Once We Were by Kat Zhang Page A

sunlight.
    Addie let me take control of our body as I tried my best to explain. Our chest quivered with my attempt at steady breathing.
    It probably won’t even happen,
I thought, trying to calm myself.
    Which was fine. Addie had agreed to try, and that was the important thing. We wouldn’t achieve anything this go-around, but Addie had agreed to try, so there would be other chances, and sooner or later, she’d—
    There was a feeling like a balloon popping inside us.
    Then Addie was gone.
     
    I did not shout her name.
    That was the reaction I’d come to expect, and the one I’d steeled myself against: the urge to cry out. Then the urge to reach for her, to clamber toward that abyss where Addie should have been and stare over its edge, scrabbling for her in the darkness.
    I was propelled back to all those after-school sessions at the Mullans’ house, learning to move again as Addie floated in a Refcon-induced sleep. Refcon was a drug that suppressed the stronger soul. Hally had stolen some from her mother’s hospital, and Addie drank it to give me a chance to regain my strength.
    But this was different. Addie was gone by her own volition, without the aid of drugs, of
medication
, of any kind.
    The first blink was followed by the first breath. Then the second. The third.
    Addie was gone, and I was still here, sitting on the bed.
    Alone.
    The word echoed through the empty chambers of my mind.
    Nobody but I knew.
    I curled our fingers into a fist, harder and harder until our nails bit a painful line across the center of our palm. Then I studied the stair-step pattern of red crescent moons etched into our skin.
    The silence in the room—in our head—was enormous. It seemed at once a great, untouchable emptiness and some stifling, half-living thing that might, at any moment, break down the door hiding me from the rest of the world.
    I stood. Our legs held. Of course they held. I’d been walking fine for weeks. But the steps I took now seemed no less momentous.
    I took fourteen steps, just weaving around the room.
    Emalia’s spare bedroom wasn’t large, and furniture ate up most of the floor space. In addition to the two beds, there were two matching nightstands—with two mismatching lamps—and a medium-sized dresser we shared with Kitty. Atop the dresser was the prettiest thing in the room, a large, rectangular mirror with an ornate wooden frame.
    I stood before it. The shadowy girl in the glass stared back at me. The same girl who’d stared back at me my entire life. I reached up, touching my face.
    Was it my face now, when Addie wasn’t here?
    The girl in the mirror frowned.
    I returned to the bed, suddenly finding it difficult to breathe. The world seemed too big, and yet too small.
    This was what being alone felt like.
    This was how Mom, Dad, Lyle—all the other girls at school, our teachers, the people on the street—this was how they spent every second of their lives. This was the silence and loneliness in their heads, the echo of their thoughts.
    It had felt different when I was immobile. I’d still been partially trapped, then. But now . . . I could do anything. I could do anything, and no one but me would ever have to know.
    A little more than five minutes later, Addie was back.
    I held her, tight, as she reemerged to the waking world.
     
    
I asked.
    Addie stared blankly at the television screen. Kitty had called us out to watch a movie, and we’d joined her, but neither Addie nor I could concentrate.
    
Addie said.

Refcon had always taken a few minutes to wear off, even after Addie woke, leaving her woozy and unsteady on our feet.
    Back in Lupside, Addie had asked Hally about other potential side effects. There hadn’t been anything very serious, which meant it beat the other drugs Addie and I had taken as a kid, all in attempts to get us to