“Absolutely not,” Seb said. “You could drown or get hurt. If anyone’s going, it’s me.”
“What was that motto you were always spouting back in the day, when we were kids? Oh, that’s right. ‘Don’t think,’” I quoted, teasing.
“That motto is only for dumb shits like me, not for the big brains.”
“Just be ready to pull me back up.”
“Paige—Paige!”
I didn’t think. I didn’t hesitate, either. After tightening the strap on the headlamp, I put my feet in the hole, took a deep breath, and jumped.
My stomach lurched as I plunged into darkness.
I immediately regretted my decision. I mean, what was I thinking? I was a walking billboard for a stereotypical pasty academic—not Lara Croft.
But then my feet hit the water, and I knifed beneath the surface. The water was shockingly cold and tasted dank. Even with the headlamp, it was too chaotic to see anything, so I shut my eyes and descended. Down, down...
Until I hit the bottom.
My landing stirred up detritus in the water that obscured my vision, even with the headlamp. Yellow lights floated above—the Wags’ flashlights. They were useless down here, just bobbing yellow circles. I hadn’t considered that I wouldn’t be able to navigate well, but now I feared what I couldn’t see.
What’s down here?
As the sediment settled, I was able to get my bearings. The cavern wasn’t big—half the size of the small one above, maybe. And it didn’t look like there was much of anything down here. I dared to swim, using a modified breaststroke while keeping close to the floor, and all it did was churn up more dirt and small particles that muddied everything.
However, when I turned in the water, something glinted on the rocky floor in the light of my headlamp. My eyes stung from keeping them open underwater, but I was able to swim toward the glint. What is that? I reached between a couple stalagmites growing from the floor, stretching out my fingers until they touched something cold and smooth.
A key!
A skeleton key.
I grabbed it and started to turn around and swim back up, but I wasn’t moving.
Stuck. The rubber bottom of my sneaker had gotten wedged between the stalagmites. I jerked my leg, trying to free it, but it only seemed to make it worse.
Couldn’t get my shoe unstuck. Couldn’t get my foot out of my shoe.
Panic rushed through me. I was running out of breath, so I shoved the key into the little pocket of my cutoffs and tried to work my shoe out of the rocks. But the more I tugged, the worse I became stuck.
My foot wasn’t budging. When I struggled harder, my headlamp slipped off and fell out of sight, and the sudden darkness made everything so much worse.
My lungs tightened painfully.
This can’t be real. It only happens in movies. Why did I come down here?
I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, lungs nearly bursting. My vision darkened around the edges. I was going to die inside this cave—that much was clear to me. Best to just give in and let it happen.
Hey, at least I wouldn’t have to face my estranged father.
And the financial aid office back at Harvard.
No regrets, right?
Well, maybe a few. The only one I could think of in the moment, though, was that I desperately regretted Seb hadn’t felt me up on purpose.
Hey, at least I could admit that now that I was dying.
When the world began slipping away, I felt the water shift. Something was moving. Fast. Somewhere in the back of my drowning brain, I vaguely wondered if I’d discovered a long-lost cave creature, Haven’s very own Loch Ness Monster. But a secondlater, I felt human hands on my leg, jerking me painfully until my shoe popped, and I was free.
