“Okay. I’ll say you’re meditating.” Zadie sighed.
Finn couldn’t help but grin as she watched Joel crawl out fromunder the watermelon and attempt to remake the bed while muttering to himself. “He’s a hoot,” she said. “I’m still bummed you guys broke up.”
“That makes one of us.”
“Oh, come on. You must have missed him a little.”
Zadie hesitated. “Yeah, kinda. He can be… a lot, but he was the only person who was really there for me after Mom left.”
Finn studied her sister’s face. Zadie was usually hard to read, a letter written in invisible ink, but Finn could tell Zadie had meant what she’d said. Joel had been there for her during a time when no one else was.
No one—including her.
Finn cringed, remembering all the times she had been too busy with school or sports or dinner with her foster family to answer Zadie’s calls; all the times she’d had to cancel their plans to go out for frozen yogurt.Oh, and then there was that one time I canceled the beach vacation she’d been planning for months to drag her out to the desert, where she could get stuck in a car with her ex-boyfriend.Had her sister been hurting all those years, and she’d just now noticed? Finn had been only a kid when their mom left, but that now felt like a feeble excuse.
“I was thinking…” she began. “Rice is only two hours from Austin. You can come visit me in the dorms, or I could drive down on weekends to see you.”
Zadie turned her face away, but Finn could tell from the crack in her sister’s voice that her offer had meant something to her. “I’d like that,” she said.
Black nail polish. Joan Jett poster. Finn must have been asleep because she was back in Zadie’s childhood room.
Yellow carpet. She was in the hallway now. Honeyed light spilled down the stairs.
Finn/Zadie kept one hand on the banister. She counted her steps:one, two, three…
Fourteen.A bird somewhere was singing. Her mom would leave the windows open on days when the weather wasn’t too hot.
Fresh air. Fresh air is good for you.
But it was windy that day. Fresh air had knocked over a pencil cactus and spilled its dirt onto the windowsill. The wordsclose the windowfilled her head as if it were her own thought, but it wasn’t.
A premonition was telling her to close the window.
Another gust rattled the window screen, and the clay pot rolled to the edge of the sill, then over it. Finn/Zadie outstretched her arms instinctively, swiping air. When the pot smashed, she felt the impact in her bones.
Finn woke with a start, but not wrapped up in her sleeping bag. She felt pine needles underneath her, glimpsed the moon through a web of branches.I must have sleepwalked.How far was she from camp? It couldn’t be that far. She could still smell the lingering scent of their campfire. Hopefully, she could find her way back before Zadie noticed she was missing. If Zadie knew that on top of her echoes, Finn was now sleepwalking, she would probably drive them back to Texas first thing in the morning, and she couldn’t let that happen.
It occurred to Finn that their mom’s gift—if that’s what it was—was a lot like sleepwalking. Where did she go in those in-between moments? Did she go backward as Finn did or forward like Zadie? Or did she lose time because she was somewhere in her own head, somewhere no one could follow?
It’s getting worse.The phrase sent a chill through Finn’s bones. She had found herself thinking about it more often since the echo at the bar, not just out of a desire to know what her mom meant by it, but because she’d started to feel something like it herself. She would never admit it to Zadie, but the moment she’d touched that bike, she’d felt like a different person. In the echo, she was no longer Finn, the casual observer. She wasn’t just feeling her mother’s memories. She was living them.
Zadie’s heart had nearly stopped when she woke up to find Finn gone and the tent flap open. Her heart nearly stopped a second time when she saw a dark shape emerging from the woods.
“Gah!”Finn shielded her eyes with her hands as Zadie aimed her flashlight at her sister’s face. “Are you trying to blind me or something?”
“Sorry. I thought you were a bear,” Zadie said, lowering her flashlight. She looked agitated. “Where were you? I was freaking out.”
“Bathroom.”
“Oh,” Zadie said, relaxing a little. “I thought you’d run away again. I was about to go in there looking for you.”
“Nope. Just had to, you know—”
Zadie raised her hand, preventing her from elaborating further. “Got it.”
Finn waved a hand in the direction of the tent, and said, stilted, “Well, I should probably…”
“Yeah. Sorry.” Zadie stepped aside to let her pass, but something was gnawing at her. She looked down at the flashlight in her hands. Why hadn’t Finn taken it with her? Surely the forest was too dark to see where she was going without it. To test her theory, Zadie clicked off the flashlight and stumbled her way back to the tent in the dark.