She seems powerful.
She seems…like me.
And looking at her – wondering about her, recalling how great it felt to fight alongside her – I immediately feel less alone. Like that silly girl I was standing in Joan’s trailer all those months ago, wasn’t so silly after all. That, of course, there’s something else like me out there in the world, and I’m looking right at it.
I’m standing right beside it.
And the world feels very right.
Bryce and I end up in an all-night diner on the Lower East Side, Bryce drinks coffee and eats three different kinds of pie - blueberry, cherry, and rhubarb - each on their own plates – switching between them at random, while I sip hot chocolate and chew on an egg sandwich, mesmerized by everything about her.
Bryce looks up from one of her slices. “I can’t believe you know Liesel and Ben,” she says chuckling. “It’s such a strange and very small world in a way, isn’t it?”
I nod, swallowing a bit of my sandwich. I’m not sure what I can ask, what I should ask. What would I bristle at her asking me? I mean, despite how close I feel to her after the fight in the warehouse, we’re really just strangers. I don’t know what the rules are or should be, but I can’t deny how connected I feel to her. So, I just ask her the thing that’s reverberating loudest in my brain.
“So, what do you want to do, Bryce?” I ask, putting the sandwich down.
She looks up from her blueberry pie, her doe eyes somehow innocent and also serious as graves. “I want to save the world.”
“Okay,” I answer back, nodding earnestly, returning to my sandwich, my faith in life restored.
We’re the same. We want the same thing, and suddenly, together, I know we can do anything. We part ways that evening with plans to meet up the following night at my place.
I’m grateful for the distraction because every moment I’m not throwing punches, I’m thinking of Clark, of the empty, dull ache inside, where things used to be filled with him. I miss his face and his hands. His voice and his eyes. Everything about him, even the irritating things, now seem like great losses to me. I accidentally (but totally on purpose) walk by his apartment on the way home, and only by some superhuman miracle am I able to resist knocking on his door and throwing myself at his feet begging him to take me back.
•
I wake up to the sound of my name, and it’s been a long time since that’s happened. It’s annoying but also somehow comforting.
“Lola. Lola, wake up,” she sounds more irritated than frightened, which is not really what I was going for, but whatever. I open one eye, the bright California sun is already high in the sky and pouring through the doors and windows.
“What time is it?” I ask, rubbing my neck and cracking my shoulders from the long night’s sleep in the awkward chair. Liz glances at her slender silver watch.
“Nearly one,” she says.
“Wow. I must have been really exhausted,” I say, yawning and stretching. I look around, remembering the previous night. Returning to the beach house and cuffing a still knocked out Liz to the intricate ironwork of a giant metal and concrete table that weighs at least 500 pounds. I remember thinking that it looked a little bit like a sacrificial slab, which I have to admit, gave me ideas, but I resisted. Why kidnap her only to kill her? Liz glances at the half full water bottle by my side.
“Can I have some of that?” she says, reaching out her free hand.
“Sure,” I say, tossing it to her. The cap is loose though and as it tumbles toward her it drenches her blouse and hair. She sputters and looks up at me like a drowned cat. I’m already laughing.
“Thanks a lot,” she says dryly. I cover my mouth.
“Sorry,” I say. Then I notice her bruised hand, probably from my smack last night, “And sorry about your hand.”
Liz looks down at the shirt and then her bruised hand cuffed to the table, then back to me and around the room. “Where are we?” she asks.
“My house. Nice, huh?”
“Actually,” she lifts her head to take in the room again and then levels her gaze at me, “The view is spectacular, but otherwise it’s rather tacky.”
“Oh really? Apparently you’ve grown some balls in the last fourteen hours, huh?” I smile at her and lean back in my chair.
“Well, you’re obviously not going to kill me, I take it you’ve got something else in mind. I assume I have to be alive for that something else,” she says, lifting her chin in the air defiantly.
“Sure, sure, but what condition you’re in, while still being alive, is pretty much up to you,” I say. I see her shudder but she tries to hide it.