A World Without You (29 page)

Phoebe

I pick up the phone on the third ring.

“Hello? Hello?” a panicked voice calls out from the other end.

“Hello?” I say.

“Who's this?” the voice demands. “Phoebe, is that you?”

“Yeah?” I reply warily.

“I need to speak to your parents! This is Dr. Franklin, at Berkshire Academy. I have to speak to your parents right away!”

In the background, I can hear a siren.

“Dr. Franklin? What happened?”

“Your parents!”

“They're not here.”

Yes, that's definitely a siren. And . . . a beeping sound. People talking. What's going on?

“There's been an accident—a fire.” Dr. Franklin's voice is weary.

“A fire?”

“Have your parents call me right away!”

“Is Bo okay?” I ask, my heart catching in my throat. I never wanted this, I never thought the idea that he could be gone would hurt this way, a deep, sharp pain that crackles under my skin, into my bones, burning away the air in my lungs.

The line goes dead.

I can feel something
—someone—pinching my nose, forcing air into my mouth. I feel my chest rise with someone else's breath, I feel my ribs pushed down under someone else's hands.

• • •

It's foggy, and I'm alone. The timestream has been a tapestry, spreading out like a blanket over the world, but it's not that way now.

Right now, it is only two threads, hanging limply in my hands.

• • •

“We're losing him!” a voice shouts. Someone cuts my T-shirt right in half and pulls it apart, all the way down to the hem. Something sticky is pressed onto my skin.

I hear sounds in the dense fogginess of this world where I exist now. A heart monitor, drowning out all other noise.

Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

• • •

Two threads.

Two choices.

• • •

A radio crackles. They're taking me to a hospital. I can feel the needles in my arm and hand. I can hear the first responders talking in hushed voices. The Doctor is here. He's telling them I don't have any allergies, he's calling my parents on his cell phone.
Please
, he says,
please save him.

• • •

I see the girl. I know her immediately.

She's not tall, but she's not short. Average. Her hair is to her shoulders, her face is round, her hips are round, her arms long and straight at her sides. Her eyes search mine, a question there, suspended over their brown depths.

She is at the end of one of the threads in front of me.

She does not flicker this time.

She does not disappear.

She is not tantalizingly out of reach.

Instead, she steps forward, her fingers trailing along the thread leading to her. She's barefoot and silent, her steps like a dance.

• • •

On the other thread, there is a sound.

Beep . . . beep . . . beep . . .

• • •

I know what two threads mean.

Other people may not see their choices, but I do. I see the threads of fate. I control them. I have two threads in my hand. All I have to do is let go of one and hold on to the other. The
one I keep will become my reality, the only truth I know. The one I let go of will be nothing more than a faded dream, an opportunity I never took.

Time is giving me a choice between which reality I want to live.

I look down at my hands.

In my left hand is the red thread connecting me to Sofía. If I choose that life, I have powers. I have adventure. And I have Sofía.

In my right hand is the black thread connecting me to the sound of my heartbeat. To the Doctor. To Berkshire. To Phoebe and my family. To Ryan and a world where I'm sick, where I don't know who to trust, where my life is hollow and bitter.

But it's still my life.

• • •

And it's still my choice.

Phoebe

One year later

My gown is made
of cheap polyester, and the zipper is already broken.

I love it anyway.

“One more!” Mom says, adjusting her camera.

“Come on,” I whine.

“Just one more,” she promises. When she doesn't lower the camera, I stand up straighter, turning to the lens and smiling, making sure the tassel over my graduation cap is on the left side. Mom darts forward and adjusts the medal hanging from my neck—the award for highest AP scores in math—and then dashes back to snap the picture.

“Okay,
done
,” I say. Jenny and Rosemarie are nearby, both of them humoring their parents with more pictures too. Rosemarie's little brother, Peter, keeps trying to steal her graduation cap.

“Want me to take one with your whole family?” Jenny's mother asks me.

“Yes! Please!” Mom says, grabbing Dad and dragging him to the fountain, where I'm standing.

“You said this was the last picture,” I say under my breath.

“
This
one is.” Mom kisses my cheek.

Dad stands up straight and tall beside me. He looks uncomfortable in his suit, even though he wears one every Sunday. He's very aware of the camera Jenny's mom is pointing at us, as if whether or not the picture turns out good rests entirely on his shoulders.

“Wait a minute!” I say before Jenny's mom can click a picture with Mom's fancy camera. “Where's Bo?”

Mom frowns. “He was just here a minute ago . . .”

“Here I am.” My brother runs forward. “Trying to cut me out of the family picture?”

I drag him beside me. Without thinking, I'd grabbed his bad hand, the one injured in the fire. It doesn't hurt him, but his skin feels unnaturally slick beneath my touch, and the scarring on his palm feels weird. I drop his hand as soon as I realize, but I bump his shoulder with mine, looking up at him and grinning.

“Okay, everyone, this way!” Jenny's mom calls. “Ready? One, two, three!” She snaps the picture, then holds the camera out to Mom for approval.

“Glad you could make it,” I tell Bo as Mom gets Dad to take a picture of Jenny's family for her.

“Glad to be here,” he says, but there's still a little distance in his voice, as if he's not really here, not all the way. His eyes are on Dad, drinking in the dark suit and carefully knotted tie.
Bo's not dressed up. He's wearing a plain shirt with no holes in it, though, so I guess that counts for something. But the difference between Bo and my dad is far greater than the way they dress.

I want so badly to ask Bo if he's happy now. He came back from the fire at his old school different, but I've never been able to decide if that difference was good. He's steadier now, but is that really better? Sometimes there's a hollowness in his gaze, a melancholy twist to his smile. I think about the blank pages in his notebook. I'm sure they're still blank.

I shake my head. That's Dad's way of thinking. Bo isn't a before-and-after picture, he's just the same Bo. And even though he's different now, and even though I cannot read the difference, he's still my brother. Asking him if he's happy now is moot.
Happy
is too definite a word to describe Bo. He's alive. He survived. And when we talk about the future, like we did that morning over cereal, the conversation now includes what he wants to do and be.

“These are new,” Bo says, tweaking my navy blue cat-eye glasses.

“I'm tired of contacts,” I say. “And they're not that new.”

“New to me.” This is the first time I've seen Bo in over three months. The new school he attends is in upstate New York, and even though it's just a few hours' drive, the program there is more “rigorous,” as Dad describes it. Mom and Dad get monthly reports from the school, detailed analyses and charts all mailed in a giant manila envelope. They talk about Bo's medication and how it's more stabilized now, and they include schedules of therapy and courses, as well as charts that track grades and progress, both academic and psychological. Every envelope
includes a note saying that the purpose of Bo's therapy is not to “heal” him, but to help him cope with his illness and navigate a somewhat normal life. One day. In the future.

He does look better, though. But there's still a part of him that isn't quite here. His body's present, but maybe there will always be a part of his mind that's not. Ever since Sofía died and the academy burned, there's been something about Bo that's more absent than before. He's like a man who lived through a battle but isn't quite sure whether or not he left the war.

“Well,” I say. “I'm going to go hang out with my friends.” I lean down and pick up my purse from the ground, rooting around inside it for my phone. My parents got their pictures; now it's time to get mine.

“Hey,” Bo says, reaching for me.

I pause, surprised, half thinking he's going to pull me into a hug, which he has literally never done before. Instead, his hand goes to my face. He brushes my hair away.

“You're about to lose that earring,” he says, touching the diamond.

My hands go immediately to my ears. He's right; the back is loose. I tighten it, then check the other one.

“How did you even notice?” I ask. The graduation cap and several bobby pins hold my hair in place, covering my ears.

“Lucky guess.” Bo smiles at me. “I'd hate for you to lose one.”

“Yeah,” I tell him, my voice choking with unexpected emotion. “These really mean a lot to me.”

“I know,” he says.

I fiddle with the earrings, checking them again. I'm surprised that Bo would pay enough attention to notice that one was loose, to remember that they're important, to even
recognize that these were Grandma's earrings before they were mine. Maybe I'm not as invisible to him as I thought.

“Only for special occasions,” I say, imitating Mom in a high-pitched voice.

Bo cracks a smile. “Yeah, well, life is a special occasion.”

The words surprise me, coming from him. But for the first time in a long time, I feel like maybe everything's happening the way it's supposed to be happening, and that it'll all be okay.

“Go on,” he says genially. “I'm sure you want to take pictures with your friends.” I turn to go, but he calls out to me: “Pheebs?”

“Yeah?”

“What school did you pick?” He shuffles his feet. “I mean, the last time we talked about, you know, your future, you seemed a little . . . undecided.”

I grin at him. “Don't tell Mom and Dad,” I say, leaning toward him and lowering my voice. “I did get accepted to NYU, and I'm going there, undecided major for now, but . . .” I draw out the last word.

Bo waits, his eyebrow cocked in anticipation.

“But I'm going to defer a year,” I say. I look behind me, making sure our parents haven't overheard. I'll have to tell them eventually that I plan on waiting a solid year before going back to school, but they can't do anything about it. I've already submitted the paperwork and finalized it all. It's my decision to make, and I made it.

“What are you going to do for that year?” Bo asks.

A grin spreads across my face, an immediate reaction that I'm not sure comes from joy or relief or something else entirely.

“That's the best part,” I say. “I have no
idea.”

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