Mirrored (27 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“What the—?” Jonah yells.

But I know. Of course it’s Violet. She looks different than the nurse I saw before, but I know her by the expression on her face. And, um, the fact that she’s not letting us move.

The first thought that flashes through my head is that I must be right about Jonah. I must be close. Violet hasn’t bothered Celine until now. If she’s suddenly trying to stop me, she must know that Jonah is the handsome prince who can wake Celine.

I lunge for the alarm button. It starts ringing. Jonah’s screaming, “Help! Help! I’m being kidnapped! I’m a rock star!” But then, just as suddenly, my arm, my whole body freezes. Jonah’s screams stop. I can see that he, too, is frozen, stone-like, like Medusa’s victims. I can only move my eyes, and with them, I see Violet push the button for the roof.

“I’ll drag you up and throw you off. Falling from a great height is your destiny, dwarf.”

I feel the elevator start up again. I can’t do anything about it.

And then, there’s another person in the elevator. She looks like Violet. My eyes take in blazing red hair and high-heeled boots. “What are you doing here?” the nurse-Violet screams.

“Saving them!” the other Violet screams, so I know it’s Kendra. “It’s too late to save you. Violet, you disappoint me.”

The elevator again jolts to a stop.

“Disappoint you? I always disappoint you,” Nurse Violet mocks. “I disappoint everyone.”

“That’s not true. I thought you were the daughter I never had. It breaks my heart to have to stop you, to have to use tough love.”

“Then don’t!” Nurse Violet screams.

And suddenly, a ball of fire flies right at Kendra and me. I can move, and I duck to avoid it. Kendra somehow quashes the flame, but there is another, and another. Jonah is shrieking. The doors open, and Kendra screams at us to run, even as she uses a fireball of her own to hold Nurse Violet at bay.

“How?” I look out the door. The elevator is several feet above where it’s supposed to be, hovering above the floor. The white linoleum floor looks slick and hard as ice.

“Just jump!” Kendra/Violet says.

And, amazingly, tugging Jonah behind me, I do.

I fall hard, but I don’t die. Jonah lands neatly, and I yell, “Come on!” I don’t look back. I hear the door close. I think, hope, we’re on the right floor, Celine’s floor. I check the numbers on the doors, 1201, 1202. Yes! We skid around a corner and almost hit an oncoming nurse.

“Slow down!” she yells.

At least it’s not Violet. We slow. Jonah’s been making frightened, incredulous sounds, combined with lots of cursing. Once we pass the
nurse, he says, “What the hell was that?”

“A witch.” I don’t look at him. “I didn’t tell you because you’d have thought I was lying. Or crazy. But now you know. A witch put a spell on Celine to make her go to sleep. I want you to kiss her, so you can wake her up.” I keep walking fast, not looking at him. Eyes on the prize. Celine.

Presumably because of what he’s seen, Jonah doesn’t seem to think I’m crazy. “You think I can break the spell?”

“You’re a handsome prince, aren’t you? Or as close as we have.” We reach a corner. I grab the wall to stop myself, then check around it.

“Oh, yeah.” He’s panting, but he grins. “Guess I am.”

We round the corner at a fast walk, me working hard to keep up with Jonah’s longer legs. I say, “So you’ll do it?”

“Sure. Why not?”

Why not? Because you might be putting yourself in a witch’s path.
But I don’t say it. Why would I? If he’s too dumb to realize it, I’m not going to enlighten him. I just need him to wake Celine. He can leave right after. In fact, I’d prefer it.

We fast-walk around a last corner, then to Celine’s door.

I open it.

She is so beautiful. It’s been a day since I’ve seen her, and I am stunned by her like it’s the first time. She lies there, so pale against the white sheets. Her black hair is fanned out behind her on the pillow, and her full, red lips are exactly the ones I’ve always wanted to kiss.

Please let this work. Please come back to me.

I jut my hand toward her, in case Jonah doesn’t get
which
comatose girl exactly I meant. “That’s her.” It’s hard to form words. “Celine.” Something’s wedged in my throat, making it hard to talk.
The idea that, if this doesn’t work, maybe nothing will. She might never awaken, she might die, and with her, the possibility—however slight—that I keep with me every night as I drift off to sleep, the possibility that she could someday love me.

Of course, if it works, if Jonah’s kiss wakes her, that possibility will be gone anyway. He doesn’t know her, but once he sees how pretty and sweet and funny she is, he’ll fall in love with her. Even a douche like him would know she’s special. They’ll walk off into the night together, like Andie and Blane, and I’ll be left all alone—well, alone with a houseful of people, but without her. So, alone.

Still, I have to try it. I love her. She needs to be alive on this planet, even if it’s not with me. That’s what love is, after all, wanting the best for the other person, not yourself. I learned that the hard way.

Jonah looks at her, and smiles. “She’s lovely.” His admiration is genuine, of course. With his accent, it comes out all
loff-lee
, which is probably why girls think he’s so hot. Maybe someday, I can move to another town where nobody knows me, pretend to be a Brit, and get all sorts of girls, short girls, tall girls, lots of girls. Just not Celine.

“She is,” I say. “Loff-lee. She’s nice too, and funny, and talented and . . . good with kids. She’s like no one I ever met before, which is why I need you to help her.”

“And you think my kissing her . . . ?”

“I hope so.”
Do I hope so? I do.
“I can be straight with you now that you’ve seen the witches, seen what they can do. This is her only chance.”

He shrugs. “Guess we can try.” And then, without another word, he leans down toward her and . . .

I can’t look. I turn away. This is what I wanted, dammit. This is what I wanted, the reason I traveled so far, lied to my parents, hid in the room service cart, and hung from a balcony. I want this. I just
want her to wake up, no matter what.

The room is silent. God, are they still kissing, all this time? I want to look, but I don’t want to see if she’s, you know, enjoying it too much.

Finally, Jonah’s voice says, “I don’t think it worked, man.”

My chest is a deflating balloon. My eyes ache like I just came out of salt water. I squeeze them together. I wanted it to work. I did. Now what?

I turn back, opening them. Jonah’s staring down at Celine. “I was really hoping it would, and not just because I wanted the reputation of having my magic lips raise someone from the dead. I knew if you were willing to go to all that trouble for her, she must have been pretty special.”

It’s a really coherent thing for him to say. Still, the past tense about kills me. My eyes are damp, but I’m not going to wipe them, not in front of him. “She was. She is.”

He tosses his hair a little girlishly. “So this spell, the spell the witch put on her, it said
I
had to kiss her?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. In all the fairy tales, the girl gets awakened by a handsome prince. I was going with that idea.”

He chuckles. “Perhaps not handsome or princely enough.” He looks down, thinking. “My mum used to read me those storybooks. It was nice. I was a shit to my mum, wasn’t I?”

“Yeah, sort of.” I was a shit to mine too, and it didn’t even help.

“You know,” Jonah says, “most of my books talked about true love as well. Perhaps that’s a factor. Perhaps that’s what’s missing, the love part. Beautiful as she is, I don’t love her.”

That must be it. Still, I say, “She loves you, though. She listens to all your songs, has posters of you all over the place, writes your initials on her notebook in pink highlighter . . .”

He throws back his head then and laughs. “But that describes
half the teenaged girls in the world, these idiots who camp out in the airport. Do you think I can resuscitate all of them too?”

“They probably don’t all need it.” Celine’s not an idiot, but he does have a point.

“Still, I think your definition of love may be a little thin.”

“My definition of love isn’t thin at all.” I take Celine’s hand and squeeze it in the silent room. It’s so soft, and I remember teaching her to play the piano, one finger over the other. I love her fingers.

Jonah sees me and nods. “Surely there must be someone who actually loves her, who
knows
and loves her. She’s quite pretty.” He looks back at her, and now, I hate him looking at her, since it didn’t work. He turns back toward me.

“She’s very pretty,” I say. “Nice too, and talented and fun. But she doesn’t have a boyfriend, if that’s what you mean.” When you think about it, it’s crazy that someone as cool as Celine doesn’t have hundreds of guys in love with her. She once told me she didn’t like guys who think they’re hot. That describes most guys at our school.

Jonah tugs at his pants, then seems to realize they aren’t falling down, since they’re the geeky pants his mom got him. “Well, maybe not a boyfriend, but it strikes me that someone who went to all this trouble for her—I mean, someone who could have been arrested dozens of times. Someone who did get beaten up by my bodyguards—that, perhaps, that person may in fact be her true love.”

Oh. Duh. He means me. Am I that easy to see through? Is he smarter than I thought? “Yeah, well, of course I love her. But that doesn’t mean she loves me back. I mean, look at her, and then look at me.”

“Of course,” he says, and I sort of want to hit him for agreeing so quickly, but then, he says, “Ahem. I mean, of course, we don’t know what she thinks, and she isn’t awake to tell us. She could love you. You have rather a charming personality.”

“Gee, thanks.” This guy’s getting less charming by the minute.

“But even assuming you’re right, does it have to be mutual? If you are truly in love with her, might that not be enough love?”

“I don’t know. I hadn’t thought of that.” I hadn’t.

“Should you not perhaps, try?”

I think about it. I’ve wanted to kiss her since forever, or at least a few months. But the thing that stopped me was her reaction, what she’d think of me. If I didn’t kiss her, we could be friends. I could be with her all the time, like buddies, see her every day. But if I kissed her, it would get all awkward if she didn’t love me back. I didn’t want to upset things.

Now, she’s in a coma. She wouldn’t need to know I kissed her. In fact, I’ll take it to the grave. Is that pervy? Maybe. Perhaps, as Jonah would say. But does that matter? The fact is, she holds my heart in her body, and if she doesn’t awaken, I may die.

I nod. I step up to Celine. Her lips are so full in her heart-shaped face. I wish she’d open her eyes so I could see those too, so I don’t feel like I’m taking advantage. But, of course, that defeats the purpose of kissing her. I touch a lock of the shiny, black hair on the white pillowcase. It feels soft like the satiny ribbons my mother uses on packages at Christmas or on my sister’s hair. Celine used to do Isabella’s hair in ribbons. I can hear her breathing, smell the sweetness of her breath. I imagine for a moment that she loves me. It’s not so impossible, is it? I’m a great guy. I picture us sitting at the piano that one night, me playing “Clair de Lune”, trying to impress her
.
She could have loved me then. I reach forward and adjust her face so it’s leaning toward me. I feel like there’s no air in the room.

It’s not like I’ve never kissed a girl before. Just not this girl, the one that matters. And there’s the part about her being asleep. I inhale through my nose. Then, my lips meet hers.

God.

I mean to give her a small kiss, a polite kiss, not be like one of
those guys who waits until a girl passes out then mauls her. I love this girl. I love this girl, but I don’t want her like that, not by fraud. In my fantasies, she wants me too. And yet, when our lips meet, I feel a flash of something—call it electricity, call it magnetism, call it magic—binding us together, and I can’t let go, I can’t let go, and I’m kissing her like I’ve always imagined.

Finally, I back off. I more than back off. I pull my lips off her like a plunger getting yanked out of a toilet. I run behind Jonah, then out the door.

It didn’t work. I knew it wouldn’t. A regular guy like me couldn’t possibly be the true love of the most beautiful girl in maybe the whole world. I’m not Blane. Heck, I’m not even Duckie. Still, I hoped it would work. I hoped it would because now, I’m out of ideas, and Celine’s still in a coma and I am there with her. Maybe she’ll die or just stay there, suspended, forever, and I will never have anyone to teach piano to or watch John Hughes movies with, no one to tell me I don’t have to be funny for people to like me.

And, at that moment, with no one there to see except the nurses (who are probably used to it), I give way to the tears that had been threatening to seep out of my eyes for the past week. I bury my face in my hands and sob.
Celine.

“You’re here. You?”

What?
A voice from inside the room. Not Jonah’s voice. A girl’s voice. Celine’s voice! But how?

“I am here,” Jonah’s voice says back. “Was it . . . Celine?”

“Yes. I had a dream about you. You were in it. In my dream, you kissed me. I thought it was only a dream because it sounded so crazy. I mean, why would Jonah Prince be here with me? It’s so incredible.”

She’s talking to Jonah. She’s so happy to see him.

“Why indeed,” he says. “A little friend of yours came to see me, to tell me about you.”

No. No. Don’t tell her I kissed her. It will ruin everything.

“A little . . . oh, you must mean—Goose! In my dream, you weren’t the only one who kissed me. In my dream, Goose kissed me, and that’s what woke me up.”

What?

“Goose!” She’s calling me. “Where is he?” Her voice holds a note of panic I can’t help but imagine is from missing me. Could it be? I wipe away the embarrassing tears. My face hurts.