I type the name into Google faster than I thought possible, and there it is. The very first link:

Scarlett Mills Gazette, August 13, 1865

The honorable Dr. Barnaby Quince and his wife, Mary Elizabeth, have perished in the house fire of 221 Stanton Hope Lane on the night of August the third. The cause of the fire is unknown, but may be due to construction currently underway at the home. Building materials, paired with the high summer temperatures and low precipitation of the season, may have caused the combustion that sparked the deadly blaze. Services for the doctor and his wife will be held at the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church, Sunday, August 15, 1865, in the year of our Lord.

Deadly blaze.

The professor?

My head is in my hands now. I don’t want to make a scene.

A pair of giggling girls walks right past me and I try to compose myself, not wanting to establish myself as the freshman freak before classes even begin.

But they don’t even glance at me.

Not a nod.

Nor a polite smile.

Wait.

What?

What is happening here?

I leap to my feet and run out of the library, down to the green. I walk across the green, looking at everyone walking by. Everyone. Just walking by. Just chatting away. Ten, fifteen, twenty people.

All chatting away, chirping happily.

And none of them see me.

And again, I hear the voice. That voice inside my head like a memory.

“Remember . . .”

Chapter 50

This is like that moment in a movie when everything gets distorted and all you see is the lead actor’s face and the rest of the world goes fuzzy in the margins.

This is like that moment, with me waving my arms, and yelling, and jumping up and down, and getting into everyone’s line of vision and nothing.

Nothing.

I have an invisibility shield.

A cloak!

And now it all makes sense, as I make my way through the students and professors and some tearful parents sending their kids off to college for the first time. None of them see me.

Now it all makes sense as I take a seat on this stone bench at the end of the row of trees and continue to watch as the people go by, not seeing me.

Now it all makes sense how I don’t really remember anything past the point where the blue and red sirens went around in swirls and the red red ambulance and the red red blood was covering Zander and covering the steering wheel and covering the dash.

Now it all makes sense how I don’t remember anything after that point in the April rainstorm, the crash, or the kind words from my grandma, or even my graduation, or even the fuzzy details of the trip here on the train. The tickets. The money. The conductor. None of it remembered—

—because none of it ever happened.

And now it all makes sense how none of the waitresses in town ever saw me, that the librarian never noticed me, just let me walk the stacks all day—that none of the people in town ever stopped me.