Echoes by Marissa Lete (best books for students to read txt) 📕

“That time, Alice only gave us enough medicine to last two weeks, so I was forced to go back to her sooner. But when I did, I decided I was going to confront her about what was going on—why she wanted me to get rid of certain people. That’s when she showed me her laboratory—the building you were locked up in. It’s where she does her research.”

I have a flashback of Alice sticking a needle in my arm, then the strange future-echoes I’d experienced. “What is she researching?”

Maverick meets my eyes, the disgust plain on his face. “Us. People with strange abilities. ‘Anomalies,’ she calls us. There are more, a lot more. She has them locked up in there like lab rats.”

“What is she hoping to accomplish?” I ask.

“She tells me she wants to find a way to block our abilities, to prevent people from using them in the wrong ways.”

I imagine a world where my “ability” could be blocked so that I wouldn’t have to listen to the echoes. It doesn’t sound too bad. Not worth kidnapping and hurting people to get it, though.

“I think there’s more, though. I think she’s up to something else,” Maverick tells me.

“Like what?”

“Weaponizing us. Finding a way to replicate certain abilities, then using them to her advantage.”

My eyes widen.

“Once I found out about everything, I told her I wouldn’t work for her anymore, but because of it, I couldn’t get the medicine for my mom.” His head goes down, a hand running through his hair. “She… passed away back in April.”

Instinctively, I reach a hand out towards his. He looks up at me when we touch, his eyes meeting mine, and my heart skips a beat. “I’m sorry,” I say, pulling back my hand and averting my gaze. I’m not sure why I reached for him like that. I still don’t know him.

He blinks a few times, then sighs. “You and I… we were together,” he tells me. It’s something I’ve sort of known for a while, but it’s strange hearing him say it. “You knew my mom pretty well, too.”

Of course I would know his mom. “Did I know about Alice? And the medicine? Your ability—any of it?”

He grimaces. “No. I didn’t know how to tell you, I guess.”

I expect a feeling of hurt, betrayal, or anger to come, but there is none. I obviously hadn’t told him about my ability, either, or he would have known that erasing my memory never would have worked. I can understand why he wouldn’t; it’s not exactly the easiest of subjects to talk about.

“But after she died, I tried to go back to a normal life, I tried to put it all behind me. It was fine for a while, but then I started receiving threats from Alice. If I didn’t go back and work for her, she was going to start taking everything I had from me. Everything I loved.” He meets my eyes as he says the word loved.

I hold his gaze for a moment, understanding the pointed look he’s giving me, but then look away. It’s strange to think that he could have been in love with me when he feels so much like a stranger right now. Had I loved him, too?

“I didn’t know what to do. I tried to get the police involved, but they couldn’t track her—I’d covered up her crimes too well. And no one’s going to believe me when I say I can take their memories away. So I tried to wait it out, but she started terrorizing me. My tires were slashed, my house was broken into—all kinds of things. I couldn’t escape her.”

Understanding hits me all at once, knocking the breath out of me. “You were afraid she would come after me.”

He nods solemnly. “I couldn’t stand the idea of you being hurt because of me.”

“So you erased yourself from my life,” I finish.

“Yeah,” he says, his eyes shut. “I couldn’t just leave, I needed to make sure you wouldn’t know anything about me, I needed to make sure she couldn’t use you against me. I erased myself from you, from everyone we’d come in contact with together.”

I glance up at him. “You missed someone.”

He frowns. “What do you mean?”

“I didn’t understand it at the time, but a worker in this shop downtown recognized me. Coffee and Cream. She told me about you.”

It dawns on him. “Oh. Right,” he says. “I can’t believe I forgot about that.”

We sit in silence for a few minutes after that, and I go over everything he’s told me in my head. The story makes sense. It makes complete sense. I’ve finally gotten my answers. But I still feel empty inside. Like something is missing.

“So it was as if you’d never met me, after that?” I finally ask him.

“For you, yeah,” he answers, his eyes burning into mine. The color of them seems to change with his emotions—amber one moment, then greenish, then yellow. Right now they’re dark.

I watch him fiddle with a piece of string coming off his shirt as I think about it. Maverick still remembered me, the whole time. Even now, he remembers everything about our relationship. I hate it, knowing that he knows about every moment we shared, and I’m a blank slate.

“Is there some way I can get my memories back? Can you... restore them, somehow?” I wave my hand in the air, a little bit of hope creeping into my voice.

Maverick simply shakes his head, and the hope dies.

“I erased your memory because I thought she didn’t know about you, I thought making you forget me would protect you from being used as a pawn in a game.”

“Obviously that didn’t work out,” I mutter. Maverick’s plan made sense, it