Chapter 4

The plan didn't last a day.

Thursday night I'd lain in bed staring at the rabbit stain, telling myself I could do this. Go to school. Avoid Shelby. Keep my head down. Wait for everything to go back to normal.

By Friday morning I knew that was garbage. Nothing was going back to normal. Normal had been a lie I'd been telling myself for three years, and now the lie had a face and a name and a text thread full of messages I couldn't bring myself to read.

Shelby had texted four more times since I'd told her I was sick. I'd read the previews on my lock screen without opening them.

hope you're feeling better

eli seriously are you okay

you're still coming tonight right

please just talk to me

Tonight. The volleyball game. The promise I'd made before I knew anything, back when I thought she was my friend instead of my assignment.

I should skip it. Should stay home, fake sick again, let the whole thing die a quiet death. That would be the smart move. The safe move.

But some stupid part of me wanted to go. Some desperate, pathetic part that kept whispering maybe you were wrong. Maybe you misunderstood what you saw. Maybe if you just watch her play, watch her with her team, you'll see something that proves the reading was a lie.

I went to school. Kept my distance. Sat in the back of every class and left before Shelby could catch me in the halls. She found me at my locker before third period and I mumbled something about still feeling sick and practically ran to the bathroom.

I hid there until the bell rang, then slipped into English late. Mrs. Patterson gave me a look but didn't say anything. I took a seat in the back corner, as far from Shelby as the room allowed. She turned around twice to look at me. I kept my eyes on my notebook and didn't look up until the bell rang. Then I was out the door before she could get to me.

Hiding. That's what I was doing. Hiding from a girl I'd known since fifth grade because I'd accidentally seen inside her head.

The day crawled by. I ate lunch in the library again. Watched the clock tick toward the final bell like it was counting down to something I couldn't stop.

After school I walked to the grocery store.

Dad had mentioned that morning that we were out of milk. I'd barely registered it at the time, but now it felt like something to do. A normal errand. A reason to delay going home, where I'd just sit in my room and think about whether I was actually going to that game.

The store was mostly empty. Late Friday afternoon, everyone either still at work or already starting their weekends. I grabbed a basket and headed for the dairy section, moving on autopilot through the fluorescent aisles.

I was reaching for the two percent when a man brushed past me. His shoulder caught mine, just a glancing contact, barely enough to notice.

The flood hit like a truck.

His wife at the kitchen table, crying. Divorce papers spread out between them. Twenty-three years and it's come to this. The weight of failure so heavy it made breathing hard. His daughter's face when he told her. His son refusing to speak to him for six months. An apartment that smelled like mildew and loneliness. Frozen dinners for one. Staring at his phone at 2 AM, wanting to call her, knowing she wouldn't answer. The particular shame of a man who did everything right and still ended up alone.

I dropped the milk.

The carton hit the floor and split open, white spreading across the tiles like something bleeding out. The man turned, startled, and I was on my knees, gasping, trying to separate his grief from my own.

"Hey, you okay?" He crouched down, reaching for me.

"Don't." I scrambled backward, my sneakers slipping in the milk. "Don't touch me."

He froze. The concern on his face curdled into something else. Suspicion, maybe. Or the particular wariness people get around crazy.

"I'm fine," I managed. "I'm fine. I just need to go."

I left the milk on the floor and walked out of the store as fast as I could without running. The automatic doors whooshed open and the October air hit my face and I kept going, across the parking lot, past the gas station, my legs moving without input from my brain.

I made it to the bus stop bench before I had to sit down.

My hands were shaking. My whole body was shaking. I pressed my palms against my thighs and tried to breathe and couldn't stop seeing his daughter's face, couldn't stop feeling the weight of twenty-three years collapsing into paperwork and silence.

That wasn't mine. None of it was mine. But it felt like mine. It had crawled inside me and made itself at home and I didn't know how to get it out.

This was worse than Shelby. With Shelby there had been connection, history, something linking us together. This man was a stranger. I didn't know his name. We'd shared half a second of accidental contact and now I knew things about his life that his own kids probably didn't know.

I couldn't live like this. I couldn't go through the world terrified of every accidental touch, every handshake, every brush of skin on skin. Sooner or later I'd bump into someone on the street or get jostled on a bus and their whole history would pour into me and I'd end up curled on the sidewalk, drowning in feelings that didn't belong to me.

The card was still in my nightstand drawer. I could see it in my mind, the clean white cardstock, the simple text.

Vivian Cross. Instructor, Mudwick.

You belong.

I pulled out my phone. My hands were still shaking as I typed the number from memory. I didn't remember memorizing it. But apparently some part of me had been ready for this moment longer than I'd admitted.

It rang once. Twice.

"Eli." Cross's voice, warm and completely unsurprised. "I was hoping you'd reach out."

"How did you know it was me?"

"I gave you the card. Who else would be calling from an Ohio area code?"

Fair point. I watched a car pull into the gas station across the street. Normal people doing normal things.

"Something happened," I said. "At the grocery store. I touched someone and I saw his whole life. His divorce. His kids. Everything."

"That sounds frightening."

"It's getting worse. It used to be just flickers. Now it's like..." I didn't have words for what it was like. A dam breaking. A door being torn off its hinges. "I can't control it. I can't make it stop."

"No," she agreed. "You can't. Not without training."

"Training."

"There's a great deal you don't understand about what you are, Eli. What you can do." A pause. The line crackled faintly. "I'd like to show you. If you're willing."

I should have said no. Should have hung up, thrown my phone in a trash can, gone back to pretending this wasn't real.

"When?" I asked instead.

"Tonight. There's a place I'd like to take you. Somewhere that might help you understand."

Tonight. The volleyball game was tonight. Shelby's big game. The thing she'd been talking about for two weeks. The promise I'd made before everything fell apart.

"I have something," I said. "Until around eight, maybe nine."

"That works. Do you know the old mill road? Past the creek, where it dead-ends at the trailhead?"

I knew it. Kids went there sometimes to drink or hook up. I'd never been, but I knew where it was.

"I can meet you there at nine," she said. "If you're willing to trust me that far."

Trust was a big word. I didn't trust anyone right now. But I was sitting on a bus stop bench with a stranger's divorce rattling around in my skull, and Cross was the only person in the world who might be able to explain why.

"Okay," I said. "Nine o'clock."

"I'll be there." She paused. "And Eli? Whatever you're doing tonight, try to stay calm. Avoid physical contact if you can. Strong emotions can make the readings more intense."

Great. Perfect advice for attending a volleyball game in a packed gymnasium.

"I'll try," I said, and hung up.

I sat on the bench for another few minutes, letting my heart rate settle. The shaking had mostly stopped. The stranger's grief was fading, retreating to some corner of my mind where it would probably ambush me later.

Nine o'clock. The trailhead. A woman I'd met once, offering to show me things I didn't understand.

My dad would think I was at the party at Brianna's. The party I wasn't invited to. There was something almost funny about that, using my own exclusion as cover for sneaking out to meet a stranger in the woods.

I got up from the bench and started walking home. I had a few hours to kill before the game. A few hours to convince myself I was making the right choice.

Or any choice at all.

The gymnasium was packed.

I'd forgotten how loud volleyball games got. The squeak of sneakers on hardwood. The thump of the ball. Parents and students crammed into bleachers that weren't designed to hold this many people, everyone talking over everyone else, the noise bouncing off the walls until it became a solid wall of sound.

I found a spot high up in the corner, as far from the crowd as I could get while still being able to see the court. Kept my arms pressed tight against my sides. Tried to breathe.

The teams were warming up. I spotted Shelby immediately, her ponytail swinging as she practiced her serve. She was laughing at something one of her teammates said. Brianna Hollister was next to her, bumping her shoulder in that casual way friends do.

Friends. Real friends. Not obligation friends. Not charity cases assigned by grieving mothers at funerals.

I watched Shelby move through the warm-up drills. She was good. I'd known that abstractly, the way you know things about someone you've spent three years sitting across from at lunch. But seeing her here, in her element, surrounded by people who actually wanted to be with her, it was different. She belonged here. She fit.

I didn't fit anywhere.

The game started. The home crowd roared. I sat in my corner and watched and tried not to think about the bodies pressed around me, all those people with all their histories, any one of them close enough to touch.

Shelby played well. Really well. She had this focus on the court that I'd never seen from her anywhere else, this intensity that made her seem like a completely different person. The girl who texted me memes and threw tater tots at lunch was gone. This was someone else. Someone driven. Someone fierce.

I wondered if I'd ever really known her at all.

Midway through the second set, she looked up into the stands.

Her eyes swept the crowd, searching. I knew who she was looking for. I almost ducked, almost tried to hide behind the people in front of me.

But then she found me.

Her whole face changed. The tension around her eyes softened. She smiled, quick and bright, and raised her hand in a little wave before turning back to the game.

She was glad I came. Actually glad. I could see it in the way she held herself after that, a little lighter, a little more confident. Like knowing I was there mattered to her.

Maybe the reading was wrong. Maybe I'd misunderstood. People's emotions were complicated. Maybe what I'd felt as obligation was really just the weight of caring about someone who was hard to care about. Maybe the texts to Brianna were just venting, the way everyone vents about the people they love.

Maybe I was still her friend.

They won the third set. The crowd exploded. The team rushed together in a huddle of high-fives and screaming and the particular joy of victory that I'd never experienced but could feel radiating off them like heat.

Shelby was in the middle of it all, hugging her teammates, laughing. She looked so happy. Happier than I'd ever seen her at our lunch table, happier than she'd ever looked sitting across from me.

I stayed in my seat while the crowd started filtering out. Watched the team gather their stuff, their parents coming down from the bleachers to congratulate them. Watched Brianna's mom talking to the coach, car keys in hand.

The party. They were all going to Brianna's house. The team thing I wasn't invited to.

Shelby had her bag over her shoulder. She was scanning the bleachers again, looking for me. I stood up so she could see me.

She smiled and started making her way through the crowd toward the bleachers. My heart did something complicated in my chest.

But then Brianna grabbed her arm. Said something I couldn't hear. Pointed toward the door where the rest of the team was gathering.

Shelby looked at Brianna. Looked back at me.

I saw the decision happen. Watched it play out on her face like a movie. The hesitation. The guilt. The relief when she realized she had an excuse.

She held up her phone and mouthed "text you later" with an apologetic shrug. Then she let Brianna pull her toward the door, toward the party, toward the people she actually wanted to be with.

I stood there in the emptying gymnasium and watched her go.

She looked back once, right before she disappeared through the doors. She was still smiling, but it was a different smile now. The kind of smile you give someone when you feel bad about something but not bad enough to change it.

Then she was gone.

I sat back down on the bleacher. The gymnasium was almost empty now. Just a few parents helping pack up equipment, a janitor starting to sweep the far end of the court.

The reading wasn't wrong. I hadn't misunderstood.

Shelby cared about me. I believed that now. But she cared about me the way you care about a responsibility. The way you care about a stray cat you've been feeding for three years, that you'd feel guilty about if you stopped, but that you'd never choose if you didn't have to.

She'd seen me. She'd been happy I came. And then she'd left anyway.

Because that's what you do with obligations. You fulfill them. You check the box. And then you go be with the people you actually want.

I pulled out my phone. 8:47.

The trailhead was a fifteen minute walk if I cut through the park.

I grabbed my jacket and headed for the door. The janitor nodded at me as I passed. I nodded back. Just two people existing in the same space, not touching, not connecting, not flooding each other with decades of accumulated pain.

It was a relief.

The trailhead was empty when I got there. Just a dirt parking area, a wooden sign marking the start of a hiking path, and the trees pressing in on all sides. The moon was up, almost full, casting everything in silver and shadow.

I leaned against the wooden sign and waited. My breath made small clouds in the cold air.

Cross's car pulled in a few minutes later. Black, practical, nothing flashy. She got out and nodded at me like we'd done this a hundred times.

"Thanks for coming."

"Thanks for not being a serial killer. So far."

She smiled slightly. "The night is young." She gestured toward the trail. "It's about a fifteen minute walk. You up for it?"

I nodded. We started walking.

The trail wound through woods going silver with moonlight. The October colors were muted in the darkness, everything reduced to shapes and shadows. Neither of us talked at first. The only sounds were our footsteps on the packed dirt and something rustling in the underbrush.

"The man at the grocery store," Cross said eventually. "Tell me what you felt."

"His whole life. His marriage falling apart. His kids." I kicked at a rock on the path. "It was like I was him for a minute. Like his memories were my memories."

"And before that? The experience with your friend?"

I flinched. "How do you know about that?"

"I don't know the specifics. But something happened recently that was worse than what you'd experienced before. Something that made you realize this wasn't going away."

I didn't answer. Didn't have to.

"What you're experiencing," Cross said, "is something we call reading. Most people move through the world without absorbing anything. They're like sealed containers. Nothing gets in, nothing gets out. But some people are different. Some people are open. They pick up what others leave behind."

"Leave behind?"

"Emotions. Experiences. Memories, sometimes. Intense moments leave a kind of residue. Most people can't sense it." She stepped over a root in the path. "Usually it's places that hold the residue best. A battlefield where people died. A church where people prayed. A home where a family lived for generations. All of that experience accumulates. Saturates the location. Most people like us learn to read places first. It's easier. More controlled."

We walked in silence for a few more steps while I tried to process that.

"But I don't read places," I said. "I read people."

"Yes." She glanced at me. "That's much rarer. And much harder to control, as you've discovered."

The trail opened up ahead of us. Through the trees, I could see the remains of a building. Stone walls, half-collapsed, pale in the moonlight. Empty windows like missing teeth.

"What is this place?"

"It used to be a hospital. A long time ago." Cross stopped at the edge of the clearing. "A lot of people died here. A lot of people survived here too. Both experiences left marks."

The air felt different here. Heavier. Like the atmosphere before a storm, charged with something I couldn't name.

Cross started walking toward the ruins. I followed.

She stopped at the threshold of what had once been a doorway. The walls rose around us, broken and jagged against the night sky.

"Put your hand on the stone," she said.

I looked at her. "Why?"

"Just try it."

I reached out. Pressed my palm against the cold rough surface of the wall.

Nothing happened. Just stone. Just cold.

"I don't feel anything," I said.

Cross nodded slowly, like I'd confirmed something she suspected. "That's what I thought. You don't read places. Only people."

"Is that bad?"

"It's unusual. It means you'll need to learn differently than most students." She was watching me with an expression I couldn't quite read in the darkness. Curious, maybe. Or something else. "It also means you have access to something most of us don't. The ability to read what people carry inside them. Their accumulated experiences. Their history."

"Their secrets."

"Sometimes. Yes."

I pulled my hand back from the wall. Looked around at the ruins. If what she was saying was true, this place should be humming with decades of suffering and hope and death. But to me it was just old stones and dead leaves and moonlight.

"You said you could show me," I said. "What places feel like. How do you do that if I can't read them?"

Cross held out her hand.

I stared at it. At her.

"You want me to read you?"

"I want to show you what's possible. What you're part of." Her hand stayed extended, steady in the silver light. "This will be intense. More intense than anything you've experienced so far. But I'll be guiding it. You won't be alone."

I thought about the grocery store. The stranger's grief hitting me like a wave, dragging me under. I didn't want to feel that again. Didn't want to drown in someone else's experience.

But I also didn't want to keep living like this. Terrified of touch. Isolated from everyone. Falling apart one random contact at a time.

I took her hand.

And the world cracked open.

It was nothing like reading Shelby. Nothing like reading the stranger.

Those had been flashes. Fragments. Individual memories rising to the surface like bubbles in dark water.

This was a river.

Through Cross, I felt the place. The old hospital. The weight of everything that had happened here, pressing down like centuries of stone.

People screaming as doctors worked on them. The smell of blood and disinfectant. Nurses moving through the wards, exhausted beyond thought. Hands held in the dark by people who would never let go and people who already had. Last words whispered to no one. The relief of those who healed, that first step outside into sunlight that felt like being born again. The despair of those who didn't, who felt their bodies failing and knew exactly what it meant.

It poured through Cross and into me, a flood of human experience so vast I couldn't separate the individual streams. Pain and hope and fear and determination and loss, all tangled together, all preserved in this place like insects in amber.

And underneath it all, I felt Cross herself. Her focus. Her control. The way she shaped the flow, directing it, keeping it from overwhelming her. She'd done this a thousand times. She moved through the saturation like a swimmer in familiar waters.

For just a second, I brushed against something else. Not the hospital. Something personal. A locked room at the edge of her mind. I felt myself drifting toward it, curious, and then her attention shifted. Gentle but firm. Redirecting me back to the flood of place-memory like a teacher steering a wandering student.

Then it stopped. She let go of my hand.

I was on my knees in the leaves. I didn't remember falling. My face was wet. I touched my cheek and my fingers came away with tears.

Something moved at the edge of my vision.

A figure in the doorway of what had been a room. White, but not glowing. More like faded. Washed out. A woman in old-fashioned clothes, her hands moving in a repetitive motion. Wringing something. A cloth, maybe. She didn't look at us. Just kept wringing, over and over, like she'd been doing it for a hundred years.

"Don't stare," Cross said quietly. "It's rude."

"What is that?"

"A ghost. This place has dozens." She said it the way you'd mention pigeons in a park. "She was probably a nurse. The motion suggests she was cleaning something. Blood, most likely. Over and over, long after it stopped mattering."

The figure flickered. Repeated the same motion. Didn't acknowledge us at all.

"Can she see us?"

"Ghosts aren't really people anymore. They're recordings that somehow developed something almost like will. She's not seeing anything. Just repeating." Cross stood, brushing leaves from her coat. "You'll get used to them."

I wasn't sure I wanted to get used to them.

"That," Cross said, "is what places hold. And that's what people like us can access."

I couldn't speak. Could barely breathe.

"You felt them. The patients. The nurses. The dying and the saved."

I nodded.

"That was decades ago. Longer, some of it. But it's still here. Still preserved. Because experience leaves residue, and some places hold more than others." She crouched down beside me. "This is what you're part of, Eli. A world most people will never know exists."

"Why me?" My voice came out hoarse. "Why can I do this?"

"I don't know. Some people are born open. Some have it triggered by trauma or loss. Some never find out why." She paused. "Does the why really matter?"

I thought about it. About the grocery store, the stranger's grief. About Shelby, three years of false friendship bleeding into me through a single touch. About a lifetime of feeling things I couldn't explain, thinking something was wrong with me.

About standing alone in an empty gymnasium while the girl I thought was my best friend walked away to a party I wasn't invited to.

"I guess not," I said. "I just want to understand it. Control it."

"That's what Mudwick is for." Cross stood up. Offered me her hand again, just to help me to my feet this time. "A place where people like you can learn. Where you don't have to be afraid of what you are."

I took her hand. Let her pull me up. The flood didn't come this time. She was keeping herself closed, I realized. The demonstration had been deliberate.

"What would I tell my dad?" I asked. "I can't just disappear."

"Mudwick has been enrolling students for over a century. We know how to manage the logistics. Scholarships. Cover stories. Your father would know you're attending a boarding school for gifted students. That's not even a lie."

"But he'd think it was normal school."

"Yes."

I looked around at the ruins. At the ghost still wringing her phantom cloth in the doorway. At the trees pressing in on all sides, silver in the moonlight.

That morning I'd been hiding in the back of classrooms, trying to survive another day of pretending. Now I was standing in the shell of an old hospital, being recruited by a woman who could show me what places remembered, while a dead nurse went through motions that had stopped mattering before I was born.

"I'm not saying yes," I said. "I need to think about it."

"Of course." Cross nodded like she'd expected nothing else. "Take your time. But Eli? Don't wait too long. What you have is going to keep getting stronger. And without training, without people who understand..." She didn't finish the sentence. She didn't have to.

We walked back to the trailhead in silence. The woods felt different now. Not threatening, exactly. Just alive in a way I hadn't noticed before. Full of things I couldn't yet sense but was starting to believe existed.

At the parking lot, Cross stopped by her car.

"You have my number," she said. "When you're ready, call. Day or night."

"Okay."

"And Eli?" She paused with her hand on the car door. "What happened with your friend. The one whose memories you saw. That wasn't your fault. You didn't choose to see what you saw. The guilt you're carrying... you don't have to carry it."

I didn't know what to say to that. The gymnasium flashed through my mind. Shelby's smile when she saw me. The way she'd walked away anyway.

"Thanks," I said. It felt inadequate, but it was all I had.

She got in her car and drove away. I stood in the empty parking lot for a long time, watching the space where her headlights had been.

Then I walked home through the October cold, past the empty streets and darkened houses, thinking about places that remembered, about people who could read them, about a school called Mudwick where someone like me might finally belong.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. Shelby.

saw you in the stands!!! thanks for being there 😊

I stared at the message for a long time. The smiley face emoji. The exclamation points. The words that would have meant everything to me two days ago and now just felt like another kind of haunting.

I didn't respond.

When I got home, Dad was asleep in front of the TV. I covered him with a blanket and went upstairs.

The rabbit stain was waiting on my ceiling. Same as always. Same as it had been for three years.

But I wasn't the same. Something had changed in that ruined hospital. Something had cracked open and couldn't be closed again.

I lay in the dark and thought about what Cross had said. About control. About belonging. About a world that existed just beneath the surface of everything I'd known.

And for the first time since I'd touched Shelby's hand in English class, the cold thing in my stomach felt a little bit lighter.