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

easily, not knowing what’s happening, too confused to protest. Maverick maintains his hold on their arms until they’re in their room, tucked in bed. He lets go, and they both fall asleep.

When they wake up, they won’t remember the past several hours. They won’t know I exist.

Alice has already taken away their memories of me. Trying to explain what had happened to them and why—when it had already taken years for me to convince them about my ability to hear the echoes—would be a difficult task. And then what? Would they ever be able to love me the same as they loved the daughter they knew they had raised, the one they remembered? It’s impossible to know.

If I just erase myself from their lives, maybe they’ll be able to live a happy, normal life. They won’t have to bear the weight of all of this craziness, of having a daughter that hears echoes of the past. And maybe they will be safe from Alice, too.

In that moment, I realize that this is probably how Maverick felt when he’d erased my own memories.

It hurts. A lot.

But through the pain, I get to work.

“We have to get rid of everything in the house that shows I exist,” I tell Maverick when we’re out in the hall.

“I know,” he replies. He knows. He’s done this before. For Alice. For me, too, though he doesn’t remember it.

I go to my room, slide a big box out of the closet. I tear things off the walls, out of drawers. I pack my suitcase, throwing all of my clothes into it in an unorganized, heaping mess. I’m afraid that if I slow down, if I take time to think, I’ll lose it.

Maverick helps me, quietly and steadily. He still doesn’t know who I am, what we were to each other. I don’t know how I’m supposed to explain everything to him when I’m not even sure of it all myself. Before Alice erased his memories, there was barely something developing between us. Now he’s been cut out of my life again, and it’s impossible to know whether we’ll ever be able to rebuild a relationship, or even a friendship.

Within an hour, the house is stripped of me. It’s like I never existed here. We’ll still have to track down my parents’ co-workers, friends, and anyone else who knows about me, but cleaning out the house makes everything feel so final.

I stand in the doorway, holding one last pile of photos I’d torn off the walls. I can’t stop the tears now. I can’t control them.

“I’m sorry,” Maverick’s soft voice says from behind me, but he doesn’t move closer to hold me like I want him to. Like the Maverick that knew me would have. I don’t face him. I don’t want him to see my pain.

“I’m sorry, too,” I tell him. “You’re just as much of a victim as they are.”

“Yeah,” he says quietly. “I knew Alice was evil. I didn’t know how powerful she was, though.”

His words spark a thought in my mind. Alice is powerful because she can heal, making her basically indestructible. Untouchable, even to Maverick, whose ability is powerful enough. I finally turn to look at him, wiping my eyes on my sleeves. “You once told me that you couldn’t erase Alice’s memories,” I say.

He looks exactly like how I felt every time he told me something I didn’t remember doing. But he nods. “I can’t, it never works on her. I thought it was because she found a way to block it… ” His eyes grow wider, filled with a new light of understanding.

“But it’s not. It’s because she can heal.”

“Me erasing her memories is like inflicting little wounds in her brain, but she probably just heals them instantaneously,” he adds.

I nod. “And Alice found a way to replicate your ability. Which means—”

“—there must be some way to replicate her ability, too.”

We stare at each other, trying to figure out what to do with this information.

“If we can figure out how to get it, do you think it will restore my memories? And your parents?” he asks me, bright yellow eyes alive with hope. And mine, I add in my mind.

I shrug, but I feel the hope, too. “I think it’s definitely possible.”

When I walk to the car, a new surge of purpose courses through me. This isn’t the end. There’s still a way to fix this.

When Maverick gets inside the car, he turns to me, a strange expression crossing his face. “How exactly did we know each other? In what way?” he asks.

I try to squash the sting that comes with his use of the past tense. I ponder the question for a minute because I don’t really know the answer myself. “You came over to welcome us to the neighborhood the night we moved here, a little over a year ago. Then we got to know each other. We were… close,” I manage.

“Close?” he asks, his eyes boring into me questioningly.

I nod. “We were… together.” Is that the right word?

He blinks a few times before responding. “So Alice took my memories away to hurt you. Is that it?”

I’m on the verge of breaking down, but I blink the tears away fiercely. “It's a little more complicated. But essentially, yes,” I tell him. And someday, I’m determined to make Alice pay for it.

“Complicated how?”

I don’t know where to start. But as I pull the car out of the driveway, and as we’re driving through the streets, I try my best to explain it to him. How we’d dated for all those months. How once he realized I was in danger, he erased my memories of him. How I hear the echoes, and so I learned of his existence. I tell him about Alice kidnapping us, sneaking into