Page 94 of Don't Let Me Go
“What’s the matter?” I ask.
“Sorry. I was thinking about our dreams.”
“What about them?”
Riley hesitates. “Well, if we do have past lives, and if the dreams we’ve been having aren’t dreams but actual memories of those lives, then...”
“Then what?”
Riley lifts his face off my chest and studies me carefully. “What do you think it means that we always die at the end?”
Chapter 37
Riley
There’s a queasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I keep telling myself it’s because of the criminal amount of bacon that I scarfed down at breakfast. But I don’t think that’s true. Mainly because, no matter how hard I try, I can’t stop thinking about my dreams.
I wish I shared Jackson’s certainty that they’re nothing more than the by-product of our overstressed imaginations. But I can’t shake the feeling that they’re something more. A glimpse of the past, maybe. Or a warning about the future.
“Maybe it’s an unfinished-business thing,” I announce more to myself than Jackson as we cuddle on his living-room sofa.
“Unfinished business?”
Jackson pulls his gaze away from the morning cartoons we’ve been “ironically” watching since breakfast and stares up at me with his clear blue eyes. He looks so comfortable with his head resting in my lap, I hate disturbing him with my paranoid speculations. Especially when I’m aware of how insane they sound. But I can’t help myself. I need to make sense of what happened last night.
“Yeah. You know how in movies, ghosts are always haunting a place because they can’t move on? Because they have unfinished business? Maybe it’s the same with reincarnation,” I theorize. “Maybe in our first lives, we had something important that we needed to accomplish, but we didn’t get to do it before we died, so the universe gave us a second chance.”
“And then a third chance and a fourth chance?” Jackson teases, not bothering to hide the skepticism in his voice.
“Maybe.”
“So life is like a video game? And we both get multiple do-overs until we, what, win?”
“I don’t know,” I sigh. When he puts it like that, it doesn’t sound particularly plausible. But then, what explanation would?
Jackson must sense my frustration. He sits up on the sofa, clicks off the TV, and turns his full attention to me.
“I take it we’re not done talking about this?” he asks, flashing me a patient if somewhat condescending smile.
I shrug and look away. I held my tongue all through breakfast this morning. Mostly because I didn’t want Jackson’s aunt to think her nephew was hooking up with a complete nutjob. But now that Miss Haines is sculpting in the garage and we have the house to ourselves, I feel like the possibility of us having hadmultiplepast lives deserves some additional discussion. And frankly, I’m surprised Jackson doesn’t.
“You aren’t the least bit curious about what’s happening to us?” I ask.
“Dude, of course I’m curious. But like I said, there’s got to be a rational explanation.”
“Does there?”
Jackson shakes his head and laughs. “Look, I know you want to believe that something supernatural is going on—”
“I never said supernatural.” Although I guess I didn’tnotsay supernatural.
“Okay, just for the sake of argument, let’s say you’re right, and reincarnation is real, and Fate or Destiny orwhateveris throwing us a bone by giving us extra lives so we can finish our unresolved business,whatever that is. Why didn’t Fate reincarnate us somewhere safe? Why put us in a plague or the middle of a world war?”
That’s a good question. And I don’t have a good answer. “Maybe it’s just bad luck?” I suggest rather lamely.
“Bad luck?”
“Or maybe that’s the trade-off? We get extra lives, but we have to deal with crazy shit like Vikings and Nazis.”
