Page 19 of Lifebound

I didn’t stop. I just ran out the door and stopped in the driveway. The wide road in front of the houses was empty. Lights were on everywhere, and the night was quiet. I closed my eyes and breathed in deeply, tried to calm down my racing heart.

But Dad called my name again, and what little control I had left disappeared. I turned and ran all the way around the house, into the forest, and I didn’t look back.

Trees. Darkness. Silver moonlight barely peeking through the canopy. Tall grass blades and bushes and leaves fallen from the trees. Pines and twigs breaking underneath my feet. I was breathing and my heart was beating in my ears, but I could have sworn that I was the wind. I could have sworn I didn’t exist outside of this darkness.

Then the trees ended.

My body, my thoughts came to a halt as I looked ahead into the meadow illuminated by the silver light of the moon shining in the sky. I’d run much, much farther than I’d intended to.

As if hypnotized, I stepped out of the tree line and the moonlight touched my skin. The tall grass, the wildflowers, the trees surrounding the open space looked so different now than they had back then—a place where I’d danced and sang to myself and made pretty tiaras and felt like a real-life princess. A place where I could be completely me, so absolutelyfreefor the first time in my life when I still didn’t even know what freedom meant.

Where that snake bit me, and where that boy with the golden eyes saved my life.Changedmy life forever.

I went to the very place where I had fallen that day. I looked around, breathed in the smell of pines, heard the song of the nightingales and the hooting of the owls. I tried to see through the shadows of the trees, as if a part of me was hoping to find a golden-eyed boy smiling at me.

There was nobody there.

My eyes closed and the tears that had gathered in them came out of me all at once, spilled down my cheeks and dripped from my chin. My head lowered but my chest felt like it was on fire, and my muscles locked tightly, too. The flames that were ignited over my very heart traveled up and down my body, sent scorching heat to the palms of my hands. A scream ripped out of me, long and hard, and birds flew from their branches and animals scattered away. I heard it all—or maybe it was just my imagination—but I fell on my knees on the forest floor, and I cried more tears, warmer, bigger, until my eyes opened. Until I saw twigs and pines and leaves and flowers floating in the air around me, the moonlight giving them an eerie appearance, like they were ghosts, translucent, not really there.

And the palms of my hands were glowing.

This I had never noticed before in my room, but the darkness made it easy to see how the skin of my palms had come alive, how they pulsated with a heat that should have melted my hands off completely. It didn’t, though. Instead, it made everything around me that wasn’t attached to the ground, possibly in a half-mile radius, levitate in the air.

I didn’t try to stop it. I didn’t look at any of it for long, either—couldn’t if I tried. Too many tears in my eyes. They closed, and my chin rested against my chest, and my shoulders shook now and then.

For a while, I sat there in the middle of the meadow in silence. My hands cooled down more with each new tear, until nothing around me was floating in the air anymore.

It was over. Everything was over for real.

In that moment, I saw what I wanted—what Ineededto do with more clarity than I ever had before.

This was my very last night in this town. Tomorrow, I left Lavender Hill behind.

five

My handsstill shook a little when I sat on the rooftop of my garage and waited for Betty. She came with beers in hand, sat across from me on crossed legs. Looked at my face, swollen and red because I’d only stopped crying a half hour ago when I came out of the forest.

The words were there at the tip of my tongue, and I looked into her wide amber eyes. Held my breath for a few moments.

Then…

“I’m leaving.”

The words came fromherlips, not mine.

Apparently, shehadapplied for colleges back in January because her parents had insisted that she needed to keep her options open, see what more she could do out there in the world. She hadn’t told me because she was sure that she wasnevergoing to leave here, but she’d sent in the applications to get her parents off her back.

Turned out, two colleges had accepted her—one of them the Thornton School of Music in L.A. That’s why she had chosen to go—living in L.A. had been a dream for her since we were young. Learning to play the violin professionally and get an actual degree was just the cherry on top.

“I didn’t actually think I’d get it,” she told me after half our beers were gone, and after we hugged and cried and hugged some more.

“Of course, you would. They’re smart fuckers to have accepted you. You’re going to kick ass, babe.” I touched my can to hers, though neither of us drank anymore. We just lay down on the rooftop and watched the clouds in the sky that sometimes moved and allowed us a glimpse of the stars they hid.

“I know, I know,” she said. “And it’s not that far.”

My stomach fell then, and this time, the words, “I’m leaving,” came out ofmylips.

“I know,” Betty said, surprising me. “I’ve known for a while now.”

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