Page 113 of The Same Backward as Forward
No pretending.
It doesn’t take long for me to become the kind of person that others stare straight through. My hair grows longer, my body frailer. I am a ghost, and time is neither an arrow nor a wave. I’m halfway convinced it doesn’t even really exist.
I’m halfway convinced thatIdon’t exist, either.
I’m a cat in a box that no one ever opens, Schrödinger’s addict, deadandalive, sober but very far from sound. There are times when I want oblivion so badly that I can do nothing but stare and stare and stare at a bottle of liquor or a little white pill, but I never partake.
And then one day, in an alleyway, another addict comes at me with a jackknife because he doesn’t like the way I’m staring at his whiskey. And I just… stand there. He slashes at me twice, three times, four.
I know that I don’t get to die. I promised. I know that. But it doesn’t even hurt.
Why doesn’t it hurt?
Schrödinger’s addict is lying on the pavement, bleeding out, but all Schrödinger’s addict can do is wait for the universe to open the box and go to a place in his mind where everything is warm and light.A white sand beach. A tropical sunset. A backlit angel.As the world begins to fade away, I tell myself a story.
Once upon a time, there was a girl…
Chapter 39
I wake up in a white room—white walls, white ceiling, white floor. I think at first that I am dead, that this is whatever comes next, but then the pain hits me.
I look down at my body. I’m wearing brand-new clothes—white, like the room. My wounds have been patched. I peel back one of the bandages on my arms to see a row of neat little stitches. The skin is partly healed. There is not a drop of blood on the white bandage.
Time.I have no idea how much of it has passed or where I am—a hospital of some kind, I assume, except when I sit up, I realize that I am lying on the floor. There is no bed, no visible medical equipment of any kind.
No windows.
No doors.
And that is when I notice that something has been etched into the white floor, the white ceiling, the white walls—thick lines that twist and turn, indentions I can press my finger into.
Another maze.
In my mind, I go back to the place where nothing can touch me, a place where I can rewrite our fairy tale as often as I like. In thisversion, my name really is Harry. Instead of having blood on my hands, I’m just a spoiled, reckless rich boy in withdrawal. And she is Hannah—alwaysHannah.
Her family still wants me dead—but it’s because of something I witnessed, not something I did. Maybe they shot me and left me for dead, and she found me and hid me away. As she heals me, I am awful to her.
Until I’m not.
And she hates me—until she doesn’t.
“You’re awake.” Those words manage to permeate my mind, not a single one of my mental walls high enough to keep them out. I am still alone in the white room, the words delivered over a speaker.
Father, I think—but that’s not a man’s voice. It’s my mother’s. And my mother isdead.
Even a pale imitation of a person sees a newspaper occasionally, and my mother’s funeral—her very recent funeral—was quite the affair.
It’s him, I think.It has to be.Billionaire Tobias Hawthorne’s inventiveness knows no end. Maybe he’s playing a recording of my mother’s voice. Maybe it’s something more complex. Regardless of the precise method, I refuse to give my father the pleasure of acknowledging his latest clever trick.
“So you found me,” I say, no emotion whatsoever in my voice.Found me. Saved me. Brought me here and locked me in.I take it this is an intervention.
“This isn’t you, Toby.”
I try to remember if my mother said those exact words to me the last time I was locked in a box like this. “You don’t know me,” I retort.
“I know that you do not get to meet your end in a back alley with no one to mourn you, like you arenothing.”
The continued sound of my mother’s voice, saying something that Iknowshe has never said to me before, brings with it a bevy of memories: the smell of honeysuckle, a closet filled with ballgowns, party after party after party.
