After Ever by Jillian Eaton

voice carries on the wind and echoes through the trees. I try to keep to a straight line, but the terrain makes it difficult. The ground curves and dips. I trip over a hidden stump and go down to my knees. Get back up. Keep going. I look behind me only once, trying to tell how far I have gone. Impossible. The woods have closed in all around me. Skeletal branches hiss and clack. Pine boughs bend and shudder under the weight of the snow. I clench my teeth and look straight ahead. My feet feel like they are attached to cinder blocks. I walk another hundred yards and have to stop again. Breath rattles out of my chest. I wrap my arms around a thick tree and use it to hold myself up. Tears born from the wind leak onto my cheeks and freeze. I need to turn back. I should not have come this far.
    The flash of red goes by so quick I think at first I have imagined it until I see it again. There, through the trees, I can see something moving. Brian has a red ski jacket. I picked it out for him before we came here. He wanted blue, his favorite color, but red was all they had so I got him a blue hat to make up for it.
    “BRIAN!” I scream his name desperately. The wind catches my voice and slings it gleefully over my shoulder. I start to run, pumping my arms and snapping my knees up to my chest. My exhausted body reacts with one last surge of energy fueled by adrenaline. I don’t notice the trees have begun to thin out until I hit the ice hidden beneath the snow. It groans under my weight, an entire lake’s worth of frozen water. The forest fades away. Under the snow the lake looks deceptively calm. Sturdy. I don’t think twice about racing across it. Not until I hear the crack.
    It is quiet at first, like a tinkling of glass. I can barely hear it over the roaring of the wind. Then it gets louder. The snow beneath my feet shifts and bucks, throwing me forward. I land hard on my right arm. It buckles beneath me, just as the ice is buckling beneath me, sharp and without warning. Kicking, screaming, crying I try to scramble away from the hole that is forming in the middle of the lake but it is too quick, too fast, too powerful. It sucks me forward with a ravenous hunger, tilting the ice under my body until for one fleeting second I am standing on air before I plunge into the darkness.
    If I thought I was cold before, it is nothing compared to this. The cold steals the very air from my lungs. It streams out of my mouth in a series of white bubbles. I try to swim up, towards the glimmer of light I know to be the surface, but my hands won’t paddle. My legs won’t kick. Pain gnaws at my empty chest, filling the cavity with sharp needles that poke and jab. I claw with my fingers, fighting for every inch, every centimeter. I don’t want to die here. Not here, forgotten beneath a sheet of ice. Not now, when I have felt what it is like to be happy again.
    I have to breathe. I have to. I have to. I make one last desperate lunge for the surface. My fingertips touch something solid. Something hard. The ice. I have reached it, but I have floated from where I first fell in. The surface is no longer my salvation.
    I pummel the ice. I scratch and claw until the water blooms red with my blood and when I can’t fight anymore, when my body is limp from exhaustion, I finally allow myself to breathe. I breathe in the water. It floods my nose, my mouth. For some reason I expected it to taste salty, but it is fresh and sweet. I swallow convulsively. Spit it back up. Swallow again.
    I begin to sink. Slowly at first, then faster and faster, spinning round and round. The light fades away. I keep my eyes open, straining to catch every last drop of it. And then the darkness swallows me and I see nothing.  
    I am nothing.

 
     
     
    CHAPTER SIX
     
     
    When I surface from the darkness, Sam is there.
    He hovers over me, his face pale and his mouth drawn tight. “Win?” he says, studying me closely. “Are you awake?”
    I let the fact that my eyes are