13.
“Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.”
—“FIRE AND ICE,” 1920
The dead trees are how I know I’m in the right place. Only now it’s not just a few at the edge of the lake. All of the trees around McCloud are dead from the volcanic gas that started leaking up through the ground years ago. It had probably just started when Julianna and Orion were up there. For a while the whole area was closed down, but then the scientists, or forest service, or whoever decides those things, determined it was safe for people to be in the area, even though the trees were dying. I never came up here after that, and the utterly deserted feeling it has makes me think not many other people do either.
When I get out of the car, it’s so quiet in the parking lot I can almost hear my own heartbeat. The bleached white skeletons of the trees stand stiff against the gray afternoon sky like ghosts, which seems appropriate. It’s creepy enough to make me question what I’m doing here alone. I could just as easily hole myself up in my room to read the rest of the journal. But like yesterday, something in me wants to see the place Julianna wrote about—where she once swam in a sparkling lake, lay under the midday sun, and fell for a boy she wasn’t supposed to.
But it’s so different here from how she wrote it, and it makes me a little sad as I look around at the emptiness. It’s dead. A shadow of what it used to be. I wanted to see this place the way she did—beautiful and dreamy, and romantic. I thought maybe there would be something of that left. Some little piece of her world that’s been here all this time, like another secret I might be let in on. But there’s no life or beauty or magic up here. There’s only whitewashed trees and a sky that’s getting darker by the minute.
I came to see the lake, so I grab her journal and a sweatshirt just in case the clouds in the distance move in, and I head across the parking lot. The sign at the trailhead says it’s a mile up to the lake, but as I step onto the trail, I remember her journal entry and feel like I’m closer than that. Like I’m right there with her, climbing the steep hill, maybe to end up at something I didn’t see coming. The trail is narrow and twisty like she said, and between the gnarled roots pushing up through the dirt and the loose rocks all around, I have to keep my eyes on the ground directly in front of me to keep from tripping.
As I walk, a sound like a soft, continuous exhale moves through the trees high above me, and I pause for a moment, startled and unsure of what it is. But then I feel the stray wisps of the breeze that made it; they reach down through the branches, lifting a few strands of my hair, making them dance around me. And I remember what she called this place. A dream world, she’d said, where two worlds meet. She’d been talking about herself and Orion. Today, it feels like her world and mine. It seems perfectly fitting that I should read her journal in this spot. There’s something poetic about it. But more than once on the way up, I have to convince myself that Julianna didn’t somehow, from beyond, put her journal in my hands for me to find, that the place is not haunted, and that I am not crazy for coming up here to do this.
After what seems like farther than a mile, the trail opens up to a rocky white beach, where the lapping of the water on the shore is the only sound besides the constant shush of the breeze. That part is just like she said. And the lake. Tucked down against sheer gray rock on the back side, it still sits perfectly calm and blue. Even in the pale afternoon light I can see straight through to the bottom, where so many dead trees have fallen in it looks like a forest has grown beneath the surface. I turn around to look for a decent place to sit, and that’s when I see the letters carved into a tree, just a few feet from where I stand.
I WAS HERE.
Chills shoot down my back and out through my feet. In that instant it feels like she’s talking to me, telling me I’m in the right place. It has to be the carving she mentioned in the journal, that Orion drew before he drew her. Which means she really was here. They were here together. So close. Maybe in this exact spot. It does feel like knowing a secret, and I sit down right there to read.
June 3
Shane gave me a gift today and I could barely look him in the eye. We sat in his Jeep at the edge of the creek, and when I opened the box from the jeweler, and it sparkled in the sun, I should have felt happy. I should’ve felt lucky that he’s so sweet and giving and the one person who knows me best of anyone. But the only thing I felt was something heavy that started to twist, deep and tight, in my chest.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
And it was, but it wasn’t anything I would’ve chosen for myself. Inside the box, on a layer of white satin, was a lacy silver snowflake, intricate and inlaid with tiny diamonds over the entire thing. The perfect necklace for his ice princess. He took it out when I didn’t and held it up so it spun in the sunlight at the end of its delicate chain.
“I thought it looked like you. Here.” He undid the clasp and I automatically swept my hair to the side so he could hook it at the back of my neck.
“It’s perfect,” he said. And he sat back and smiled, and the thing in my chest twisted even tighter, and the front seat of his Jeep felt ten times smaller, because at that moment the only thing I could think about was Orion. And of how much more I’d felt like me at the lake with him yesterday than I did in Shane’s car right then.
I brought my hand to where the necklace hung on my chest, felt the new weight of it around my neck. “It really is beautiful, but you didn’t need to do this . . . . I don’t . . .”
I searched his face, nervous all of a sudden about what he might be able to see written on mine. It seems ridiculous, but I was worried he’d look at me and know something was off. Maybe even be able to see that since the day at the lake, I haven’t stopped thinking about Orion, and it’s made a mess of me. Nothing happened between us. Nothing physical, anyway. We never touched, and after a while, we hardly even spoke. But I felt different. Torn. And today I was afraid Shane would notice. It made me want to hide.
“Why did you do this?” I asked him. It was heavy, the guilt of feeling what I did, and it came out more as an accusation than a question.
“Wow. Do I need a reason? I just wanted to surprise you.” He leaned back against the seat and looked out his window, and I could feel the distance between us stretch beyond the space between our two seats. “If you don’t like it you can take it back,” he said after a moment. I didn’t answer. “Am I missing something? Because you’re acting weird.”
I put a hand on his leg, wanting to smooth the tension away. “No, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to sound that way. I love it. I just wasn’t expecting this . . .”
“That’s usually how surprises work,” he said, a smile returning.
I leaned over the seat and took his face in my hands, kissed him on both cheeks. “It’s perfect, thank you. You’re too good to me. You know that, right?” My stomach clenched when I said it, because of how true it was.
“I could never be too good to you, Jules.” He smiled again and ran his fingers through my hair, and then, through lips that kissed mine, he whispered, “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” I told him. And I meant it. But today when I said it, the words felt distant.
I shiver again. I know the necklace she’s talking about. They found it on the river’s edge, not far from Shane’s Jeep.
June 6
I’ve been thinking about the picture Orion drew of me at the lake. He closed his sketchbook without showing me, so I didn’t ask. We walked down the trail together, quiet, and when we got to my car, he smiled and gave me a tiny slip of paper. A fortune. I laughed when I looked down and read the words he said to me the first night we met, about meeting your destiny while trying to avoid it. And then I went quiet when I turned it over and saw a phone number on the back. A moment went by where we didn’t say anything, like we both knew what it could mean if I took it.
“If you ever need to find me,” he said.
I nodded and put it in my pocket, and we went our separate ways.
I haven’t seen him since, but there isn’t anything I want to do more. I don’t know how I can feel this way about someone who’s so different from Shane, or who, really, I hardly know. But it doesn’t feel like that with him. Orion feels like someone I’ve always known, but also someone I need to know more.
I got in my car yesterday and drove circles around town, then up to the lakes hoping the entire time to find him by accident again, without having to cross that line and call him. And the whole time I was pleading with fate, or chance, or whatever, for him to find me. Just find me again. Find me and take me somewhere secret, where I can be who I am when I’m with him. I even told myself that if we did somehow find each other, it would mean something. Maybe something important enough to justify the way I feel.
But he wasn’t anywhere.
I came home and stared at the numbers etched out in pencil for a long, long time. Read the fortune over and over. Thought about what I would say to Orion if he picked up. Calling him, period, would say it all: that I needed to find him.
I didn’t. Thank God I didn’t. I tucked the slip of paper away in the back of this book, safe like all of the other secrets I’ve put down in here. And now I’m going to close it up tight. Pack it away. This is dangerous, what I’m doing.
Shane’s supposed to call soon to go out tonight, and that’s where my head and my heart should both be. With him.
I stop reading, positive now that I know where this is going. Then I turn the page. The entry is short, but I can tell from the very first line that I’m right.
June 7
A moment was all it took to change everything. A moment to sit alone in my room after Shane told me he was going out with his friends tonight. A moment to justify dialing Orion’s number. To slip out my front door and into the warmth of his car waiting in my driveway. A moment to end up at the hot springs under a glittering sky and a fresh dusting of snow, to feel the fire of the water and the ice of the air mix between us. For hands to brush skin, and lips to meet beneath the moonless sky.
A moment for want to erase thought.
A moment for him to pull back and search my eyes for a reason to stop.
A moment for me to close them against every last one and press my lips to his.
A moment was all it took to lose my balance on this tightrope I’ve been walking.
And now I don’t know what comes after this.
I don’t know what comes next.
I drop the journal in my lap. Oh my God, Julianna. I know what comes next.
In two days you and Shane will graduate. You’ll pose for a picture in your gowns, with your hats crooked on your heads and your arms around each other. That night a storm will blow in out of nowhere. The two of you will go to a party, then leave together, and that will be the last anyone ever sees of you. Some will say Shane was drunk. Others will say you both were. A few people will think they remember you having a fight.
The next morning a snowplow will spot Shane’s Jeep half buried at the bottom of the ravine before you’re even reported missing. Search and rescue will be called out when it’s found empty. Half the town will volunteer to help, including my dad and uncle. They won’t find you, but they will find some of your things—Shane’s leather wallet, with everything still in it. A tiny diamond snowflake. Two graduation tassels. And blood in the snow.
Then, after a week of searches and vigils and prayers, it’ll be announced that you and Shane were swept down the river into Summit Lake. That a further search will have to wait for the summer when the ice on the lake melts completely, but even then, the chances of recovering anything are slim. The lake is deep, and below the surface it narrows like the neck of an hourglass before opening up into an underground cavern. Few of those lost in it are ever found.
People will cover the shore with flowers that stand out bright against the melting patches of snow. They’ll leave prayer candles, whose glass will crack from the cold, spilling out wax of different colors. The whole town will come to the memorial at the edge of the half-frozen lake. A little girl will watch the grief hang heavy on the people’s faces, not understanding or really knowing what was lost.
Until ten years later.
It’s unsettling to think that this is what happened two days before. Two days before they left a party together and ended up dead. From a car crash. In his Jeep. Where maybe they had a fight. It could have just been the icy road and the blinding snow that caused it. But what if that wasn’t it at all? What if she told Shane about Orion, or he found out some other way? Maybe anger or hurt or shock was what sent them hurtling over the edge. And all this time they’ve been remembered as something that wasn’t true at all: Lakes High’s golden couple. A legacy unknowingly built on a lie.
I don’t know what to think. The second I start to judge her for what she did, I feel bad. She was seventeen. Torn. Felt something for Orion that was enough to make her question what she had with Shane. But it’s unnerving to find out something isn’t actually like you always imagined it. To see the tarnish just past the shine, or find a crack in the glossy finish. And there’s something else. The sketch that she wrote about sounds eerily similar to one I’ve seen hanging behind the counter at Kismet. It’s one I’ve noticed before when I ordered, but never really looked at.
A fat raindrop plops onto the open page of Julianna’s journal, smudging the ink, and then another and another. I shut it quickly and tuck it up under my shirt, then make a run for the trail down. Miraculously, I make it to my car just before the sky opens up. I sit in the seat for a moment, catching my breath and watching the rain pound the windshield. Julianna’s journal rests on the dash, damp but safe. There are two more entries before her story ends and the pages go blank. I don’t want to get there just yet, so instead I turn the key and I drive. I need to see that sketch up close.