Chapters (47)
- Front Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Part One
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Part Two
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Part Three
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Acknowledgments
- Excerpt from Survive the Dome
- Prologue
- 6 Months Later
- One
- About the Author
- Back Cover
My heart is pounding in my chest so hard that I think I’m going to pass out. This doesn’t feel the way a jump feels; this feels different. This feels like an emotional high. Like joy and anger and hurt and fear all at once.
It feels good and bad and real and false and like something I want and something I want to stay as far away from as possible.
And it’s exactly what I need to push through the pain that erupts the moment I think about jumping back to the present. My present.
It’s what I need to go home. My home. My real home. My real life.
And to live it like Michael did: to the fullest.
And that’s exactly what I’m going to do.
When I return, Blake is still on my bed.
That was, and most likely will be, the most important seventy-five minutes of my life.
I wonder if it will be the most important seventy-five seconds of his.
Blake looks up, smiling nervously. “Hey,” he whispers. “You okay?”
I don’t think okay is the right word. There are so many other appropriate expressions to describe how I feel.
Broken.
Shattered.
Exhausted.
Defeated.
But none of those come out. Instead, I wrap my arms as tightly as I can around Blake, as if to test whether he’s real, and I cry—I cry so hard my whole body shakes.
And Blake? He just holds me, and he doesn’t say a word.
10 Months Later
Thirty-Two
“Babe! Come on! I swear to God, if you don’t come out here right now, I’m going to watch the season finale of Heroes without you!”
I roll my eyes. There’s no way to know if Blake is telling the truth or not, but something like that? He might just do it. And he knows I’ve been dying to get his reactions to a show he barely understood. Watching his face and having to pause the show every five minutes to explain what was going on was more fun than actually watching the show.
But, this is his graduation party, and it is, after all, his day. What the prince wants, the prince gets.
“I need to go see what he wants,” I tell Isobel, giving her the rest of my cake as I jump off the stool. “Finish this for me?”
Isobel shakes her head, her bangles clicking. “Absolutely not. I’m not going to eat all those carbs right before I leave for my internship in Italy! It’s like you don’t even know me!”
“I know you always have and always will look beautiful.”
“You’re supposed to say that. You’re my best friend, and you know that if you’re not nice to me before I leave for Milan and my plane crashes and I die, you’ll hate yourself forever.”