Page 49

22

“You ready?” Heather asked.

Hart sat in the passenger seat of her Range Rover. They’d been parked in the student lot, and although Heather had cut the engine and unclipped her seat belt, Hart hadn’t moved. Outside the window, the kids streaming into the main school entrance distracted him. His so-called peers.

The one thing he had never considered doing after all of Rose’s deaths was moving on with his life. The plan had always been to plant a seed and turn back time. He’d done it so successfully before that this new idea, of putting one foot in front of the other without it leading a path straight to Rose, felt so foreign to him. Like he was inhabiting a body that didn’t belong to him.

But things were different this time. Hart wasn’t going to go back into the Wish Garden. And Heather promised she’d do the same. They were holding each other accountable, two addicts helping each other stay clean. Hart had even given Heather his supply of seeds, asking her to hide them somewhere he’d never be able to find them.

He clicked his seat belt free, felt the strap zwip across his lap and chest, leaving him unmoored. The Hargrove twins stepped out of the car and followed the tide of people heading toward school. The season had changed since the last time Hart had been here. He’d been on his knees in the dirt while the rest of the world continued as usual. It was colder out. But maybe the chill that crawled up his spine had less to do with the weather and more to do with what he saw as he approached the bulletin board, just off the entrance.

Usually, the board displayed flyers for tutoring, student club sign-up sheets, and schedules. But today one yellowing piece of paper, crisp and wrinkled with weather, made Hart stop to stare. It was one of the MISSING posters he’d seen at the Come Back Home party. Centered beneath the big block letters, a black-and-white Lowell from five faces ago smiled back at him. It served as a reminder that the death and destruction Hart had wrought in this lifetime would always be there to face him, no matter how hard he tried to convince himself it could stay buried in his backyard.

A tugging on his wrist made Hart glance at his sleeve, where he found Heather’s hand. “They’ve already forgotten about him,” she whispered, pulling him through the open double doors.

“I’m fine,” Hart muttered, though he realized too late that Heather hadn’t actually asked him how he was. She was adept at moving on. But for Hart, his choice to move on effectively doomed Lowell to a permanent grave. Hart quickened his pace until Heather’s hand fell from his wrist. He didn’t want to linger by the MISSING poster. Didn’t want to keep thinking of Lowell. Over his shoulder, he said, “I’ll meet you here after school.”

Hart tried to move on with his life—with his day, even—he really did. But Rose was everywhere he looked. A pencil on the floor made him think of her sketchbooks. Their tree in the quad made him think of all the lunches they’d never have again. In English class, when Mr. Serdanto started his lesson, Hart remembered an offhand comment Rose had once made about how grating the teacher’s voice was to her.

But worst of all were the people who came up to him. In the few moments Hart had where his mind was totally blank—focusing on a mundane task like fastening the top flap of his book bag, or taking books out of his locker—some kid whose name he did not know would start talking to him about how sad they were for him.

Coming back for a full day of school turned out to be a bad idea. Hart wanted to go home, crawl back into bed. But he’d told Heather he’d be waiting for her after school. So he decided to spend the last two periods out in the empty football field, where at least he could be alone, haunted by lifetimes of memories. And where he could take off his shoes and socks, even if it was too cold to really do so, and let his toes feel the grass.

Hart always felt better in a green space. His mind latched onto a memory of him and Rose lying in the tall grass of the Meadow, in sun so bright they had to close their eyes to it. He couldn’t remember what lifetime the memory was from. They were teenagers in this memory, which made it harder to place. But Hart knew for a fact that they would’ve had this conversation in any lifetime. He knew it for a fact because it was about lifetimes.

In the memory, Hart asked Rose a random, meandering question. The kind they loved to ask back when they were getting to know each other and they had nothing at all in the world to do or worry about or wish for.

“Would you do this all again?” Hart had asked. “Love each other over and over again? If it gets too hard, and we’re torn apart. After it ends, would you do it again?”

Rose, lying on Hart’s chest, shifted, until he could sense that her head was blocking the sun. He opened his eyes to see the concern creasing her forehead. “Torn apart?” she asked. “Is there something you want to tell me?”

Hart smiled and shook his head, his temples tickled by the grass. “I’m not breaking up with you.”

“Good,” Rose said.

Hart let his eyelids drift shut again, and Rose lowered her head again. But he could tell she was still watching him by the way her chin anchored into the center of his chest. “I just mean, would you do it all over again? If you could.”

With his eyes closed, Hart heard Rose’s voice, disembodied, which made the lilting tones of it more ethereal somehow. “I’d do it a thousand times over with you,” she whispered. “A million times.”

In the football field, Hart closed his eyes so he couldn’t see his surroundings. Couldn’t see the chain-link fence, the grass ruined with dyed yard lines and the brash colors of the end zones. Hart closed his eyes so he could stay in that memory, tricking himself into being there. Because the truth was that his life with Rose—the one he could only access in his memories—felt so much more tangible than his current reality. The lifetimes he’d built with her. The struggle and the ecstasy.

Hart wanted to get back to all of it.