Sofía had sat there, in the middle of the bedroom her mother retreated to when her father drank too much, surrounded by her clothes and the smell of her perfume, and she read every single page.
Her mother had started the book the day she took a pregnancy test and realized she was going to have another child. More than half the written pages were about her hopes and her fears for Sofía while she was growing in her belly. She poured her heart into those pages, whispering in writing that was barely legible her wish that Sofía would be another girl, that she would grow up strong and courageous, far more so than her mother had ever been.
The rest of the written pages were from after Sofía was born. More and more time passes between each entry. Some of the entries were angry—at Sofía, at her father, at the life her mother struggled with. But some of them were far kinder. These entries were written in pencil, hardly leaving a mark on the page, as if her mother was so certain the good days would not last that she left herself an easy way to erase the marks should they prove untrue.
Sofía said that when she found the notebook, she cried—for the first time since the accident, she cried. And she held that book close to her heart, upset not just because of what the pages held, but because of all the pages that held nothing at all. Most of the book was blank. Although Sofía’s mother started writing in the notebook before Sofía was born, somewhere between giving birth to her little sister, raising three daughters, living with Sofía’s father, and everything else life threw at her, she just . . . quit. Maybe she forgot. Maybe she ran out of things to say. But either way, the blank pages would remain forever empty.
Since I can’t access the timestream and I’m stuck at home, I’ve been writing in an old notebook. Sometimes, instead of jotting down ideas of ways to get everything back to normal, I just write about Sofía. Or to Sofía. And sometimes the blank pages stare at me, waiting, and I don’t know if they’ll stay blank forever or if they’ll become something more.
My words would give them meaning, but there’s a meaning behind blank pages too.
? ? ?
I got Pheebs’s laptop. If I can’t figure out the past through the timestream, maybe I can figure out more from the USB drive.
For the most part, the recorded sessions are a weird hybrid between what I know happened and what doesn’t make sense. It’s all talk. Talk, talk, talk. No powers.
I don’t know if it was the officials who tampered with the videos, but whoever did it did a good job. Any outsider watching these would have no idea that each session with the Doctor was a group lesson about controlling our powers. Gwen’s fires are either missing altogether or they’re the result of matches or lighters that the Doctor jumps up quickly to confiscate. Rather than travel through time, I just stare blankly ahead. When Ryan uses his telepathy, it simply looks like he’s throwing something.
And Sofía is always visible.
I watch her, mostly. Sometimes I can line up my memory with the way she appears on-screen. The moments in sessions when she’d turn invisible are altered so that she just grows very still and withdrawn, sometimes hiding behind her hair.
I like to think I’ve been a good student. I always paid attention during the Doctor’s sessions, and I’ve always wanted to have control over my powers, to not be such a liability.
But now I’m watching her instead of Dr. Franklin. I’m looking at the moments that made her go invisible. There are times during the Doctor’s sessions when it’s like a gun blast going off; Sofía flinches visibly, and then that weird sort of stillness washes over her, indicating that she went transparent in real life.
It happens when Dr. Franklin talks about the way we react to things that make us anxious, about how our first instincts in moments of fear or pressure may not be our best ones. It happens when Harold talks to his ghosts loudly, in a way that overtakes the session and the Doctor has to escort him out. It happens when Ryan sits too close to Sofía or pays her too much attention.
It happens when the Doctor talks about family. He likes talking about family and the way it defines us, and every time, Sofía goes invisible.
CHAPTER 45