Blue Week #2
The church watch is a tradition for Blue, as familiar and punctual as his birthday, but this year he’s with Neeve instead of his mother, and it feels strange. She asks him questions, about school and girls and life with Maura. Usually, he just listens to the list of names and carefully writes them down, approximating spelling, and waits for the night to be over so he can crawl into bed for a few hours of sleep before school. Neeve isn’t exactly chatty, but she is inquisitive, and this makes him wary of her. He’s mostly just cold and tired and ready to go home, not actually unnerved by the change to the tradition or even the morbid task at hand. It’s too familiar to frighten him. But then he looks up and he sees a figure.
It doesn’t look the way he thinks a ghost should. It’s not transparent or wavering or glitching. It’s more like a distant star, easier to see if you don’t look directly at it. Brighter in your peripheral vision. Blue thinks all the blood in his body must stop moving as he opens his mouth to speak. “I see her.” Then, again, more urgently. “Neeve, I see her.”
He had only looked up from his notebook because Neeve had had to ask for a name twice, apparently without success. Now every part of his body feels cold.
“Get her name. She won’t answer me and I need to get the others!”
“Me?” Blue only looks at her for a moment before Neeve nods urgently and takes the notepad and pen from his hands. Standing, he moves down the line toward the retreating figure. He can see now that it’s a girl, wearing the pleated skirt and emblazoned cardigan of Aglionby Academy. She stands like a schoolgirl, hands clasped behind her back, but her expression is terrible. It doesn’t make sense because he can’t actually see her face. It’s more like sense, like when his mother lies behind him in his bed and even with his back turned, even with the lights out, he can tell that she’s holding back tears. Except you’re only supposed to be able to sense that kind of thing with people you love. People you’re connected to. He can’t imagine feeling that way toward an Aglionby girl.
“What’s your name?” When he speaks, she turns toward him a little, and the movement seems all wrong, like the turning of a figure whose bones don’t all hinge together correctly. She brings her hands up to her face. He thinks she must recognize him, and that makes him feel worse. The dip in his stomach makes him realize he had already been feeling terrible. Just looking at her, he feels like he’s breaking apart.
She turns away, continuing down the path to the church, stumbling a little over her feet. He looks down and sees that she’s wearing kitten heels and for some reason, this almost makes him laugh, but the laugh turns almost to a sob in his throat. He tries again. “Who are you?”
She shakes her head a little at him, the movement frantic, like she’s trying to tell him that she can’t speak. Softer, more gently, he says, “Please, will you tell me your name?”
Finally she takes her hands away from her mouth. It must be an illusion, but he thinks he almost can almost feel her breath warm against his face, and smell mint. Her lips are pink and terribly young, but then he blinks and her face is again featureless and vague. Her voice, though, is surprisingly solid. Low and deeper than he expected, lovely in a way that is physically painful to him. “Gansey,” she says.
It’s an incomplete answer, but when she says it, it seems right to Blue. As if he’d known her name all along, as though it had been on the tip of his tongue. He can’t get used to the way she shifts in and out of focus, how one moment he can see clearly the blue of her eyes, her hair in damp curls against the rain soaked shoulders of her cardigan. He thinks, it will be raining when she dies. He thinks, Gansey.
“Is that all?” He asks, trying to keep in mind through all of this that he has a job to do, that he needs to bring this girl’s name back for his mother. He wishes he could say something else, like “it’s going to be okay,” or “I’m here for you,” but that’s not his job, and anyway it isn’t true. She isn’t going to be fine. This girl with her sweet voice and strange name and her kitten heels will be dead before Blue turns eighteen. Blue thinks he will die of this thought.
“That’s all there is,” she says, and with this she falls to the ground as if overwhelmed by pain or grief. Blue can see her fingernails digging in the dirt though he can no longer distinguish the color of her hair which a moment ago he’d seen clinging in wet strands to the side of her face. He wants to take her hand and hold it, and this makes him aware of the fact that not only his hand but his whole body is trembling. She is fading, not like light but like the memory of a dream, fragment by fragment in a way that his mind can’t quite make sense of. Though he has never met this girl, he feels that this is what it is to lose someone. All of a sudden, he doesn’t understand how anyone could survive this life.
“Neeve,” he says softly, aware of her presence behind him and needing to speak. “Neeve, she’s -- dying.”
“Not yet,” she says, and Blue thinks that this must be her voice when she is trying to be gentle or kind.
“Why -- why can I see her?” He asks, though it’s not really the most important question on his mind right now. He is watching, trying to hold all the parts of her together, but he can’t really see her anymore. She’s gone, and he’s trying to make that stop hurting so much.
“There are only two reasons a non-seer would see a spirit on St. Mark’s Eve, Blue. Either you’re her true love, or you killed her.”
Blue finally tears his eyes away from where Gansey had been kneeling on the ground, his mouth open but unable to form words. It doesn’t seem right or possible when he thinks about it logically, but it also feels the way learning her name had felt. Like he’d known all along and just couldn’t remember. It seems frightening and obvious, a piece of knowledge he hadn’t dared to look at because it had the power to take him apart. Of course, he thinks. Of course he loves her. How could it have been anything else?