CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I spat out, my arms waving my own caution signal. “I didn’t mean that.”
“Okay, but—”
“Wait, no, I meant some of it.” I jumped up. Anne Shirley had anticipated my reaction, springing away before being upended. “It’s been days, Penn.”
“You know I have no control over that.” His face was too blank, too closed. This Penn from Oregon was the right boy, the right phantom weight and height, but that was all. The rest appeared eerily wrong and tilted sideways.
“You’re scaring me.” I trailed it with a silent laugh.
He dropped his head, and the silence stretched.
“Shit.” His face bent with anguish, and that wasn’t helping. “Like this isn’t already too hard.”
I halted, inside and out. What was harder than dying at nineteen?
Sometimes I was the worst at patience. Sorry, world and friends and people who deserved better from me.
Write me up for anything. Because Penn was everything in my sight line, my periphery, the beat behind my ribs.
But he wasn’t in any hurry to help my unease.
Or to say he was just nervous, or tired of the way he was, or missing a slot of eternity he hadn’t found yet.
Instead, he kept circling around a million thoughts he wasn’t sharing. And we didn’t have time for that.
“Just start from the beginning,” I said. “I need a play-by-play. Okay?”
He nodded. Progress.
“What happened to you at the lake? It was because Del said she saw something, right?”
Penn scrubbed his face, forehead to chin. “I was trying to stay away, so we didn’t tip her off before we knew what was up. If she could see or hear me or anything like that.”
“Right. But she didn’t see or hear you. She’s certain that whatever she sensed was about me.”
“‘It’s not your time,’” Penn supplied.
“You heard that part,” I said, the moment like new again in my head.
Another nod. “I followed you away from the crowd, and I stayed there for a minute, but then, I just . . . couldn’t.
” The whole of him was still off, and he stood far across the room.
Lately we hadn’t been that way. He was always as close as possible; his foreign heat and too-real presence had become so familiar.
“Is that when you disappeared?” I asked. “The watch was still ticking. I couldn’t make you come back. Something changed, and I didn’t understand. I still don’t.”
I sharpened my stare, and he widened the gap between us, angling away.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I pressed. “How am I supposed to help you if you don’t tell me everything?”
He curled his lips, gathering minutes like we’d been given an unlimited supply. “Look,” he finally said, “I left—it was my doing. I walked off into the woods to think. Apparently, I went too far.”
How was it possible that my blood went hot, but my skin iced over, limb to limb?
“Why, though?” I brandished my arm. “Why test the limits of the watch when we don’t know enough about what brings you here?
” Or what would finally take him away. “And then you pick the exact moment when Del had me in a virtual choke hold? Why would you leave me like that?” My words came out thick, drenched in old hurts.
“I didn’t mean to disappear.” He bit out a wry laugh. “I guess I just forgot.”
“About me?”
“No.” He gave a ragged sigh. “No, Sylvie. I forgot about me. There, with you at the fair, at the lake, I was a regular guy who couldn’t deal with some stuff and needed a little space to think.”
A guy who’d forgotten he was a ghost.
“Real talk?” he whispered.
“You don’t have to ask.”
“I didn’t leave because of what Del saw,” he said. “It was because of what I saw.”
The atmosphere thinned, the boards under my feet crumbling into dust, but I couldn’t move a single inch. “You remembered something.”
He nodded, pinching the bridge of his nose. “That watch is dangerous, Sylvie. You have to take it off. You have to get rid of it.”
Dread coated my gut; my hands trembled like they had the first time I saw him. “No.”
“Shit,” he mumbled again. “I’m serious, okay?
The lake opened up a lot of my past. I got more memories than ever.
” One step forward. “I went camping there with my grandfather. The burgers, the tubing—all him. I remembered the name Patrick too. That’s him.
He had a goatee and a bald spot in the center of his head.
His personal sundial, he always joked.” Penn hardened, balling his fist. “The watch was his; it’s been in our family for years. And it’s not normal or safe.”
My bottom lip dropped. “That’s why you’re tied to it. Your . . . spirit.” Your curiosity, your goodness.
“Yeah, along with some wild stuff you don’t want to mess with. You need to take it back to Spines and Pines. Throw it in the ocean. Put it on an airplane—anything.” He caged his hands over his face, spoke through the web of his fingers. “You have to take it off. Please.”
My pulse quickened. But that would mean . . . “You’ll disappear.” I barely got it out.
“I’ll disappear.”
“Without me wearing the watch, who knows what will happen? It might not even tick. You might not come back. Ever.”
Penn had never cried; I didn’t think this version of him could. But the lack of watery emotion didn’t change anything about what his feelings did to his face. He went dark. And for the first time, he looked truly haunted. “I might never come back.”
“Then no,” I repeated, stronger. “We haven’t learned enough about you. We don’t know how you died. You don’t know why the watch keeps bringing you here, or what you need to do to free yourself.”
“Then I won’t know.” He gave a defeated shrug.
“I can’t just leave you out there”—I waved my hands—“somewhere. Your eternity matters!”
“Not more than your life. The longer you wear that thing, the more it puts you in danger.”
“But what if it doesn’t? What if you remembered something wrong?
” I lifted my arm, wiggling my wrist back and forth.
“See? Harmless. I swear, when you’re not here, it just hangs out on my arm until it ticks.
” I stared at my bare feet. “And when it does, you appear, and it’s . . . It’s the best part of my day.”
The confession hung between us. I wanted to take it back. I wanted to say it again.
“It’s the best part of mine,” he said finally. “But I can’t be the reason you put yourself at risk. Will you please just listen to everything before making a decision?”
I stole a glance at the piece in question, wishing its magic would change and it would take us back to days ago.
A Ferris wheel and a funnel cake. Sitting side by side in the cooling dusk.
The parts of him who listened and laughed, the parts of me who forgot the timeworn frailty of us and all of it.
Tick, tick, tick, went the second hand and a heart.
I made myself sit. “Tell me everything.”
“My grandpa tried to get rid of that chunk of gold dozens of times. It had belonged to his grandfather until it was passed down to him. He loved that thing at first, even had a special case to store it in. But a few years after he inherited it, the watch started to change and act strangely. One time the hands went wonky and moved the wrong way. Then he felt exhausted and drained every time he put it on. He began seeing things that weren’t there, like visions of loved ones who’d passed, and scenes he didn’t understand.
Another time he fell asleep with it on and woke up outside in the cold, a mile away from his house.
That was it for him. He took it to a pawnshop.
Two days later, it ended up back in the box where he’d kept it, just like that. ”
My stomach sank.
“He drove it to another town and left it on the side of the road. Same thing. It was back the next day. He was too afraid to try to destroy it, so he had no choice but to just guard it in his study. But it became a legend in our family—well, a running joke. Most everyone thought it was funny, him keeping a cursed watch. One night when I was five and I was staying at his house, I got curious—”
“You don’t say.” I found it in me to tease.
He smiled, then recalled the harsh center of his memory.
“I went into his office and found the watch. It was clearly broken, but I still wanted to put it on. It was huge on my wrist. And then out of nowhere the second hand started to tick. And just as quickly, everything went black. I don’t know how long I was out before Grandpa found me on the floor.
The way he told it, he took the watch off, and I woke up.
Doctors ruled it as a febrile seizure, but he was convinced it was the watch. ”
“You got all this info in the time it took me to walk over to Del?”
He clenched his hands tightly. “It’s not like I remembered a list of these things one by one. It came to me all at once. Like it was always there.”
I stared at the champagne dial. “Time plays tricks.” Cruel ones. Miraculous ones. “Is he dead? Your grandfather?”
“That I don’t remember. Not yet. That watch got to Spines and Pines somehow, though.”
“Where it technically never existed, according to the owner.” I snuffled out a laugh. “For some reason, this time, the watch found me instead. And hasn’t left me since.”
“Not until tonight.”
Oh, I knew what that meant. And why did it strike harder and more final than death? I cupped the dial, felt nothing but cool metal. “It found me for a reason. It wants me to wear it—”
“And you don’t think that’s concerning?”
“It hasn’t hurt me. It could be worse, Penn, but it isn’t,” I said, my features locked in challenge. “I’ve never gotten a weird vision. I wake up in my bed every morning. I sleep and shower with it and never feel unsafe.”
“You don’t yet. I won’t risk that changing.” His chin trembled.
“I can’t take the watch off your wrist. I’m asking you to do it, to get as far away from it as possible.”
“No.”
“Sylvie.”
“I can’t.”
“Sylvie—”
“I don’t want you to go!” I admitted to him. To myself.