Golden (13 page)

Orion jumped in again with me, and we swam for as long as we could stand the cold, legs brushing and hearts pounding and teeth chattering.

I've always thought I'm most myself when I'm with Shane, but today with Orion I was most like who I want to be. I was someone different and bold and honest. Not embarrassed or unsure about anything. Not even the feel of his eyes taking in the lines of my body, or the quiet shush of pencil moving over paper as he drew me there on the beach, drying in the afternoon sun.

I stop at the doodle at the bottom of the page. Orion's tattoo. She went home and drew it in her journal, like a memento from the day. I'm about to go back and reread what he said it meant when the high-pitched monotone of the bell rings out above my head. I jump at the sound of it, and it takes me a good few seconds to get my bearings and go from watching Julianna and Orion fall for each other at the edge of McCloud Lake to gathering up my stuff so I can make it to second period.

I tuck Julianna's journal in my backpack, grab the box full of the others I still haven't finished addressing, and ease open the closet door, wondering if I'm the only person in the world besides the two of them who knows about this. I wonder where it went from there. If they saw each other again. Where Orion ended up. If Shane ever found out. What he would've done. The leap my mind makes at that last thought is a dark one and I dismiss it quickly before I slip out the door.

In the hallway it's crowded and bright and feels worlds away from Julianna and the story that's unfolding on the pages of her journal. It's all I can do not to duck back in the closet and finish reading. As much as I want to, though, I can't miss a second day of all my classes for that. But nothing says I can't pick it back up after school. Maybe even up at the lake where chance brought them together and choice made them stay.

“Some say the world will end in fire,

Some say ice.

From what I've tasted of desire

I hold with those who favor fire.”

—“FIRE AND ICE,” 1920

The dead trees are how I know I'm in the right place. Only now it's not just a few at the edge of the lake. All of the trees around McCloud are dead from the volcanic gas that started leaking up through the ground years ago. It had probably just started when Julianna and Orion were up there. For a while the whole area was closed down, but then the scientists, or forest service, or whoever decides those things, determined it was safe for people to be in the area, even though the trees were dying. I never came up here after
that, and the utterly deserted feeling it has makes me think not many other people do either.

When I get out of the car, it's so quiet in the parking lot I can almost hear my own heartbeat. The bleached white skeletons of the trees stand stiff against the gray afternoon sky like ghosts, which seems appropriate. It's creepy enough to make me question what I'm doing here alone. I could just as easily hole myself up in my room to read the rest of the journal. But like yesterday, something in me wants to see the place Julianna wrote about—where she once swam in a sparkling lake, lay under the midday sun, and fell for a boy she wasn't supposed to.

But it's so different here from how she wrote it, and it makes me a little sad as I look around at the emptiness. It's dead. A shadow of what it used to be. I wanted to see this place the way she did—beautiful and dreamy, and romantic. I thought maybe there would be something of that left. Some little piece of her world that's been here all this time, like another secret I might be let in on. But there's no life or beauty or magic up here. There's only whitewashed trees and a sky that's getting darker by the minute.

I came to see the lake, so I grab her journal and a sweatshirt just in case the clouds in the distance move in, and I head across the parking lot. The sign at the trailhead says it's a mile up to the lake, but as I step onto the trail, I remember her journal entry and feel like I'm closer than that. Like I'm right there with her, climbing the steep hill, maybe to end up at something I didn't see coming. The trail is narrow and twisty like she said, and between the gnarled roots pushing
up through the dirt and the loose rocks all around, I have to keep my eyes on the ground directly in front of me to keep from tripping.

As I walk, a sound like a soft, continuous exhale moves through the trees high above me, and I pause for a moment, startled and unsure of what it is. But then I feel the stray wisps of the breeze that made it; they reach down through the branches, lifting a few strands of my hair, making them dance around me. And I remember what she called this place. A dream world, she'd said, where two worlds meet. She'd been talking about herself and Orion. Today, it feels like her world and mine. It seems perfectly fitting that I should read her journal in this spot. There's something poetic about it. But more than once on the way up, I have to convince myself that Julianna didn't somehow, from beyond, put her journal in my hands for me to find, that the place is not haunted, and that I am not crazy for coming up here to do this.

After what seems like farther than a mile, the trail opens up to a rocky white beach, where the lapping of the water on the shore is the only sound besides the constant shush of the breeze. That part is just like she said. And the lake. Tucked down against sheer gray rock on the back side, it still sits perfectly calm and blue. Even in the pale afternoon light I can see straight through to the bottom, where so many dead trees have fallen in it looks like a forest has grown beneath the surface. I turn around to look for a decent place to sit, and that's when I see the letters carved into a tree, just a few feet from where I stand.

I WAS HERE.

Chills shoot down my back and out through my feet. In that instant it feels like she's talking to me, telling me I'm in the right place. It has to be the carving she mentioned in the journal, that Orion drew before he drew her. Which means she really was here.
They
were here together. So close. Maybe in this exact spot. It does feel like knowing a secret, and I sit down right there to read.

June 3

Shane gave me a gift today and I could barely look him in the eye. We sat in his Jeep at the edge of the creek, and when I opened the box from the jeweler, and it sparkled in the sun, I should have felt happy. I should've felt lucky that he's so sweet and giving and the one person who knows me best of anyone. But the only thing I felt was something heavy that started to twist, deep and tight, in my chest.

“It's beautiful,” I said.

And it was, but it wasn't anything I would've chosen for myself. Inside the box, on a layer of white satin, was a lacy silver snowflake, intricate and inlaid with tiny diamonds over the entire thing. The perfect necklace for his ice princess. He took it out when I didn't and held it up so it spun in the sunlight at the end of its delicate chain.

“I thought it looked like you. Here.” He undid the clasp and I automatically swept my hair to the side so he could hook it at the back of my neck.

“It's perfect,” he said. And he sat back and smiled, and the thing in my chest twisted even tighter, and the front seat of his Jeep felt ten times smaller, because at that moment the only thing I could think about was Orion. And of how much more I'd felt like me at the lake with him yesterday than I did in Shane's car right then.

I brought my hand to where the necklace hung on my chest, felt the new weight of it around my neck. “It really is beautiful, but you didn't need to do this . . . . I don't . . .”

I searched his face, nervous all of a sudden about what he might be able to see written on mine. It seems ridiculous, but I was worried he'd look at me and know something was off. Maybe even be able to see that since the day at the lake, I haven't stopped thinking about Orion, and it's made a mess of me. Nothing happened between us. Nothing physical, anyway. We never touched, and after a while, we hardly even spoke. But I felt different. Torn. And today I was afraid Shane would notice. It made me want to hide.

“Why did you do this?” I asked him. It was heavy, the guilt of feeling what I did, and it came out more as an accusation than a question.

“Wow. Do I need a reason? I just wanted to surprise you.” He leaned back against the seat and looked out his window, and I could feel the distance between us stretch beyond the space between our two seats. “If you don't like it you can take it back,” he said after a moment. I didn't answer. “Am I missing something? Because you're acting weird.”

I put a hand on his leg, wanting to smooth the tension away. “No, no. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound that way. I love it. I just wasn't expecting this . . .”

“That's usually how surprises work,” he said, a smile returning.

I leaned over the seat and took his face in my hands, kissed him on both cheeks. “It's perfect, thank you. You're too good to me. You know that, right?” My stomach clenched when I said it, because of how true it was.

“I could never be too good to you, Jules.” He smiled again and ran his fingers through my hair, and then, through lips that kissed mine, he whispered, “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I told him. And I meant it. But today when I said it, the words felt distant.

I shiver again. I know the necklace she's talking about. They found it on the river's edge, not far from Shane's Jeep.

June 6