Chapter 16
Outside the train window, the sun’s just now starting to show its sleepy pink face in the sky.
I couldn’t sleep last night—how could I?
—and on a mad whim, I hopped on a six thirty a.m. train to Boston.
I feel numb. Hollow. I look down at my palms, searching for some clue, some sign that these hands existed two hundred years ago.
There is none. They just look like my hands.
At least that palm reading makes sense now.
You have no idea what danger you are in.
Now I do. Does it matter that it’s because of Hayden? Because of some curse that’s doomed me to die over and over again?
I let my eyes fall hazy, watching the small brick buildings and clusters of small houses of suburban Massachusetts rush by. The fall foliage is looking more bare now. Less brown and red. More naked branches. I pull my scarf tighter around my face.
Every falling leaf brings me closer to my nineteenth birthday.
I shudder. This is why I’m going to Boston: I need to be anonymous. At least for a day. I need to go back to being that quiet, insignificant Rose. The one who wasn’t even special enough to sit beside in the school cafeteria. Just…Rose.
But…was I ever her?
A faint mist hugs the large window. I rest my cheek on the icy glass, fogging it with my long exhale.
At least a lot of things are making sense now.
Why those nightmares were the realest thing about me at times.
I think of my mom and dad. No wonder they’re so different, why I always sensed a slight disconnect with them.
Can they even be called my parents? If I’m the exact same Rose from the 1800s, then aren’t they just two poor souls who were randomly assigned mine?
I scrub my red, swollen eyes. Delia was still at her very-late-night study session when I went back up to our room last night. I look at the text she sent me.
Delia:
Hey! Wrapping up here soon thank fucking god, these overachievers are gonna kill me. I know it’s late, but I figured you’re probably up, little miss insomnia. Wanna do a late night nosh sesh at the dining hall? Haven’t seen you all day and I miss your face
I felt heartsick reading it. This whole time, I thought I’d made my first real friend. I’d felt so lucky, thought it was a reward from the universe for eighteen long, lonely years.
But Delia’s just been doing a favor for Hayden.
Her sob-story background, sixteen school cafeterias over four years, that lone wolf crap: Is there even a kernel of truth there?
She said she loved me, and I said it back, meant it.
It’s so humiliating. This gorgeous, ethereal vampire pretending to connect with me, a pathetic, milk-sucking mortal. How she must be laughing…
I scrub angrily at my leaking eyes.
I never replied to her text. I just pocketed my phone, changed into my warmest clothes, grabbed my bag, and headed to the library on west campus where I bumped into Hayden on the silent floor.
That wasn’t random, was it? None of this was.
They’ve both been lying to me.
I think about all my interactions with Hayden.
There’s a huge relief to know I hadn’t imagined it, the truck on the bridge, the glimpses of him across campus.
Now it makes sense why he fled every time, why he pulled back every time I got too close.
And what had he said when he first brought me to that church?
Don’t you think that there has been at least one out there who has loved another so desperately, so ruinously, so absolutely, that their love could resurrect countries? Continents?
The memory unbottles me. The grief in his voice, the tight curl of his fists, the shake in his breath.
Does he really love me that much? It doesn’t feel real.
Hayden, the most beautiful indigo-eyed, sharp-jawed boy I’ve ever seen—that anyone has ever seen.
A vampire, swifter than sound, deadlier than any creature known to man or nature…
He loves me, weird little Rose, that much?
Then why wouldn’t he even kiss you?
The stab of hurt curls into anger. How many times did he lie to me?
Sneer at how stupid I sounded, accusing him of being in Irvine last year?
How many times did he make me cry? Allow me to feel crazy?
And now he’s abandoned me. Told me he’ll be my shadow forever, just behind me, promising me that anytime I turn around, he’ll vanish. Promising I can never see him again.
Screw Hayden.
Why won’t he let us love each other?
I lean forward, bury my face in my hands.
The blur of trees out the window has now given way to a more urban landscape.
The fog of exhaust and smog mingles with the mist of rain.
We’re passing larger and larger buildings until they’re scraping the sky.
Small roads are now a tangle of giant highways crowded with cars and buses. A voice crackles over the intercom.
“We are about to pull into Boston’s North Station. Please begin collecting your baggage and ready yourself for our arrival.”
I drum nervously on my thighs, feeling like a stripped, sparking wire. I haven’t slept. I’ve never been to a big city by myself.
Vampires are real.
Magic is real.
Curses are real.
I’m not the first Rose.
What the hell is anyone supposed to do with all that information?
My pocket vibrates. I scramble for my phone like an idiot before remembering Hayden and I have never exchanged numbers.
It’s Julian.
Julian:
Question. If I were to cook a gourmet meal for you, would you come over?
I can make (wait for it) jam and toast OR beans and toast
I’ll hold for applause. How’s Friday looking for you?
I shove my phone back into my jeans, groaning. I feel awful, but after all the revelations of the past twenty-four hours, Julian seems like a stranger now. I can’t possibly think of a response. I’ll deal with him later.
Boston’s a symphony of new sounds, the air frigid and smelling of exhaust. I’m surrounded by the braying honks of cars, the huge public buses lurching and stopping in traffic, screeching and chuffing like terrible beasts.
An ad at a bus stop catches my eye. A picture of an art piece, taller than me, of jerky lines weeping down the page, two hands, the top of a head, holding a square of white.
Lost in My Life (Chiral Lines 3) now showing at the Institute of Contemporary Art. Only 1.5 miles away.
Lost in my life? I can’t think of anything more fitting. I find that I’m already heading in the direction the arrow is pointing, the way to the art museum. Seems like fate. I shiver at the thought, pulling my scarf up and hunching into the slicing cold of the wind.
Is it my fate to always die before I’m nineteen? I suck in a lungful of icy air. It tastes like salt, and when I turn a corner, I see why. Sailboats sway in the harbor, the ocean waves slapping against the seawalls. When the mist starts to bite, I realize it’s begun to sleet.
Fall is going by so quickly.
Hayden had looked so, so scared when he talked about my possible death. That, more than anything, silences any doubt: I don’t want to know the level of threat it takes to frighten a vampire.
When panic starts to squeeze my lungs, I stop walking and turn to the churning sea. The visibility is cut by a thickening layer of fog hovering over the dark water. In the distance, a foghorn blows mournfully.
Hayden thought he could keep me safe by staying away. Keeping us apart.
He’s done that (mostly), and I’ve still almost died twice. Maybe three times. Who knows what Noah would have done to me at the Ballroom? Will keeping us separated truly be enough? Sleet stings my skin, and I realize: In all likelihood, I am going to die soon.
The wind snags a loose carabiner hanging from a sailboat mast. It slams it against the metal pole, ringing like a church bell.
Clang, clang, clang. It sounds funereal.
A seagull the size of a beagle lands on the fence in front of me, balancing on the splintering, swinging rope. It fixes me with a sharp black eye.
“But I’ve already died,” I blurt at him. The seagull gives a reptilian cock of its head, blinks.
Then why am I still so scared? Why aren’t I braver? Maybe because some small part of me wonders: If I die again, what if I don’t come back? How does Hayden know I will? But does that even matter? It’s not like I’ll remember.
The whole train of thought makes me feel bleak. I turn away from the enormous seagull, the harbor’s death knell, shove my hands in my pockets. Do what I’ve always done.
Just keep walking.
—
The Institute of Contemporary Art is an ultramodern geometric marvel, a building of sleek right angles of glass and metal on Boston Harbor.
It’s exactly the sort of aesthetic I hate.
Which, right now, I love; right now, as much as possible, I want to feel as removed as possible from Reincarnated-About-to-Die Rose.
I pay for my ticket and enter the hushed, just-as-ultra-modern lobby, feeling none of the warmth that older buildings and lived-in spaces bring me.
I stop walking when it hits me. Of course I’m drawn to historic buildings.
Of course I’ve always loved standing in ancient rooms, picturing the lives of the people who left the grooves in the antique wooden floors, the fingerprints of those who wore the brass candles to fading.
I wasn’t fascinated with the people from bygone days.
I was, in a way, reminiscing.
I have to stop walking and press a fist to my forehead, just for a moment. A girl can only take so many universe-tilting revelations within a certain period.
I came here on a whim, following the call of the oh-so-relatably titled piece Lost in My Life.
Well, in my case, lives. Plural, with a capital P.
But as I stroll through the echoing gallery, I stumble on an exhibit comparing current works with classic ones and glimpse a painting that strikes me still.
There, rendered sumptuously on the canvas, is a pale, ethereal beauty of a young woman floating listlessly in a river, surrounded by dense, verdant grasses and trees, the lush greens scattered with dots of white, red, and purple from daisies, poppies, violets.
Ophelia by John Everett Millais, the label says.
Rendered in oil on canvas, Millais has captured the moment before Ophelia’s death.
Ophelia, drowned by the madness of heartbreak.
The madness of toxic, agonizing love. Her face haunts me.
I’m sure this is what drew me to her, the vacant, almost relieved surrender in her gray eyes, the slack mouth.
What kind of love leaves you with such despair that you embrace death with such abandon?
It’s been a while—I read Hamlet in tenth grade—so I don’t remember much other than Hamlet needlessly being an asshole to her. Other bad stuff happened, but right now, that’s what’s striking me. Hamlet, her love, was a mercurial, emotionally savage man.
Hayden, my love, is a mercurial, actually savage vampire. A monster, as he’s been telling me all along. I fiddle with the buttons of my peacoat, staring at Ophelia’s face, obliterated by heartbreak. The saying comes to me: It’s better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all.
Whoever said that is smug, righteous, and has never had the perfect vampire of their dreams say I love you, but you’ll never see me again.
Would I have preferred that things had gone according to plan?
That I had never known of Hayden’s existence at all?
I bury my head in my hands because, probably, that’s what I should want.
Hayden has ripped people’s throats out. He’s broken my heart more than once. Is no love better than doomed love?
I chew my lips, trying to picture following Hayden’s instructions, going on to live my life like normal, like I never met him.
It’s laughable. Does he really expect me to get a part-time job at an Einstein’s Bagels?
Find a cute guy in organic chemistry? Accept his invitation to watch the new Fast & Furious movie in theaters?
Chew stale popcorn with him, let his sweaty, hot hand find mine in the dark?
I realize that’s the best-case scenario, because all of that can only happen if I don’t die in seventeen days.
I have an insane, unbidden thought: If those are my only two options, Einstein’s Bagels without Hayden or dying to restart the cycle again with the slim chance of loving Hayden…I choose death.
Hayden shouldn’t have given me a taste, a glimpse of what being loved by him might be like.
There’s a dark, bottomless fire within him.
He tries to keep a lid on it, but I’ve seen it before, the lick of flame that flickers from his eyes when he’s glanced at me sometimes, the molten curl in his voice, his words.
Even in my woeful inexperience, I can sense it. I can tell.
To be loved by Hayden is to be burned alive—but not like a forest fire. Like a phoenix. I want to turn to ash in his hands, his mouth. I want him to ruin me every night, resurrect me every morning.
But he’s taken that choice from me, hasn’t he? Decided it for us both. Would I rather die a horrible death in seventeen days at least knowing what his lips feel like on the skin of my neck? Below my belly button?
Or would I rather live long, healthy, and so, so lonely?
It feels like being offered two poisons: One tastes like strawberries, the other mango, which one would you like? Neither. Neither. Both choices end in the sloughing of my gut, a gruesome, organ-failing pain.
I squeeze my eyes shut, wondering if perhaps an answer will come to me. Some inkling, some clue. I search deep inside, wondering if, somehow, there’s a part of the old me that knows the old knowledge, deep in the recesses of my soul.
But all I see, all I ever see, is the artful sculpt of cheek and jaw, the sweep of black hair across dark brows, eyes filled with fathomless midnight fire.
Hayden.
All I see is Hayden.