chapter one
SULLY
It wasn’t until I lost my parents in a car accident that I learned about the gift I inherited from my mother. The gift that changed everything I thought I knew about myself and my family.
Sometimes, I even manage to forget the new powers I possess, until I touch something, anything, and am bombarded by memories. I can’t very well pull away from my brother’s outstretched hand as he passes a packing box to me to load into the truck, so I brace myself and wince as I’m bombarded by his thoughts and memories.
I wonder if there will be any hot girls there.
I wish Sully would talk to me like we used to.
There better be enough gas in this thing to make it a couple hours north at least.
As he thinks about the truck, an image flashes through my mind of the day my parents brought home the truck for his sixteenth birthday, only I’m seeing and feeling everything from Sam’s point of view. I can even see my glowing, smiling face in the background.
A gasp wrenches from my chest and I jerk away, rubbing my hands together to rid myself of the remnants from the vision. They leak from my mind like sand in an hourglass and I refocus on Sam’s concerned face in front of me.
“Hey, you okay?”
I hate that question. I must have been asked it a thousand times since the night we lost our parents. As a result, I bite out, “I’m fine,” with more force than necessary. I immediately regret it when his face falls and I want to say something to apologize, but there are no words left.
How do I tell him what’s happened to me? How do I even do that without sounding crazy?
Before I can offer an explanation, he’s slamming the back door and loping to the driver’s seat. I sigh and lift my thick brown hair off of my shoulders. I’m looking forward to cooler weather in Indiana.
As he pulls away from the curb of the home we spent our entire lives in, I keep my eyes on its shrinking form in the rearview mirror. I wish I’d been given the power to control time instead of…whatever it is I have. At least it would allow me to do something useful.
Like save my parents.
Instead, the only thing I have are memories. All of them, it seems. It doesn’t matter if it’s a person or an inanimate object. If I touch it, I see everything about it. Like a history lesson I wish I could ignore as easily as I had my seventh period AP class senior year.
It’s no wonder my mom was so eerily in tune with us.
For a while I thought maybe Sam had gotten it, too. I’d even tried bringing it up at the funeral, but he only looked at me like I was crazy.
I didn’t bring it up again.
As I leave everything I’ve ever known behind, I wonder if I’ll ever start to feel like the girl I was before my life fell apart. I touch the window in farewell as our house disappears from view. A tear leaks from the corner of my eye and even in my sorrow, the memory of Sam making out with his ex-girlfriend fills my thoughts. I jerk my hand away, rubbing it on my jeans and groaning. That was definitely not an image I want burned into my brain. I force myself to relax and fall asleep. I manage to do so somewhere around Mississippi.
“Wake up, we’re almost there,” Sam says.
I peel myself off of the center console and look out into a different world. Florida doesn’t have time for seasons like fall or winter. There’s barely a drop in temperature before the sun comes back, brighter than ever.
Somehow we made it to Indiana without killing each other. Farmland and palm trees were replaced with full, towering oaks. Beach and sand with thick, vibrant woods. And endless country roads with a quaint little town nestled at the edge of a massive national forest.
I watch Sam out of the corner of my eye as his aviator sunglasses flash and his lips, identical to my own, mouth along with the pop song on the radio. A few months ago, I would have been singing along with him—we made the perfect duet. Call it twintuition or whatever. Now I don’t even have the energy to mouth the words.
“C’mon, Sully. It’s your favorite song,” Sam says beside me. He only calls me Sully when he’s trying to be particularly pitiful. Normally it makes me smile, but this time it doesn’t. I feel…nothing. Inside, I am empty and raw. I tug on my mother’s locket and a wisp of her face appears, but it’s faint, almost transparent. Maybe there’s a limited number of times I can revisit a memory.
The thought makes me ache. “Don’t call me that,” I say as I stare at the passing scenery. Just hearing that name now makes me want to explode.
The last time he called me Sully was the night our parents died. I was laying on my bed in the soft, dreamy space between awake and unconsciousness. My earbuds were crooning a sweet song, and I was entirely relaxed. Then, I shot straight up in bed, my heart beating double time in my chest. At first, I thought it was one of those dreams where you’re falling, but wake up just before yousplaton the ground. But it wasn’t. A knock came at my door and my head jerked in its direction to find Sam in the doorway. The look on his face told me it wasn’t a dream. That what was coming was the stuff of nightmares. The racing heart was because he felt it, too.
I relaxed a little just knowing he was there. “You scared me,” I told him.
When he didn’t crack a joke or even a smile, I pulled out the earbuds. “Something wrong? Did you and Lena have another fight?” She was the cheerleading captain to his quarterback. They were notorious for their on-again off-again relationship. “Mom and Dad home?”
It was their twentieth anniversary and he’d taken her out to their favorite restaurant to celebrate. I made fun of them when they were leaving for how sappy they were about it, but inside I loved the way their eyes caught each other from across the room or when my dad stopped what he was doing just to kiss her silly.
