Fathomless by Jackson Pearce Read Free Book Online Page A

and went back into it, her memories of screaming. I’m afraid to try to explain her, afraid of the fact that I
can’t
explain her.
    I fall back onto my unmade bed, tangle my legs into the sheets, and close my eyes. Maybe she was a dream. Maybe when I wake up, I’ll realize there was just the boy. Nothing more. No one else.

    My dreams are full of screams and waves, boys falling into the arms of girls in the ocean. When I open my eyes and realize my room is flooded with sunlight, I feel like I’ve been tricked—how have I possibly been home for hours? It feels like one, at the most. Regardless of how long I was out, sleeping didn’t do what I’d hoped—I still remember Naida perfectly, well enough to know for certain that she was real, even though I don’t know who or what she is. Just thinking about her makes my head hurt.
    I can never fall back asleep once I’ve woken up, so I begrudgingly get out of bed. My hair is still stringy and ragged from the ocean water last night, and I have scrapes from the sand on my legs that I didn’t notice before. I sigh, tie my hair into a ponytail, and open my bedroom door—
    “Whoa. What happened to you?” Anne says before I have time to process where she’s sitting. I blink blearily—she’s at the bar, eating a gigantic bowl of cereal, hair wet but combed out from a recent shower.
    “Nothing. I mean…” I sigh, shaking my head. “A guy fell off the pier. I ran down to the beach to help.” We don’t lie to one another as a general rule—after Jane’s power developed, there was no point, since she could read our minds. Still, omitting the truth about Naida seems so, so much simpler right now.
    “Wow,” Anne says. She looks over at Jane, who’s sitting on the couch with her legs drawn up.
    “Did he survive?” Jane asks.
    “He’s fine. I went with him to the hospital.”
    “You can do that?” Jane says. “I thought only family could ride with the paramedic. Was he hot?”
    “The paramedic?”
    “No, the guy you saved,” Anne says, even though Jane asked the original question.
    The guy I saved. There’s that word again,
saved
. I try to ignore it, thinking instead about Jude’s face. He had long eyelashes, I remember that, and hair that was streaked from the sunlight to become the exact color that some girls pay money for. Handsome, though? He was nearly dead.
    “No one’s hot when they’re drowning,” I argue, walking into the kitchen to scrounge up my own breakfast. Anne took the last of the cereal, so I start making a peanut butter sandwich.
    “And anyone stupid enough to fall off the pier isn’t hot at all,” Anne says. “I prefer smart guys.”
    “That’s so not true,” Jane argues.
    “It is! The guys we pick up don’t count. I’m talking, if I were going to fall in love, it’d be with a smart guy,” Anne says, rolling her eyes at Jane. “Think you’ll be in the newspaper?” she continues.
    “I doubt it.”
    “What if he’s, like, a millionaire’s son, though? And you saved him,” Jane says, twirling her hair. “Maybe then we can afford a real apartment instead of this place.” She gestures at our suite. It’s really not that bad—it is an apartment, practically. It’s just that it’s still in a dorm, a fact that Anne and Jane find incredibly irritating. Actually, they find school in general irritating—why learn math when you have secret powers?
    “He wasn’t a millionaire’s son. Don’t get excited. He’s a musician from Lake City, he’s broke—”
    “You
read
him? While he was drowning? Get anything interesting?” Anne asks.
    “No. I didn’t even mean to read him, it just… happened,” I say, taking the first bite of my sandwich and shrugging.
    “See, if you used your power more, you’d learn to control it,” Jane says in a voice that makes me want to yell at her. She’s right, though—they can control their powers better than I can, in large part because of their nights of “practicing.”
    But