“Okay, um, maybe someone in the yogurt shop is still closing up and would hear us if we yell.” I start pounding on the door, yelling for help. Tristan gets up from the floor and joins me. We yell for a few minutes and then wait to see if we can hear anyone.
I start to shiver.
Twenty or so minutes go by without anyone coming to our rescue. I pace around the freezer. “Worst-case scenario, we’re just stuck in here until the morning crew comes in at what? Like seven in the morning?”
“That’s eight hours from now,” Tristan says with his back to the door.
“Okay, we’ll just be a little cold.”
“A little cold? This is a freezer!”
“People live in colder temperatures! I mean, there’s, like, Eskimosand other people that live in the arctic—this can’t be much worse. We’ll be fine for eight hours.”
“Sloane, this is a freezer.”
“I heard you.”
“There is not enough oxygen in here for both of us for eight hours.”
“Oh.”
We both sit with our backs to the freezer door, taking slow, shallow breaths. Eventually the motion sensor light goes out, leaving us in the dark. We don’t move to turn it back on.
“Are we going to die in here?” I ask him in the frigid blackness.
“I don’t know if we’ll die, but we’ll definitely get hypothermia and probably pass out.”
“Lovely,” I say, shivering. Tristan scoots closer to me so we’re huddled together in the cold.
“I did make that bet,” he admits.
I purse my lips and nod. “I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know,” I say again. “I forgive you.”
“I didn’t even know you or Alaina when I said it. I was just being a jerk. And when we started actually hanging out I realized I liked you. I wish I could take it back.”
“I liked you too,” I say.
“Is that why you wrote about me in your journal?”
“Yep.”
“You have to admit we had fun, though. The concerts, the parties... the time you accidentally met my parents with no pants on.”
I shake my head but my lips tug upward in the dark. “Or whenI had bronchitis for a whole month but we continued to see each other anyway. Your parents probably hated me.”
“Nah, they were cool,” he says. “Until I got bronchitis, and then so did they.”
“Well, that’s what you get.”
He lets out a dry laugh. “If that was my karma then why am I trapped in a freezer right now?” Because this ismykarma is what I want to tell him. When I don’t say anything he talks again. “So what’s going on exactly with these murders? Explain it to me again.” But the thought of explaining this situation again makes my brain hurt. Or maybe that’s from the lack of air. Or the below-thirty-degrees temperature.
“Aren’t we supposed to be conserving air?”
A noise outside the freezer thirty minutes later has me snapping up my head from Tristan’s shoulder.
