21
NIGH INCURABLE
THE AFTERNOON SCROLLS THROUGH MY head on a reel. I’m torn between irrepressible urgency and overwhelming—emptiness.
Seeing the names and faces of the Gifted—that’s what Stella and Leo kept calling them, the word they preferred to use. But are we? Gifted? Seeing them cut skin, tuck pills under tongue, step into air. It’s . . . I’m—
Triggered. Triggered is the word for it, much as I hate to admit. I keep trying to push it down, sweep it away, shut it down the way I always had when I’d seen the others hurt themselves or be hurt. But this—this is different.
This must be like what Mara felt when Jude was tormenting her, pushing buttons she didn’t know existed, pushing her till she lost control.
I’m losing control now. Jumping in to defend Felix’s choice to die because he thought his girlfriend had. It feels like wolves are at my door, my house, circling.
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.”
It takes a beat for that to land. Daniel, Jamie, and Goose are uncomfortably, awkwardly silent.
“I mean it, “ Mara repeats. She’s breathing quick and hard, so angry, so fast. “I’m leaving the loft, moving back in with my parents. We’re done, completely.”
“Mara.” Daniel puts a hand on her shoulder—withdraws instantly, as if burned.
“No.”
“Mara, I’ll heal,” I say casually.
“That’s not the point and you know it.” She looks around at everyone, visibly holds herself back from saying something.
“Do I?” I push her without quite knowing why. I’m still holding the knife.
“Um, should we . . . give you guys a minute?” Daniel asks.
Mara looks at me, challenging. But I’ve decided. I want to do this, which is why Mara doesn’t.
I’d done what she asked me to, all those months ago. I started keeping that journal for her, wrote about nothing but her, and then she went behind my back and read it, and we had our most splendid fight.
“You want to hear how I first learned about my ability? About being told that we were moving into yet another miserable home two days before we left by my father’s secretary, because he couldn’t be bothered to tell me himself? About feeling so numb to it and everything that I was sure I couldn’t actually exist? That I must be made of nothing to feel so much nothing, that the pain the blade drew from my skin was the only thing that made me feel real?”
She looked like I’d struck her.
“You want to hear that I liked it?” I went on. “Wanted more? Or do you want to hear that when I woke up the next day to find no trace of any cut, no hint of a forming scar, all I could feel was crushing disappointment?”
“You want me to hurt you,” she’d said.
“You can’t.”
“I could kill you.”
If I hadn’t been so furious with myself, I might’ve laughed. As if killing me would be the worst thing she could do to me.
I took a step toward her. “Try.”
Now she’s threatening me again, but with something worse. So I’m not quite sure what possesses me to take the knife and slide it across my palm. The steel parts my flesh like soft butter, and the blood instantly pours to the white floor, puddling, blooming. Mara spins, deft as a deer, that gorgeous face marred by pain and betrayal, and takes the stairs at a run, with footsteps hard enough that I think she may shatter it.
“Dude,” Jamie says, going pale, backing away.
Daniel rushes for a towel. “Pressure.” He forces it against my palm. I take it from him, let it fall. The blood hasn’t stopped rushing, hasn’t slowed.
Goose even looks sick. “That’s . . . mental. Jesus fuck.”
Daniel again. “Noah, you need stitches.”
A single shake of my head. “Watch.”
We all do, all except Jamie, who has a blood thing, apparently.
“It’s going to be fine,” I say, but the words feel furred, each letter separate and fuzzy. Daniel forces the towel back into my hand, holds it there.
“Dude.” Jamie. “Maybe we should go to the hos—”
“Stop.” I gather myself as Mara did, coalescing around a spark of white I feel in my chest. I close my eyes. “You wanted this. Both of you. Don’t pussy out now.”
I watch the two of them watching me. Daniel watches the clock. Everyone’s heartbeat is rabbit-quick and frightened. I ignore it, them, and listen to myself, a bundle of raggedy notes splintering at the edges. A mangled theme that won’t stop scraping at me. If I blot out everyone else, concentrate on each note, I’ll fix it.
My blood’s soaked through the first towel, but with each breath, it slows, now only petaling the second. They all watch in curious, dazzled horror. But Goose watches with scepticism. I’ve never had to prove myself to anyone before this, and it makes me wonder for a moment—just a moment—whether I’ll heal myself.
I peel off the towel, look down at the cut—still bleeding, pooling in my palm. But not to the floor. A surge of pride, and a gratifying—rush. Like I’ve let poison out, and for the moment, I’m clean.
We wait till the blood stops pooling, which, if I’m being honest, takes a bit longer than I thought it would.
“Well, there we are, I’m a cunt,” Goose says.
“Not news.” I get up to rinse my hand, and my body nearly sways, surprising me, but I right it in time, before they notice. Run my hand under the faucet, and Goose, Daniel, and Jamie are all slack-jawed and staring. My anger’s burned itself out, and I want to talk to Mara, talk her down, really, but the loft seems to breathe and stretch, the stairs seeming impossibly far.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” I say, and push off the counter.
Coward.
All in my head. Back straight, gait long—keep up or fuck off.
I find Mara in our bed, clothes on, curled on her side. Closet’s open, and some clothes lie in a little nest at the bottom. One glance at her bag shows she’d started to pack.
“Going somewhere?”
She doesn’t answer.
“Mara.”
“Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Say my name.”
“Shall I come back later?”
“You can do whatever you want. It’s your house.”
“I had to do it. Goose wouldn’t’ve believed any other way—”
“Bullshit.”
I stay where I am. “It isn’t.”
I can’t hear her. Not her heartbeat, her pulse, nothing. The silence frosts the windows. All I can hear is the train trembling by on the Manhattan Bridge.
“You’re really going to leave?”
She doesn’t answer that, either.
It’s like approaching a dangerous animal—show no fear. I cross to the bed and run my finger along her bare instep, and she kicks out at me and swears. For a moment she lies there, half shadowed by the ash grey sky, turning darker by the second. She leans up on her elbows and twists, lip under teeth. If looks could kill, I would be dead already
“You said you’d never cut yourself again.”
“This wasn’t like that—”
“You promised.”
“Mara—”
“You lied to me.”
“I didn’t lie.”
“You’re lying now. To yourself.”
I sit next to her on the bed. “Do you want to see it?” She looks down at my hand, curled into a fist. “It’s not even bleeding anymore.”
“That’s not the point.”
“Isn’t it?”
Annoyed, frustrated. “Fine, that isn’t the whole point.” There she is, my Mara. “You weren’t just proving yourself to Goose. You were . . . hurting yourself. On purpose. A chef’s knife, a straight razor, your father’s hunting knife. It doesn’t matter how you do it. Or how you excuse it.”
I risk a finger, tracing it down the line of her shoulder to the inside of her wrist. She’s still quiet—all of her—but she doesn’t protest.
“You’re my preferred method of self harm.” She tries to hide a tiny smile. If I didn’t know her the way I do, I wouldn’t catch it.
But I do know her. And I do catch it.
“I know I am,” she says. “ ‘You’ll love him to ruins,’ the professor said. ‘Unless you let him go.’ ”
“Fuck’s sake, Mara. Really? I’m fine.”
“You’re not, and if you say that again, I really will kill you, and you’ll prove the professor right.” Her heart’s not in it though.
“All right,” I say. “I’m not.” Her body goes slack, and she curves back into the bed. “I’m—I don’t know what to do with all this. Sam. Beth. Goose explains why I’m seeing, feeling more—he magnifies everything we’ve got. Which, by the way, means I’m even more safe around him. You have even less reason to worry.”
Even as I say it, though, I realise the opposite must also be true. He must amplify her, too. I see the thought reflect in Mara’s eyes.
“You think he’s magnifying you, too.”
“All for one, one for all.”
I turn her face toward me. I open my fist. The cut is deep, still open, but not bleeding. “Look. No scar.”
There is, though, and Mara knows it. The scars you can’t see are the ones that hurt the most.