My past life body was so content that I thought about lying there for a while longer and falling asleep to the drumming rain. I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was until I felt that overwhelming sense of rest and relaxation. I was in the most deliciously comfortable position – the kind that usually eludes you until five minutes before your alarm goes off in the morning. I didn’t want to move. My hips were sunken perfectly into the mattress. My head was perfectly cradled. My cheek rested on a warm, smooth surface.
A surface that rose and fell along with my own breath.
I bolted upright to find myself sharing a bed with a boy. A bare-chested boy. My bare legs were entwined with his.
I gasped and pushed away from him, only to lose my balance and fall right off the edge of the bed. I landed on a cold stone floor with a smack.
“Ivy?” the boy said, reaching for me in the dark.
I scrambled to my feet and backed away from him. I was wearing a guy’s long-sleeved collar shirt – only a guy’s collar shirt – which barely came down to the middle of my thighs. I tried to pull it down further to no avail.
There were only three positives I could see in my particular scenario. At least I had underwear on under the collar shirt. At least I wasn’t completely naked like in 1961. And at least I landed in the right time period. The boy had called me Ivy.
I glanced around to locate a closet or wardrobe, anything that might contain clothes. It was a cold, sterile-looking room with bare walls and floors, harsh lines and corners. The bed was the only source of warmth and softness, even though the linens were hospital white. A gray steel door stood to my right, which could be a closet. Another steel door stood behind me, a sliver of fluorescent light leaking through at its base.
I took a step toward the closet but froze when I felt a draft on my head like a frosty breath. My hands flew to my scalp. My hair was buzzed so short I was practically bald. My jaw dropped as my fingers searched the top of my skull.
I remembered the day Audrey came home demanding to have her head shaved. Two weeks after she began chemo, her hair started falling out a few strands at a time. One or two would fall and tickle her nose or cheek while she’d be talking to me. She’d sweep them away with her hand or send them flying with a puff of air. It was a small inconvenience then, but soon they fell into her plate at the dinner table. She was always picking them out of her soup. Brushing them from her shoulders. Her pillow. She said she felt covered in hair when she took a shower. And one day three years ago, when she still attended school, a boy sitting at a desk behind her raised his hand and said, “Mrs Cuthbert? Audrey’s shedding all over my stuff.” When she looked behind her, a layer of her hair covered the boy’s desk and books. All the other kids laughed. The boy sneered at her.
She demanded the clippers that very day. She didn’t even want to wait for Mom and Dad to come home. Gran buzzed all her hair off, all her long, beautiful sand-colored hair, and it fell in a circle around her feet on the back porch. I remembered the look on her face when Gran handed her the mirror. She made no expression, save the tiniest quiver of her bottom lip. Then she handed the mirror back to Gran and, without a sound, went to her room to be alone. Gran saved a lock of her hair to tie with a ribbon. I swept the rest into a pile, then scooped it into the trash.
Gone forever.
“Ivy?” the boy said again, snapping me out of my thoughts. He climbed out of the bed and eyed me with suspicion.
The shadow beads danced across his pale, bare chest. Light green pajama pants, like medical scrubs, hung from his slender hips and pooled at his bare feet. His eyes were narrowed, his mouth turned down. His short hair stuck up haphazardly on top, almost as if I’d been the one who messed it up.
That thought was enough to make me forget my bald head. This guy was definitely not Blue. I couldn’t see the color of his eyes or his hair in the darkness, but he didn’t feel like Blue. He felt like a stranger. Blue and I were supposed to be partners in this life. Soul mates. So why was I in bed with someone else?
I took a step back, feeling dizzy and faint. I thought back to my swollen, pregnant belly. Good Lord. How many guys had I slept with throughout my past fifty-six lives? Fifty? A hundred? Five hundred? Had I loved them all? Had I been happy? Had they treated me right? I dropped my arms slowly to my sides. This was going to gnaw at me. I could feel it.
The boy studied me from my head to my toes, then back up again. His eyes tightened. “You just descended.”
I blinked, not knowing how to respond. I didn’t know if he meant it as a fact or a question. He had a thick accent, but I couldn’t tell which one it was.
He spoke again. “You descended from the future, didn’t you?”
He obviously knew Ivy was a Descender and what she was capable of. That actually made things easier. I wouldn’t have to pretend this time.
“What’s wrong?” he said. “Why did you travel back to this life?”
I still couldn’t place his accent. German? Irish? English? It sounded like a mixture of all three. Before I answered him, I glanced down at my bare legs. “Could I… get dressed first?”
His eyes flicked to my legs too. It took a moment before understanding dawned on his face. I wasn’t Ivy, the girl he’d been snuggling with. I was a stranger standing in front of another stranger, half-naked.
He whisked the closet door open, his movements agile and quick. He rummaged through it for a minute, scrutinizing several articles of clothing and tossing them over his shoulder if they weren’t what he was looking for. At last, he handed me a soft gray smock, a pair of flowing black pants, black socks, and a pair of black slip-on shoes. Thunder peeled across the sky outside.
When I reached for the clothes, I made sure not to touch his hands. I didn’t care that I’d known him in my past life. I didn’t know him now. “Can you turn around?”
“Oh. Of course.”
He went back to the closet, his back to me, and pulled a white T-shirt over his pale torso. I turned away from him and slipped into my clothes as fast as I could. I peered over my shoulder to see if he was peeking, but he wasn’t. Not that he probably hadn’t already seen what I was covering up.
When I sat on the concrete floor to pull my socks and shoes on, he sat on the edge of the bed in front of me, elbows on his knees. His hands were clasped, his forefingers pressed together, pointing at the floor. We watched each other.
So this guy was my boyfriend in this past life. I guess I could see why I liked him. He was cute, in a boyish, nerdy, emo sort of way. He hadn’t stopped frowning since I landed, but it was an appealing frown. The brooding kind you see immortalized as “art” in hipster magazines and photographs. Unlike Ear Nibbler, whose arrogant scowl I wished I could erase from my memory, this boy’s frown came straight from a sad and troubled soul.
He kind of reminded me of me.
He leaned back, his palms planted on the mattress behind him. There was an insignia on his T-shirt – a circular red logo bearing the words: AIDA Headquarters, Washington DC. In the center of the circle were three letters.
LVI.
CHAPTER 29
SHOCK WAVES