Panic (12 page)

But it was Ray. He was wearing only basketball shorts. For a split second, he hesitated, obviously startled, just behind the screen.

Before Dodge could say anything, Ray kicked open the screen door. Dodge had to jump back to avoid it. He lost his footing.

“What the fuck are you doing here?”

The sudden motion had screwed Dodge up. He was already off balance when Ray grabbed him by the shirt and then shoved him. Dodge stumbled down the porch stairs and landed in the dirt on his elbows. He bit down on his tongue.

And Ray was above him, in a rage, ready to pounce. “You must be out of your mind,” he spat out.

Dodge rolled away from him and scrambled to his feet. “I’m not here to fight.”

Ray let out a bark of laughter. “You don’t have a choice.”

He took a step forward, swinging; but Dodge had regained his balance and sidestepped him.

“Look.” Dodge held up a hand. “Just listen to me, okay? I came to talk.”

“Why the hell would I want to talk to you?” Ray said. His hands were still balled into fists, but he didn’t try and swing again.

“We both want the same thing,” Dodge said.

For a second, Ray said nothing. His hands uncurled. “What’s that?”

“Panic.” Dodge wet his lips. His throat was dry. “Both of us need it.”

There was an electric tension in the air, hot and dangerous. Ray took another quick step forward.

“Luke told me about your little threats,” Ray said. “What kind of game do you think you’re playing?”

Ray was so close, Dodge could smell cornflakes and sour milk on his breath. But he didn’t step back. “There’s only one game that matters,” he said. “You know it. Luke knew it too. That’s why he did what he did, isn’t it?”

For the first time, Ray looked afraid. “It was an accident,” he said. “He never meant—”

“Don’t.”

Ray shook his head. “I didn’t know,” he said. Dodge knew he was lying.

“Are you going to help me, or not?” Dodge asked.

Ray laughed again: an explosive, humorless sound. “Why should I help you?” he asked. “You want me dead.”

Dodge smiled. “Not like this,” he said. And he meant it, 100 percent. “Not yet.”

Sometime around midnight, when Carp was quiet, dazzling in a light sheen of rain, Zev Keller woke in the dark to rough hands grabbing him. Before he could scream, he was gagging on the taste of cotton in his mouth. A sock. And then he was lifted, carried out of bed and into the night.

His first, confused, thought was that the cops had come to take him away. If he’d been thinking clearly, he would have realized that his assailants were wearing ski masks. He would have noticed that the trunk they forced him into belonged to a navy-blue Taurus, like the kind his brother drove. That it
was
his brother’s car, parked in its usual spot.

But he wasn’t thinking clearly. He was panicked.

Kicking out, watching the sky narrow to a sliver as the trunk closed over him, Zev felt something wet and realized that, for the first time since he was five years old, he’d peed himself.

At last he realized too that despite everything, the game was ongoing. And that he had just lost.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 13

heather

THE WAR MEETING TOOK PLACE AT BISHOP’S HOUSE. IT had to. Heather’s trailer was too small, Dodge wouldn’t have invited them to his place, and Nat’s parents were home all day doing a garage-clean. Heather had to bring Lily. Lily had nothing to do now that school was over, and most days took the bus by herself a half hour to Hudson, where the library was.

But the library was closed for renovations. For once, Lily was in a good mood, even though she was dirty and sweaty and stank like horses; in the morning, she’d helped Heather at Anne’s. She sang a song about tigers all the way to Bishop’s house, and made waves with her arm out the window.

Bishop lived in the woods. His father had once owned an antique store and pawnshop, and Bishop liked to say his dad “collected” things. Heather always threatened to sign them up for that TV show about hoarders. The house, and the yard around it, was littered with stuff, from junky to bizarre: at least two to three old cars at all times, in various states of repair; crates of spray paint; rusted slides; stacks of timber; old furniture, half embedded in the soil. Lily ran off, yelling, weaving through the old piles.

Heather found Nat and Bishop behind the house, sitting on an old merry-go-round, which no longer turned. Bishop looked as though he hadn’t slept in days. He pulled Heather into a hug as soon as he saw her, which was weird.

She tensed up; she probably smelled like stables.

“What’s up with you?” Heather said when he pulled away. The circles under his eyes were as dark as a bruise.

“Just glad to see you,” he said.

“You look like crap.” She reached out to smooth down his hair, an old habit. But he caught her wrist. He was staring at her intensely, like he wanted to memorize her face.

“Heather—” he started to say.

“Heather!” Nat called out at the same time. She, at least, seemed unaffected by Bill Kelly’s death. “I mean, it’s not like we knew him,” she’d said days earlier, when Heather had told her how guilty she felt.

Heather didn’t wait for Nat to speak, although Nat had called the meeting. “I’m out,” she said. “I’m not playing anymore.”

“We have to wait for Dodge,” Nat said.

“I don’t have to wait for anyone,” Heather said. She was annoyed by Nat’s calm. She was blinking happily, sleepily, in the sun—as though nothing had happened. “I’m not playing anymore. It’s as simple as that.”

“It’s sick,” Bishop said fiercely. “Sick. Anyone in their right minds—”

“The judges aren’t in their right minds, though, are they?” Nat said, turning to him. “I mean, they can’t be. You heard about Zev?”

“That wasn’t—” Bishop abruptly stopped speaking, shaking his head.

“I, for one, don’t plan on losing my chance at sixty-seven thousand dollars,” Nat said, still with that infuriating calm. Then she shook her head. “It isn’t right to start without Dodge.”

“Why?” Heather fired back. “Why are you so worried about Dodge?
I
made the deal with you, remember?”

Nat looked away, and then Heather knew. A bitter taste rushed into her throat. “You made a deal with him, too,” she said. “You lied to me.”

“No.” Nat looked at her, eyes wide, pleading. “No. Heather. I never planned on cutting him in.”

“What are you guys talking about?” Bishop asked. “What do you mean, ‘cutting him in’?”

“Stay out of it, Bishop,” Heather said.

“I’m in it,” he said. He dragged a hand through his hair, and in that instant, Heather felt they would never get back to normal: to making fun of Bishop’s hair, to loading it with gel and twisting to make it stick straight up. “You’re at my house, remember?”

“This isn’t a game anymore,” Heather said. Everything was spiraling out of control. “Don’t you get it? Someone’s
dead
.”

“Jesus.” Bishop sat down heavily, rubbing his eyes, as though Heather saying the words had made them real.

“Why did you play, Heather?” Nat stood up when Bishop sat down. Her arms were crossed, and she made little clicking noises with her tongue. Rhythmic. A pattern. “If you didn’t want the risk, if you couldn’t handle it, why did you play? Because Matt-stupid-Hepley dumped you? Because he was sick of getting blue-balled by his girlfriend?”

Heather lost her breath. She was conscious of the air going out of her at once, escaping in a short hiss.

Bishop looked up and spoke sharply: “Nat.”

Even Natalie looked surprised, and immediately guilty. “I’m sorry,” she said quickly, avoiding Heather’s eyes. “I didn’t mean—”

“What did I miss?”

Heather turned. Dodge had just appeared, emerging from the glittering maze of junk and scrap metal. She wondered what they looked like to him: Nat flushed and guilty; Bishop awful-white, wild-eyed; and Heather blinking back tears, still sweaty from the stables.

And all of them angry: you could feel it in the air, a physical force among them.

Suddenly Heather realized that this, too, was a result of the game. That it was part of it.

Only Dodge seemed unaware of the tension. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked Bishop. Bishop shook his head.

Heather broke in. “I’m out. I said I was out and I meant it. The game should have ended—”

“The game never ends,” Dodge said. Nat turned away from him and for a moment, just a moment, he looked uncertain. Heather was relieved. Dodge had changed this summer. He wasn’t the slope-shouldered weirdo, the outsider, who had sat for three years in silence. It was as though the game was
feeding
him somehow—like he was growing on it. “You heard about Zev?” He exhaled a straight stream of smoke. “That was me.”

Nat had turned back to him. “You?”

“Me, and Ray Hanrahan.”

There was a moment of silence.

Heather finally managed to speak. “What?”

“We did it.” Dodge took a final drag and ground out the cigarette butt underneath the heel of his cowboy boot.

“That’s against the rules,” Heather said. “The judges set the challenges.”

Dodge shook his head. “It’s Panic,” he said. “There are no rules.”

“Why?” Bishop tugged at his left ear. He was furious and trying not to show it; that was his tell.

“To send a message to the judges. The players, too. The game will go on, one way or another. It has to.”

“You don’t have the right,” Bishop said.

Dodge shrugged. “What’s right?” he said. “What’s wrong?”

“What about the cops? And the fire? What about Bill?”

No one said anything. Heather realized she was shaking.

“I’m done,” she said. She spun around and nearly collided with a rust-spotted furnace, which, along with an overturned bike, marked the beginning of the narrow path that wound through the landscape of litter and junk to the house, and around to the front yard. Bishop called out to her, but she ignored him.

She found Lily crouching in a bit of yard uncluttered by junk, marking the bare grass with bright-blue spray paint she had unearthed somewhere.

“Lily.” Heather spoke sharply.

Lily dropped the paint and stood up, looking guilty.

“We’re going,” Heather said.

Lily’s frown reappeared, as did the small pucker between her eyebrows. Immediately, she seemed to shrink and age. Heather thought of the night Lily had whispered, “Are you going to die?” and felt a fist of guilt hit her hard in the stomach. She didn’t know whether she was doing the right thing. She felt like nothing she did was right.

But what had happened to Bill Kelly was wrong. And pretending it hadn’t happened was wrong too. That, she knew.

“What’s the matter with you?” Lily said, sticking out her lower lip.

“Nothing.” Heather seized her wrist. “Come on.”

“I didn’t get to say hi to Bishop,” Lily whined.

“Next time,” Heather said. She practically dragged Lily to the car. She couldn’t hear Nat or Bishop or Dodge anymore; she wondered whether they were talking about her. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough. She drove in silence, gripping the wheel as though it was in danger of slipping suddenly from her hands.

WEDNESDAY, JULY 20

heather

THE WEATHER TURNED FOUL, COLD AND WET, AND THE ground turned to sludge. For two days, Heather heard nothing from Nat. She refused to be the one to call first. She texted back and forth with Bishop but avoided seeing him, which meant that to go to work she had to bus it to the 7-Eleven and walk three quarters of a mile in the driving rain, arriving wet and miserable just to stand for more hours in the rain, chucking the chickens soggy feed and hauling equipment into the sheds so it wouldn’t rust.

Only the tigers seemed more miserable than she was; she wondered, as they huddled underneath a canopy of maple trees, watching her work, whether they dreamed of other places as much as she did. Africa, burnt grasses, a vast round sun. For the first time it struck her as selfish that Anne kept them here, in this craptastic climate of blistering heat, followed by rain, followed by snow and sleet and ice.

There were rumors that the police had turned up evidence of arson at the Graybill house. For a whole day, Heather waited in agony, certain that the evidence had to do with her duffel bag, positive that the police would haul her off to jail. What would happen to her, if she were accused of murder? She was eighteen. That meant she would go to real jail, not juvie.

But when several more days passed and no one came looking for her, she relaxed again. She hadn’t been the one to light the stupid match. Really, when you thought about it, this was all Matt Hepley’s fault.
He
should be arrested. And Delaney, too.

About Panic, there was not a single whisper. Dodge’s move had, apparently, failed to rouse the judges to action. Heather wondered whether he would try again, then reminded herself it was no longer her business.

Still, it rained: this was mid-July in upstate New York, lush and green and wet as a rain forest.

Krista got sick from the humidity and the wet in the air, saying it made her lungs feel clotty. Heather refrained from pointing out that her lungs might feel better if she stopped smoking a pack of menthol cigarettes a day. Krista called in sick to work and instead lay on the couch in a daze of cold medicine, like something dead and bloated dragged up by the ocean.

At least Heather could use the car. The library had reopened. She dropped Lily there.

“Want me to pick you up later?” she asked.

Lily was back to being snotty. “I’m not a baby,” she said as she slid out of the car, not even bothering with the umbrella Heather had brought for her. “I’ll bus it.”

“What about—?” Before Heather could remind her to take the umbrella, Lily had slammed the door and was dashing for the library entrance through a slow ooze of dark puddles.

Despite the rain, Heather was in a decent mood. Lily was almost twelve. It was
normal
for her to be a brat. It was maybe even a good thing. It showed she was growing up okay, the way that everyone else did—that maybe she wouldn’t be messed up just because she’d grown up in Fresh Pines with ants parading all over the spoons and Krista fumigating the house.

And there were still no police knocking on her door, still not a single, solitary breath about Panic.

Work was hard: Anne wanted her to muck the stables, and afterward they had to recaulk a portion of the basement, where the rain was coming in and the walls were speckled with mold. Heather was shocked when Anne stopped her for the day. It was nearly five p.m., but Heather hadn’t noticed time passing, had barely looked up. The rain was worse than ever. It came down in whole sheets, like the quivering blades of a giant guillotine.

While Anne was preparing her a cup of tea, Heather checked her phone for the first time in hours, and her stomach went to liquid and pooled straight down to her feet. She’d missed twelve calls from Lily.

Her throat squeezed up so tight she could hardly breathe. She punched Lily’s number immediately. Her cell phone went straight to voice mail.

“What’s the matter, Heather?” Anne was standing at the oven, her gray hair frizzing around her face, like a strange halo.

Heather said, “I have to go.”

Afterward, she didn’t remember getting into the car or backing it down the driveway; she didn’t remember the drive to the library, but suddenly she was there. She parked the car but left the door open. Some of the puddles were ankle deep, but she hardly noticed. She sprinted to the entrance; the library had been closed for an hour.

She called Lily’s name, circled the parking lot, searching for her. She scanned the streets as she drove, imagining all the terrible things that might have happened to Lily—she’d been hurt, snatched, killed—and trying to stop herself from losing it, throwing up or breaking down.

Finally, she had no choice but to go home. She’d have to call the police.

Heather fought back another wave of panic. This was it, the real thing.

The road leading to Fresh Pines was full of ruts, sucking black mud, deep water. Heather bumped through it, tires spinning and grinding. The place looked sadder than usual: the rain was beating fists on the trailers, pulling down wind chimes, and overflowing outdoor fire pits.

Heather hadn’t even stopped the car when she spotted Lily: huddled underneath a skinny birch tree missing most of its leaves, only fifteen feet away from the trailer steps, arms wrapped around her legs, shivering. Heather must have parked because all of a sudden she was rocketing out of the car, splashing through the water, taking Lily in her arms.

“Lily!” Heather couldn’t hug her sister tight enough. Here, here, here. Safe. “Are you okay? Are you all right? What happened?”

“I’m cold.” Lily’s voice was muffled. She spoke into Heather’s left shoulder. Heather’s heart seized up; she would have spun the world in reverse for a blanket.

“Come on,” she said, pulling away. “Let’s get you inside.”

Lily reared back, like a bucking horse. Her eyes went huge, wild. “I won’t go in there,” she said. “I don’t want to go in there!”

“Lily.” Heather blinked rain out of her eyes, crouching down so she was eye level with her sister. Lily’s lips were ringed with blue. God. How long had she been out here? “What’s going on?”

“Mom told me to go away,” Lily said. Her voice had turned small, broken. “She—she told me to play outside.”

Something inside Heather cracked, and in that moment she was conscious that all her life she had been building up walls and defenses in preparation for something like this; behind them, the pressure had been mounting, mounting. Now the dam broke, and she was flooded, drowning in rage and hate.

“Come on,” she said. She was surprised she still sounded the same, when inside of her was a sucking blackness, a furious noise. She took Lily’s hand. “You can sit in the car, okay? I’ll turn on the heat. You’ll be nice and dry.”

She brought Lily to the car. There was an old T-shirt in the back—Krista’s, reeking of smoke—but it was dry, at least. She helped Lily wriggle out of her wet shirt. She untied Lily’s shoes for her, and peeled off her wet socks, then made Lily press her feet up to the vents where the heat had begun to blow. The whole time Lily was limp, obedient, as if all the life had been washed out of her. Heather moved mechanically.

“I’ll be right back,” she told Lily. She felt detached from the words, as though she wasn’t the one speaking. The anger was drumming out the knowledge of everything else.

Boom, boom, boom.

There was music coming from the trailer, practically shaking the walls. The lights were on too, although the blinds were down; she could see a figure swaying in silhouette, maybe dancing. She hadn’t noticed before because she’d been too worried about Lily. She kept seeing her sister huddled underneath the pathetic birch, practically the single tree that Fresh Pines boasted.

Mom told me to go away. She told me to play outside.

Boom, boom, boom.

She was at the door. Locked. From inside, she heard a shriek of laughter. Somehow she fit the key in the lock; that must mean she wasn’t shaking.
Strange,
she thought, and also:
Maybe I could have won Panic after all.

She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

There were three of them: Krista, Bo, and Maureen, from Lot 99. They froze, and Heather froze too. She was seized momentarily by the sense that she’d entered a play and had forgotten all her lines—she couldn’t breathe, didn’t know what to do. The lights were high, bright. They looked like actors, all three of them—actors you see too close. They were too made up. But the makeup was horrible. It looked as though it was beginning to melt, slowly deforming their faces. Their eyes were bright, glittering: doll eyes.

Heather took in everything at once: the blue haze of smoke. The empty beer bottles, the overflowing cups used as ashtrays, the single bottle of Georgi vodka, half empty.

And the small blue plastic plate on the table, still faintly outlined with the imprint of the
Sesame Street
characters—Lily’s old plate—now covered with thin lines of fine white powder.

All of it hit Heather like a physical blow, a quick sock to the stomach. Her world went black for a second. The plate. Lily’s plate.

Then the moment passed. Krista brought a cigarette unsteadily to her lips, nearly missing. “Heather Lynn,” she slurred. She patted her shirt, her breasts, as though expecting to find a lighter there. “What are you doing, baby? Why are you staring at me like I’m a—”

Heather lunged. Before her mother finished speaking, before she could think about what she was doing, all of the rage traveled down into her arms and legs and she picked up the blue plate, crisscrossed with powder like it had been scarred by something, and threw.

Maureen screamed and Bo shouted. Krista barely managed to duck. She tried to right herself and, staggering backward, managed to land on Maureen’s lap, in the armchair. This made Maureen scream even louder. The plate collided against the wall with a thud, and the air was momentarily full of white powder, like an indoor snow. It would have been funny if it weren’t so horrible.

“What the hell?” Bo took two steps toward Heather and for a moment, she thought he might hit her. But he just stood there, fists clenched, red-faced and enraged. “What the
hell
?”

Krista fought to her feet. “Who in the goddamn do you think you are?”

Heather was glad that they were separated by the coffee table. Otherwise, she wasn’t sure what she would do. She wanted to kill Krista. Really kill her. “You’re disgusting.” Her voice sounded mangled, like something had wrapped around her vocal cords.

“Get out.” The color was rising in Krista’s face. Her voice, too, was rising, and she was shaking as though something awful was going to detonate inside her. “Get out! Do you hear me? Get out!” She reached for the vodka bottle and threw it. Fortunately, she was slow. Heather sidestepped it easily. She heard shattering glass and felt the splash of liquid. Bo got his arms around Krista. He managed to restrain her. She was still shrieking, writhing like an animal, face red and twisted and awful.

And suddenly all of Heather’s anger dissipated. She felt absolutely nothing. No pain. No anger. No fear. Nothing but disgust. She felt, weirdly, as if she were floating above the scene, hovering in her own body.

She turned and went to her bedroom. She checked her top drawer first, in the plastic jewelry box where she kept her earnings. Everything was gone but forty dollars. Of course. Her mom had stolen it.

This didn’t bring a fresh wave of anger, only a new kind of disgust. Animals. They were animals, and Krista was the worst of them.

She pocketed the twenties and moved quickly through the room, stuffing things in Lily’s backpack: shoes, pants, shirts, underwear. When the backpack was full, she bundled things up in one of the comforters. They would need a blanket, anyway. And toothbrushes. She remembered reading in a magazine once that toothbrushes were the number one item travelers forgot to pack. But she wouldn’t forget. She was calm, thinking straight. She had it all together.

She slid the backpack onto one of her shoulders—it was so small, she couldn’t fit it correctly. Poor Lily. She wanted to get food from the kitchen, but that would mean walking past her mom and Bo and Maureen. She’d have to skip it. There probably wasn’t much she could use, anyway.

At the last second she took the rose off her dresser, the one Bishop had made her from metal and wire. It would be good luck.

She hefted the blanket in her arms, now heavy with all the clothing and shoes it contained, and shuffled sideways out of the bedroom door. She’d been worried her mom would try and stop her, but she shouldn’t have been. Krista was sitting on the couch, crying, with Maureen’s arms around her. Her hair was a stringy mess. Heather heard her say, “. . . did everything . . . on my own.” Only half the words were audible. She was too messed up to speak clearly. Bo was gone. He’d probably split, since the drugs were nothing but carpet crumbs now. Maybe he’d left to get more.

Heather pushed out the door. It didn’t matter. She’d never see Bo again. She’d never see her mother, or Maureen, or the inside of that trailer again. For one second, she could have sobbed, going down the porch steps. Never again—the idea filled her with a relief so strong, it almost turned her knees to water and made her trip.

But she couldn’t cry, not yet. She had to be strong for Lily.

Lily had fallen asleep in the front seat, her mouth open, her hair feathering slightly in the heat. Finally her lips weren’t blue anymore, and she was no longer shivering.

She didn’t open her eyes until they were just bouncing out of the entrance to the Pines and onto Route 22.

“Heather?” she said in a small voice.

“What’s up, Billy?” Heather tried to smile and couldn’t.

“I don’t want to go back there.” Lily turned and rested her forehead against the window. In the glass’s reflection, her face was narrow and pale, like a tapered flame.

Heather tightened her fingers on the wheel. “We’re not going back there,” she said. Weirdly, the words made the taste of sick come up. “We’re never going back, okay? I promise.”

“Where will we go?” Lily asked.