Afterworlds

A rushing sigh escaped Darcy, as if she had been holding her breath for a long time. “Really?”

“Yeah. You totally brought the darkness.”

“I was feeling dark that week. Kind of gritty and real.”

A laugh bubbled up out of Imogen. “And brave, too, with Kiralee Taylor herself telling you to write a happy ending. I’m proud of you.”

Darcy’s eyes opened and closed, a deliberate blink to test if this were the real world—it was. In fact, this bubble of conversation with Imogen was the only world. None of Moxie’s praise for the first draft of Untitled Patel mattered, nor did the kind words she’d heard at her signing. Not next to this.

“I’m glad you liked it.”

“It was suitably brutal.”

Darcy laughed. Kiralee had actually used those words in her blurb, and she hadn’t let Marketing edit them out. “Speaking of brutal, I just finished the first draft of Untitled Patel. Did it in a month!”

“That’s great, Darcy.” Their glasses met with a sharp, bright sound. “I got worried when you weren’t writing. You aren’t designed for not writing.”

“Yeah, I kind of suck at it. I won’t make that mistake again.”

They held each other’s gaze, and again Darcy was only half aware that there were other people in the room.

“So Untitled Patel still doesn’t have a title?” Imogen finally said. “Don’t I owe you one of those?”

“I stole your scene. I think we’re even.”

Imogen still smiled, but she looked away. “I’m sorry I had to leave.”

“But you had to.” Darcy wanted to keep going, to explain that she understood everything now, even if she hated every minute of being apart. That she could need Imogen with every scrap of her being and still give her room for her secrets, or the space to stay away. But that was too much too soon, and wanting too hard had been Darcy’s problem from the start.

So she said, “How’s Phobomancer going?”

Imogen breathed a little sigh of relief. “Really well. I’m almost done.”

“Tell me it still starts in the trunk of a car.”

“Of course. My agent loves that part now! He says it’s finally got some actual fear in it.”

Darcy felt herself shiver. “I knew you’d nail it, sooner or later.”

“It was easy once I figured out what I was afraid of.”

“You’re not afraid of anything, Gen.”

Imogen didn’t answer this at first, and Darcy felt earnest again, like someone flailing their way through their very first relationship. This was not the moment to be young and foolish.

But then Imogen took a step closer, her voice almost fading into the hubbub of the party. “Turns out, I was afraid you wouldn’t wait. That you’d give up on me.”

“Never,” Darcy said at once. “I trust you, Gen.”

“I didn’t mean to make it some kind of test. I just wanted to get my book right before dealing with us. But it was selfish, staying away this long.”

Darcy had only heard a single word of this. “You said was.”

“What?”

“You used the past tense, Imogen. It was selfish to stay away. Does that mean you’re not anymore?”

Imogen nodded, took her hand.

“Oh,” Darcy said, her heart unbroken in her chest.

There was so much more to fix—her apartment situation, her muddle of a first draft, her disaster of a budget, her absence of a college career. And there was, as Nisha had pointed out in a text that morning, the small matter of maintaining her sanity for the hundred and seventeen days until Afterworlds came out. And the possibility that people had better things to spend their money on than a debut novel by an unknown teenager.

It was also possible that she and Imogen hadn’t changed that much in the last two and a half months. In real life, transformations were reluctant, piecemeal, and slow.

Imogen still needed her secrets. Darcy still needed everything.

“I’m running out of money,” she said.

“I’m suddenly in demand,” Imogen said.

“I won’t have an apartment in two months,” she said.

“We can write together anywhere,” Imogen said.

“I might go to college. Somewhere cheap.”

“That might be a good thing. I’ll visit.”

Darcy nodded. Maybe the trick was not to panic. In life, as in the bewildering business of writing stories and flinging them out into the world, you had to focus on the page in front of you.

“I’m sorry I dropped the ball,” she said.

“The ball bounces.”

“You don’t think happy endings are stupid anymore?”

“Your question is irrelevant,” Imogen said. “This isn’t the end.”

CHAPTER 42

A WEEK LATER I FOUND myself in a hospital again. Not in a field tent in the snow, but a bright and shiny chemotherapy ward in Los Angeles.

My mother wasn’t getting chemo—not yet, anyway. She was hooked up to a blood bag, which was filling her with extra red blood cells. She had to do this once a week until her tests looked better, merely the beginning of a long process with many more treatments and tests and machines.

After the nurse had set everything up, he left us alone and we were quiet for a while. Mostly I was trying not to look at where the tube went into my mother’s arm. The doctors had put a piece of plastic in her, called a port, which let them slip an IV in without making a fresh hole. I didn’t mind needles, but the thought of Mom needing a permanent valve in her skin gave me the creeps.

She claimed she liked it, because it made her feel like a cyborg.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“Not really. The most annoying thing is, I can’t eat red meat for a while.”

“That’s weird.”

“With all this red blood getting pumped in, I have to watch out for something called ‘iron overload.’ ” My mother laughed. “Sounds kind of heavy metal.”

“Which is so you,” I said, doing a quick search on vegetarian recipes on my phone. “Okay. How about I make a cauliflower frittata tonight?”

“Seriously? We don’t have to be vegetarians. Just no red meat.”

I scrolled some more. “Maybe some kale stew?”

“Are you trying to kill me? Kale has more iron than beef! Parsley is also deadly.”

“Wow. ‘Parsley is also deadly.’ I bet no one’s ever said that before.” To test my theory, I typed the phrase into my phone. The top result was something called the Parsley Massacre, in which twenty thousand people had been killed. Everything was about death if you looked closely enough.

I put away my phone.

Another patient was brought into the chemo ward. He was much older than my mother, and shuffled past with a young nurse on his arm. His hair was wispy, his skin stretched tight over the bones of his face.

Walking behind him was a young girl. Her flowery dress looked old-fashioned, and no shadows played in its folds. She seemed not to notice me and my psychopomp shine. She kept her head down, smiling a little, like a child at a somber ceremony trying not to giggle.

My mother and I watched in silence as the nurse hooked the old man up. When she was done, he put in headphones and lay back with his eyes closed. His hands twitched in time to the music in his ears. The ghost girl watched, tapping her feet as if she could hear the music too.

I took a steadying breath. “I’ve deferred college for a year.”

My mother stared at me, the muscles of her arm gone tight. For a moment, I thought the IV was going to pop out of her skin.

“You can’t do that, Lizzie.”

“It’s done.” My voice stayed firm. “The call has been made.”

“Call them back! Tell them you’ve changed your mind.”

“That would be a lie. And I can’t back out now, anyway. They already gave someone else my spot.”

My mother groaned. “Lizzie, you don’t have to do this. I can lie here with a tube in my arm without your help.”

“You don’t want me here?”

“I want you in college!”

“For now,” I said, readying my mental list of arguments. I’d been preparing myself for this conversation since my first college acceptance letter had arrived. “But once you start chemo, you’ll need someone to drive you up here. And to help you remember which pills to take.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not senile. Just sick.”

“But some of your meds affect short-term memory. And you’re not going to feel like cooking for yourself most days. And because the deferment’s for medical reasons, my spot is a hundred percent locked in. And don’t forget, you won’t have much income for a while, so my financial aid app will kick ass next year. There’s nothing but upside.”

She stared at me for a long moment. Across the ward, the other patient was humming along with his music. The ghost was sitting motionless, hands folded.

“You’ve thought about this way too much,” Mom said.

“By which you mean, my logic is irrefutable?”

“By which I mean, you could have included me sooner in your thinking.”

“You’d’ve told me not to think about it at all.”

My mother sighed in defeat, staring off into space. “Okay, Lizzie. But only one year. You can’t give up your life for me.”

I took her hand. “Mom . . . this is life. Right here in this room, with you, is life.”

My mother surveyed the room—the blinking lights of the transfusion machine, the fluorescents in the tile ceiling, the tube in her arm—and gave me a droll look. “Great. Then life sucks.”

I didn’t argue. Life sucked all right. It sucked hard, because it was random and terrifying and too easily lost. Life was full of death cults and psychopaths, bad timing and bad people. Life was broken, basically, because four ass**les with guns could kill an airport full of people, or some microscopic error in your mother’s marrow could take her from you far too soon. Because you could make one mistake in righteous anger, and lose the person you most loved.

But everything that sucked about life also proved that it was priceless, because otherwise all of that wouldn’t hurt so bad.

“I want to be here for you,” I said.

My mother smiled. “That’s sweet. But are you sure this isn’t about staying near your boyfriend?”

My reaction must have showed on my face.

“Oh. He’s not your boyfriend anymore?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him for a while.”

* * *

On our way out to the hospital parking lot, we went through the waiting area for the emergency room. My mother had to stop and pee, so I was alone for a moment in a crowded, bustling hallway. I leaned against the wall watching the floor, hoping not to see any more ghosts.

But something must have made me look up.

A paramedic was passing by, pushing an empty folding wheelchair. He was young and handsome, with a freckled shaved head and a whisper of a mustache. A radio was slung over one shoulder, and his uniform was rumpled, like he’d been working a long shift.

He looked up at me as he passed, our eyes catching for a moment, and he slowed. His skin shone, luminous even under the harsh fluorescents in the hospital hallway.

A smile cracked his tired face. He’d seen my shine as well.

“Need any help?” he asked.

It took me a second to realize what he meant.

“No, I’m fine. I’m just here with my mom.” I glanced at the bathroom door.

“Gotcha. It’s just, you look like you caught a gnarly one.” He took a quick look both ways down the hall, and lowered his voice. “Round this place, you can run into some pretty f**ked-up wraiths. Some real Do Not Resuscitate ass**les.”