Panic Read online

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  But Matt loved her. Matt thought she was pretty.

  The noise on the beach swelled, grew to a roar: hoots and screams, people waving homemade banners and flags, firecrackers exploding like a smattering of gunfire, and she knew it was time. The whistle would blow.

  Panic was about to begin.

  Just then Heather saw him. The crowd parted temporarily; she could see him, smiling, talking to someone; then the crowd shifted again and she lost sight of him. “He’s here. Nat, he’s here. ”

  “What?” Nat wasn’t paying attention anymore.

  Heather’s voice dried up in her throat. Because the crowd had opened again, just as she’d started moving toward him, as though directed by gravity—relief welling in her chest, a chance to make things right, a chance to do things right, for once—and in that second she had seen that he was speaking to Delaney O’Brien.

  Not just speaking. Whispering.

  And then: kissing.

  The whistle blew—sharp and thin in the sudden silence, like the cry of an alien bird.

  Heather reached the top of the ridge just as Derek Klieg got a running start and hurled himself into the air, body contorted, shouting. A few seconds later, a cheer went up as he hit.

  Natalie was crouching a few feet away from the edge, her face pale; for a second, Heather thought she heard her counting. Then Nat turned and blinked repeatedly, as though trying to bring Heather’s face into focus. She opened her mouth and closed it again.

  Heather’s heart was beating hard and high. “Hey, Nat,” she said, just as Natalie straightened up.

  “What the hell are you doing?” Natalie spat out.

  Now Heather registered everything, all at once: the ache in her hands and thighs, the pain in her fingers, the sharp bite of the wind. Natalie looked furious. She was shaking, although that might have been the cold.

  “I’m going to jump,” Heather said, realizing, as she said it, how stupid it sounded—how stupid it was. All of a sudden, she thought she might puke.

  I’ll be cheering for you, Heather had said to Natalie. The guilt was there, throbbing alongside the nausea. But Matt’s voice was bigger than everything. Matt’s voice, and underneath it a vision of the water stains above her bed; the dull thud of music from the park; the smell of weed and cigarettes; the sounds of laughing, and later, someone screaming, You dumb piece of . . .

  “You can’t jump,” Nat said, still staring. “I’m jumping. ”

  “We’ll jump together,” Heather said.

  Natalie took two steps forward. Heather noticed she was balling her fists almost rhythmically. Squeeze, relax. Squeeze, relax. Three times.

  “Why are you doing this?” The question was almost a whisper.

  Heather couldn’t answer. She didn’t even know, not exactly. All she knew—all she could feel—was that this was her last chance.

  So she just said, “I’m going to jump now. Before I chicken out. ”

  When she turned toward the water, Natalie reached for Heather, as if to pull her back. But she didn’t.

  Heather felt as though the rock underneath her had begun to move, bucking like a horse. She had a sudden terror that she was going to lose her balance and go tumbling down the rocky slope, cracking her head in the shallows.

  Panic.

  She took small, halting steps forward, and still reached the edge far too quickly.

  “Announce yourself!” Diggin boomed out.

  Below Heather, the water, black as oil, was still churning with bodies. She wanted to shout down—move, move, I’m going to hit you—but she couldn’t speak. She could hardly breathe. Her lungs felt like they were being pressed between two stones.

  And suddenly she couldn’t think of anything but Chris Heinz, who five years ago drank a fifth of vodka before doing the jump, and lost his footing. The sound his head made as it cracked against the rock was delicate, almost like an egg breaking. She remembered the way everyone ran through the woods; the image of his body, broken and limp, lying half-submerged in the water.

  “Say your name!” Diggin prompted again, and the crowd picked up the chant: Name, name, name.

  She opened her mouth. “Heather,” she croaked out. “Heather Nill. ” Her voice broke, got whipped back by the wind.

  The chant was still going: Name, name, name, name. Then: Jump, jump, jump, jump.

  Her insides were white; filled with snow. Her mouth tasted a little like puke. She took a deep breath. She closed her eyes.

  She jumped.

  SATURDAY, JUNE 25

  heather

  HEATHER HAD ONCE READ AN ARTICLE ONLINE ABOUT how time was relative, and moved faster or slower depending on where you were and what you were doing. But she had never understood why it moved slower during the really awful stuff—math class, dentist appointments—and speeded up whenever you tried to make time go slow. Like when you were taking a test, or at your birthday party.

  Or, in this case, dreading something.

  Why did time have to be the wrong kind of relative?

  She had never regretted anything as much as she regretted making the decision, on the beach, to enter the game. In the days that followed, it seemed to her like a kind of insanity. Maybe she’d inhaled too much booze-vapor on the beach. Maybe seeing Matt with Delaney had driven her temporarily psychotic. That happened, didn’t it? Weren’t whole defenses built on that kind of thing, when people went crazy and hacked their ex-wives to pieces with an ax?

  But she was too proud to withdraw now. And the date of the first official challenge kept drawing nearer. Despite the fact that the breakup made her want to go into permanent hiding, despite the fact that she was doing her best to avoid everyone who knew her even vaguely, the news had reached her: the water towers near Copake had been defaced, painted over with a date. Saturday. Sundown.

  A message and invitation to all the players.

  Matt was gone. School was over. Not that she’d ever liked school, but still. It got her out of the house; it was something to do. Now everything was over and done. It occurred to her that this was her life: vast and empty, like a coin dropping down a bottomless well.

  She moved as slowly as she could, spent her nights curled on the couch watching TV with her sister, Lily, turned off her phone when she wasn’t obsessively checking it for calls from Matt. She didn’t want to deal with Bishop, who would lecture her and tell her that Matt was an idiot anyway; and Nat spent three days giving her the cold shoulder before admitting, finally, that she wasn’t that mad anymore.

  Time tumbled, cascaded on, as though life had been set to fast-forward.

  Finally Saturday came, and she couldn’t avoid it anymore.

  She didn’t even have to bother to sneak out. Earlier in the evening, her mom and her stepdad, Bo, had gone over to some bar in Ancram, which meant they wouldn’t be stumbling home until the early hours or, possibly, Sunday afternoon—bleary-eyed, reeking of smoke, probably starving and in a foul mood.

  Heather made mac ’n’ cheese for Lily, who ate in sullen silence in front of the TV. Lily’s hair was parted exactly down the middle, combed straight, and fixed in a hard knot at the back of her head. Recently she had been wearing it like that, and it made her look like an old woman stuck in an eleven-year-old’s body.

  Lily was giving her the silent treatment, and Heather didn’t know why, but she didn’t have enough energy to worry about it. Lily was like that: stormy one minute, smiley the next. Recently, she’d been more on the stormy side—more serious, too, very careful about what she wore and how she fixed her hair, quieter, less likely to laugh until she snorted milk, less likely to beg Heather for a story before she went to bed—but Heather figured she was just growing up. There wasn’t that much to smile about in Carp. There definitely wasn’t much to smile about in Fresh Pines Mobile Park.

  Still, it made Heather’s chest ache a little. She missed the old Lily: sticky Dr Pepper hands, the smell of bubblegum breat
h, hair that was never combed, and glasses that were always smudgy. She missed Lily’s eyes, wide in the dark, as she rolled over and whispered, “Tell me a story, Heather. ”

  But that was the way it worked—evolution, she guessed; the order of things.

  At seven thirty p. m. , Bishop texted her to say that he was on his way. Lily had withdrawn to the Corner, which was what Heather called their bedroom: a narrow, cramped room with two beds squeezed practically side by side; a chest of drawers missing a leg, which rocked violently when it was opened; a chipped lamp and a varnish-spotted nightstand; clothes heaped everywhere, like snowdrifts.

  Lily was lying in the dark, blankets drawn up to her chin. Heather assumed she was sleeping and was about to close the door, when Lily turned to her, sitting up on one elbow. In the moonlight coming through the dirty windowpane, her eyes were like polished marbles.

  “Where are you going?” she said.

  Heather navigated around a tangle of jeans and sweatshirts, underwear and balled-up socks. She sat down on Lily’s bed. She was glad that Lily wasn’t asleep. She was glad, too, that Lily had decided to talk to her after all.

  “Bishop and Nat are picking me up,” she said, avoiding the question. “We’re going to hang out for a little while. ”

  Lily lay down again, huddling in her blankets. For a minute, she didn’t say anything. Then: “Are you coming back?”

  Heather felt her chest squeeze up. She leaned over to place a hand on Lily’s head. Lily jerked away. “Why would you say something like that, Billygoat?”

  Lily didn’t answer. For several minutes Heather sat there, her heart raging in her chest, feeling helpless and alone in the dark. Then she heard Lily’s breathing and knew she had fallen asleep. Heather leaned over and kissed her sister’s head. Lily’s skin was hot and wet, and Heather had the urge to climb into bed with her, to wake her up and apologize for everything: for the ants in the kitchen and the water stains on the ceiling; for the smells of smoke and the shouting from outside; for their mom, Krista, and their stepdad, Bo; for the pathetic life they’d been thrust into, narrow as a tin can.

  But she heard a light honk from outside, so instead she got up, closing the door behind her.

  Heather could always tell Bishop was coming by the sound of his cars. His dad had owned a garage once, and Bishop was a car freak. He was good at building things; several years ago he’d made Heather a rose out of petals of copper, with a steel stem and little screws for thorns. He was always tinkering with rusted pieces of junk he picked up from God-knows-where. His newest was a Le Sabre with an engine that sounded like an old man trying to choke out a belt buckle.

  Heather took shotgun. Natalie was sitting in the back. Weirdly, Natalie always insisted on sitting bitch, in the exact middle, even if there was no one else in the car. She’d told Heather that she didn’t like picking sides—left or right—because it always felt like she was betting with her life. Heather had explained to her a million times that it was more dangerous to sit in the middle, but Nat didn’t listen.

  “I can’t believe you roped me into this,” Bishop said when Heather got in the car. It was raining—the kind of rain that didn’t so much fall as materialize, as though it was being exhaled by a giant mouth. There was no point in using an umbrella or rain jacket—it was coming from all directions at once, and got in collars and under shirtsleeves and down the back.