A World Without You by Beth Revis
When the Doctor came out to see what we were all doing, Ryan floated his gold fountain pen from his front pocket and used it as the Snitch. I think he made sure that Harold got it; Ryan wasn’t so much of a dick back then. Ryan was still Ryan, though, so he made sure the ball we were using hit Harold as soon as he snatched the pen from the air. Harold collapsed onto the soft grass below, laughing his brains out.
As the vision fades, the timestream comes into sharper focus. Sofía’s string is a little closer, but it’s not enough. The end is still trapped in the dark spot swirling over 1692. I work quickly and select another moment along the string, striking like a cobra as I snatch it, tugging it from the weave.
Ryan, Harold, and I are hanging out by the marsh. Harold’s wearing shorts; this is still at the end of summer. When Ryan starts to talk, I realize that this memory is from one of the first few days at Berkshire, when everyone was still moving in, before classes had even started.
“I’ve been to three of these before,” Ryan says, gathering rocks into a little pile. He starts throwing them into the marsh, aiming for the birds.
“Three?” I ask.
“Schools like this.” I didn’t know other schools like Berkshire even existed.
“You?” he asks.
“My first.”
“Me too,” Harold says in a small voice, his eyes unfocused, as if he were speaking to someone other than us. “Berkshire. I like the name of it. Sounds like a place where hobbits would live.”
“This place does look pretty cool,” Ryan admits. “It’s nicer than the last place I was at. That joint was like a prison.”
“Look.” Harold points down the path, toward the academy and the black van pulling into the circular drive.
“They’re in our class,” Ryan says. He chuckles; he’d almost hit a magpie with that last stone he threw.
I see the shorter girl first, and right away, I can tell she’s the kind of girl who loves attention. It’s Gwen, wearing sparkly clips in her black hair—the tips of which are dyed red—and a shirt so low-cut I can see her cleavage all the way from where I’m standing. She’s showing off her power too, sparking little fires in the palms of her hands like it’s no big deal.
And just when I start to look away, I see Sofía.
And then I don’t.
I almost shove Ryan in the marsh to get him to shut up about the stupid birds for two seconds as I lean forward, trying to find her again. She’d been visible for just a second, but that second was enough—she’s burned into my mind. Gwen’s the type of girl who demands to be noticed, but Sofía’s just the opposite. She likes silent places and shadows and watching from the sidelines. She doesn’t want me—or anyone, really—to notice her . . . so of course I notice her even more.
The memory blinks out of my mind in a flash. Seeing her like that, for the first time, reminded my heart of all the reasons why I fell in love with her in the first place. A weird, painful lump rises in my throat, and I swallow it down. I have to control my emotions, or I’ll lose control of the timestream.
It looks like one more good tug will pull the end of Sofía’s string from 1692. I’m not sure what this is doing to her in the past—does she feel me manipulating time around her in an effort to bring her home? But it’s the only thing I can think to do.
I reach out and pluck at the red string again, already bracing for the memory that will overtake me.
Gwen bounces with excitement. “It’s almost time!” she cries, pulling Sofía behind her as she leads us all outside. Dr. Franklin looks almost excited as her. We’re heading to the beach well past lights-out, but he got special permission for us to view a NASA rocket shooting off from somewhere in Virginia but visible all the way up here. Gwen’s not a science nerd, but she’s obsessed with firepower, and she begged for the chance to watch the rocket fly by on its way to space.
The night is beyond freezing. I’m wearing my puffy coat and a hoodie and two shirts under that, and it’s still cold.
Beside me, I notice Sofía shivering, so I pull off my hoodie and offer it to her. This was before we were, you know, a thing or whatever, but she accepts the hoodie and pulls it over her head, the sleeves dangling off her wrists. The whole thing is comically large on her, and she flaps the arms around herself.
“Thanks,” she says, still twisting so the sleeves of the hoodie thwack her back.
And I don’t know what to say because I’m an idiot, so I just sort of stand there and grin.
“T-minus five minutes!” Gwen shouts, glancing at her cell phone. She and Dr. Franklin stand excitedly on the beach. Harold’s chattering to one of his ghosts, and Ryan’s playing on his cell phone, not really caring.
Sofía and I step back from the group. Not far enough to draw attention, but enough so that we feel like we’re a little bit alone.
“Thanks,” she says again.
“No problem,” I say, zipping up my coat.
“No, I mean . . . for being nice,” she says. “Not just now, but just . . . in general.”
She looks up at me, and I’m so flustered that I don’t know what to say or do. As I stare at her, her pupils go transparent. That was the first time I noticed it, but I noticed it every time after. Sofía’s eyes always went invisible before anything else. It wasn’t like her pupils suddenly disappeared and showed her brains or whatever, it was like they became this sort of laser-focused, pinpointed reflection of the world.
And because behind her is the ocean and the sky, that’s what fills her eyes.
I just keep staring, and her eyes sparkle with it all—all the stars, and then all the stars again, reflected in the waves. The transparency spreads into her irises. Moonlight dances on her eyelashes.
I grab her hand.
“Don’t go,” I say.
So she blinks, and the stars are gone, and she is back.
A crackle of lightning bursts behind me, and I turn to see Gwen sparking up, the strands of her hair electrified, little licks of flame sizzling on her skin.
“Tone it down a notch,” Ryan complains.
“It’s almost here!” Gwen shouts, ignoring him.
Sofía moves closer to me. And while everyone else’s eyes are on the rocket, my lips are on hers.
CHAPTER 8
When I open my eyes, my whole body is trembling. Living through these memories again is messing with my head.
But it’ll be worth it if I am able to reweave time. I stare down at the chaotic, beautiful timestream spreading out in front of me. I can see the three little puckers I’ve made to the red string. I reach out to try one more time, but even as I watch, the red string of Sofía’s past evens out along the weave, smoothing down flat again. Any chance I had of pulling the end of Sofía’s string from the vortex disappears before my eyes.
Time has a way of correcting itself, and I won’t be able to save Sofía this way.
I stagger, almost falling when I get up from my desk chair. The weight of those memories drags me down and reminds me of just how much I have to lose if I lose Sofía.
And yet, like a drug addict looking for another hit, I want to dive back into the timestream and relive more memories. I almost bring it back up, but I force myself to lie down instead.
It’s dangerous to dwell in the past. You don’t have to be a time traveler to know that. But more than that, I can’t let myself be satisfied with just memories. I need to find a way to save the real Sofía, not the image of her I carry around in my head.
Ugh. I need fresh air.
I used to hate Sundays. They always felt too close to Monday and to responsibilities. Since coming to the Berk, though, Sundays have become my favorite day of the week. They’re the days I return from my parents’ house to the place where I really belong, and to Sofía.
As I head out of my bedroom, I can hear someone, probably Ryan, playing a loud video game in the
Growing up on the coastal side of Massachusetts, I was never too far from the Atlantic. But I didn’t really appreciate being this close to the water until I moved to Berkshire. Until Sofía would take me for walks on the sand.
I arrive at the beach and kick off my shoes. Wind makes my shirt flap around as the sandy soil with stubborn clumps of grass gives way to the sand. I can taste the salt in the air, crisp and pure, and the ocean’s waves drown out my dark thoughts.
The last time I was out here, Sofía came with me. It was cold that day, made bitterly so by the wind. Dark storm clouds billowed over the ocean, and although we could see lightning far out across the waves, it wasn’t even raining on us. Sofía could stare at the sea for hours, but that day, there weren’t any pretty blue waves, and everything was choppy and gray, as if the water was so disgusted by itself it was trying to jump out of the ocean.
We walked as far north as we could, up to the point where the sandy beach gives way to a rocky hill topped by the lighthouse. Then we turned around and walked south, past the academy, to the sharp point at the end of the island.
“My mother loved the beach but hated the sun,” Sofía said, tipping her face up to the cloudy gray sky.
“Then this is the perfect place for her.”
Sofía laughed. But there was a hitch in her voice, and her smile fell from her face almost immediately.
I wanted to ask her what happened to her family. She didn’t talk about them often, just that they were dead. When she looked at me, I think she could see the questions I didn’t ask.
“Car accident,” she said.
“You don’t have to—”
“It’s okay. Dr. Franklin says I should talk about it. And it happened a while ago. Almost a year now.”
The tide was rising; cold saltwater splashed over our feet, and Sofía gasped in surprise and pulled me further up the beach.
“Drunk driver,” she added, not looking at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I never know how to feel about it,” she confessed. “The Doctor seems to think that I feel guilty, but I don’t. It wasn’t my fault. I know some people have survivor’s guilt, and I guess I feel that way sometimes, like, why did I live when they didn’t? But that’s not how I really feel about it.”
“How do you really feel?” I watched her closely, waiting to see if she’d go invisible, hoping she wouldn’t.
“Empty,” Sofía said.
The waves were getting higher, the air colder. There was an edge to the wind, as if it wanted to cut us.
“Let’s go inside,” Sofía said, rubbing her shoulders.
I checked the time on my phone. “Kitchens are closed,” I groaned. After dinner, the kitchens were always open with snacks until an hour before lights-out. Usually, they were just stocked with fruit or granola, healthy stuff, but Ryan almost always talked his way into chips. He’s good at getting what he wants.
“Come on,” Sofía said. “I’ll make you something.”
Even though the kitchens weren’t off-limits, it felt like we were breaking rules being there just before lights-out. I don’t think students were supposed to cook, but no one came to stop us as Sofía pulled out a container of eggs and set a pot of water to boiling, adding a pinch of salt.
“My sisters and I called these ‘ghost eggs,’” Sofía said.
“Harold would like them then,” I replied, trying too hard to be funny.
She grinned anyway. “It’s because of how they look when they cook.” The water barely started to bubble, and she moved quickly. She swirled the water with a wooden spoon, making a tiny tornado in the pot, then cracked an egg with one hand. As soon as it hit the hot water, the egg twirled into the center, the clear parts immediately turning white and streaming around. It looked . . . delicate. Beautiful.
“See?” she said. “Ghost eggs.”
And she was right. The poached egg did look like a little ghost floating in the water.
After a minute, she took the egg out of the hot water with a slotted spoon, dropped it on a plate, and handed it to me with salt and pepper.
“My little sister would poke the yellows and scream, ‘I’m making the ghosts bleed!’” she said. “She was kind of macabre.”
“Mmm, ghost blood,” I said, licking my fork.
And she smiled at me, but it was a sad smile. She missed them. Not in the same way that we all missed our families while we were at Berkshire. She missed them in a deeper way, because she knew she’d never see them again. It wasn’t that she was gone from them; it was that they were gone from her.
• • •
We talked a lot about family, me and Sofía. Not at first. Sofía kept her family close to her heart, like a secret, but eventually she opened up.
“Carmen was two years older than me,” she told me after we hopped over the gate and were walking on the boardwalk together. A crane watched us from the marsh as we passed. “And Maria was just eleven months younger. People used to tell Mom that Maria and I were Irish twins, but she didn’t understand what that phrase meant, so she’d tell them, ‘No, no, we’re Latina, not Irish.’”
She laughed, and the crane flew off, its long legs dripping water like glittering crystals.
“I miss them,” Sofía said in a small voice. She moved closer to me and touched the back of my hand, as if to remind herself that I wasn’t gone. Not like them.
“Carmen would always try to be my mom, even when Mom was around,” she continued. “She pretended like she knew all there was to know about raising babies. And Maria—” Sofía laughed. “Maria would always try to make it harder on her, you know? Like, Carmen would say that she could get Maria to eat her vegetables, so Maria would load up all her peas in her mouth and then spit them at Carmen one at a time when Mom wasn’t looking.”
Sofía’s face fell.
“She was only fourteen,” she said, starting to turn invisible around the edges.
I pulled her down onto one of the benches on the edge of the boardwalk. It overlooked a shallow part of the marsh where the ground was dry enough to grow coneflowers and goldenrod. “I’m still here,” I whispered in her ear, and I kept my arm around her until she was fully visible again.
“I just really enjoyed being a sister,” she said. She snuggled deeper into my arm; it was starting to get dark and cold. “It was like being in this exclusive club, and we were the only members.”
“They sound pretty amazing,” I said.
“Tell me about your sister.”
I shrugged, and even though the moment was nice, I got up and started walking back to the academy. “Nothing to say,” I told her.
I was never really able to explain to Sofía what my family was like. For her, family was this unbreakable bond of trust and loyalty and love, and that sounds nice and all, but that’s not what it’s like in my home. That’s not to say we didn’t have those things. I’m certain if I needed my family, they’d be there. It’s just that they weren’t there otherwise.
Take Phoebe. You’d almost think we weren’t related. We look nothing alike. We act nothing alike. We share no friends. We are as different as two people can possibly be.
Sofía doesn’t really know how to live in a world where she’s not a sister. But Phoebe’s the exact opposite. She just doesn’t think in terms of us being brother and sister. I’m just a guy who grew up with her, and we happen to share the same parents.
She was always like that, even when we were kids. She did her thing, and I did mine.
By the time I started high school and Phoebe was in middle school, there were cracks in our family. I don’t think I noticed it at the time. It’s only now, here, away from them, that I can see them.
Mom a
Dad lived his job. He came home every night at the same time, but he was never really there. “Lots of work is good,” he’d insist, locking the door to his office.
And Phoebe . . . she just sort of . . . she spun around so fast. She’s like one of those ballerinas in the cheap music box she got for her seventh birthday. She’d spin from school to clubs to cello lessons to friends’ houses, and sometimes she’d spin through the house, but she never seemed to notice anything or anyone.
And I, somehow, never really seemed to notice her.
When Pheebs entered high school, I was a sophomore. One day when I was walking down the hall, preoccupied and not really paying attention, I bumped into a girl in a bright blue sweater, her hair done up in braids, shiny pink gloss perfectly applied to her lips.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, already moving away when I realized—
It was Phoebe.
She had somehow become a stranger to me. There was a moment there, brief but true, when she had legitimately been a person I did not know or recognize. Somehow while I was retreating to my room and listening to music and taking notes on history, she was spin-spin-spinning away from us all. Somehow in all this time, she had become a different person than the one I had known, a stranger.