Between the Stars and Sky Read Online Free PDF Page B

what happens next.
    I wait for my heart to beat as fast as it was at Jameson’s, but I realize it already has been. Pounding. Racing. Since I saw her, since I dreamed of her, my heart hasn’t stopped trying to catch her.
    But.
    I can’t. How can you catch someone when you can’t even catch yourself?
    “Get dressed,” she tells me, finally, in between the thumps of my heart. She smiles and I’ve known her forever and not enough. “We have someplace to be.”
    “What?” My heart is on fire, burning so violently I might die or live or both. “Where?”
    She grins, and her eyes flash. “You’ll see. Now put some pants on. You look a little cold.”
    “Shit.”
     
    *   *   *
     
    The sun is less awake than I am; dark clouds sit still in the quiet abandon of sky, and I wonder if this is how the world looks when no one is watching. I want it to rain, to pour, so that I know the clouds are as alive as I feel with Sarah, but as the sun begins to touch the sky a dim orange, I know it won’t. I wonder if the clouds will cry.
    My voice hits the wind and bounces back against me, warmer than the cool air colliding with the car. “Where are we going?”
    “To the Point,” Sarah says, moving her hand just outside the open window like a wave against rushing air as we drive, and it strikes me that she is always moving forward. She is the tide, the current. “Haven’t you been there before?”
    I nod. “The Firelight Fall a few years ago. I went but I didn’t jump. Wasn’t old enough.”
    “I’ve jumped,” she tells me.
    “Really?”
    She smiles. “No, but I will.”
    “Liar.”
    “Sometimes,” she says, her voice a low, dark contrast to the steady rhythms of her body, “a lie is closer to the truth than anything else.”
    “So tell me a lie.”
    “I hate you.”
    I have to think about breathing; her words take me back to a moment I refuse to remember completely. But I do, and I don’t. “You like me, you mean.”
    “I don’t know you.”
    A lie? “Do you want to?”
    “No.”
    Yes. “Why?”
    “Because you have the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen, Jackson. And somewhere inside you is a story I want to read. I want to know.”
    “That was a truth.”
    She smiles. “Maybe.”
    “What’s your story?” I ask, but the wind grabs my voice away and I have to yell the words again.
    “I don’t have a story.” Sarah’s hair is wild; blonde attacks the air, her face, and I wonder if she might be dauntless. Fearless. “Yet.”
    “What are you waiting for?”
    “I was waiting for you, Jackson.”
    “Me?”
    “Yes,” she says. “Be my story.”
    I wait. And then, “Was that a lie?”
    “Yes.”
    “And that?”
    She laughs. I ask, “Do you remember me?”
    She does not smile, but her eyes do. “No.”
    Beat jumps my heart.
     
    *   *   *
     
    There is a place where dreams go to live and fears go to die; if you survive the jump off the Point, you can survive anything. The Firelight Fall makes you stronger. You become invincible. You murder fear, destroying each facet of it before they take you completely over the edge.
    That is the rumor, the lie.
    Because here I am: Standing with my toes over the edge of the cliff, the wind in my face pushing me back, cold and hot, I am so afraid I might die that I think maybe I’m already dead. Maybe it’s because I’m here before the festival has started, but everything about this feels wrong, illegal, like I’m here too soon.
    And then-
    Sarah takes my hand, squeezes it.
    She says, “We’re not going to jump today. We can’t, you know. People would know. We wouldn’t be allowed here after.”
    I live again.
    I breathe.
    “I just wanted you to see this,” she tells me, her hand still in mine. “I wanted you to see the place where fear leaves you.”
    I almost miss it; the sky breaking open. It happens in one fast breath of time. The world shifts and bends and breaks, reforms. The clouds beat red like hearts. The sun rises, slowly at first, then