It was real to see her, to hear her, tofeelher. I’d been so angry at the world for so long for taking her from me. I’d been so stuck since that morning she’d been gone, and I hadn’t wanted to beunstuckfor a second after.
I hadn’t wanted to let go.
Tick-tock, tick-tock, tick-tock,went the voice in my head, sometimes Jinx’s, sometimes March’s, sometimes that of the Cheshire’s.
“I love you, you silly snake,”I whispered, and the words tasted like salt and sunlight and every single note she’d ever played on her piano.
I’d wanted to say that for so long, so badly. I’d held those words in my chest, unable to utter them at her grave, knowing she wouldn’t hear.
But here…she did. Jinx heard, and even though she didn’t turn her head or look at me again, I saw how her smile stretched wider. I saw how her cheek became rounder. I saw how eagerly she pressed those keys.
Those words were out there now. She finally heard me.
Icouldlet go.
Not because I wanted to—I didn’t. But because it was time. Because I’d been searching for a way to release myself since forever, and because I was no longer all alone in the world. There were others who…likedme. There was March whoknewme.
It was time.
Two long years, but it was time to fall back.
So, I let go.
With Jinx’s melody in the background, and her smile close to my heart, I let go. Notof her—I could never, if I tried—but I let go of the feeling of her loss that had pulled me under for so long. I stopped letting it drag me down andstarted to carry it instead. In my arms and my chest and my head—everywhere on me. Like that, it was still with me, her loss, but it didn’t weigh me down and paralyze me the way it used to.
Then my heart started beating again.
I heard it—that first beat, powerful enough to shake me, to set things into motion again. The floating, the images, the sounds—all at once, they came back. Jinx continued to play and the image of her sitting there in front of the piano dissolved little by little. I was crying, sobbing, smiling,letting go.
But I was no longer falling as I did.
I was floatingupinstead.
The faster my heart beat, the faster I breathed, the faster the scenes and the moments around me changed. I no longer focused on any of them, no longer really saw what the shapes and the colors showed me.
The piano faded away into nothing, but the sound of that melody remained in my head, and my fingers itched for a piece of paper to draw her sitting there, smiling, and the nothing pulled me farther and farther up…
Until I was lying.
Somewhere hard and cold. Somewherereal.
Hands on mine, on my cheeks. March’s voice cracking on my name. Mimi screaming something I couldn’t quite get.
I was back, in the real world where there was light behind my closed lids as I fought to open them—not scenes and moments from all of time flashing around me. I was back where Jinx no longer played her piano or smiled or talked to me about dreams…and that was okay.
It hurt, but it was okay.
I washere.
36
The melody played in the back of my mind, sometimes whole, smooth; sometimes full of the wrong notes. Both were equally perfect.
And equally painful.
“Ora?! Ora, can you hear me?”
The image of her sitting there bathed in sunlight, pouring her heart onto that keyboard was at the center of my mind, shining in the dark.
