“We’ll catch up with you at the cabin,” Brenda told Ed. “Gimme the address.”
Ricky and Ed exchanged a look, a low one, like a growl, or the smell of plastic burning.
“We have to drive out there together,” Ricky finally said.
Brenda shrugged. “Then you’ll have to wait. Me and Maureen and Heather just played the set of our lives. We deserve some rides.”
There was some more negotiating, with Claude agreeing to deliver our instruments to Brenda’s parents’ car (they’d watched the whole show from afar), Ricky, Ed, and Ant going off to buy some weed from one of the carnival workers, and Brenda making sure Junie got safely back to my dad.
That’s how I found myself alone with Maureen for the briefest moment, the two of us standing close in the crush of the crowd and heat, so close and in such a pocket that I could see what she’d been trying to hide all night with her broad grins and her glittery eye shadow and the dark swoop of her eyeliner: her face was tormented, razorblade shapes—memories?—pulsing beneath her tender skin. I pulled her into my arms.
“You okay, Mo?” I said into her hair. She was trembling.
“I’ve always been after something,” she whispered.
I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. I pulled back, stared into her raw, beautiful face.
“You know it, too,” she said, trying to smile and failing. Her voice was as thin as a spiderweb. “I’ll try anything. Food. Smokes. Pills.Anything.But I never feel full. Not even tonight’s show did it. It makes me so tired, Heather.”
I had no idea what she was talking about. I dragged her close again.
That last exchange would haunt me forever.
BETH
Beth knew she had to stay awake. If she fell asleep, he could creep in and take her when she was vulnerable. She wasn’t going to let that happen twice. But she’d been pacing for hours, the hot metal of the lantern handle digging into her palm.
By her best estimate, she’d been trapped in the room for four days.
In that time, he’d brought her only a half loaf of bread and a nearly empty jar of peanut butter. She’d strung them out as long as she could, but she was hungry, and she was tired of smelling her own waste, and her feet ached from the walking, the walking, always the walking in her square cage. She was doing push-ups, too, and squats and burpees, everything she could to keep her body strong.
But fatigue pulled at her.
She set the lantern on the hardpack floor. She’d rest her eyes for just a moment. It’d be okay. She wouldn’t even lie all the way down. She’d lean against the cold wall, tip her head back, and just take a load off. The second she heard his footfalls, she’d lurch to her feet, lantern in hand, swinging at his awful head, crushing it like a pumpkin.
Smash. Pop.
She curled up in the corner.
Exhaustion draped its blanket over her.
Before she knew it, she was dreaming about a pumpkin disappearing beneath a car tire when all of a sudden he was on her, one hand over her mouth, the other at her throat. She felt as if she were emerging from a pool of glue, her limbs barely responding, everything nightmare dark. She was so disoriented that it took her a moment to place the new smell, so strong it cut through the vinegary tang of her urine and days of fear sweat. The new smell was greasy. Thick. Sweet.
Unmistakable.
Fair food.
CHAPTER 14
I’d visited Dead Man’s Quarry during the day. It was a little over three miles from Pantown as the crow flew. Once Brenda, Maureen, and I were old enough, we biked there to swim, supposedly. Really, it was an excuse to stare and be stared at. I never went in the water. The height of the rocks and the depth of the water terrified me. Plus, a campfire story about the quarries—sometimes it was Dead Man’s, sometimes a different one, depended where you’d just been swimming—claimed they were haunted by the bloated corpse of a guy who’d drowned in their watery depths. Once a year, he’d trick a swimmer into believing down was up. They’d jump in, all laughs and peace signs. As soon as they plunged below the surface, though, they’d get turned around. They’d stroke toward the bottomless bottom, thinking they were about to break the surface, their breath growing tighter, their kicks more frantic as the water grew icier, the sweet light of the sun a receding promise.
By the time they figured it out, it was too late.
I knew it was just a story. I also knew I wasn’t ever going to swim in the quarries.
Brenda didn’t go into the water, either, but that was because she didn’t want to mess up her hair. The two of us would roll out on a blanket, near to the water but not too close, and slather ourselves with baby oil mixed with iodine, spritzing lemon-scented Sun-In over our hair and settling in for a day of tanning.
Maureen was the opposite. She waited only as long as it took to yank off her shirt and shorts before running to the tallest of the cliffs in her green bikini. She’d stand in line on that wall of scoured rock soaring fifty feet above the water, massive granite boulders scattered behind her like giant toy blocks. The water below was clear but so deep it was black, the air saturated with its froggy smell.
