Wither by Lauren DeStefano Page B

her mortality. His inability to save her. All the pills and potions in the world couldn’t buy more than a few fleeting months.
    A party in the orange grove. The pain on Linden’s face is immediate. I am unwavering. He has cost me more pain than I will ever be able to repay.
    Cecily, oblivious, says, “Yes! Oh, Linden, we’ve never even seen it!”
    Linden dabs his mouth with a napkin, sets the napkin on the table. “I thought along the pool would be more entertaining,” he says quietly. “The warm weather’s nice for swimming.”
    “But you said we could pick,” says Jenna; it is perhaps the first time she’s ever said a word to him. Everyone looks at her, even the attendants. She glances briefly at me and then at Linden. She bites a piece of steak from her fork daintily and says, “I vote for the orange grove.”
    “Me too,” says Cecily.
    I nod assent.
    “It’s unanimous, then,” Linden says into his spoon.
    The rest of the meal is very quiet. The dinner plates are all cleared. Dessert is served, and then tea. Then we’re dismissed, because Linden has a headache and needs to be alone with his thoughts.
    “You’re something else,” Gabriel whispers to me as he escorts us to the elevator. Just before the doors close between us, I smile.
    Once upstairs I immediately retreat to my bedroom.
    I lie on the bed, sucking a blue June Bean and thinking about how the Atlantic Ocean lapped under my and Rowan’s bare feet. I think about the ferry along the pier that I would watch slice a path toward the horizon, and how secure I would feel in my small piece of the world, how lucky to be alive if only for a short while. That’s where I want my body to be cast when I’m dead. I want to be ashes in the ocean. I want to sink to the ruins of Athens and be carried off to Nigeria, and to swim between fish and sunken ships. I’ll come back to Manhattan frequently, to smell the air, to see how my twin is doing.
    My twin, however, does not like to discuss what will happen in four years, when I’ll be dead and he’ll have five years of life in him. I wonder what he’s doing now and if he’s okay. I wonder how long it will take me to break free of this place, or at least communicate to him that I’m alive. But somewhere, in a place in my heart that’s darker than that awful basement, I worry that my corpse will become part of Housemaster Vaughn’s research, and my brother will never even know what’s happened to me.
    For that, I am not sorry that Linden Ashby is off somewhere being sad because of something I said at dinner.
    It’s been so hard to keep track of the days in this mansion, when they all look the same, when I’m nothing more than Linden’s prisoner. I’ve never been apart from my brother for so long; from the time we were tod-dlers, our mother fit my hand in his and told us to stay together. And we did. We were together on our walks to school, clinging to each other in case of dangers lurking in the ruins of an old building, in the shadow of an abandoned car. We were together on our walks to work, and our voices kept each other company at night, in a dark house once filled with our parents’ presence. Before now I’d never been away from him a day in my life.
    I thought that as twins we would always be able to reach each other, that from far away I would still hear his voice as clearly as I heard him in the next room of our house. We would talk to each other as we moved about the rooms—him in the kitchen, me in the living room—to keep the silence of our parents’ deaths away.
    “Rowan,” I whisper. But the sound doesn’t travel farther than my bedroom. The cord between us is severed.
    “I’m alive. Don’t give up on me.”
    As though in answer, there’s a soft knock at the door.
    I know it’s not Cecily because it’s not followed by a question or a demand. Deirdre doesn’t knock, and it wouldn’t be Gabriel at this hour. “Who is it?”
    The door cracks open and I see Jenna’s gray