Chapter 10
The stairwell we enter feels like it’s heading toward a dungeon. White-tiled walls narrow and darken as they give way to concrete ones. Carter’s and Benji’s laughter floats up from in front of us, and a light flickers on the wall.
I’m going to get murdered in this dream.
At the bottom of the stairs is a heavy metal door with NOT AN EXIT painted in red across it.
On the other side is a basement. Long windows circle the tops of the concrete walls, letting in faded moonlight that bounces off the floor below and finds its way to us.
Planter boxes sit against the walls with tall stalks of corn growing next to shorter tomato vines and other things that I can’t identify.
Chairs are set up in an informal circle to the side as if they were dragged toward each other instead of set that way intentionally.
On the floor between them is a vintage-looking coffee can with cigarette butts in it.
And at the center of everything is a pool.
It looks like an Olympic racing one, with lines at the bottom that peel and disappear in spots, but the light shining inside it casts the whole space in a beautiful blueish-green glow.
“They grow vegetables down here?”
“And other stuff. Between the corn is Professor Torres’s pot plants,” Linden says.
Now the cigarette butts look a bit different.
Seconds later, Carter is stripping down to his boxer briefs. Benji follows, laughing as he pulls his shirt over his head. Linden is in her underwear and already jumping in.
Max stands next to me, finishing the can of beer he holds.
“Has this always been here?” I ask.
He looks at me, confused, because I’ve just asked something that doesn’t make any sense. Something about Max makes me forget that I can’t ask these things. Maybe it’s because I don’t care if he thinks I’m weird.
“Get in!” Carter yells, and Linden shushes him.
Water falls down his face and arms and bare chest. Even in this light, I feel like I can see him so clearly.
In the water.
I take another deep breath.
Everyone has piled their clothes onto a low folding chair, and Max sits in a matching one next to it. I sit on the other side of him and look out at my friends. It’s hard to know what to talk to Max about.
There’s a buzzing, and I look down to see Carter’s phone ringing. A name flashes on the screen with a picture. Alex.
And the picture is of Carter, a guy I don’t know, and a beautiful girl with black hair.
The girl from Carter’s funeral.
My body goes still. This girl is here, too? In the past? Was she here before?
Max looks down and lets out a groan before silencing the phone.
“A friend?” I ask, but it feels like there are rocks in my throat.
“It’s Carter’s phone.” He tells me like I didn’t know. “And that is not his friend. That is his Moby Dick.”
“Moby Dick? Like the book? Or is this like a euphemism?”
He rolls his eyes, but there’s a twinkle in them. “No, Moby Dick is the whale that the captain keeps chasing. That call was from—”
“Flower!” Carter calls me that stupid name, interrupting Max. “Get in here!”
I don’t want to go anywhere near the water or Carter. I want Max to finish what he was saying. “No, I’m good.”
But Carter doesn’t hear words like that often. “Come on, Nieve. You have to break the law like we do, or you can’t be one of us.” He props his arms up on the edge of the pool, folding them to keep him in place.
“This isn’t breaking the law.”
But I look over at Linden. She wiggles her eyebrows. “Trespassing.”
Benji chants from the center of the pool, “One of us. One of us. One of us.”
“That’s okay.” I scoot my chair backward toward the wall.
But Carter hoists himself out of the water.
“Carter,” Linden says in warning.
He moves toward me slowly, with a smile.
“Carter”—I say his name like that will be enough to stop him—“I’m serious.”
“Me, too.”
When his wet arms wrap around me, I’m not sure what to do. For a brief second, the familiarity of touching him feels overwhelming and perfect. His smell mixed with chlorine, his breath on my skin as he lets out a laugh. It must be why I don’t pull out of his embrace right away.
“Carter,” Max says.
I’m pleading with him, a panicked string of words falling from my lips incoherently, but it’s no use. Carter has picked me up and he’s moving toward the water. Some of the lights are out, and it glistens in the dark, and I cannot get into water again. I cannot.
I start to thrash, panicking—it’s instinctual.
But Carter is still laughing.
I close my eyes and wait to fall in the water, wait for the world to swallow me, but suddenly, I’m yanked out of Carter’s grip.
The floor under me feels rough from the concrete as I land on my hands and knees, and it takes me a moment to realize Max is standing over me. He’s not looking to see if I’m okay; instead, he’s looking at Carter. “What the fuck?”
Carter is still smiling, but not as brightly. “What?”
Max takes a deep breath, his chest expanding.
Linden pulls herself out of the pool and wraps her arms around my shoulders. She’s wet, but I’d rather have her holding me than not. “You good?” she whispers. I think I nod, but the longer I sit on the floor, the clearer it is I’m not.
My hands are shaking, and this reaction … I didn’t expect it.
“What?” Max practically growls at Carter. “Pay attention. Look at her. She said no.”
Carter looks at me, and I can only imagine what he sees.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t—”
Linden stands up. “Don’t pull that shit again.”
Now Carter frowns, and I hate that I know why. He doesn’t understand what’s happened. He doesn’t know why the mood has shifted. He was just trying to have fun, and most of the time he is fun. Why didn’t it work this time? “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were afraid of water.”
I’m not, I almost say. Because I love the water. My whole life, I’ve spent every summer swimming. Which is why I was in the river.
Max turns away from us. “I’m heading back. I’ve got to wake up early.” He doesn’t check on me as he walks back to the door, as if he hadn’t just wrenched me from Carter’s grip.
Linden helps me stand up. I have a scrape on my knee from falling to the floor that stings when I move. “Come on.”
Back in our dorm, Linden hands me the Band-Aids she keeps in her drawer.
She sits on her bed and clasps her hands together in her lap. “So,” she starts. “What was that?”
I swallow and take out a few painkillers from the bedside table. “I don’t know.”
“You … don’t know.” She repeats it slowly. “Do I need to be worried about you?”
Yes. “No.”
She gives me an unbelieving look. “Because you went home, and now—”
“Really,” I tell her. “I’m fine. Just. A little…” I take a deep breath. “It’s just been a lot of changes.”
She looks at me for a long time as if she’s deciding if she can believe me or not, and then she says, “I love you, Nieve. You know that, right?”
With a nod, I tell her I do.
And I do.
But that’s the question I keep going over in my brain.
Is love enough to change anything?