The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

Henry can see Addie’s upturned face, the edges of her smile. “Three hundred years,” she whispers. “And you can still find something new.”

Their hands touch again over the chips, legs skimming beneath the metal table, and each time it’s like a tiny burst of light inside his chest. And for once, he isn’t talking himself in and out of every single line, isn’t chiding himself for each and every move, isn’t convincing himself that he has to say the right thing—there’s no need to find the right words when there are no wrong ones. He doesn’t have to lie, doesn’t have to try, doesn’t have to be anyone but himself, because he is enough.

“Hello,” she says. “Are you lost?” She hesitates, torn between yes and no, unsure which is closer to the truth. “I am a ghost,” she says. The boy’s eyes widen in surprise, delight, and he asks her to prove it. She tells him to close his eyes, and when he does, she slips away.

But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world. And she does not want to miss it—any of it.

Eighteen is old enough to vote, twenty-one is old enough to drink, but thirty is old enough to make decisions.”

It is a long play, and yet, it is over too soon. Hours, gone in moments.

She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat. She missed the sound of his voice, the knowing in his touch, the flint-on-stone friction of their conversations, the way they fit together.

But humans are messy, Luc. That is the wonder of them. They live and love and make mistakes, and they feel so much.

“Want is for children. If this were want, I would be rid of you by now. I would have forgotten you centuries ago,” he says, a bitter loathing in his voice. “This is need. And need is painful but patient.

And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”

And Addie looks at him as if she can read his mind, see the storm building in his head. But she is sunshine. She is clear skies.

That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.