Touching the Surface (11 page)

His room was nothing like I expected. It was a living book of memories, one layer of decoration and talisman tacked on top of another. At the very top of the room, pressed up against the ceiling, was a wallpaper border of airplanes. As I examined it closer, I saw that the blanket that David was clinging to had matching aeronautics on it.

The room was like a giant scrapbook of a boy’s life. Airplanes, robots, baseball paraphernalia, music posters. On the desk and bookcase were da Vinci models and anatomy books stacked in piles. This was the room of a child with dreams. Every inch of the place seemed to tell the story of a boy who was nothing like the hard-hearted man I’d encountered.

I couldn’t reconcile it and it scared me a little. David must’ve created all these items and brought them into his room. Everyone did it to a certain degree. If you were bored while sitting out by the dock, you could simply create a book to read. Then, when the sun went down and it got dark during the very best chapter, a book light would appear. Rarely did anyone erase his or her creations. They just brought them home and dropped them in their rooms or passed them on to someone else. Then, once they’d left the Obmil, their belongings left too. Anything that wasn’t consciously connected to a remaining soul disappeared along with its creator.

David’s room felt different than creating when a need
arose. It was like he was deliber);
font-style: normal;
font-weight: g beforeately reconstructing his childhood, collecting objects to fill an emotional void. Were they memories or wishes?

Quietly I pushed the door open further. David was making soft whispered sounds that I couldn’t make out, so I leaned closer.

“What are you doing, Elliot?”

The voice behind me was soft, but it was magnified by the adrenaline already coursing through my body. I whipped around, swallowing a high-pitched squeal of fright.

“Oh crap, Freddie, you scared me to death.” I clutched my heart, trying to keep it in my chest. “Well, I guess it’s impossible to actually scare me to death.” I rambled through my nervousness, unable to stop myself from babbling. “I know it’s silly, but I keep forgetting that I’m not alive anymore.”

“What makes you think you’re not alive?” asked Freddie. He leaned his broom against the wall and tucked his hands into the pockets of his overalls.

His unexpected question made me freeze in place while my mind raced. I sucked in a deep breath to give myself a moment, inhaling the scent of root beer.

“Well, I guess I would consider myself not alive because I just died recently. Although . . .” Something was scratching at the back of my mind, but I couldn’t get a clear picture of what
it was. I moved closer to Freddie, magnetized by his words.

“Yes, there usually is more to think about under the surface.” He nodded at the layers of papers, posters, and art scotch-taped to David’s walls. “Scratch that surface and there’s typically another layer below it. Makes easy explanations a little bit more complicated, huh?” He pulled his fingers out of his frayed pocket and cupped an antique silver pocket watch.

He flipped it open and gazed at the face.

“Time. Now, time, Elliot, is a very interesting thing to think about.” Freddie snapped the watch closed and tucked it back into his pocket.

Before I could say or ask another thing, David began to stir behind me. I’d almost forgotten he was there.

“Freddie?” David’s voice was sandpaper.

“You want to know what he’s doing, huh?” Freddie stared at me, unruffled by David’s ascent into awareness.

I looked back at David, who seemed to be close to waking up. The clock ticking in the background was forcing my breathing into a rapid rhythm. I wanted to hear what Freddie knew, but I didn’t want to get caught here. I didn’t want David to figure out that I’d seen him. But seen him doing what? Having some kind of emotional breakdown? I wiped the sweat from my palms onto my pants, and decided to be risky. I was already one up on that curious cat, being dead and all already.

“Yes. I want to know what he’s doing,” I said. I sidled closer.

“Can’t rightly say for sure, but maybe he’s remembering.”

“Remembering what? He can’t Delve. He’s not a Third Timer. He works here,” I said, trying to get it all out before I had to flee. My heart accelerated as David became more alert.

“I can only guess at the things I don’t understand, but I can tell you what I do know.” Freddie placed a steady hand on my shoulder. “We have a choice. We always have a choice and we can pick again any time we want to.”

“What’s that me a weird sensationg beforean?”

“You gotta go. You know he wouldn’t like knowing that you saw him in the middle of his choices.” Freddie pushed me away from the door.

It felt as if I’d stepped farther away from some important piece of knowledge, rather than closer. I glanced back over my shoulder, my feet pointing down the hall but my mind glued to the intrigue of the moment.

“Remember you were saying something about not being alive because you had died?” Freddie’s voice reached out to me.

I nodded.

“Well, I think David isn’t alive, but it’s got nothing to do with the fact that he died.”

“Fred? That you?” David’s words filtered up out of the depths of wherever he had been.

Freddie went inside and closed the door behind him, releasing me. I ran through the halls and launched myself out the front doors of the Haven, my mind whirling with what had just been dumped in my lap. Every time I thought I was beginning to make sense of the afterlife, something else popped up to muddy the waters.

I was never going to make it before the end of Workshop. Mel was going to be worse than angry, she was going to be disappointed. And then there was Oliver. I pictured myself lost in one of his hugs and couldn’t imagine a place I’d feel safer right now.

Wait. If everyone was at Workshop, why wasn’t David running his group? Where was his group? Where was Julia? Maybe she really was available to hang out with Trevor. My stomach tightened because the truth was, I hadn’t been expecting that, even though I’d run my big mouth about it. I’d left him at the pond because I was mentally exhausted, but things were even worse now. Emotions shot around inside me like Pop Rocks followed by a gulp of soda: repulsion and attraction bouncing together in a hyperactive dance.

It didn’t take me long to reach the Delving School because I tromped along at a pace that kept time with my busy mind. When I got to Mel’s room I couldn’t hear anything so I pushed the door open quietly. Trevor was relaxed in the Delving chair
and the rest of the room had on their headsets and were just as submerged as Trevor was. That’s when I realized Julia was in the room, curled up like a kitten on a giant pillow near Trevor. I couldn’t believe that he’d actually gone searching for her, that she’d had the nerve to come back to Mel’s Workshop. She had no business knowing about my past. I headed across the room toward her, not sure what I was going to do when I reached her, then growled at my own stupidity. The moment I crossed the threshold, I could feel myself sinking to the floor as Trevor’s Delve dictated my life once again.

•  •  •

The good news, if you can call it that, was that I hadn’t missed much. Trevor must’ve just fallen into his Delve. He was staring at the Elliot from his past. From the look of horror on her—my—face, it appeared everyone would get to see exactly what Trevor would do if he met the girl who’d killed his brother.

“What?” The word left his mouth in slow motion, but the rest of him stayed eerily still. I watched Elliot shrink under his gaze.

“I . . .” She had to clear her throat to make the words come out. “I killed your brother.” She shuffled her feet and I thought that she was going to run, but piece of informationasuinstead she dropped to her knees, bowing her head. She appeared sacrificial.

“You? You killed my brother? You’re the unidentified teenage girl under protection? It was you who ran my mother off the road and killed Oliver?”

He took a step closer, towering over Elliot kneeling on the ground.

“Answer me.” The words were too quiet. A hurricane was about to hit land.

Elliot lifted her head to look Trevor in the face. Her face was shadowed, fragile. Her response darted out between barely parted lips.

“Yes.”

Trevor raised his hand, searching for something to destroy. I flinched, but the old Elliot never batted an eye. She watched him in a detached way, like his hand was a natural side effect that she wasn’t surprised to see. His anger was an extension of the r question? I

15

optical
illusion

Still in Trevor’s Delve, I saw myself close up, sitting on the bench, the grave marker">“Yes.”, changed my mind for Oliver. I could almost feel the length of my leg pressed up against Trevor’s. It was a different day. Elliot was wearing another outfit, sure, but I didn’t need a wardrobe change to know that this wasn’t the same moment I’d just left. The biggest indicator of time having passed was my face. I still appeared tense, close to breaking into a million pieces, but there was a subtle change behind the surface.

Of course, I couldn’t see Trevor because I was in his Delve, and when he suddenly turned his head, Elliot was no longer in the picture either. As he began to speak, he looked down into his cupped hands, his forearms propped on his thighs. It appeared as if he was trying to give his words a place to land so they wouldn’t scatter.

“You were brave, Elliot, telling me about you and Oliver.”

His leg brushed up against Elliot’s as it moved up and down, as if to discharge whatever excess emotion he was feeling.

“I watched you kneeling there, telling me how you killed Oliver and destroyed my family. I wanted to rip you limb from limb. I came close.”

A crow cawed in agreement.

“That’s when I saw you, really saw you for the first time. I didn’t intend to look at you, it just happened. It was like those pictures, you know, those optical illusions. You can gaze at them forever and see only one thing. Then when you relax your eyes for just a moment, another picture magically appears. The funny thing with that kind of visual trick is that it’s really hard to go back to seeing the original picture once you’ve seen the new one.” He sighed. “I realized instantaneously that there wasn’t a thing I could do to you that you hadn’t already done to yourself. You were already gone, a shell of a person. You stared me in the face and I knew. You wanted the hate and the rage that I was providing. You wanted punishment.”

He didn’t face me, so I couldn’t see myself either, but I could hear my soft sobs and almost feel my shoulder pushing up against him in time with my tears.

After a few minutes Trevor said, “I’ll be honest, in that first moment that I backed off, I only did it because I hated you so much. I couldn’t give you anything that you wanted. It was empo class="TX" ai

16

the things
we
don’t see

My mind was swimming as I pulled my head up off the floor. My fingers bumped into someone close by. I rolled over onto my stomach, meeting Oliver eye-to-eye on the floor. He had a smudge on the tip of his nose, perhaps from working with Freddie. I reached out to brush away the imperfection and then changed my mind at the last minute. He was almost too beautiful. The streak of dirt grounded him, made his connection to me much easier to believe. My hand was still stalled in front of his nose, so Oliver threaded his fingers through mine, connecting us.

“Keeping watch?”

“Haven’t seen you all day. I missed you.” He brushed back a lock of hair that was hanging over my eye.

Like a child waking up from a deep sleep, I remembered where I was and who was in the room. Oliver steadied me by the elbow on my way to my feet. The first person I saw was Mel. There were worry lines etched on her forehead and it made me uncomfortable. I wrenched my neck toward the Delving chair, but Trevor was gone.

“Elliot?” I turned around. Julia was standing behind me, nibbling on an apple. I’d forgotten she was there. Everything had fallen out of my head except Oliver and Trevor. Julia hitched her thumb toward the door. “He ran out right after the Delve.”