Echoes Marissa Lete (best ereader for students .TXT) 📖

her office, him getting shot, then how we ended up trapped in Alice’s laboratory. I leave certain things out—like how angry I’d been at him when I found out he’d taken my memories away, and the searing kiss we’d shared in his kitchen.

When I’m done, I’m breathing as hard. As my heart rate calms, I wait for him to respond. Glances over at him tell me he’s deep in thought, which makes sense. I remember how I felt when I heard the news. It’s difficult to decide how to feel.

When he finally opens his mouth, I expect him to say something about how he understands or he just needs time to process it all. That maybe we can fix all of this if we just figure out where Alice is and how she replicated his ability. But instead, all he does is ask me one, impossible question.

“What do we do now?”

What do we do about Alice? Or what do we do about us? Of course, there’s no easy answer to either one. But we have to do something. Life doesn’t ever solve problems for you. You’ve got to go and solve them yourself.

“We find her. We stop her. We make her fix this,” I tell him.

Maverick doesn’t look so sure. “I’m not sure if we can. I don’t even know where she would be now that her lab’s gone.”

“We have to try,” I reply.

He nods solemnly. “It’s weird, that there’s this whole part of my life that I don’t even remember.”

“I understand,” I tell him, letting out a short sound somewhere between a laugh and a sigh.

Then, unexpectedly, he asks me another question. “Did I love you?”

The words strangle me. I don’t know the answer. I know him better than he knows me right now, but there’s no way to know exactly how he felt about me. I know what I want the answer to be.

“I think so,” I finally tell him, feeling his yellow eyes boring into me even though I’m staring at the road. It’s the best I can do.

He doesn’t wait to ask me his next question. He doesn’t give me time to think about it. “Did you love me?”

There’s the past tense again. As if he and I aren’t sitting in the enclosed space of the car, together, right now. As if everything we had is just stuck somewhere in the echoes, never to be seen in the present again.

Do I love Maverick? Well, we’d dated for eight months. There’s definitely got to be some feelings that were lost in those memories. But what about now? We've been through a lot together, but I only remember knowing him for a few weeks. Is that enough time to know if you love someone?

I don’t know. All I know is that he had rescued me from danger more times than I could count. I know that when he kissed me, I felt a burning in my heart that was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. And I know that I was devastated when I discovered his memories had been taken away, almost as devastated as when I found my parents in a similar situation.

Is that all it takes to love someone?

I glance over at Maverick, fidgeting with his seat belt. Then I focus my eyes back on the road, my answer coming out firmer, more final than I’d expected it to.

“Yes.”

And for the rest of the car ride, neither of us knows what else to say.

✽✽✽✽✽

When we get back to the house, the sun is peeking just above the horizon. I roll to a stop in the driveway, forcing myself to accept this new reality.

Inside the house, there are thirteen people who need help. Who need to start a new life or find some way to resume their old ones. Somewhere out in the world, Alice is alive, probably plotting her next scheme, ready to inflict her wrath on someone else. She can’t be allowed to do it. She has to be stopped.

I glance over at Maverick as he exits the car. Right now, I want more than anything to be back in my normal life, dealing with only drama between Grace and Leo. I want my parents to remember me. I want Maverick to be there, and I want him to hold me tight, telling me that everything will be okay. I want him to have all the answers like he seemed to have before. I want to live a normal life.

But I can’t. All of this mess, with Alice and with Maverick and with my parents—there’s no one else who can deal with it.

It’s all up to me now.

Acknowledgments

        First of all, I want to say a huge thanks to you, the person holding this book. However you ended up here, and wherever you are, thank you. Books wouldn’t do any good without readers, so you’re an essential part of the equation.

        Secondly, I want to say thanks to my best friend Briana. Your constant support and belief in me all the way from the beginning in my melodramatic high school days has kept me going throughout the years. I couldn’t have finished this without you. May you always be the first person I send my stories to, even when they aren’t very good yet.

Mom, thanks for instilling a love of reading into me from a very young age, and for driving me to the library every few days while I was growing up to get another stack of books. If you hadn’t encouraged that little hobby of mine, I might’ve never taken on writing.

Thanks to Dad, who passed down the genes I needed to have the brain of a writer, and who always supported me when I told you I was writing. I still remember those “books” I used to write