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“Like what?” he asked gently as Harlow’s eyes opened and she looked over at me.
“I can’t,” I said and hesitated. “I mean, it’s hard to explain what I saw, but it felt like another world inside a swirl of darkness.”
“Are you okay? Did you have a seizure?” Harlow gasped, putting the back of her hand on my forehead. “She feels hot. I should get her back to her room.”
“I’ll take her,” Luke said. “I can support her if she needs help standing up.”
I did feel weak, and my head still throbbed, only this time it wasn’t in time to any beat or anything I heard externally. I simply felt as if I had a fever as if I was fighting an infection.
I nodded and let him put his arm around me as we left the ritual place. I still wanted to call it a church, but that felt like such a silly argument now. Lowers could call it anything they wanted.
“What happened back there?” Luke asked as we got out of earshot of anybody else. “You seemed like you were out of it.”
We walked down the path through the hedges, and I said, “I don’t know. I could feel this weird pulse in the church. I mean, the ritual space.”
“You don’t have to worry about calling it a church around me,” he laughed. “I’m not a traditionalist, obviously, or else I wouldn’t be hanging out with you.”
“Why does it matter?” I asked. “I only know something like that as church. Why did Harlow get upset when I called it that?”
“Church is for old times,” he said. “Before the split, remember? Uppers and Lowers used to mingle across class barriers, but they no longer do. Church was reserved for Uppers, but honestly? I don’t even know if you have it anymore. Science has taken over, and Uppers pride themselves on logic and rational thought over spirituality.”
“I wasn’t that obnoxious before, was I?” I asked, mortified. “None of this makes sense. Why not just havepeople,all of them equal, instead of splitting them up?”
“How would I know that?” he said with a shrug. “I’m a Lower. None of it is discussed around us.”
I fell silent then, not knowing what to tell him. I wished I could defend the practice, but it felt strange to me and wrong. And I knew nothing about it. There was that dull, foggy sensation in my head when I tried to remember details of the split.
That was awkward with Luke, the one thing that always hung in the air between us. It felt like a deep fracture present in everything we did, in everything we said, every time we touched. There was a chasm so deep the bottom was unfathomable, and nothing could close it up.
My memory loss was my side of the split, and his suspicion of me being an Upper was on his side.
I wasn’t sure we could ever cross to each other. And if we did, would we recognize ourselves when we saw our faces up close?
“This is my place,” I told him as we approached my dorm tower. “I know. It’s a bit much.”
“I know where you live,” he said and flashed me this shy lopsided smile that was like a bolt of electricity to my heart. It skipped a beat, flip-flopped, and sent a surge of adrenaline through me.
“Then show me the way,” I laughed and gestured towards the door. “Prove it.”
“Sure thing, sunshine,” he said with a wink. And as he hit the last note of the nickname, something struck a cord inside. I’d heard him say that before. That was his special name for me.
I had a flash of memory. A vision of a bright sunshiney morning with light streaming in through a tall window in a run-down apartment. We were lying on a mattress under a thin blanket. He was overtop of me, holding the blanket up like a tent, dust motes danced in the air, and his eyes shone with love.
And we laughed. God, how we laughed. We were so filled with joy it was exploding out of us in mad giggles and bursts of happiness.
“Oh,” I gasped, and just like that, it was gone. The fog returned, and that memory felt wrong. It was warped, like a dream within a dream, and as I tried to grasp at the images as they disappeared, they burst like soap bubbles in my fingers.
I was left with a faded feeling, something like love, something like being happy.
“What is it?” he asked, and I looked into his eyes, hoping to see them shining. They weren’t. They were beautiful, impossibly dark blue and almost violet in certain lights. But they held no love for me.
“Nothing,” I said. “Just a headache.”
“Still want me to prove it?” he asked, that lopsided smile warming me again.
“Of course,” I replied. “Show me the way.”
I handed him my keys and watched as he chose the correct one for the front door, opened it, and walked straight to the elevator. He pushed the button to open it, a hidden one behind a scrolling metal design, and waited for me before getting into the car.
