Not that I was doing it for an adrenaline rush. Or for the fear or the pain or even the pleasure. I wasn’t trying to prove something to anyone, not even myself. It wasn’t about that.
It was about Zo and my father and Walker and all of them—all of them who hated what I’d become. Maybe because it had replaced the Lia they really wanted or because it was ugly and different and, just possibly, if Jude was right, better. Maybe they were scared. I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I just knew they hated me. I knew my sister didn’t believe I existed, and wanted me gone. My father wished—prayed—I was dead. Maybe it would be easier for all of them if I was.
Too bad.
I was alive. In my own unique, mechanical way, maybe. But alive. And I was going to stay that way for the foreseeable future. They would age, they would die. I would live.
There were too many people too afraid of what I’d become. I wasn’t going to be one of them. Not anymore.
I didn’t take a deep breath.
I didn’t close my eyes.
I stretched my arms out.
I shifted my weight forward.
I let myself fall.
The world spun around me. The wind howled, and it sounded like a voice, screaming my name. The water thundered. The spray misted my body. And then I crashed into the surface, and there was nothing but rocks and water and a whooshing roar. And the water dragged me down, gravity dragged me down, down and down and down, thumping and sliding against the rocks, water in my eyes, in my mouth, in my nose. It was too loud to hear myself scream, but I screamed, and the water flooded in and choked off the noise. There was no time, no space in my head, to think I’m going to die or I can’t die or Why am I still falling, where is the bottom, when is the end? There was no space for anything but the thunder and the water, as if I was the water, pouring down the rocks, gashed and sliced and battered and slammed and still whole, still falling—and then the river rose up to meet me, and the water sucked me down and I was beneath, where it was calm. Where it was silent.
Still alive, I thought, floating in the dark, safe beneath the storm of falling water.
Still here.
I closed my eyes, opened them, but the darkness of the water was absolute. I was floating again, like I had in the beginning, a mind without a body. Eyes, a thought, maybe a soul—and nothing else. But this time I wasn’t afraid.
I let myself rise to the surface. The water slammed me, like a building crumbling down on my head, and again sucked me under.
And again the silence, again up to the surface, again the storm, and again sucked down to the depths.
I wasn’t afraid. I knew I could stay below, swim far enough from the base of the falls to surface in safety. When I was ready. Which I wasn’t, not yet. I was content to stay in the whirlpool, limp and battered, letting the water do what it wanted, filling myself up with the knowledge that I had done it, that I had jumped, that I had fallen. I had survived. I was alive; I was invincible. I wasn’t ready for it to end.
Until I surfaced and heard the wind scream my name again. Except it wasn’t the wind, it was Auden, who had come for me, who was screaming. I screamed back, but the water poured into my mouth. I waved an arm, but the water sucked me down again, and when I fought back to the surface, Auden was gone.
Then I did swim, deep and swift, my mind starting to seep back into itself and with it, panic. I was still invincible; Auden wasn’t. I surfaced again, a safe distance from the churning water at the base of the falls. Nothing.
“Auden!”
Nothing.
Then back down into the dark, swimming blind, my arms outstretched, so that even if I couldn’t see him, I would feel him, but there was just the water, parting easily as my body sliced through, water and more water and no Auden.
Until I broke through the surface and there he was, gasping and struggling to stay afloat, his hair plastered to his face, his eyes squinty and his glasses long gone. I grabbed him, squeezed tight, kicking hard enough to keep us both afloat.
“Are you okay?” As we drifted away from the falls, the water grew shallower until we hit a point where our feet touched the bottom, midway between the base of the first waterfall and the edge of the second, smaller drop-off.
“Okay,” he said, panting. The current was lighter here, easy enough to fight. “You?”
“Fine. What the hell are you doing?”
“Rescuing you.” He shivered in my grasp. “You were drowning.”
I shook my head.
He looked like he wanted to drop down into the water and never surface. “Stupid,” he said furiously. “Of course you weren’t. I just—I saw you up there, and when you fell, and you didn’t come up, and I thought—”
“Thank you,” I cut in, hugging him tighter. “My hero.” I didn’t need a hero, and I wasn’t the one who’d needed rescue. But he was soaking and freezing and had nearly drowned, and I figured there was no harm in giving him a little ego stroke.
“Uh, Lia?”
“What?” I asked, hoping that he wasn’t going to choose yet another horribly timed moment to start talking about the great love affair that was never going to be. An ego stroke was one thing, but there was only so far I could go.
“You’re, uh, not wearing any clothes.”
“Oh!” I let go, and bent my knees until I was submerged up to my neck.
“I couldn’t see anything, anyway,” he said. “Not without my glasses.”
I grinned. “So you were looking?”
His cheeks turned red. His lips, on the other hand, were nearly blue.
“Let’s get out of here,” he suggested, hugging himself and jumping up and down against the cold.
I wasn’t ready, not yet. “You go. I just want…” It was just another thing I couldn’t explain to him, the way it felt to go over the falls, to know that I had absolutely no control and to just let it happen, let myself fall—and to survive. I knew I’d have to drag myself out of the water to see what damage I’d done, if any. I’d also have to deal with everything else. And I would. Just not yet. “I’m staying in. For a while.”
“Then me too,” he said.
“You’re freezing.”
He shook his head, stubborn. Stupid. “I’m fine.”
“Fine. Have it your way.”
So we stayed in, Auden making a valiant effort to pretend he wasn’t noticing my body. While I, for the first time, wasn’t noticing it. I wasn’t ashamed, wasn’t repulsed; I was just content to be where I was, what I was—and to be with him. We did backflips and somersaults and competed for who could hold a handstand longer before the current swept us over. We laughed. We didn’t talk about my family or about Jude or about “us” and especially not about what had happened in the city or what was going to happen when we got back to shore. We didn’t talk about much of anything, except some supposedly funny vid he’d seen of a monkey in a diaper and whether if one was in a position to eat, daily chocolate was a required element of a healthy and balanced diet. Meaningless stuff like that. Easy stuff.
I hadn’t been so happy in a long time. Maybe since the accident.
“I think… I need… to get out,” Auden finally said as I resurfaced from a perfect handstand. His teeth were chattering so hard he could barely form the words.
I nodded. “Race to shore?” And before he could answer I took off, digging my strokes into the water, pushing hard to win. I missed winning.