A World Without You Read online

  I was fifteen the first time I lost control of my power. I was sitting in history class, and my teacher was giving a lecture about the Civil War. She was describing the Battle of Shiloh, one of the bloodiest battles ever, and she told a story about a little pond near the battlefield that turned red with all the blood from the wounded. She explained to us that the story was a myth, that it probably never really happened, but then I blinked.

  And I was there.

  Just like that. One minute I was in class, and the next minute I was at the Battle of Freaking Shiloh in Tennessee, and it was loud, it was so loud, and the air was thick like fog and smelled like blood. There were people shouting and guns drawn and cannons firing, and I could see it all. And then I saw the pond. It was just as my teacher described it: small and stained red with blood.

  And I don’t know what happened next. I guess I just lost it. I started screaming and screaming and screaming, and then I blinked again.

  And I was back in class.

  Obviously I freaked everyone the hell out. The whole class was staring at me. I was gone so quick no one even noticed, so as far as they knew, I was yelling for no reason. They didn’t know that I could still smell the blood and the gunpowder and the death that hung in the air.

  After that, I was scared, really scared. What if I got stuck in the past? What if I spent the rest of my life bouncing around time, powerless to stop it?

  Instead, Dr. Franklin found me. And I came here. Here, where Gwen can wrap fire around her hands like a glove, where Harold whispers to ghosts and they whisper back, where Ryan can move things with his mind and influence people’s thoughts. We all have powers here, except for some of the staff and a few of the tutors. Even Dr. Franklin is one of us. He can heal himself and others, which is ironic because he is literally a doctor, but he’s the kind of academic doctor that teaches, not the medical kind. But even with his degrees and experience, he hasn’t really been able to help me progress all that much.

  “What are you thinking about?” Gwen asks, breaking the silence.

  I shrug. It’s sort of embarrassing to admit that I don’t have much control over my powers. From the moment I arrived at Berkshire, everyone else seemed to advance so much faster than me. And while the Doc is nice, I can tell that he’s getting frustrated with my lack of progress.

  When the Doctor found me and told my parents about the academy, we were all pretty relieved. I was glad that someone finally understood me, and I kind of hated high school anyway, so it was nice to get a change of scenery. I also liked that the Berk was a boarding school. I mean, I love my parents, but I don’t really feel comfortable at home. I never have. To be honest, I think I get along better with my old man now that I’m out of the house. We can tolerate each other when we only have to be in the same building on weekends. Our relationship is built on absence.

  It’s little wonder that Berkshire has become my real home.

  “I wish I knew what she was thinking,” Gwen says, her eyes still fixed on the fireplace. She glances at me, but looks away again. “You know, before.”

  I don’t want to talk about that, about the day Sofía went missing.

  Just thinking about it makes my head hurt. Like sharp, shooting pains.

  And my tongue. How weird is that? Thinking about the day Sofía got stuck in the past makes my tongue hurt. On the back of my tongue, near my throat, it just aches. It feels like that sort of burning dread rising in your throat when you know you need to cry but you just can’t.

  I open my mouth. I don’t know what I’m going to say to Gwen, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because in that moment, she disappears. The cold twilight air is replaced with morning mist and damp dew, and the shadows from the trees suddenly all point away from me.

  And I am standing in front of the chimney on the day Sofía disappeared.

  CHAPTER 3

  My heart thumps, and I feel like I might throw up. I bend over, my hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.

  My powers have been more and more erratic since Sofía disappeared, but they’ve never brought me back here, to this moment. And I’ve tried. I’ve tried to get back so many times.

  I gather myself, breathing in the crisp morning air. I may not have meant to snap back to this time, but that doesn’t mean I can’t use it.

  On the day Sofía disappeared, I had gone for a walk by myself. I went north to the gate on the boardwalk and then turned around and was heading back to the school. But I veered closer to the beach and went past the old camp ruins. They’re state-owned property, and we’re not supposed to hang out there. But that day I ignored the Doctor’s rules.

  I look around and then up. You’d be surprised how adept you get at using the sun to tell time when you never know when and where you’re going to end up. Judging from the position of the sun, I figure that the past me, the me on a walk about to meet Sofía and screw up her life, is probably near the polio camp ruins.

  The abandoned camp is left over from the days before vaccinations, when the sick had to be quarantined. It was built in the ’50s for people with polio, but it remained open through the ’80s. Now, after years of neglect, it’s just a bunch of rotted wooden buildings that look like a haunted summer camp. Berkshire was built when the camp closed, and no one bothers to maintain the abandoned buildings.

  I still don’t know why I went there that day . . . but I did.

  And that’s where I saw Sofía.

  To be accurate, I saw her shoes first. Bright red, perched on the edge of the remains of a shallow swimming pool at the center of a circle of broken-down buildings. It’s nothing but a concrete depression now, no water or anything, and Ryan keeps talking about how it should be turned into a skate ramp, but Dr. Franklin says that’s disrespectful.

  She was just sitting there, her legs dangling over the edge.

  “Hey,” I said.

  Sofía didn’t respond.

  I walked over and sat down next to her, her red shoes between us. It seemed strange that she’d taken her shoes off. The morning was cold, the dew on the blades of grass frozen like crystals. It was no longer quite winter but close enough. I guess Sofía was in denial about the weather.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  Still, nothing.

  And that’s when I noticed she was crying.

  Not, like, loud, sniffling crying that makes your shoulders hunch and your face hurt. Just quiet tears leaking from her eyes, trailing down her cheeks, and dripping from her chin. She was so lost in her sadness that I wasn’t even sure she was aware of my presence until I touched her cold face, wiping away one of the tears with the pad of my thumb.

  “Hey,” I said as gently as I could. “What’s wrong?” I moved her shoes so I could scoot closer, but she stood up abruptly, stepping back from the edge of the pool.

  “Nothing,” she said, and I knew it wasn’t true, but she started walking away, barefoot on the cold, sandy soil. I figured if it meant that much to her not to talk about it, then she could keep her secrets.

  Still, I followed her. I knew she wanted to be alone, but there was something about the way she walked, something about the little hiccup sound she made as she wiped away her tears and pretended like they never existed . . . it didn’t feel right to abandon her.

  Maybe I should have left her alone. Maybe then she wouldn’t have gone away.

  As she passed by one of the old camp buildings, she whirled around. “You can go back in time, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I watched her closely. She wasn’t acting like herself, but I didn’t know how to make it better.

  “Can you take other people back?”

  I nodded. “Do you want to go back here?” I asked, waving my hand toward the abandoned buildings of the polio camp. “It’s just a bunch of sick kids.”

  She shook her head. “No, not here. But, you know, I think maybe . . . maybe th
is place wouldn’t be so bad.”

  “Sick. Kids. Just, like, buckets of sick kids all around being sick. Not my idea of a fun place.”

  “You don’t understand,” Sofía said. “When you’re sick with, like, a terminal illness, something you live with forever, there are very few moments you can forget about it. It’s like a lead weight inside your chest, cracking your ribs. Every time you move, you can feel that weight shifting inside of you. But then there are moments when, for whatever reason, the weight goes away. You forget you’re sick. I bet this camp was full of those moments. That’s what I’d want to see. That’s what I want to feel.”

  She was right. I didn’t understand.

  “So where do you want to go?” I asked, still unsure of this wild mood of hers.

  Sofía looked off into the distance, toward the ocean and the sun and forever, but she couldn’t see any of that. “I want to go somewhere far away.”

  She didn’t bother explaining any further. She just kept walking. I don’t think she was going anywhere in particular, but we headed toward the state park. I thought about running back to get her abandoned red shoes so she wouldn’t have to walk on the splintery wood of the boardwalk, but she veered left, where the ground was soft.

  I look around me now. Any minute, past-me and past-Sofía will come around the bend and be standing right in front of me, at the chimney. It’s where Sofía took me that day, right before she whirled around, her eyes blazing, her long, dark hair whipping back, and said: “Here.”

  “Here?”

  “Can you take me back to this place? Back when there was just one family on the island, the ones who built this house?”

  “It wasn’t built here,” I said. “It was built in Salem.”

  “Fine, then when the house was moved here. To . . .” She turned around, her eyes scanning the plaque. “Let’s go back to 1692.”

  “I . . . um . . .”

  “You can do it, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said immediately, wanting to impress her, to erase the doubt in her voice. “I’ve been back further than that. It’s just . . . why?”

  “I want to go away. I want to be as far away from this world as possible. Take me back further than 1692, I don’t care. Let’s go to the days when Native Americans were here. Let’s go further. Let’s go to the dinosaurs.”

  All my muscles were tense, and I moved very carefully, like I would if there were a wild animal in front of me. “I’ve never been that far back before,” I said. I regretted telling her that I could take her back. I wanted to wrap her up in my arms and hold her tight, not fling her through time and space. I didn’t realize it then, but a part of me sensed that she was running away, and I didn’t want to let her go, even if I was going with her.

  “I don’t care, I just—” Her voice cracked. “I need to escape.”

  I took a deep breath and grabbed both her hands in mine. I didn’t know what was wrong with her, but I knew I would do anything to make her happy. As I was holding her, I called up the timestream. I saw it expanding out from the two of us, strings erupting in every direction, each one linked to a different time and place. She couldn’t feel it; she didn’t react at all as I focused on the date engraved on the chimney, on the house that once contained it, on the island of the past.

  And then we were there.

  We had been standing among ruins; we were now standing in front of a chimney with bright red bricks streaked with soot. A roaring fire blazed at the bottom, casting Sofía in an orange-yellow glow and flickering shadows across the wood floor. There were herbs drying in one corner, an iron cauldron bubbling in another. The house smelled . . . warm. It wrapped around us, peaceful and beautiful.

  Sofía sighed. In that moment, I think, she was happy.

  Then the door behind me flung open, and I could hear a man’s deep, accented voice: “Oh my God.”

  I started to turn.

  Sofía’s hands slipped from mine.

  And suddenly, like a rubber band breaking, I was snapped back to the present. I gasped for air, my entire body in shock, having been thrown through more than three centuries. My arms and legs trembled, and I fell to the cold ground, my fingers clutching the sharp blades of the long sea grass.

  “What happened?” I said.

  But there was no answer. Just the ruins of an ancient chimney.

  Since then, I’ve spent every waking moment trying to find a way back to Sofía. But my powers have worked sporadically at best, and never in a way that would be helpful. Now, though . . . now that I’m here, back to the time before she was trapped . . .

  I have a chance.

  I could save Sofía. I could stop my past self from taking her back, from leaving her stuck in a world that wasn’t hers. I’ve tried so many times to reach this time and place again, and now that I’m here, I can fix it. I can make sure she never ends up in the past, abandoned, trapped where I can’t reach her.

  I hear voices down the path. It’s past-me and Sofía. This is my chance. I can save her.

  I stand up straighter, prepared to run to her.

  I take one step forward, my voice already rising in my throat, ready to shout a warning . . .

  • • •

  I’m snapped back to the present.

  I feel a cool hand on the back of my neck. “Hey,” Gwen says softly. “You okay? You were gone there for a moment.”

  I nod, swallowing. I don’t know why I expected this time to be different.

  I can’t save Sofía. I took her to the past, and I left her there, and I can’t bring her back. I’ve tried and I’ve tried. Every time I get close to her, time snaps me away again.

  She’s trapped. And I put her there.

  CHAPTER 4

  Phoebe

  “Where has that boy gone off to?” Dad asks. He scowls at the dispersing crowd.

  Mom looks at me like I’m keeping Bo’s location a secret, but I just shrug. He stormed off before the memorial service was over. How am I supposed to know where he went?

  A tall black man with a thin mustache and old-fashioned waves in his hair approaches us. He holds out his hand for my dad to shake, and Mom greets him with a smile.

  “I’m Dr. Franklin,” he tells me. “I’m your brother’s psychiatrist.”

  A muscle twitches in my dad’s jaw at that last word, but he doesn’t say anything.

  “Do you know where Bo went?” Mom asks the doctor.

  Dr. Franklin frowns. “He’s been greatly affected by Sofía’s death,” he says. He glances up; the paper lanterns are still visible, tiny specks of light in the fading sky. “They were close,” he adds, looking back down at my mom.

  “She was so young,” my mother says. “It’s tragic.” Her voice drops a notch. “Depression?”

  Dr. Franklin’s lips press together as if he’s holding back a frown. “She was very sick. We’re still reeling from what happened. Sofía had seemed to adjust well to our program . . .” His voice trails off, and his eyes lose focus.

  When Dr. Franklin called the house to tell us that one of Bo’s fellow students passed away, he hadn’t mentioned that she’d committed suicide. A Google search and some newspaper articles covering the incident revealed that. But the details were limited: TROUBLED TEEN, 17, FOUND DEAD ON CAMPUS IN PRESUMED SUICIDE; AUTOPSY REVEALS INTENTIONAL OVERDOSE OF PRESCRIPTION DRUGS.

  Bo had never mentioned Sofía before, but we all still nod knowingly when Dr. Franklin tells us they were close. After all, Bo was one of the four kids who lit lanterns. We figured he knew her well. Still, he never talked about her. Not at home.

  Not that I’m surprised. It’s not like any of us really talk about anything when Bo’s home.

  There’s an awkward silence, and Mom shifts nervously.

  “I’m sure Bo’s just inside, getting a plate with his friends,” Dr. Franklin says.

&nb
sp; Dad grunts like he no longer cares where Bo is. “So, how ’bout them Patriots?”

  “I’m more of a basketball fan,” Dr. Franklin replies.

  Dad scowls.

  Dr. Franklin turns his attention to me. “And you’re Bo’s little sister?”

  “Phoebe,” I say, holding out my hand. His grip is firm, almost too strong.

  “Your brother’s a great kid,” Dr. Franklin says.

  I raise my eyebrows but don’t say anything. Before Bo came to the Berkshire Academy for Children with Exceptional Needs, he and I attended the same high school, and I can guarantee that none of our teachers would have called him a “great kid.” Usually late and always inattentive, he barely passed any class other than history. Most of the teachers didn’t even know we were related, but the ones who did were always shocked.

  “Why don’t we go inside?” Dr. Franklin says. He leads us all toward the big glass doors. Mom and Dad walk up to the main hall as if they’re as comfortable here as they are at home. I trail behind, and the doctor slows his pace to walk beside me.

  “This is your first time on campus.” The doctor says it like a statement, but I guess it’s a question.

  I nod.

  When my parents moved Bo to the academy, they didn’t let me join them. I wanted to go, but Dad was insistent. I don’t know if he was shielding me from the image of Bo at the school or if he didn’t want me interacting with the other kids there, but either way, I stayed home. Now, when Dad drives to Berkshire to pick Bo up on the weekends, he goes alone.

  I’d always pictured the Berkshire Academy like the asylums in horror movies: concrete walls, straightjackets, cold white tile everywhere. But this place is brick and . . . nice. The garden is perfectly landscaped, not a single leaf out of place. Pebbled paths meander through the plants, and I can hear the ocean over the sounds of people mingling. Ivy climbs up the wall, drooping elegantly over the bricks. Berkshire is like a rich old person’s home. Except for the bars on some of the windows.