A World Without You(44)

“But—”

“Bo.”

I step inside my room, and Dr. Franklin closes the door behind me. I listen as the Doctor punches in a code, and I can hear the heavy metallic thud of a lock clicking in place.

Lights-out is literal—our overhead lights don’t work from midnight to seven in the morning. But I don’t go to bed. Instead, I cross the room to the window, where moonlight filters through my thin curtains. I sweep them aside, hoping to catch a glimpse of the ruins by the marsh, hoping that will give me some inspiration for what to do to next to save Sofía.

But my gaze outside is marred by iron bars on the window.

I try to get a closer look at the bars, but the window is sealed shut. I strain against it, but it’s utterly immovable. I grab my cell phone and use its flashlight to illuminate the bars. They’re painted black, but there are cracks of rust in them, tiny slivers of red leaking through the edges.

These bars have been here for a while.

But at the same time, they’ve never been here before. The locks on the doors, the bars over the windows . . . none of this was here before I went home this weekend.

I turn my cell phone off, letting the darkness wash over the room. For just a moment, I see a glint of something—fire, maybe, or just sparks—in the distance, near the edge of the marsh, near the ruins where I lost Sofía.

But I blink, and it’s gone.

I move to the bed and sit cross-legged in the center.

The video from the USB drive plays through my mind. It wasn’t real, I know that, but it seemed real.

And this does too. The iron bars and the locked doors. It’s ironic; I just came back from a house where I wasn’t even allowed to have a door, and now I’m in a room trapped behind one.

I jump up from the bed and test the door now. It doesn’t budge.

We never used to have locks . . . I think, but then another thought: Yes, we did. We always did.

There have always been locks on the doors, iron bars on the windows.

No, there haven’t.

? ? ?

I don’t know what’s real anymore.

? ? ?

Except . . . Sofía. She’s real. I may only ever be able to see her in the past, but I still know that she’s real. I can still taste her kiss on my lips, reminding me of truth.

I grab my calendar from the desk and use my cell phone to illuminate its pages, picking a weekend when Sofía was at Berkshire and I was home. I blindly reach into the timestream, grabbing the strings of that date and practically throwing myself into the past, before everything went pear-shaped. When I open my eyes, I’m in my bedroom, but my calendar confirms that it’s March 15.

I burst out of my room. It’s not yet time for lights-out, so I head straight to the common room. But first I check my door behind me.

No keypad. No locks. No iron bars on the window.

Ryan and Harold are still around here somewhere, and there’s a chance I could run into the Doctor or someone else on staff, but I’m too excited to be careful.

I throw open the door of the common room.

“Bo?” Sofía asks when she turns around.

I almost lose it right there.

“Sofía.” I breathe her name.

“I thought you left already.”

“I decided to stay here instead,” I say. “I’d rather be here.” With you.

She smiles. “I was about to watch a movie, but would you rather—”

I stop her. “A movie would be great.” I want a normal date. I just want to remember that she’s real. I don’t need more than that.

The movies in the common room aren’t that great—about a dozen crappy DVDs and Blu-rays that are a decade or more old, most of them for little kids. Ryan has a few newer movies that he brought with him from home, but he doesn’t share. We can only watch them when he feels like it.

“How about this one?” Sofía asks, holding up Titanic.

I laugh. “That was my sister’s favorite movie when she was a kid.”

“Too girly?” Sofía starts to put the DVD back on the console.

“It’s fine,” I say.

I drag two beanbag chairs in front of the television while Sofía loads up the ancient player with the disc. She plops down on the red beanbag beside me, leaning into my shoulder. Her head finds that perfect place on my chest, where my arm and body meet, and she snuggles in, and I’m in absolute heaven.

I watch her more than I watch the movie.

I guess when someone’s gone from your life for a while, all you think about are the big things. The big regrets, the could-have, should-haves. Or the big moments, the memories that are going to be with you forever, those life-changing moments, like first kisses and first confessions and first trusts. And you think about the lasts too: the last kiss, the last words, the last moments.

But the firsts and lasts and the big highlights between aren’t a life. They aren’t a person. They aren’t what you love. When you fall in love, you don’t fall in love with the first kiss, you fall in love with every kiss after that. The big moments are great, and it’s obvious why you remember them, but it’s the little things that make a person real: the smell of her hair, the warmth of her head resting on my shoulder, the way her ear curves, how her legs curl under her when she’s relaxed, the little gasps and mutterings she makes when she’s so focused on a movie she forgets that she’s making sounds. The big moments are just photographs in your head; the little things are the memories.