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Her brow creases. She doesn’t look happy, but she inclines her head.
“I don’t…I don’t even know for a fact that anything Theo’s told me is true! I have no evidence for…foranyof it!”
Principal Ford sighs heavily, brows raising, eyes wide. “Yes, well, Theo knows better than to do what he did. He shouldn’t have even been at Toussaint this time around, but—”
I jerk as if she’s struck me. “What do you mean, this time around?”
Another deep, frustrated sigh. “This isn’t the first time we’ve done this, Sorrell. Against my best judgement, this is thethirdtime we’ve attempted to trigger your past memories and bring you back to yourse—”
“THIRD TIME!”
She swallows thickly. “The first time was only a couple of months after the accident. It was too soon. You weren’t even physically healed from what happened, and who you were at the time…god. Catherine was very angry. Very troubled. Theo pushed you…her…so hard, and it ended in disaster. You had to go back to Falcon House and start all over again. Amazingly, you managed to complete your junior year there. I don’t even know how that was possible. You’d lost every scrap of your past and what made you you that time, but you remembered everything you’d been learning perfectly. You picked up assignments you were halfway through when you were injured and finished them like it was completely normal. Without even missing a step.”
I don’t remember any of that. None of it. I definitely don’t remember being Catherine.
“Then we staged a new school semester here with your old classmates during the summer break,” Principal Ford continues. “You weren’t Catherine by that point, thank god. You were Rachel. We had two months to try and coerce you back to health, and it looked like it was going to happen for a moment there. You did start remembering bits and pieces from before the accident. You remembered Theo most of all, which obviously made it impossible for him to take a step back and let things take their course, to just see what would happen.He insisted that we tell you the truth. And when we did, it was all too much. You slipped again. We were allsothrilled when you said that you were Sorrell. But it quickly became clear that while you recalled your name and your personality traits seemed to be very similar to the old you, you had no idea what was going on. You were convinced Rachel was a separate entity, that she had died, and that it was all Theo’s fault. You can imagine how hard that was for him—”
So it’s true, then.
Principal Ford keeps talking.
I watch her mouth move, but it’s as if I’m falling down a deep, bottomless well, tumbling further and further away from her as this news sinks in. I can’t hear her. Can’t process.
All of it is true?
Some small part of me has been clinging onto the possibility that Theo’s revelations last night were all some cruel lie. A joke on his part, designed to make me question my own sanity. That would have been preferrable to this. I would have just hated Theo even more—that would have been so, so easy. But no. Now I have to align myself with the fact that my entire existence is akin to navigating quicksand; the ground might shift out from under my feet at any moment, and I might just…cease to be.
“Sorrell?”
My head whips up.
Principal Ford smiles apologetically. “I know that this must all feel like some huge act of betrayal to you. We’ve kept things from you and lied to you repeatedly. I apologize for keeping you here, for the subterfuge with the old access road and the sea plane, I do. This whole…” She gestures, hands up, to the school around us, “…façade is more than a social experiment, though. Some of your doctors believe that having you here, in a setting that holds so many memories for you, is the one thing that’s most likely to bring you back to yourself. This academic year is a little different, I’ll admit. Aside from three or four of your old friends, most of the students you’re studying alongside now are brand new to Toussaint. Last year’s junior year have all transferred to another location to complete their senior year, at great inconvenience and expense to a lot of people. We thought keeping only Seb and the girls here might help trigger you in some way. That having a few familiar faces amongst a sea of strangers could potentially jar you back to reality. We were going to give it at least three more months before we changed tactics or introduced new, additional measures, but...” She looks so defeated. “Your connection to Theo has once again made that impossible. He was warned a thousand times—”
“Will you excuse me, please?” There’s no two ways about it: I’m puking. The sheer lengths so many people have gone to, to try and fix me…I can’t even begin to wrap my head around any of it. It’s incomprehensible. Yep. Definitely going to puke. I bolt from the chair and fly out of Ford’s office, racing down the hallway. It isn’t until I’m on my knees, bowed over a toilet, that I realize Theo has followed me; he must have been waiting for me outside Ford’s office.
Luck would have it that the first bathroom I came across was a disabled restroom—much larger than most. There’s plenty of room for the both of us in here. He doesn’t say anything. He sits himself down on the floor beside the toilet, hiking his knees up, resting his elbows on them, letting his head hang as I hurl.
I don’t want to throw up in front of him. I don’t want him to see me like this. It turns out that he’s seen me in far worse states, though.
I’m wracked with cold sweats when I push away from the toilet bowl and lean my back against the bathroom wall. I can’t remember the last time I felt this bad. But that’s the whole point of this nightmare, isn’t it? I can’t fucking rememberanything.
I drive the heels of my palms into my eye sockets, trying to push back the urge to cry. I am so done with crying. It isn’t going to get me anywhere. When I feel like I’ve mastered myself, I lower my hands and look at Theo.
“You’re still here,” I say quietly.
“I am,” he whispers.
“I was awful to you. I’vehated you. Itoldyou that I hated you. To your face.”
He picks at his fingernails, chewing ruefully on his bottom lip. His face is unreadable, blank, as if none of this can touch him anymore. “Yeah, youdidsay that. You asked me if I wanted tofeelhow much you hated me.”
“And you said yes.” My voice cracks on the last word.
He smiles, finally displaying a flicker of sadness. “I did.”
“Why? How could you want that after…” I’m hopeless. I thought I was safe from my tears, but all I did was delay them.
“Because having you hate me wassomething, Kid,” he says. “It would have been enough. I would feel it, and know that underneath all of that anger, you oncelovedme so much fucking more.” His voice catches again, belying a deep well of emotion, choking him just beneath his all-too-calm exterior.
