The Becoming of Noah Shaw (The Shaw Confessions #1)(75)

At four, I look away.

The girl moves back into the crowd, but throws a look over her shoulder. She’s hurt.

Better this way. She wants connection, and I can’t connect.

Kent says something obscene over the music, and I consider hitting him to break the tedium. I manage to resist, barely, and take another sip. I haven’t been able to get properly drunk in years, but I like the burn.

That is what I’m thinking when I hear her voice for the first time. Fear and rage twisted into three words:

“Get them out.”

Her voice brings pain with it; my head throbs and aches and every muscle feels sore. Then I go blind.

I would panic, if this were the first time this had happened. But it isn’t, and I know that I’m still with Kent surrounded by tourists, though when I try and look down at myself out of habit, I see nothing at first. Then out of the darkness, hands come into focus. Pressed up against something—a wall, a ceiling perhaps. Not my hands, though—the fingernails are small, dirty, the fingers slender, feminine. But I see them as if I’m looking through the lenses of my own eyes. They push against the wall, and I can feel the texture of the cinderblock and dirt even though my hands are clean.

The waking nightmare ends, eventually, but now, nearly two months later, I hear that same voice again. Those same words.

The sun is shining aggressively, and I’m staring at the thatched roof of one of Croyden’s absurd tiki huts, avoiding it and class. I don’t look up to see who happens to be beating the shit out of the vending machine until I hear that voice. I would know it anywhere, in any dream or memory, but I never imagined I would hear it in reality.

When I do, I lean up and watch her. The girl’s more angry than annoyed, as if the malfunction is personal.

“You have an anger management problem,” I say. She whips around.

My psychic disaster seems to have developed a life outside my psyche. She stands there in dark jeans that would be indecent if she didn’t wear them so casually, with a loose, faded black T-shirt that sets off her skin. Not from Florida, clearly new, and so beautiful I nearly laugh out loud. And with this look on her face like she doesn’t give a fuck what I think of her. Perfection.

She considers me for a long moment, her eyebrows drawing together.

“Get him out,” Mara says. It’s her voice, but her mouth doesn’t move. And the tone is off—oddly tinny, and far away.

“What?” I ask, or try to, but something’s wringing the air from my lungs. The sun pierces the shade of the roof.

“He’s waking up; I’ll call you back.” Those words come from nowhere. And that is definitely not Mara’s voice anymore. It’s Jamie’s.





44


WHAT I LIVE FOR

I BLINK, AND THERE’S A flare of light. The sun in my memory becomes a fluorescent tube light in reality.

“Noah, come on, we gotta go.”

It’s Jamie, shaking my shoulder. I gasp for air, and Florida sheds its skin; the picnic table shrinks into a hideous chair, the thatched roof bleaches out into a white ceiling. The vending machines are still here.

“Where is everyone?” I ask him.

“Where we need to be.”

“Where are we?”

“Mount Sinai,” he says, and the pieces fit together. We’re in a waiting room. “You insisted.”

“I insisted?”

“They brought Stella here, but.” Jamie shakes his head. “It’s not good.”

An image comes to me, a memory, possibly, of people pulling her out of the water—one of her shoes was still on.

“Is she alive?”

Jamie nods, but his eyes dart away. “For now.”

“Can you get me to her?”

He shakes his head, his dreadlocks flicking his cheeks. “No one’s getting near her right now. Her neck’s broken and she’s on life support, I overheard.”

I can choose my own ending.

She didn’t, though, seeing as how she’s still alive. Seems especially cruel.

“Noah, we really need to go.”

“Where’s Daniel?” I say as I get up, swaying on my feet. I steady myself on one of the chairs. Jamie’s not watching—he’s looking at the front entrance.

“At the precinct,” he says. “Waiting for his parents.”

“What? What precinct? The fuck—why?”

“Because he doesn’t want to talk to the police without a lawyer. And neither do you.”

“I’ve got enough to go round,” I say. “But it would be simpler for you to just get us out of it.”

“I can’t get us out of anything. You can’t do anything. Are you listening to me?” He faces me, fake smiling, speaking through clenched teeth. “Someone cut the power. Like literally, in our case—our abilities are gone. We have to go.”





45


UNSURVEYED AND UNFATHOMED

JAMIE TRIES TO FILL IN the gaps in my memory as I walk numbly out of the hospital with him.

“Goose passed out on the bridge as I was trying to get us out of there,” he says. So that happened in truth. Good to know. “Daniel was getting paranoid,” he finishes.

“For good reason, it seems.”