“It’s real?”
“Real,” he said. He bent down, searching on the ground for something. When he stood up, I saw he was holding a jagged piece of rock. Before I could guess what he wasdoing, he’d dragged the rock across his forearm, leaving a nasty trail of blood in its wake.
I watched, my stomach sick and churning, as the cut knit itself up before my eyes.
“No shit,” I said.
“Yes shit.”
“Did you show that to my aunt?”
“Yes. She told me I have an accelerated rate of coagulation.”
“That sounds like her.”
I sat down on the floor. I breathed as deeply and as slowly as I could. I thought I felt Sam’s fingers in my hair, but I might have been imagining it; when I looked up, he was ten feet away from me.
“How old are you?” I asked him.
“Three hundred. Give or take.”
Three hundred years.
“And my aunt?”
“My best friend.”
“But you only knew her for a year. A year out of three hundred.”
“I’d been traveling for a long time. I hadn’t let myself settle down anywhere for more than a few months, a year, and I certainly never made friends. Invisibility—that’s always been the key for me. But with your aunt... She didn’t let up, didn’t take no for an answer. Three hundred years, yeah, but she was the first person who ever reallytook the time to get to know me. Even when I was doing my best to push her away.”
I tried to picture Sam and my aunt—Sam the same as he was now and my aunt only a teenager, almost my age. I had seen the pictures of them together, but it wasn’t the same as trying to imagine it, as trying to really believe it. Twenty-five years ago. But to Sam’s elongated timeline, that would feel like just a few minutes. Just like how humans feel like they own the universe, but really, we’re nothing more than the tiniest of blips on the evolutionary scale.
“Lottie?”
“Three hundred years,” I said. Had I already said that? Had I just thought it? “What do you even do for three hundred years?”
Sam laughed. “You just found out I’m immortal, and you want to know what I’ve been doing?”
“It seems relevant.”
“Well, mostly I just travel around. You can’t stay in one place for too long—maybe six or seven years, depending on where you are, what you’re doing. I try to keep a low profile. I work small jobs, easy to get. A bookstore clerk or a local tour guide. Basically every tourist city has those ghost tours, you know? I’ve done thousands of ghost tours. Something that won’t ask for a lot of qualifications or references. And I don’t really own that much. Just one suitcase holds everything. A few changes of clothes. A toothbrush. I get a library cardwherever I go, that’s important.”
“And you make enough money that way?”
“Usually,” he said.
“Are there others?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”
“Did you know, when you drank it?”
“There were rumors. It was a different time back then; people thought an eternal spring could really exist. When I found it... I think a part of me just knew. But I was young and stupid. And who doesn’t want to live forever? If you give that choice to the majority of people...”
“What about now? Do you regret it?”
The air around Sam’s head turned blue, then black, then back to normal.
