“Let’s go, Will,” I say, grabbing him by the arm and pulling him along more quickly, back across the front yard that has waves crashing against the garden wall.
“See how you like it!” is the last thing I hear Lucy call before the gate shuts.
25
In the Drawer
AS WE make our way toward home, winding down Laurel Canyon and through the west side of LA, it’s as though a giant weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I haven’t felt this light in weeks, since before Lucy showed up. The path before me feels clear. My decisions are finally my own, and nobody is going to get in my way.
So it takes me a little while to notice that Will is completely silent. He stares straight ahead, but the light from his eyes is gone, his face expressionless.
“I’m sorry, Will,” I finally say as we turn off of Venice Boulevard onto my street. “But I meant what I said. And you do deserve better.”
“There is no better than you, in my mind,” he says, as though he’s given up. “I feel hopeless. Like a werewolf in Twilight who has imprinted on someone.”
I snort. “You’ve been reading Twilight?” I ask.
“You think I wouldn’t do my research?” Will says. “I watched the movie. Did people really freak out that much about that series? Jacob is the obvious choice. Edward is so . . . serious.”
I bite my lip, trying not to smile.
“What?” Will frowns. “What’s so funny?”
“I hate to break it to you, but in this book, in the scenario Lucy Keating created . . . you are Edward.”
“No . . .” Will starts. “Because you are choosing Elliot, so that makes me Jacob.”
“No.” I shake my head with a pitying look. “In Lucy’s conception, you are Edward, and Elliot is Jacob. He’s not even Jacob status, really. But you are the one I’m supposedly destined for.”
“Well, now I’m Jacob, though, right? In this reality?” Will looks at me a little desperately.
I pat him gently on the arm. “Yes. Now you can be Jacob.”
Will seems satisfied with this.
As we pull up outside my house, and I go to remove my hand from Will’s arm, I notice that it looks strange. It’s weirdly fuzzy, like I’m looking at it through a piece of warped glass. I rub my eyes, blink, and look again, but it doesn’t help. There’s no depth, no shadow. My whole hand appears flat, like it’s made of paper. Will notices it, too.
“Will. What happening?” I say, holding my hand out to look at it more closely. There are no knuckles, no wrinkle creases where my hand meets my wrist. My throat catches in my chest when I realize that suddenly there aren’t even any fingernails.
“Oh, no,” Will says, a panicked look on his face. “This is exactly what I was afraid of. But I didn’t know it would happen like this.”
“Afraid of what?” The edges of my hands are starting to fade and lose their pigment.
“You look . . . like a comic book character,” Will tells me. “You’re, like, two-dimensional. Like Animal Man.” And when I look up at him I see what he means, because so is he. His hair looks like it’s painted and would be stiff to the touch, and his eyes are large circles in the middle of his face. And when he turns to the side, he all but disappears. It’s like I’m sitting next to a paper doll.
Outside the car, all around us, the world seems to be getting brighter, like someone is editing a photo of us on their phone and pushing exposure to the highest level. I shield my eyes with one hand.
“Why is everything disappearing?” I cry out, but my voice comes out muffled.
“She stopped writing us, Annabelle,” Will says, looking around, and his voice sounds farther away than it should. “Our world is ceasing to exist, and we are going to go with it.”
“It’s not disappearing. We can’t just disap—” I start to tell him, but when I turn to Will, he’s gone, and so is the car we were just sitting in. Only a bleached-out street corner remains. I rotate back around again, and where The House should be, it looks like a life-size rendering of my mom’s exterior house elevations. Just an outline of my childhood home, as though drawn in pen, set against a bright white backdrop. It sends a wave of fear rushing through me. I run to the front door, throwing it open.
“Mom? Dad? Sam?” I call out, but on the other side of the doorframe, there is nothing but whiteness. I think I hear voices from far away, but I can’t see anything. Then the voices fade to nothing. Now, there isn’t even the outline of a house. Everything is gone.
I take a few steps in one direction, then start to run full speed in another for what feels like twenty minutes but could be three. It’s so hard to tell anything when there is nothing to use as a frame of reference. I keep hoping to see something in the distance, for a speck of the familiar to come into view, but nothing changes. It’s just blank.
Unsure of where else to go or what to do, I sit down on the white surface. It’s not hard like the floor of a house would be, but it’s not soft, either. It’s smooth and matte, like I’m sitting on top of a piece of my mom’s vellum paper. I wrap my arms around my knees, and try to think. My heart is beating quickly, and my brain feels fuzzy. I can’t seem to hold on to any of my thoughts.
I take a deep breath, attempting to regain some focus. “Try, Annabelle,” I urge myself. “You can do this.”
I close my eyes, rocking back and forth, struggling to hang on to something, and then I hear Elliot’s voice, even more crackly than usual. It’s like I’m listening to a recording of him from our fight on the beach through a long-distance phone line. He’s telling me that maybe I like being written, so I have an excuse for when things aren’t going according to my plan, for when I lose control.
“It’s not true,” I whisper. “I don’t want that anymore.” An image of him appears in my head, like a worn-out photograph, standing outside Little Boots as he asked me to tell him what was happening between us. I am disappearing, and the last thing I think is that I will never get to tell Elliot how I really feel.
And then another image replaces it, and I see Lucy standing in front of me in the school parking lot, that very first day.
“Some of my characters demand to be heard,” I hear her say, leaning against the side of her car. “Others just sit in a drawer, waiting for the right time.”
I lay my forehead against my knees, realizing that my world isn’t simply ceasing to exist, I am going “into the drawer,” like a piece of discarded manuscript. Who knows how long I could stay in here, waiting for Lucy to decide I’m worth it after all. Now I understand her choice of words back at her house. See how you like it, she’d said. She knew this was where I was going as soon as we walked out the door. She said she’d stop writing, but she was never really going to set us free.
“I am not going in a drawer,” I protest quietly, using the last of my strength. “I am trying to write my story.”