor on the table along with empty glasses in front of them.
“Millcara, where were you?” your father asked, sounding cold and mean and not at all normal.
Your uncle turned around. And I saw in his suddenly narrowed eyes that he knew me—knew what I was as no one but my victims has ever done. I backed up involuntarily. He half-stood before he remembered himself and sank back into his chair.
But a moment after it happened, I thought I must have imagined it. It must be guilt, I told myself, my own body slow with satiation, guilty at being caught creeping home from a prowl.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not sure what happened. I woke in the bodega on the corner, but I couldn’t remember why I’d gone there. I think I was sleepwalking. I had the milk case open and was just staring at the bottles.”
Your father stood up and led me back to your room. “Please, you and Laura have to rest. I know that Bertha’s death rattled you both. The doctor thinks that your both getting ill like you did might be a reaction to stress—but I can’t have you going out in the middle of the night, do you understand? Your parents aren’t here and I have to trust you to be responsible.”
“I hate funerals,” I said with utter sincerity. “I hate them.”
He put both his hands on my shoulders and regarded me with a kind of fond exasperation. “Go to bed and we’ll see how you’re feeling in the morning.” He smelled like booze and his eyes were red-rimmed, swollen with crying.
I crept into your room, your uncle’s eyes on me. Once I was inside, I turned the lock and slid under your covers, reaching for your hand and twining your fingers in mine. Your breath was hot on my cheek and I was so happy for the steady rise and fall of your chest. I settled against you, closing my eyes and letting your languid warmth enter my limbs.
A few moments later, you whispered against my neck, “Most of the universe is made of dark matter, but no one can see it. Can you see it?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t sure what you meant, but it might just have been more fever talk.
“Will it hurt?” you asked, your mouth moving against my skin, making me shiver.
“Will what hurt?” My heart was pounding now, sleep very far away.
“Dying,” you said.
I wanted to tell you it wouldn’t hurt at all, your heartbeats slowing, counting down to the thudding moment of final forever stopping, the gulp of one last breath. I wanted to tell you that, but I didn’t want to lie. And that was all over anyway, I’d promised myself. I was never going to—not ever again.
The next morning, you were much better. You put on clothes and ate breakfast with your father. I slept late, huddled under the covers, the scent of you in my nose. My stomach hurt from feeding too much and too quickly the night before in the stairwell.
Then you came in, jumping on the bed. “Look,” you said. “Wake up and look at this.”
See, when you told me to wake up, I did. I woke up right away for you and you better wake up for me. Right now, please. Pleasepleaseplease. Morning is coming, the sun is racing toward us, and your uncle will wake with it.
But then what you wanted was for me to look at a black-and-white photograph your uncle had given you. In it, a woman was sitting on a chair and a girl leaned in from the arm. They were at a New Year’s Eve party in 1924—the year was marked on a centerpiece in glittering numbers. Confetti-covered tables and a band played blurrily on the stage behind them. The woman was wearing a shimmering beaded dress, her short black hair in finger waves and a necklace of eighteenth-century ivory theater tickets around her throat. The little girl had on a frothy lace dress that made her look younger than she was and a long strand of pearls. They both held champagne coupes in their hands. The little girl was me, of course, and the woman was Mother.
“She looks just like you,” you said.
Hazy with sleep, I nearly told you it was a picture from a costume party, before I realized how ridiculous that would sound. Maybe your uncle hoped that I would be stupid enough to do something suspicious. I’m sure he tried to warn you about me, at least insofar as he thought he could without sounding crazy. No one as reasonable as your father would believe the little girl snuggled up against his daughter was a fiend. And you, Laura, you loved me, didn’t you? You love me still. You have to—I won’t be able to do what Mother says and keep going on if you don’t.
“Wow,” I said. “She really does. But like a younger me—and that dress is ridiculous.”
“I wish there were still parties like that,” you said.
At the party, dizzy with too much champagne, I’d met a boy a year younger than I was. We’d sat under one of the tables, like it was a play fort. He stabbed his fork into the swollen ankles of a society dame who stopped near it and told me all about his new puppy. Boys are loud and wild and gross lots of the time, but that night, I liked him. I think he died three days later.
I knew then that your uncle knew even more about me and Mother than I’d guessed when I’d seen the way he looked at me. He did not just suspect my nature—he knew of my history and of Mother’s. He had come here hunting me. He knew what I had done to his daughter.
I had never been hunted before, although Mother had spoken in dark whispers of suspicious men, and a need for care.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I told you, and escaped into the attached bathroom with a sundress clutched in my hand.
There, under the cold spray, as I watched my strange form, I knew I had to leave you. At the thought, I felt such a fierce possessiveness overtake me that I wanted nothing more than to run back to your bedroom, throw my arms around you, and draw you down to me. Without you, the hours of my days would pass in an agony of nervous terror that you would replace me in your heart. You would share your confidences with another, finding some new beloved friend to tell your stories about quasars and the Marianas Trench being the very deepest part of the ocean. I could not imagine there was a girl in the world who would not hang on your every word, who would not give anything to lie beside you as you slept, her breath mingling with yours.
In that state, I found my phone, unused and barely charged. I called Mother and in a voice tight with panic, told her about your uncle.
“He gave Laura a picture of us—an old picture—but he hasn’t said anything to her. I heard his ex-wife say that it was his fault that Bertha was dead. I think she believes her daughter was killed in revenge for his hunting of—of things such as we are. I don’t know what he means to do, but I just want him gone.”
“Laura? Bertha?” Mother asked. “There are too many names. Slow down, I can’t follow the story.”
“Laura’s the girl you left me with,” I said, which seemed such a poor explanation for what you were to me. And I feared for you—Mother can be gluttonous and families can bring out an envious cruelty in her.
“I’m coming right now,” she said. “Be ready to leave when I get there. Tell them your mother is taking you shopping and that she hopes she can take everyone to dinner later.”
For a moment, the fiction seemed so normal that I could pretend it was true. We went to lunch and dinner with the mothers of your other friends all the time—they ordered salads and martinis and told us funny stories about when they were girls.
But what she meant was that we were going to run—to another city, another string of fast friendships, and the emptiness of longing.
“Okay,” I said in a whisper, wishing I hadn’t called her. Your father liked me, after all. If he thought that your uncle meant to hurt me, surely he wouldn’t allow it. No one believed in monsters anymore.
But summer would end, it would drag on into the chill of fall and I would lose you to school and to your sprint toward adolescence. I would stay forever as I am, my breasts two mosquito bites, my baby teeth never fully lost, my body forever hairless under my arms and between my legs. Only my hair and nails grow, longer and longer, forever and ever.
“Stay with the girl and her father,” Mother said. “Don’t let yourself be alone anywhere the uncle can corner you. Where are you now?”
“In Laura’s room,” I told her.
“Go into the kitchen and stay there.”
I turned off my phone and tucked it into the pocket of my sundress. I could feel the other me, the night me, turning underneath my skin restlessly, but I shoved it down into the shadows and went out into the other room.
You sat at the kitchen island, a glass of water resting by your left hand. There were dark circles under your eyes and you appeared very pale, but you were smiling all the same. You spoke to me, and even though I was so scared that I do not know if I made any sense I managed to cross the room to sit beside you.
Because as I began to move, I saw that you weren’t alone in the apartment.
Sitting at the dining table, your uncle had a steak knife in his hand and was using it to carve a long stick.
Eventually, I dared to ask, “Where’s your dad?”
“He went out to get some bagels. I told him I was hungry and he was so happy that he wanted us to have a big brunch. Lox. Whitefish. Bialys.”
“You hungry, Millcara?” your uncle asked, and his tone was taunting.
I looked a question at you, but you only shrugged in answer. The grieving are expected to act strange and everyone else is expected to ignore them.
I thought about Bertha, who’d been nothing like the man sitting on the other side of the room—a man with the glassy, bloodshot eyes of someone who hadn’t slept in days. Bertha was nerdy and nice, full of life, obsessed with posting GIFs of her favorite TV shows to her blog and downloading British television. She’d been my friend and I’d drunk up all her strength until there was nothing left, and I hated that she was gone. All those things shouldn’t have been possible to be true at the same time, but they were.
I looked at your uncle and I felt all the shame of my fiendish self, doomed to be ever separate from the world. And the bright sun coming through the windows made my head pound. I thought longingly of the shadows of your bedroom, of hiding under the covers of your bed like the child I would never truly be again.
In that instant, all I wanted was my mother.
The doorbell rang, and you jumped off your stool to answer it. Even though you were still sick you must have been tired of being cooped up inside, languishing in your bed. You wanted to move.
“Hello, Laura,” Mother said, as though she remembered you. “I’ve come to take Millcara shopping. Is she ready?”
Even though I am not quite a child, I have always been child enough to need her, to see her as children see their mothers, as safe harbor, as a wonderful and indestructible sanctuary. I never could grow past that need.
Her face was what I saw, coming in with the light, on the first day of my new life. Hair black as the shadows that became my home, lips curved in a politely charming smile. She had saved me then and she would save me now.
Those are the things I thought in those moments.
Your uncle was on his feet, striding toward her. And in that split second, I saw the mistake she was making. She didn’t remember you and she didn’t remember your father, so when she saw a man in the apartment, she made an assumption.
“Thank you so much for taking care of my daughter.” She took a step forward, past him, disregarding him on her way to me. She was always good at passing things off, my mother, acting as if everything she did was perfectly ordinary and that she expected the whole world to go along with her wishes.
Her eyes went to me, bright and clear.
I heard her gasp, a small soft sound, and I saw her eyes change. I had not seen his hand move.
Nobody knows better than I that death can come swift, and quiet, and ordinary as a knock on the door. But not for us, Mother had always said. Never for us.
She crumpled around the stick he had shoved into her back, sagging forward, and fell on her face. I heard you suppressing a cry, but I could not look at you. I could look only at her shining hair spread out on the rug, and at his cold face and the stake in his hand.
His work was not quite done.
But you raced past him, grabbing me and pushing me toward the door. And I ran, ran through the carpeted hallway, racing down the stairway, down twenty-eight floors to dash across the marble foyer, past the security man at the front desk and out onto the street. I ran for the park, running until I found a cool, dark place. I shook uncontrollably. I felt lost, so utterly and completely lost that I couldn’t even really think anything but animal thoughts. My other, darker self took over for days.
When I came to myself, I thought of you.
And that is why I crept back into your room, all these weeks later. Seeing you was a balm to my heart: your eyes closed, your hair spread over your pillow like a halo of gold, your mouth as red as poppies and your skin—
Then your eyes opened.
I slid away from you, but you only smiled.
“I heard footsteps,” you whispered. “I kept my eyes closed, so you wouldn’t know I heard.”
I just stared at you, dumbfounded, my happiness that you were still my friend, still my Laura, making me feel as though I were drunk.
You sat up, nightgown puddling in your lap as you pushed away the sheets. “Are we going to run away?”
“Yes,” I told you, barely able to say more than that. I forced myself to go on. “But you can’t come with me the way you are. Do you understand?”
“Just do it,” you said, leaning forward and shutting my mouth with your own. “Don’t explain. If you explain, I’ll be afraid.”
You told me it was okay, so wake up. WAKE UP.
Wake up, because we can do anything now. We can dive in your deep seas and walk across the sands of your moon.
Wake up, so I can show you all the mysteries I promised you.
Wake up, so we can drink secrets together.
Wake up. I love you. The stars are shining down on us. The taste of you is still in my mouth. The sun is coming. Wake up and run through the streets with me, run through the world with me. Wakeupwakeupwakeup.