Undone: An Unraveling Novella Part 3

Janelle.

She was lifeguarding down at the beach; at least she probably was. She had been there most of the days this summer when I'd gone to the beach to stare at the waves, though I still hadn't spoken to her. Still hadn't gotten up the nerve to say something, anything. Now that I could be about to go home, I wanted more time.

Time to tell her that she made this fake life bearable.

But I never got the chance. I flexed my hands and headed over to the people who knew me.

Eli clapped me on the back. "Don't worry, my friend. There will be plenty of hot chicks in bikinis at home."

The if we get there hung in between us. He thought we would. I didn't, but I was willing to try anyway. I had to. I owed it to my parents and to my friends who were here because of me.

"Ready to do this?" I asked, hoping that for some reason being here would change their minds.

Eli jumped around a little and shook his arms. He was actually smiling, something he didn't do all that often.

"What's the plan?" Reid asked. "You're just going to open the portal?"

"No." I shook my head. "We should all do it. Just like the first time."

"The second time," Reid corrected.

"You know what I mean."

"Who cares?" Eli cut in. "We put our hands together, we focus, and we open a f.u.c.king portal. Once it's open, we go through."

"I'll go first." I didn't want to, but it was only fair. I'd gone first the last time. "Take it slow. We can't rush this."

I swallowed hard. The plan was for me to go almost completely through to the other side. I would leave only my hand behind, for Eli and Reid to hold on to. If I made it somewhere else, I would give them a thumbs up and keep going through. If I died . . . I wouldn't.

I left something out before when I said we didn't know anything new since we opened that portal 148 days ago. We opened more portals since the first one. Now we weren't sure how or why we had made it through the portal the first time and if we could really go through one now.

Because the last portal we'd opened had come at a price. Collateral damage, Eli called it.

I called it a person. We'd brought a person into this world. We'd opened a portal, and a person had come through.

A person who was dead.

I didn't know if we had killed him or if it was something else, but it didn't matter. I wasn't going to risk putting more people in danger.

This was the last portal I was going to open.

We would get home, or the portal would kill us, or we would be stuck here forever. This last portal was all I had left in me.

We stood facing each other in a half circle and put our hands in front of us, like it was some sort of partial huddle. It would have looked weird to someone else and it felt weird to us, but it seemed the most logical way to do this.

"So we just f.u.c.king hold hands and think of home, or what?" Eli said.

"Click your heels first," Reid replied.

I didn't know if there was a right formula. "Thinking of home makes the most sense," I said, even though I wasn't really sure that it made sense at all. The truth was I didn't understand what we could do any better than they did, but I supposed thinking of home couldn't hurt.

"All right, let's do this," Reid said.

All six of our hands came together.

I gathered the energy in my body into my chest, and I tried to think of something from home. Of my parents or my brother, of anything really, but for some reason a strong memory wouldn't come. It had been so long since I'd been with them, it was hard to remember their faces, and I sometimes worried the memories weren't real.

I pushed the energy through my arms and out my hands and I imagined a wormhole opening up in front of us. I had done it enough times now that it was starting to feel almost natural.

It started slowly. In front of our hands, the blackness seemed to open up from nowhere, and as it expanded, the wind picked up, like the portal was swallowing everything around it and sucking it inside.

"Keep concentrating on it," I said. In front of me the portal grew into a wide circle, taller than I was, rippling and black. It looked like it was full of nothingness, the absence of s.p.a.ce, like if you got sucked into it you would cease to exist, but I knew different.

I took a deep breath, held it, and stuck my arm right through.

"What thea"" Eli said, but I ignored him.

My arm felt cold and a little numb, and the portal rippled around my skin. I felt compelled to keep going, like the portal itself was somehow urging me into it. Almost like a suction, it held on to me and pulled on me. I wasn't sure what dying from a portal would feel like, but this wasn't it.

I glanced back to remind them both to wait for a sign before jumping through, but I didn't get the chance. Around me the portal seemed to s.h.i.+ver, and from the other side, I heard a rumble.

I pulled my arm out. "Something isn't right."

"I'll go through," Eli said, but I shook my head.

The portal was still growing, still spreading out, expanding, like it was going to swallow as much of this world as it could. It didn't look like the portal we had originally gone through back when we were kids. It wasn't still or steady. It looked like it was vibrating as it grew, and the edges weren't clean. They looked like they were fraying, little tendrils of the portal spinning off and dissolving into the air.

"Shut it down," I said, stepping back from it. I grabbed Reid and Eli each by an arm and pulled them back with me.

Then something came through the black.

I saw it first. It was fast, a streak of blue, and my mind struggled to make sense of it. I wanted to be relieved, because it didn't look like a body, but somehow deep down, I knew there were worse things than bodies to bring in from other worlds.

Then I realized what I was hearing. Skidding tires and the squeal of worn brakes.

It was a pickup truck, old and faded blue, and not from this world. And now it was flying down the hill, down Highway 101, swerving like no one was in control.

Everything happened in slow motion.

We were only two lanes of highway from the cliffs and the beach, on a hill a quarter mile up from where people and families were laughing and relaxing and enjoying one of their last carefree days of summer.

As the truck barreled through the portal, I saw her.

Janelle.

The red of her bathing suit and matching shorts caught my eye first. She stood down the hill, at the edge of the parking lot, on the cusp of the road. Directly in the truck's path.

Tanned skin, her brown hair pulled back on top of her head, sneakers on her feet, her cell phone to her ear.

She was talking to someone. It must have been someone important. She was pinching the bridge of her nose, like she always did whenever she was stressed and trying to figure something out, and even though I couldn't see them, I knew her eyes would be closed. I'd seen her make that face a lot.

Before I could even think through what I was doing, I was running toward her.

When my mind kicked in, it told me what I already knew, what I should have already thought of: I was going to be too late.

So I screamed her name.

She turned toward me and saw the truck. It was almost on top of her.

She threw an arm up in front of her head, like she was bracing for the impact.

Then it hit her.

When I got to her, she was still. Not breathing. One of her eyes was open and red with blood. Her collarbone was jutting up through the skin, and her lower back was bent at the wrong angle. Worse, her head was turned too far to be natural. Her neck had to be broken.

She was dead.

A cold blankness swept through me. I somehow felt both numb and like I'd been ripped in two. I had seen it happen. I could see her in front of me, and I knew it was real, but part of me still rejected it. This couldn't be real. I'd watched her get hit by the truck, but that was impossible because she was good and I would never hurt her.

I fell by her side, and my hands shook as I reached for her neck.

I stopped thinking. I righted her head, ignoring the wave of nausea that rolled through me at the way it flopped loosely in my hands. I wasn't going to let this end this way, not a chance.

I could feel the break in her neck, the separation of the vertebrae and spinal cord. I gathered all my strength and funneled it down through my hands and into her, feeling the bones and flesh s.h.i.+ft under my fingertips. When things were whole again, I moved my hands to her chest, not letting up with the flow of energy, afraid it would stop if I did. I pushed harder, focusing on her heart, willing it to start beating again.

It didn't.

I needed more energy. I pulled with everything I had, until I was light-headed and my ears started to ring. Everything I'd ever felt for her, all those complex feelings I didn't understand and couldn't put a name to. I forced it through my arms, out of my fingertips, and into her.

"Janelle, please," I whispered. "Janelle, stay with me."

I thought of everything I knew about her, everything good about who she was, the things she did, the way she smiled, the sound of her laugh. And I channeled them into her.

I remembered the first moment we met.

I'd fallen through the portal and blacked out. The next thing I knew, I was freezing. Water was everywhere, I was submerged, my head was throbbing, and my arms and legs were too heavy and sluggish to move. I was sinking. I didn't know how to get to the surface, or which way was up. The salt water stung my eyes, and my insides burned because I needed to breathe. I tried harder to move, but nothing happened, and I needed air. Needed it so badly, my mouth opened, even though there was only water.

Then she saved me. She wrapped an arm around my chest and pulled me up to the surface. I coughed, gasped for air, and vomited all at the same time. I even thrashed out for something solid to grab on to, but she didn't let go. She held on to me, leaning me against a floating spongy thing, and then I had control of myself.

Soon I could look at her and see that she was an angel. Long dark hair wet and plastered against her face, long eyelashes, chocolate eyes. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. Then she turned us, the sun moved behind her, and all I could see was her outline glowing against the blue sky.

I remembered that moment, her saving me, and I held on to that.

She saved me. My fake life was only possible because of her. I couldn't exist in this world if she didn't too.

I remembered seeing her at school for the first time. She was playing some weird game I didn't understand with another girl and two boys on the playground. She was laughing, and the waves of her hair shook behind her. That laugh, that smile, it loosened up the fear knotted inside me, the fear of being alone, because if something that good and pure and happy existed here, it meant there was hope for me.

I recalled every memory of her I could think of: when she walked to school with her brother, ruffling his hair and teasing him; when she swam, in school meets and in the ocean, how she moved through the water like she was part of it; when she ate lunch on campus with a book on her lap; when she sat in the library and tutored undercla.s.smen; when she was in the auditorium for debates. Even the nights when she was on the beach this summer with another guy.

And as I remembered these things, as I tried to put her back together, I realized what it was that I felt for her. It wasn't just a crush like Eli thought, and it wasn't even a weird obsession like Reid thought.

I loved her.

It didn't matter that she didn't know me or that I had never gotten up the nerve to speak to her. I didn't need to. What I felt for her, it wasn't about me. It was just about her. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted her to smile, whether it was small and sly, a secret smile she was sharing with a friend, or wide and contagious, the kind that turned people's heads and made them smile too. I wanted her to laugh, the louder the better. I wanted her to feel light, happy, free. I wanted her to have everything good and perfect in this world, and I wanted to s.h.i.+eld her from stress and sadness, no matter how small or insignificant.

More than anything, I wanted her to live. Needed her to live.

"Stay with me." My voice cracked as I said it. I just wasn't sure my power would be enough. "Janelle, stay with me."

Then, as if she heard me, her eyes fluttered open, but they were unfocused.

"Hold on, Janelle. Hold on," I whispered. I pushed her collarbone back through the skin, and set it against the other half. I winced, feeling the two ragged ends sc.r.a.ping together. In the next second they went smooth, as I fused the bones. She still wasn't breathing.

"I'm sorry. You're gonna feel this." Next came her spinal cord. I felt her body go rigid when the connection reestablished.

She coughed blood onto my s.h.i.+rt. Which meant her lungs were working. One of my tears fell onto her neck.

"Ben!" It was Eli calling my name, from the direction of the truck, but I couldn't look up or see what he wanted. I needed all my focus to fix the damage.

I moved my hand down her arm, healing the cuts she had, and then I slipped my hand under her back, feeling for the second break in her spine. When I touched it, her eyes closed and her body relaxed. She pa.s.sed out.

Panic seized my chest. There was a chance that this was too much. That what I was doing to her body was too much trauma, too much energy. I could end up hurting her even more or sending her into shock or something. I thought of how she had looked right before the truck hit. Her red bathing suit and shorts, tanned skin, her brown hair pulled back on top of her head, sneakers on her feet, her cell phone to her ear, standing at the bottom of the hill, at the edge of the parking lot, on the cusp of the road. Directly in the truck's path.

"Ben, we gotta go," Eli said.

This was all my fault. "I'm so sorry," I said, leaning forward, pressing my lips to her forehead.

She stirred, moving her legs with a pained sigh. I pulled back to see her eyes were open again.

"You're going to be all right," I breathed as I sat up. Her brown eyes looked up at me, and I said it again. "You're going to be all right." This time I couldn't help but smile. Exhaustion weighed my body down, making me feel weak and dizzy, but it didn't matter. She was really going to be okay. She looked whole again, like herself.

I brushed a strand of hair out of her face.

I had put her back together. I saved her life like she had saved minea"for real this time. She wouldn't ever forget this. I'd be imprinted on her memory the same way she'd been imprinted on mine. Even when I went back home, we would still always be a part of each other's lives.

Someone grabbed my arm, and I realized how little strength I had left.

"Let's go!" Reid yelled, and Eli yanked me off the road.

Reid had his bike already, and mine and Eli's were both lying on their sides. I didn't have time to ask who brought my bike down or thank them for coming after me, or apologize for breaking the rules we had and the ones we didn't.

"You okay to get up the hill?" Eli asked, grabbing my bike.

I nodded. I would have to be. We needed to get out of here. I took my bike from him, swung my leg over, and followed Reid, who'd already started up the hill.

Eli followed me, and we caught up to Reid. I felt tempted to turn around and look back, check on Janelle one last time, but I forced myself to keep going. She was alive again; she wasn't broken. That was the best I could do.

"The guy in the truck?" I said, my voice labored.