The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

by V.E. Schwab

Perhaps she has gone mad. It would not be the first time.

“Spring,” she says, “when everything is new.” “Fall,” he says, “when everything is fading.” They have both chosen seams, those ragged lines where things are neither here nor there, but balanced on the brink. And Addie wonders, half to herself, “Would you rather feel nothing or everything?”

“Mind if I take a shower before I go?” Henry kisses her. “Of course. Just let yourself out.” She smiles. “I will.”

Vintage, she thinks, though the word has never held much weight.

Beside them, a vial of pink pills marked with only a Post-it—a tiny, hand-drawn umbrella.

By the bed, an old-fashioned watch sits on the side table. It has no minute hand, and the hour points just past six, even though the clock on the wall reads 9:32.

“The worst part of every meal is when it ends.”

She can speak German, Italian, Spanish, but French is different, French is bread baking in her mother’s oven, French is her father’s hands carving wood, French is Estele murmuring to her garden. French is coming home.

He pulls her into the circle of his arms. “You are amazing,” he says, and she blushes, having never had an audience.

“I think you’ll find my word won’t fade as fast as yours.” He shrugs. “They will not remember you, of course. But ideas are so much wilder than memories, so much faster to take root.” It will be fifty years before she realizes that he is right. Ideas are wilder than memories. And she can plant them, too.

“I understand,” says Addie. “The nicest days are always the ones we don’t plan.”

He is full of roots, while she has only branches.

A comedy of memory and absence and terrible luck as Henry wraps an arm around her waist, and Robbie looks at Addie with ice in his eyes and says, “Who’s this?”

It is easy to be honest when there are no wrong words, because the words don’t stick. When whatever you say belongs to only you. But Henry is different, he hears her, he remembers, and suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty such a heavy thing.

The door groans shut, and Addie knows, as she walks away, that she will never see her mother again.

And now he feels … too much.

but the truth is, you have no desire to practice, you see the holy texts as stories, sweeping epics, and the more you study, the less you believe in any of it.

but that’s the whole problem, you’ve never felt called to any one thing. There is no violent push in one direction, but a softer nudge a hundred different ways, and now all of them feel out of reach.

“I’m fine,” he says, in that automatic way people always answer when you ask them how they are, even though his heart is hanging open on its hinges.

“Who are you?” he asks. “I am the one who sees kindling and coaxes it to flame. The nurturer of all human potential.”

Your deal and mine, they nest like Russian dolls together in a shell. I look at you, and I see exactly what I want. It’s just that what I want has nothing to do with looks, or charm, or success. It would sound awful, in another life, but what I want most—what I need—has nothing to do with you at all. What I want, what I’ve always truly wanted, is for someone to remember me.

Their eyes meet now across the store, and he knows she said she’s not immune, that their deals simply work together, but the fact remains that there is no shimmer in those brown eyes. Her gaze is clear. A lighthouse through the fog.

She smiles, and Henry’s world goes brighter. She turns away, and it is dark again.

“There’s this family photo,” he says, “not the one in the hall, this other one, from back when I was six or seven. That day was awful. Muriel put gum in David’s book and I had a cold, and my parents were fighting right up until the flash went off. And in the photo, we all look so … happy. I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”

Henry would normally go home—they both would—but David couldn’t get away from his hospital shift this year, so their parents had made other plans.

“Sorry, Book,” she mutters, lifting the cat gingerly onto the back of the old chair, where he does his best impression of an inconvenienced bread loaf.

Addie brightens, and Henry thinks it must be hard to surprise a girl who’s lived three hundred years. So when she turns to him, eyes bright, and says, “We have to go,” there’s nothing he’d rather do.

The Library of The Last Word.

I made a deal with the devil and now whenever anyone looks at me, they see only what they want.

“I can’t,” she says, looking up. “I can’t hold a pen. I can’t tell a story. I can’t wield a weapon, or make someone remember. But art,” she says with a quieter smile, “art is about ideas. And ideas are wilder than memories. They’re like weeds, always finding their way up.”

Addie leans into the wild gust, cheeks blushing with the cold, hair whipping around her face, and in that moment, he can see what every artist saw, what drew them to their pencils and their paint, this impossible, uncatchable girl.

And even though he’s safe, both feet firmly on the ground, Henry feels himself begin to fall.

and Muriel advises him to commit, really commit—as if their parents aren’t still paying her cell phone bills.

Trust Muriel to make a candid look staged.

Laughter spills down from the High Line. Built along a defunct rail, the raised park runs down the western edge of Manhattan from Thirtieth to Twelfth. It’s normally a pleasant place, with food carts and gardens, tunnels and benches, winding paths and city views.

But as they move through the carnival of free exhibits, the artists all turn to look at Addie. He may be a sun, but she is a shining comet, dragging their focus like burning meteors in her wake.

“Three hundred years,” she whispers. “And you can still find something new.”

She uses words like outgoing, funny, ambitious, and the more she talks about him, the thicker the frost in her eyes, the more it spreads, until he can barely make out the color beneath. And Henry wonders how she can see, but of course, she can’t. That’s the point.

It’s a long-running sore point between them, the fact that Henry isn’t gay, that he’s attracted to a person first and their gender second. Robbie cringes, but doesn’t apologize.

And this, this is better than all the other nights. This is better than the attention of a hundred strangers. This is the difference between a hotel bed and home.

it would be so easy to lean back, to give in to the same dangerous gravity that drew him to Robbie, the familiar pull of something loved, and lost, and then returned.

And despite it all, he falters. Because he believes her. Or at least, he believes that she believes herself, and that is worse, because it still doesn’t make it real.

Addie stares down at the ribbons of motion, the ripples fading, and if hers end a moment sooner than his, it is hard to say.

When Henry is with her, time speeds up, and it doesn’t scare him.

It was just so … permanent. Choosing a class became choosing a discipline, and choosing a discipline became choosing a career, and choosing a career became choosing a life, and how was anyone supposed to do that, when you only had one?

“Mr. Strauss, we are an academic institution, not a church. Dissent is at the heart of dissemination.” But that’s the problem. No one will dissent.

You are more than enough, because you are not real.

“I wish you saw yourself the way I see you.” What Bea sees is a good friend.

Just like that, the year is gone, the clocks reset, a three replaced by a four, and Henry knows that he has made a terrible mistake.

For the first time, he feels seen.