Claire used to love the rain before she came here. Under normal circumstances, it was an excellent excuse to stay inside and escape into a book or lose herself in practice at the ballet barre in her bedroom. Her parents couldn’t prod her to “get some fresh air and see some fresh faces” if the weather was lousy. That was always their solution: just go “participate in life.” Put herself out there. If she managed to sequester herself in her room early enough, she could squeeze in a few hours for just herself before her parents started to wonder, loudly, what she was up to and why, if she’d finished her homework, she wasn’t being social with any of her perfectly nice classmates. The rain used to be a friendly coconspirator.
But out here, it felt as if the rain was an enemy who hated them with a hateful hate.
By the time they reached the Lake House, the rain waspummeling them. It was falling so hard that it was difficult to see more than a few feet in front of them. Shielding her eyes with her arm, Claire forded ahead.
When she reached the ruins of the shed, she squatted in the mud next to the trapdoor. “Help me!”
Together, the three of them yanked the lid open. Reyva dropped her pack down the shaft, and Mariana and Claire followed suit, then Reyva scurried down the ladder. Mariana went next.
“Shut it behind you,” Mariana said.
“Absolutely not,” Claire said.
“But the rain will get in.”
“We’ll catch it in the bucket.”
“What’s the point of a shelter if you leave the door wide open?”
“What if we can’t open it from the inside? It takes all three of us to pry it up—only one can fit on the ladder. What if it’s too heavy?”
“You’re underestimating us,” Mariana said. “We’re stronger than we look.” She paused and added with a pointed look, “You are too.” But she climbed down the ladder without any further argument.
Claire pushed the lid open wider so it lay flat on the floor, and then she followed. As soon as she was partway down, she knew coming here was the right decision. The wind couldn’t touch them underground. Rain still spat at her, trickling down the opening, but it wasn’t anywhere near as intense as being exposed out in the storm.
She reached the bottom. Both Mariana and Reyva had already turned on their phones’ flashlights. “Probably should conserve batteries,” Claire said. “Just use one.” They were lucky the phones still worked at all. She knew her battery was low. She’d charged it before she’d left Connecticut, but that felt like eons ago.
Mariana glared at her as if all this were her fault, but she switched off her light. Reyva left hers on, its beam casting striped shadows from the bars of the cage.
“We’ll stay here until it stops, then we’ll take the rainwater in the jars, bring the toolbox in case we need to boil more, and hike out of here.” Claire tried to make her voice sound upbeat. She wasn’t as good at that as Mariana. Even Reyva was better at positivity when she was trying.
“And what do we do if it starts raining like this when we’re out in the woods, hiking around the lake?” Mariana asked.
“Hope it doesn’t,” Reyva said.
“Not loving that solution,” Mariana said. Claire heard the edge in her voice—the fighting-not-to-cry tone. “Do you really think we’re going to be able to make it out of here on foot? I’m not much of a hiker.”
“I think we have to try,” Claire said.
Mariana looked as if she wanted to say more, but instead she nodded.
“Or, another idea: we become wild women and live off the land,” Reyva said. She was shivering so hard that her teeth were chattering. “Never return to civilization. Years later, they’ll make documentaries about us.”
“Only if we can order pizza,” Mariana said, sounding a bit less like she was going to freak out, which in and of itself was a good thing. Claire wasn’t sure what she’d do if one of the others lost it.
She also wished Mariana hadn’t mentioned pizza.
So far, she’d done a decent job of not thinking about food, but once she imagined the taste of a nice thin-crust margherita pizza, her stomach began to complain. It let out a whine like an out-of-tune trumpet. Startled, Claire laughed, and the others laughed too—thin and strained, but for a moment, Claire felt better than she thought she had any right to feel. If they could still laugh, maybe they weren’t totally doomed.
“Do you think any place would deliver Thai?” Mariana asked. “Give them directions to the murder hole next to the burned-down house. Can’t miss it.”
“We’ll need to ration,” Claire said. “And then... I don’t know.” Hunt? Fish? Forage? She couldn’t see them taking down a deer with their bare hands. As for foraging, she didn’t know how to tell poisonous berries from nonpoisonous. She knew peoplecoulddo it, but she was fuzzy on the details as tohow.
“We may just need to be hungry for a while,” Reyva said.
“Not loving that idea either,” Mariana said.
Reyva snapped, “Open to a better one.”
