After this morning, I can’t figure how she’d think I’d be anywhere else. “Of course I did.”
“I’ve got something to show you.” She takes my hand and leads me over to a cluster of rocks out on the ridge. “Yesterday you asked me to meet you out here. You said something isn’t right about Stillwater. That the reason we felt so trapped here is because we were. You said there was a way out.”
“I said that? To you?” The only thing I remember about yesterday is that it was just like today—minus the kissing. I got up. I made my deliveries. I was bored as hell.
Delilah laughs. “I know. Yesterday you sounded as crazy to me as I sound to you right now—until you told me something I’ve never told anyone. And then I saw this.”
She points at the biggest boulder, and on it I see my own handwriting.
DON’T FALL ASLEEP
If this is some kind of trick, it’s a damn good one.
“You must’ve fallen asleep yesterday and slept till morning. That’s why you don’t remember, I think.” Her eyes are shiny in the moonlight. “You could’ve left, but you waited—” Her voice hitches. “For me.”
There’s something familiar about what she’s saying; it’s right there at the edge of my mind. “I don’t—”
“You’ll see.” She squeezes my hand and pulls me up to the cliff’s edge. “It’s starting.”
At first all I notice is the quiet, like somebody turned off the night. Then the black sky beyond the ridge fades away and there’s cars and houses and skyscrapers where there should be nothing but empty land. It calls to mind a dream I once had.
“This can’t be real,” I say, but somehow, in my gut, I know it is.
“Look.” Delilah points down below us, at a pool of water, and then across it to the shore. “Out there.”
The letters on the rock are faded, but they’re still clear enough to read in the moonlight.
PRUITT
JUMP!
—MATT
“Holy . . .” Matt. All them little memory pieces floating around in my mind pull themselves together and I remember. I have a brother. It feels as real as Delilah’s hand in mine.
“We have to jump,” she says.
My brain keeps trying to tell me this is crazy, but in my gut it just feels right. Me and Delilah, too. It’s like we’ve always been right, we just forgot.
Delilah’s grip on my hand tightens. “We don’t have much time.”
Even as she says it, the wind kicks up and darkness spills back in, blocking out the lights.
A heavy gust pushes us back from the edge. I wrap my arms around Delilah and hold her tight against my chest until it stops. I could stay standing like this forever but I know that won’t get us nowhere but stuck. We have to jump.
Over the ridge, there ain’t nothing but empty black space again. “Think it’s still out there?”
Delilah laces her fingers through mine. “It has to be.”
I step up to the edge.
“Wait.” Delilah reaches up and kisses me fierce, and I know whatever happens, we can handle it together.
I take a deep breath, and she gives my hand one last squeeze, and then we jump into the dark.
I think maybe I’m supposed to feel scared, but all I feel is free.
Sarah Rees Brennan
I Gave You My Love by the Light of the Moon
There was a creepy guy staring at her in the coffee shop.
Berthe, sitting up at the high table by the window with her two best friends, became aware of it in a gradual, nasty way, like when Berthe had gone camping for the first time, years ago, and only realized the ground was damp when the wet had already seeped into her clothes. As soon as she was aware of his stare, she knew it had been going on too long.
She even got up from the table to fetch herself a tiny packet of sugar that she didn’t want. She was hoping that he would look at Natalie or Leela, that the stare was just the unpleasant one some guys would give any girl, not personal but something they apparently felt you had brought on yourself by having boobs.
It wasn’t. His eyes followed her path to the unwanted sugar and then back. Berthe perched on the edge of her stool, self-conscious and furious, too, that some idiot just looking at her was enough to spoil her fun with her friends.
Being almost six feet tall and a sixteen-year-old girl made you self-conscious enough most days, and today Berthe had the worst cramps she’d ever had in her life.
So someone giving her the stalker eyeballs was the outside of enough. He looked like a college guy, or maybe he was a bit too young, maybe he was one of those high school boys who couldn’t wait to get into college where everyone could appreciate his tortured soul. He was wearing a tweedy hipster scarf and black rectangular-framed hipster-boy glasses. His eyes gleamed behind them, pale and intent. In fact, he was pretty pale all over, that particular shade of pale that suggested he was waiting for someone to invent technology that would allow him to get a tan from the light of his laptop screen alone.
Not at all the sort of boy Berthe would have anything in common with, even if he hadn’t decided to stare at her like a creeper when she already felt like crap.
Another cramp made Berthe hunch forward, almost tilting off the stool. Her face must have shown some of what she was feeling, because Leela reached over the table and touched her arm.
“Are you all right? You feel hot.”
Natalie, the vivacious creature of the group, all laughs and curls, and the one who usually drew boys’ eyes, raised her eyebrows at that and said, “I bet she does. Rawr.”
Leela was too concerned and Berthe was frankly too freaked out to laugh. Berthe didn’t feel hot. In fact, the skin at the back of her neck was prickling with cold sweat. She touched her fingertips to her cheek and felt them slide on the clammy surface.
“I just have, you know”—Berthe waved her hand at her midsection even as she lied—“a headache.”
As though it were punishment for her lie, Berthe actually felt a twinge start in her head, a jagged line of pain that went from skull to spine. She put her elbow on the table and put her head down, brow pressed against her palm, until the sharp pain and the slow grind of agony in her stomach eased.
She looked up. Natalie looked serious now, and almost as concerned as Leela. Berthe really didn’t like being the center of attention; eyes on her made her feel as if she should be doing something and was too inadequate to know what. Unless she was playing lacrosse.
“I’m just going to go home,” she said abruptly—she didn’t want any more fussing, she didn’t want to spoil their day—and she got up, holding on to the edge of the table as she did, so that she would look steady. “I just need an Advil and a nap. Call you guys later.”
She left precipitately; if she didn’t want one of them coming with her, haste was essential. They would be held up paying for their coffees and discussing whether to go after her, and she’d be long gone.
When Berthe found herself staggering down the steps of the exit and almost reeling into the alleyway beside it, pressing the clammy-cold, prickling-hot skin of her face against the brick wall, she began to rethink her amazing strategy. No matter how awkward she felt about being fussed over, it beat not getting home at all. It was pitch-black outside, the night sky pressing down on her, dense and dark, and she did not think she could walk.
Pain crumpled her insides like tissue and she made a sound horrifyingly like a whine, like the sound of that animal at the campsite weeks ago, the wild snarling thing Berthe had barely seen but whose teeth she could sometimes still feel, as sharp in her memory as they had been in her skin. Berthe wanted to touch the bandage on her arm, but she gritted her teeth and kept her hands flat against the wall, braced. She wasn’t going to fall down.