Page 182 - The Midnight Library

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Someone Else’s Dream

‘Life is always an act,’ Mrs Elm said, as they watched her brother being

pulled back from the water’s edge by his friends. As he then watched a girl
whose name she’d long forgotten make an emergency call. ‘And you acted
when it counted. You swam to that bank. You clawed yourself out. You
coughed your guts out and had hypothermia but you crossed the river,
against incredible odds. You found something inside you.’

‘Yes. Bacteria. I was ill for weeks. I swallowed so much of that shitty water.’
‘But you lived. You had hope.’
‘Yeah, well, I was losing it by the day.’

She stared down, to see the grass shrink back into the stone, and looked
back to catch the last sight of the water before it shimmered away and the
sycamore tree dissolved into air along with her brother and his friends and
her own young self.
e librar y looked exactly like the librar y again. But now the books were

all back on the shelves and the lights had stopped flickering.
‘I was so stupid, doing that swim, just tr ying to impress people. I always
thought Joe was better than me. I wanted him to like me.’

‘Why did you think he was better than you? Because your parents did?’
Nora felt angr y at Mrs Elm’s directness. But maybe she had a point. ‘I
always had to do what they wanted me to do in order to impress them. Joe
had his issues, obviously. And I didn’t really understand those issues until I
knew he was gay, but they say sibling rivalr y isn’t about siblings but parents,

and I always felt my parents just encouraged his dreams a bit more.’
‘Like music?’
‘Yeah.’