HOW MANY ANSWERS YOU SEEK ARE JUST A PART OF YOU, WAITING TO BE FOUND?
The game has changed.
Fresh from her first brush with mortality, a fragile Sadie Matthau is playing human in New York while the Survivors endure unimaginable tragedy. Wrought wit...
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I WANDERED OUT TO SWAN LAKE, UNABLE TO SLEEP.
I let my bare feet drag in the edge of the water. It had been over a year since I'd thrown myself into the lake, sinking to the bottom. In that time, I had grown into a person I hardly recognized. Both in wonderful ways and in awful ways.
Soon I realized I wasn't alone.
"Surely you aren't thinking of reenacting your particularly dramatic suicide scene?" Ginny called. She appeared at my side after launching herself across the lake in a single bound. She was barefoot, in a sheer vintage T-shirt, shorts that might have actually been underwear, and a mink coat. So very, very Ginny.
"Nothing like that," I said. "Can't sleep."
"You have one of the more restless minds I've ever encountered," she said.
"Sorry," I shrugged. "I'd change it if I could." She wandered along the lakeshore beside me, and I could feel heavy things weighing on her mind. "How are you holding up, Ginny? I feel like I haven't talked to you in forever."
"That's because you haven't." A bit of coldness, possibly resentment floated off her and hovered over my head.
"You're still angry with me for leaving?" I asked. She didn't answer but simply kept her eyes fixed on the ground. "We've got a lot ahead of us right now, and you're an integral part of the whole thing. If you're upset, then say it. Let's have it out."
"You're asking me to talk about my feelings? How very un-Sadie of you," she smiled. Then she bounded away again, across the lake to the far end where mountains on either side dipped down into a small plain at the water's edge. I followed her across and came up beside her as she sat on the beach. She dipped her feet in the icy black water. "Angry is the wrong word," she finally said. "Confused might be a better one."
"I'm listening," I said.
"I don't get you sometimes," she admitted. "From your own accounts, you had this hellish experience with the Survivors, and you seemed to hate your existence with them with a new fervor once you finally got out among humans. And then you met us. You found a family of creatures like you who live among humans. You found a family willing to take you in as their own. You got a mother and a father, which you've never had. You got a sister with similar interests, for crying out loud. And you got Everett. You even get a guarantee that you and Everett would end up together in the future, and yet, somehow, all this doesn't seem to make you happy."
"Maybe I'll never be happy," I said looking down at the ground around me.
Ginny laughed. "That's precisely the wrong way to look at it. I was so proud of you yesterday. That moment where you took control? It was the moment we've all been waiting for. They've waited for you to get your head together, but as the only one among us actually inside your head, I have been dying for it to come. And I was excited to see what the new, stronger, more badass Sadie would bring us, but when you say things like that I realize that maybe your attitude isn't going to be as different as I'd hoped."
