I swam over to the shore, pulling myself out of the water and heading for the path.
“You take your job as team captain wayyy too seriously,” Syd said. To my surprise, she’d followed me out of the water and was right behind me. “I’m just messing around.”
I spun around. “Stay here,” I snapped. Syd stopped in her tracks, stunned. I never spoke to her like that. “Leave her alone. You’ll make things worse.” We stared at each other, both standing our ground.
“O-kay,” Syd said after a second. She turned around and walked off, back toward the water. For a second, I wondered if I should go after her, but then I exhaled and headed for the top of the jump.
Ella was sitting on a fallen log to the side of the path a few feet away from the cliff. I might not have noticed her if it hadn’t been for her candy-pink top visible through the trees. She looked up as I came toward her, twigs snapping under my feet.
“I can’t do it,” Ella said. She sounded like she might cry.
I sat down and put my arm around her. Her grasshopper shoulder blades, the warm skin of her back where her tank top didn’t cover. “It’s okay,” I said. “You absolutely do not have to.”
“Maybe could you come back sometime with me?” she asked. “Just us? And I could try again?”
“Of course,” I said.
38.
now
The footage only goes back two days. No matter how hard I look, I can’t find anything from earlier in the month—or from the last year, for that matter—on Wolverson’s computer.
Weird.
“Where should we start?” I ask Yolo, my shaking fingers hovering over the mouse.
Yolo cranes his neck to see the screen.
“You’re right,” I say. “I should start at the beginning.”
The morning of the day everyone disappeared. There’s the cross-country team, meeting under the marquee.
I’m not there. I stopped going after last summer. I quit running my senior year.
I quit everything.
The teams scamper off on a run, they skitter back, they disband. I try not to look too closely at who is there. I try not to figure out from the amount of time it took which run they did.
I try not to think, Are they carrying balled-up tank tops in their hands, is their hair wet, do they still go to Fall Creek even now?
The day’s footage speeds past before me.
There.
Yolo yowls at the exact moment I stop the tape.
“You see it, too, right?”
The screen fuzzes in and out, like in a horror movie, but someone is definitely there. At the marquee. Up on a ladder. The evening everyone disappeared.
Someonedidchange the message that day.
“I can’t tell who it is,” I tell Yolo, freezing the frame. “Can you?”
The image is somewhat distorted. It’s hard to see the person’s height, their distinct features. But the marquee itself is clear enough. I rewind and rewatch several times to make sure, but it’s the same every time. Before, it says HAVE A GOOD SUMM3R. After, it says8/31.
“Okay,” I say. My heart feels like it’s missing beats, and my hands are shaky. “Let’s keep going, right?”
