The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(34)

I had a dream, after word reached me of my father’s death. I saw myself standing beneath a tree, a shadow me, faded and incomplete. I watch myself tie a rope to a branch; there’s no sound, no birds, no wind in the trees. I step onto a shadow and loop the rope around my neck. The ghosts of my family stand and watch, faces anaesthetised, wiped of expression. I meet my own eyes, and, without a word, my other self steps off.

The veins in my neck stand out lividly, my feet kick, but my hands don’t reach up. It’s a reflex, the last gasps of a dying body, of the meat that contains me, struggling for air, for life. It wants to keep going so badly. My feet stop kicking, my body hangs limp. I looked so peaceful, as if sleeping midair.

And then I heard the hiss of my father’s voice in my ear, in my mind; Coward. I hesitated, just for a moment; I wanted to retort, to deny it, but I couldn’t. Because I was.

That’s what they call suicides. Cowardly. Selfish. But looking around at the little clumps of people on the train, part of me truly doesn’t understand—how do they do it? How do they fill the minutes and hours and days and years of their lives? What’s missing in me that I don’t know how to fill mine? That I don’t want to?

There’s so much time, endless time, and I stand here in the centre of it with my dick in my hand, completely clueless.

It’s wrong, they say. Selfish, they say. Most people would do anything to get more time. They would kill me if they could steal mine.

I look at Mara—she’s been through hell, and she did what she had to, to get out of it. She fought to stay here, and not for me. For her.

That was always Mara’s purpose—to hold on to herself. From the very first, it’s what she worried about most.

When we burned her grandmother’s doll and found the pendant inside of it, the one that matched mine, and the one the professor had sent Jamie, we’d retreated to my room. She was shaking, ashen, and I was desperate to help her.

“Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,” I remember saying. “Tell me what you want and it’s yours.”

“I’m afraid I’m losing control,” she had said.

“I won’t let that happen.”

“You can’t stop it,” Mara said back. “All you can do is watch.”

I’d felt powerless for so long, I was resigned to it. All I could do was watch. And then she’d said:

“Tell me what you see. Because I don’t know what’s real and what isn’t or what’s new or different, and I can’t trust myself, but I trust you. Or don’t tell me, because I might not remember. Write it down, and then maybe someday, if I ever get better, let me read it. Otherwise, I’ll change a little bit every day and never know who I was until I’m gone.”

Mara was so wrong about herself, and so right about me. She was never in danger of losing herself. If anything, she became herself, and she never needed me or anyone to remind her.

I, on the other hand. I’ve always wanted to lose myself. She’s all I’ve ever wanted to hold on to. So if I could die, if I lost Mara the way Felix lost Felicity? I would probably do what he did too.

I’ve failed to notice that we’re off the train, at the clock tower, in the lift. Mara unlocks the door, and once we’re in, Goose explodes.

“Okay. Someone seriously needs to tell me what the bloody fuck is happening. And by someone, mate, I mean you.” He rounds on me.

“It’s . . . complicated,” I say to Goose.

“Yeah, twigged that,” he says. “But, really, you couldn’t be arsed to tell me about any of this before?”

“When?” I ask. “When would’ve been a good time to tell you about—”

“About your bloody superpowers? That girl back there, all of that—you’re putting me on, somehow, right?” He looks from me to Jamie. Jamie shakes his head slowly.

Goose falls back onto the sofa, closes his eyes and rubs his temples. “Well then, you’re going to catch me up, because despite that girl reading my mind and whatever else the fuck was happening back there, I’m not at all convinced you’re not taking the piss.”

I sigh. Only one way to convince him. Jamie’s ability is difficult to prove. Mara’s—well. Self-explanatory. But mine. I glide to the kitchen, begin opening drawers. Then I find what I’ve been looking for—the knife block. The sound it makes when I slide the chef’s knife out makes my blood quicken.

“No.” Mara’s voice is clear, defiant. Loud. “You’re not doing that.”

“You know,” Jamie says, making his way to the kitchen, “I’ve always wanted to see this, actually.”

“No.”

“Mara, it’s the only way.”

“It is not. You’re not doing this.”

I look past her to Goose, still in the living room, observing us with a sort of detached curiosity. I hold the knife in one hand and turn the other out, palm up in offering. “Just a small cut.”

Jamie pouts. “What? Don’t pussy out. Cut off a finger or something,” he urges. “Does it grow back?”

“Never done it.”

“No time like the present,” Goose says, his voice edgy now.

“If you do it, it’s over,” Mara says. “We’re over.”