“And so instead you make them buy you ice cream?” I snap. I don’t believe her game of “my power is worse than yours,” not for a minute.
“Yes!” she says. “Because if I don’t do something stupid with it, then I won’t do anything at all. I’ll just sit here and let it eat me alive. I do something stupid with it because I want to learn how to block the power, whenever I want, so I don’t have to be scared every time I hug you that I’ll find out you die or get hurt or leave….” She slams her hands down on the coffee table, looks away, and blinks back tears furiously. Anne doesn’t cry.
I look down, try to swallow the heavy guilt on my tongue but fail. Anger is still bright and flickering in my chest, but I don’t know what to say, what to do….
“Forget it. Come on, then. Let’s do this,” Anne says, sniffling. She tosses down the remote and motions for me to sit near her.
“Wait, no. You don’t have to….”
“You need to know?” she says, voice hard. I nod. “Then I’ll do it.” She pauses a moment, and her voice softens. “I’ll do it. Hurry, before I change my mind.”
I take the cushion beside her. She holds out her palms, waits for me….
“I’m afraid of Naida sometimes,” I say. I don’t know why I’m confessing this—it has nothing to do with Anne looking into my future. Maybe I just want to admit it to someone, to offer a confession in exchange for all Anne has just told me.
“Why?” Anne asks.
“When she remembers, she’s… she’s my friend. She’s the only friend I’ve ever had, other than you and Jane. She makes me want to help her, she makes me feel… powerful.”
“And when she doesn’t remember?”
“She’s Lo—she has a different name when she doesn’t remember. She’s a different person. I don’t think she’d hurt me. But I don’t know.”
“Is that why you want to know the future? To find out if she hurts you?”
“No. I just need to know if she’ll end up remembering for good or not. If I could just get her to hold on to her memories, she could be Naida all the time….” I shake my head. “It’s not her fault she’s like this. It isn’t fair.”
“It doesn’t really matter if it’s fair or not,” Anne says. “This is her life now. She has to choose what to do with it. It isn’t fair that our mom died, or that our dad has no idea who we are, or that our brothers get to spend his inheritance while we’re stuck in school. No one has it fair.”
“But Naida doesn’t really have much of a choice,” I say.
“Trust me,” Anne says. “With a person’s future, there’s always a choice. Even if it doesn’t seem like it.” She glances around at our dorm room—our home. This isn’t how teenage girls are supposed to live. We should have our exciting, beautiful mother. Our father, all his memories intact. Our house in the woods of Georgia, a regular school, summer jobs at the bookstore in Ellison. We shouldn’t be alone here during the summer. And yet here we are. This is our life. She looks back at me. “The only time you don’t get a choice is if you’re stuck watching the past. Sometimes you have to look away.” She pauses, smiles a little sadly. “Sometimes looking away means tricking a boy into taking you out for fondue.”
I want to laugh a little, but it doesn’t work, so instead I nod, then push my hands toward Anne. She takes them, rubs her fingers back and forth over the skin on the back of my palm.
She doesn’t speak; she raises an eyebrow.
I watch, waiting, blocking the memories that are trying to get from Anne to me—we’re like a river flowing two ways, currents crossing. I sigh, release the wall. A sea of memories comes at me—I’m in nearly all of them. I watch us moving into the dorms for the first time, our brother Samuel helping move in our couch. Our father standing there, saying good-bye, even though he had no idea who we were. The Pavilion, Anne’s first kiss, myself through Anne’s eyes—her not-quite-matched sister who she desperately wants to fix, to make happy, to make fit in seamlessly with her and Jane—
Anne pulls her hands away.
“Well?” I ask, trying to shake off the less-than-flattering image of myself.
Anne’s face is a little pale. She looks at a loss for words, like her tongue is too heavy to articulate what she needs to say.
“Anne, you’re scaring me,” I whisper.
“I can’t tell you how it ends, exactly,” she finally says. She puts her head in her hands, winds her fingers into her hair, and pulls.
“Why not?”
“Because there’s nothing there. There’s no future between you and the girl—the water girl. Naida. Whatever she is.”
“We stop being friends—”
“You’re not listening,” Anne snaps, and there’s so much worry in her voice that I feel cold. “There’s nothing there, Celia. There’s no future because there’s no ‘you and her.’ It’s blank.”
“What does that mean?”
Anne sighs, shakes her head. “What have you gotten yourself into?” she mutters before looking me in the eye. “It means,” she says, voice serious, “either she dies or you do.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Lo
I used to look at my sisters and feel joy. Feel beauty, feel like we were all connected.
Now I look at them and picture them on the shore, snapping necks, running off with the darkness that made us this way.
They’re so certain we become angels. If I try to warn them, try to tell them the truth, they’ll ignore me, all but exile me. I’ll spend the last of my time with them alone, like Molly. I want to cry, but it feels so pointless, stupid, almost, so instead I settle in the sand, tilt my head back, let the ocean rock me. Sometimes it’s easy to think it really does love me.
If it did, could I stay Lo, stay the shade of gray between Naida’s light and the old one’s dark?
If I let Naida win, it means Jude will have to die—if he loves me. I don’t know that it’s true, anyhow, but he’s the closest thing either way. He’s the only one there’d be any point trying on.
If I stay Lo, I’ll wind up like the others. Like the man who changed me. Dark. I wonder if it hurts, or if we can go dark as easily as the sky does. It didn’t look painful for the old one. And a storm is coming, a big one—a hurricane. I’d change fast; it’d be over before I knew it. It’s certainly the easiest choice.