M.I.N.D. (18 page)

Did I miss something? I look at Stephanie, then back at Vardina. Vardina looks panicked, like she swallowed the pet goldfish and is afraid to confess.

We hear a loud howl. Three tables over, Brendan is sitting with his stoner friends, laughing at something he obviously thinks is hilarious. “His Royal Jerkness will probably be there too,” Vardina says, frowning, “his parents being on the board and all. So what do you think?” she asks me. “Do you want to come?”

I pause. “Can I let you know? I have to clear it with my mother. I'm kind of grounded.” Am I? Did my mother relent? After our discussion yesterday, I'm not really sure.

“No problem,” Vardina says, flashing me her cheerleader whites.

I smile back. I guess that's that. We're officially friends.

Stephanie gives her a deadly look.

Friends with secrets, I think. Here we go again.

***

At precisely five-twenty-one that afternoon, I lean back at my desk and breathe a sigh of relief. Oreo looks up at me and grunts. After two extensions and twice as many excuses, my social studies paper is finally done. I'm printing it out when I hear a knock at my door. “Come in,” I sing, happy that I won't have to deal with anything even remotely governmental until next year. But it's not my mother standing in the doorway. It's Ethan.

Wow. My mother sure has come a long way. She's letting him in my bedroom?

Then
I
do something that surprises me. I hug him. What I mean is, I take the initiative. I go over to him and
I
hug
him
.

He hugs me right back.

We stand like that for a long time, not speaking, not moving, until he pulls away and says, “I have a favor to ask. It's about Amanda.”

“Anything,” I say.

“My parents are talking about taking her off life support, but they promised they won't do anything until I'm ready.” His eyes glisten. “Ready? I'll never be ready.”

“Oh, Ethan,” I say.

He glances at a book on my desk. “
The Colony of Connecticut
,” he reads aloud. “Snyder's government paper. I remember it. It was a pain.”

“I just finished,” I say, waiting for him to get back to the favor.

He leafs through the pages. “I hear she's retiring. She was a good teacher.”

“I guess it's time.”

“I guess.” He picks up another book. It's an astral projection how-to manual that came with a DVD. “You're really into this stuff,” he remarks, studying the cover. It's a human eye.

“Sort of,” I say.

“I spoke to Vardina,” he says, looking up. “She said she never told you about that girl. You know, at the concert. The girl who looked like Amanda.” He puts down the book. “Amanda isn't brain-dead, Cass. I want you to prove they're wrong. That's the favor.”

“So you believe me.”

“I don't know,” he says quietly. “I just know I have to.”

***

I ask Ethan to wait in the hallway while I talk to my mother. I find her on the stepladder in the kitchen, wiping the top of the fridge. “Mom,” I say, looking up, “am I still grounded?”

Smiling, she comes down the ladder. “And now so am I.” Then she sighs. “I suppose I
was
a little hard on you. I guess I can relent. I'm not unreasonable, Cassie.”

“So it's all right if I go back to the hospital with Ethan?”

She opens her mouth, then closes it. Then she nods. “Don't be late, okay?”

“I won't. Thanks, Mom.” I turn to go.

“Cassie?”

I look back. “Yeah?”

“What about dinner?”

“I'm fine. I'll grab something later. Don't worry.”

“That's what mothers do. We worry.”

I guess I shouldn't complain. Leanne says her mother forgot her. Then I remember Vardina, how she sounded that day in the hospital when she learned her mother wasn't coming. How I discovered firsthand that the cheerful cheerleader was a secret slasher.

When I was little, my dad would hug me, a big bear hug with a loud smooch on my forehead. If he hoisted me up, I'd kiss him back, smack on the nose. I can't remember the last time I kissed my mom, not even after the accident when it was just her and me. I walk back to her, and very softly, I kiss her on the cheek.

Sixteen

From a Place of Conscious Breathing

Amanda is lying perfectly still, her breath pushing in, pushing out, rising and falling to the hiss of the ventilator. Outside it's raining, furious drops beating against the window, demanding to be let in, spilling away.

I don't like rain. It reminds me of the river, unpredictable and fickle. I picture my father's face as the angry water carries him away. It's not drowning I fear, I realize. It's sinking into oblivion, dissolving into nothing.

“I'm here,” Ethan says, sitting on the chair by the bed. “Cassie's here too. She's holding your hand. Can you feel it? Amanda, can you hear me?”

His chair is like the one in the skydiver's room, only it's white. White like the walls. It's a private room, but it's still basic. Bleak. Sterile. Except for a few small framed pictures on the bedside table, you'd never know it's now someone's home.

His parents were here when we arrived. They looked the same as when I saw them on Sunday. Tired. Defeated. Ethan asked them, kindly, if we could be alone with Amanda. They didn't question him. They just nodded, sadly, then left for the solarium.

Ethan lowers the rail and I climb onto her bed, careful not to disturb the network of wires running in and out of her body. Monitors are flashing and machines are blinking, making strange buzzing sounds. An IV drips to a steady beat.

I know I can probably do this long distance. I can be lying in my own bed, in the comfort of my room. All Ethan has to do is talk about me to get me on her mind. But I don't want to do it that way. I want to be here. With her. With him.

Sitting on the edge of her bed, I take her hand. It's thin and small. Small like a child's. “Amanda,” I begin, “remember when we were kids? Remember when we used to play house? We'd make Ethan babysit our dolls while we pretended to go shopping.”

“I remember that,” Ethan says. “I used to prop them up on the picnic table and use them for pitching practice.”

I feel a smile tugging at my lips. “So that's what happened to Suzie's head.”

“Hey, I was eight.”

I bring Amanda back through time, recounting events from our childhood. How we met, on that first day of preschool, when she decked Charlie Bornstein with her pencil case after he bit me on the nose. How we used to dress up in her mother's shoes and parade around the yard. How in fourth grade she held the school record for Double Dutch skipping. How the three of us—Amanda, Leanne, and me—were determined to have a sleepover in Mr. Lockhart's SUV, but when we saw a strange light beaming in through the windshield, we ran back to the house, screaming about aliens.

“That was me,” Ethan says, chuckling at the memory.

I smile again. “I know.”

I remind her of the time we almost set her room on fire, sneaking cigarettes. How we went through an entire pack of Marlboros and were sick the whole day. I remind her of Danny Cukier's party, back in sixth grade. How even though the bottle stopped at my shoes, Danny chose her, not me. How she wouldn't go to the closet with him anyway, because she said he smelled like farts. I remind her of the summer of my boating accident, after I got out of the hospital. How she spent every afternoon in my room when she could have been riding her bike, or skateboarding, or just hanging out at the park.

I finger the locket around my neck. “Amanda, did you give me this?” I whisper in her ear. “What happened, Amanda? What are you trying to tell me?”

If she can hear me, she makes no sign. Sleeping Beauty, I muse, watching her lying in the hospital bed, her long dark hair framing her porcelain-white face. She looks so peaceful, I think, and then my heart drops. That's what they say about you when you're dead.

I think back to my skydiving experience, remembering the sinking feeling I had when the chute wouldn't open. What if Amanda dies while I'm in her body? Logically, I should be able to get back to myself, since she obviously won't be thinking of me—but what if I can't? My theories about how this works are just theories, after all.

But then my thoughts return to those long summer days when I was ten, back to those endless hours of Amanda and me. Remembering how she didn't leave my side for a second, I rest my head next to hers on the pillow. I close my eyes and concentrate.

Amanda.
Mandy
…

***

There she is, standing on the riverbank, and she's wearing that dress, that bright red dress, red like blood, and around her neck is the heart-shaped locket, the silver heart-shaped locket, and it's beating, beating, the locket is beating, and swirling around her feet is a mist, the same mist Oreo saw that day in my room.

I know where I am. I'm back in that place.

Sitting on the edge of the water, I look up into eyes, familiar eyes, brown with gold specks, just like mine. My father lifts me way up in the air, and I'm five years old again as he twirls me around and around, and I'm laughing and laughing, and he's laughing too.

Spinning in the sky, the sun is shining, a big orange ball suspended in the cradle of the moon. Somewhere in the distance I hear a tinkling like wind chimes, and then suddenly I'm in Ethan's house, in the garage, and Amanda's there too. She opens a door, a large cupboard door, and I watch as she scrounges through old yellowed clothes on thin wire hangers. Behind an old dress, a long lacy dress, maybe a wedding dress, hangs a brown jacket, a boy's leather jacket with a chess knight on the front, and behind the jacket, on a shelf, is a phone, an old-style rotary phone, and it's ringing, ringing…

I pick it up. “I just got my license,” Amanda sings in my ear. But how can this be? Isn't she standing next to me in the garage? How can she be in two places at once? “Wanna go to the mall?” she asks, sounding far away. Then
click!
We're at the food court, and we're having mochas. She pulls up her sleeve and shows me her tattoo, three little birds in a gilded cage. “It's just henna,” she says. “But nobody knows, so it's like the real thing.”

“What are their names?” I ask, sipping my mocha.

“Don't you know?” she says, laughing. The laughter stops and she starts crying. A feeling runs through me so awful, so painful, I want to scream. But I can't scream, can't talk, can't even breathe. It's like I've been buried alive and all I can do is pray that I'm dreaming—
if I can fly then it's just a dream
—and
suddenly I know the names of the three little birds.

Guilt. Sorrow. Regret.

Then
click!
I'm in the parking lot. I'm holding a rose and my fingers are bleeding. “We have to go back,” I say. “We have to go home.”

“I'll take you,” she says, “but I can't stay. I don't live there, not anymore.”

Something acrid rises to my nose, and in the distance sirens are wailing.
Smoke!
Fire!
I blink hard, and here we are, sneaking cigarettes in her room, watching her bed melt into ashes. Brendan is here too, in a hooded sweatshirt, rummaging through the flames like a beggar digging through garbage. He picks up a picture frame and laughs, then throws it to the ground. Underneath the shattered glass is Zack's troubled face.

The sirens grow louder. Brendan scrambles out through the bedroom window, and the fire dies. “You have to go too,” Amanda says. “You have to go
now
.” Her voice sounds muffled, like a distant memory, or a dream that's fading, and it's then I realize that everything I've seen, everything I've heard, has all been in my mind, and she hasn't been talking at all.

I blink again and I'm back on the riverbank. Amanda is gone.

My father sees me and waves from his boat. The water is churning around him. I blink once more and the mirage disappears. The water is calm now, the sky a landscape of dazzling white. A sea of love, I think. An eternity of light. Where dreams go on forever.

***

“Cassie, are you all right?” Staring down at me, Ethan looks worried. Worried about Amanda, worried about me.

“I'm fine,” I reassure him. “Except for this headache.”

“So it worked,” he says, hope in his eyes. “You always get a headache, right? It means she sensed you, right?”

Amanda sensed me all right, but not in the sense he means.

I sit up slowly. “She wasn't in her body, Ethan. She's on the astral plane. I had it all wrong. I don't jump into people. Not necessarily, that is. My mind attaches to someone else's, which usually resides in the body, but not always.” At least that's my new theory.

He frowns. He's probably wondering where they keep the straitjackets. “Is this where you tell me you talk to dead people?”

“I'm not crazy, Ethan. I know what I saw. I was aware the whole time, like when you're asleep and you know you're dreaming. Lucid dreams, I think they're called. Except this was no dream—I've been there before. The first time was when I was ten and I almost drowned. The second time was after the bus crash. Amanda was there too.” I look back at her, and my eyes fill with tears. “This time I got there by piggybacking on her mind.”

“So you're saying you keep dying, but then you get better. Great! It means she's getting better too. Okay, we can go home now.”

In spite of the sarcasm, he has a point. Near-death experiences have been around for centuries. Except for two things: I didn't die, and Amanda isn't getting better. But how do I make him believe me? How do I make him understand?

Suddenly it comes to me, as if from nowhere. “She took your jacket,” I say. “You know the one I mean, the brown leather jacket with the knight on the front. How would I know that?”

He looks startled. “She must have told you.
Before
the crash,” he emphasizes. “You said she was sitting next to you on the bus.”

“Remember that girl you saw at the concert? This is like that, Ethan. I was there. With Amanda. On the astral plane. Do me a favor. When you get home, look in the storage cupboard in the garage.”

He picks up a framed picture from the bedside table. It's a family portrait, the kind you send to your friends and relatives at Christmas. “We had a fight,” he says slowly, staring at his happy family. “The day before the carnival. It was about Brendan. Then my jacket went missing. She admitted taking it, but she wouldn't tell me where it was. She said she'd stay out of my business when I stayed out of hers.” He puts down the picture. “One of my last memories of her is of me yelling at her. How's that for guilt?”

“Oh, Ethan,” I say. “Brothers and sisters fight all the time. It's normal.”

“Normal,” he repeats thickly. “Let me get this straight. You're saying she told you about the jacket so you could use it to convince me?”

“I think it was something she felt bad about. But she didn't
tell
me about it. I
saw
it, through my mind's eye. Though maybe
envisioned
would be a better word.”

His frown deepens. “You said you couldn't read minds.”

I mull this over. “I can't. Not normally, I mean. Half the time I don't even know what
I'm
thinking. But it's different on the astral plane. There's no physical interference. I saw her mind through my mind's eye—and she saw me. Call it an altered state of consciousness, if you like. Without a body, you
are
your mind. Just pure energy. Pure mental energy.”

I can tell he's confused.

I gaze out the window. The rain is falling softly now, trickling down the pane. The sun is shining through the drizzle, as if the sky is laughing and crying at the same time.

“The point is, I got a glimpse of her mind. But out on the plane, you can't communicate conscious thought. There were a lot of symbols, like in a dream. Even when I envisioned her speaking, it was cryptic. I heard a phone, for instance. That one's easy. She was trying to send me a message.” I take a deep, conscious breath. “I think it was about that hit-and-run. She wants us to know the truth, that Brendan was driving—and she was with him.”

He doesn't blow up with anger, so I press forward. I describe how Brendan laughed at the face in the fire and then escaped through Amanda's window. How he was more than happy to let Zack take the blame. “As in
frame
him,” I say when Ethan looks at me blankly. I tell him what I believe, that Amanda wants the truth known. That a soul can feel trapped, and before it can move on, it has to set itself free. “Fire is a symbol of transformation,” I say, recalling something I read. “Not only does it purge the soul of a lifetime of decay, it gives it light.” Spiritually speaking, according to Carl Jung. Did I mention I'm acing my psych class?

And then I describe the lurker in the corridor. How he was wearing a hooded sweatshirt like the one Brendan had on—the Brendan who was searching through the fire in her room. How the real, living Brendan wanted her to die with the truth.

“That's quite a story,” Ethan says, running his fingers through his hair. “I have just one question. You said you saw her in that place after the bus crash. Why didn't she reveal all this to you then?”

Outside, the wail of an ambulance slices into the air, then slowly fades away. For some reason, I picture Dorothy's fake wizard floating by in a hot air balloon and yelling, “I don't know how it works! Good-bye, folks!”

I think back to what I saw after the crash. The chaos and the river, and especially the confusion. How I also saw my father and Zack. I keep seeing people who aren't really there, and now I know why. As in a dream, reality becomes just a state of mind.

“I think she tried to,” I say, “but it was just after the accident and she was confused. And then I woke up, and the next thing I saw was my mother's face.”

Ethan stares at me. He has that look, like he's going to insist I get treatment. Like he can't believe he listened to a crackpot like me in the first place. “Come on,” he says. “I'm taking you home.”