Page 11

December

Looking for ways to bring Georgina Wells crumbling down.

It’s been like this for six long years – since their disastrous first meeting in junior year of high school.

She’d been new in town – a former military brat, nomadic and friendless, fresh from several years of homeschooling.

She’d gone to school determined to make a good first impression.

To put her best foot forward. Instead, she upstaged the school’s resident genius in a quiz on which Latin conjunctions were best to use when drifting.

She hadn’t meant to do it. One minute, she was rattling off conjunctions – et, que, sed, neque, aut – and the next she was pinned by that colorless stare. Striking. Cold. Like the first breath of a winter’s day. She’d felt an immediate shiver run down her spine.

After that, she’d done her level best to avoid eye contact altogether.

Head bowed. Eyes on her paper. The room around her crackling with frost. For the most part, her plan had worked – until just after class, when she found herself cornered by the lockers, those quicksilver eyes inches from her face.

“ Next time Professor Archambault calls on you, play dumb.”

It hadn’t taken her long to figure out who he was. Tempus Academy’s golden boy. Before Georgina, Orson Auclair had been staunchly unopposed. Brightest in his year. Valedictorian hopeful. Class president. A nepo baby, whose father had an entire wing dedicated to the Auclair family name.

Georgina hadn’t been born into it. Not like him.

She’d discovered the art of drifting quite by accident – one day she’d been thinking of her mother, floating on a navy vessel somewhere in the Baltic Sea, and the next she’d been there, listening to the slap of waves against the hull, her mother’s startled gasp as she launched from her bunk.

The sight of her standing there, tangible and close, had startled Georgina right back into her own body.

She’d snapped into her bones like a rubber band, and that had been that.

Her father, a professor of philosophy at a nearby university, had declared she’d moved well beyond his ability to teach, and promptly enrolled her in Tempus Academy’s School for Gifted Children.

Orson Auclair’s ivy-clad kingdom.

Unlike Georgina, he’d been born into a family of drifters.

His father had been a spy during the Third World War, before drifting became as commonplace as any other career.

He’d slide out of himself and into enemy territory, pinning his coordinates just by looking at a photograph.

Auclair’s mother had the ability, too, though she’d preferred to use it for more personal tasks.

She’d drift to Aspen in the winters, Martha’s Vineyard in the summers – spend her days among the bright blue hydrangea blossoms and the clapboard cottages, watching the tide rush in.

As a result, Orson Auclair knew how to drift well before he could walk. She’d heard a rumor that he used to slip right out of his bassinet and into the playpen, wake the entire household with his vast arsenal of toys.

Georgina couldn’t imagine him as a little boy. In her head, he’d always been this: cruel, cold, and clever. His arm at her windpipe, his head bent in close. “ If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay out of my way.”

She used to tell herself that once high school was over, she’d be free of him.

Instead, and by some unfortunate turn of events, they’d landed at the same university.

In the same field. Matter transmogrification.

Energy sciences. Ways to unlock the brain, to widen the drift field.

To perfect the art of stepping outside oneself, and into the vast ether of the electromagnetic current connecting all humanity.

Today’s class is centered around the mantis shrimp; an ugly, iridescent creature that processes the world through twelve channels of color.

Twelve, where the human limit is three. Professor Elrod has thrown up several slides that look, to the untrained eye, gray.

The day’s instructions are simple. Clear your mind.

Think of the proper conjunction. The most accurate verb.

Vide . See. There’s a color here beyond human perception. Perceive it.

She isn’t sure how she’s meant to unlock anything with Auclair staring so intently.

There’s something markedly different about the way he’s watching her this time. He isn’t leering. Not today. Today, he looks wary. Nervous, even. He keeps trying to catch her eye. She stares dead ahead at the slide of gray. She doesn’t see a single color.

Here is the worst part about having a nemesis like Orson Auclair: he’s a natural. His talent is hereditary. Innate. He makes it look easy.

And Georgina? She’s well-read. She’s intelligent.

She’s very, very good at studying. But she’s never been able to drift.

Not on purpose. Not when it counts. Not when it matters.

For her, drifting is as accidental as a sneeze, a totally involuntary occurrence.

Three years into university, and she still hasn’t managed to recreate what she did the first time she transported herself to her mother.

By the time class ends, she’s in a horrible mood.

She didn’t see a single shred of color. She packs up her things in a huff, shooting a sorry half-smile at Professor Elrod.

Georgina can already predict the consolatory email she’ll receive later this afternoon.

Your electromagnetic field is powerful. You are brimming with raw energy; you just need to learn to tap into it. We’ll get there. Keep trying.

Her one solace is that Auclair didn’t see anything on the slide, either. He couldn’t have. He was too busy watching her flounder.

As if she’d summoned him, he appears. He’s sloppy today – dressed in gray sweats and a t-shirt – like he rolled out of bed late and raced all the way here.

It’s not at all in line with the Orson Auclair she knows – fastidious to a fault.

She’s fairly certain he’s been seeing someone.

Several days in a row, he’s been late to class.

Sometimes, he doesn’t show up at all. Once or twice, he even arrived with love bites on his throat, which is the most undignified thing she can possibly think of.

Georgina expected better from him. A shred of self-respect, at minimum.

Now, his lanky frame swallows up her path. He looks as though he’s been waiting for her. She tries to skirt around him, but he doesn’t let her through.

“Can we talk?”

She draws up short, forced to look up at him.

The worst part about Orson Auclair is how beautiful he is.

Long, full lips and dark lashes, with cheekbones that could rival the work of Michelangelo.

Back in high school, there’d been a rumor that his mother delivered him alone in a freak November blizzard.

Mid-drift. In the middle of a snowy Manhattan side street.

She’d gone into labor in the back of a taxi cab and tried her best to transport herself to the nearest hospital. The result was a baby born in snow.

Wind-whipped. Cold. Brutal.

Glowering up at him, it’s difficult not to believe the stories, ridiculous as they are.

He looks as if he’s been whittled by a biting wind.

His features are pale and sharp beneath a close crop of dark hair.

Usually, he wears it in a severe part. Today, it’s a mess, the ends peeking forward over his ears.

Like he rolled out of bed and came straight to campus.

She hopes whoever it is he’s been seeing comes to her senses soon.

She hopes this mystery girl takes his heart out and stomps on it.

“I can’t imagine what you could possibly have to say to me,” she tells him.

Shouldering her bag, she shoves past him, determined to escape into the December cold of the quad.

From there, it’s a short jaunt to her car, then a five-minute drive to the tiny attic apartment she shares with her geriatric cat and her turtle, Hank.

Georgina visualizes the coziness of her apartment – the teakettle on the stove, the knitted quilt from her grandmother, and the gentle slope of the ceiling – and wishes, for the umpteenth time, that she could drift as easily as her classmates.

It would be so nice, to blink herself away where Orson Auclair cannot follow.

As it is, he’s following her now, tailing her down the stairwell and out into the lobby. He cuts her off at the pass, skidding just slightly in his sneakers. Sneakers. Another thing she’s never seen him wear. It’s always dress shoes. Glossy and expensive.

“Georgina, wait.”

This makes her stop. Georgina. Georgina?

In the six terrible years she has known Orson Auclair, he has only ever called her Wells.

He seems to notice his slip-up at the same time.

His cheeks color – something she didn’t know they could do; she’d always thought him bloodless, like a vampire – and he clears his throat. He doesn’t take it back.

“I’d like to walk you to your car,” he says, instead.

She stares up at him, stunned. “Excuse me?”

His throat clicks as he swallows. He seems impatient. “Let me walk you to your car, Georgina.”

Georgina, again. “Have you suffered a blow to the head?”

“What? No.” He searches her face in that same, unsettling way. “Can’t I be nice?”

“I wish you wouldn’t. It’s like seeing a fish walk on land.”

“Be serious.”

“Do I look like I’m kidding? By the way, no, I do not want you to walk me to my car. I’m being so sincere when I say I’d rather eat lead.”

But he’s already tugging on his coat. As he slips his arm into his sleeve, she catches sight of what’s scribbled along the inside of his forearm.

Her name.

Georgina.

She blinks. Blinks again. It’s impossible. Impossible . Not just because it’s her name, cramped and intimate, but because of who wrote it. His arm disappears into the sleeve, but there’s no denying what she’s seen.