11. Indy
ELEVEN
INDY
I wake up in complete darkness, slowly blinking my eyes open. I immediately remember where I am and why. No merciful moment of delusion, just an immediate plunge back into reality.
My head is in Nick’s lap.
I go very still when I realize.
I have no memory of how this happened. I don’t move a muscle. If I stay perfectly still I might wake up again and the situation will change, and I’ll be anywhere else.
Maybe I’m imagining it, but the air feels much thicker than it was before. Hotter. It’s almost as if I’m breathing the kind of air somebody breathes into your face. Used air. It’s warm and damp.
Nick’s thigh shifts under me. The muscle tenses beneath my cheek.
“You’re awake,” he says.
I turn on my back. I keep my head on his thigh, though.
“How long was I out?” I ask.
“Don’t know. I nodded off too.”
Something creaks somewhere above. Both of us freeze. Nothing else happens, though.
I slowly stretch out my hand in the darkness. My fingers graze the wall almost immediately. I move my other hand. Same thing.
There’s nowhere to go. Nowhere I won’t be touching things.
I’m on the verge of losing my shit again, but my head is fuzzy enough from the heat and the thickness of the air that my body doesn’t seem to have the energy.
I swallow hard.
“Okay,” I say, because saying something feels preferable to saying nothing. Saying something grounds me in a way. “That’s… fine.”
It isn’t.
And I’m not convincing enough.
My chest rises a little faster, and then faster again.
Nick’s hand finds my wrist in the dark. “Slow down,” he says quietly.
I try to match his breathing. In. Out. In. Out. Again and again.
The space doesn’t get any bigger, the air doesn’t get any fresher, but I get a tad steadier. He doesn’t tell me to get off him, and I stay put. I feel a bit woozy, but I’m pretty sure that’s down to the lack of oxygen in this place.
“I should’ve joined the scouts,” I say.
His legs shifts, but then it settles again. “Because?”
I wave my hand in the air. “Don’t they prepare you for stuff like this?”
“Yeah,” Nick says, “this is exactly what they cover. Page one. What to do when you’re buried alive in a walk-in fridge.”
I raise my middle finger in front of his face.
“I guess it’s hard to prepare scouts to die.” It’s a sign of the kind of numbness that has taken over me that I can say it so casually. Being flippant makes it feel less like a real possibility.
“Is that the spirit of a fighter?” he asks.
“Maybe I don’t have that.”
He’s silent for a bit. “That’s a blatant lie. You’ve been fighting with me for years with no sign of giving up.”
I stare into the darkness with no idea what to say to that.
“Think about it this way. If you die… I win.”
I roll my eyes. “Proper motivation if I’ve ever heard it. I’ll go dig us out of here with my bare hands.” I bite the inside of my cheek. “How long do you think they’ll—”
“Think about something else,” he says.
“I’m going to think about dying extra hard now.”
He blows out a breath and flicks my earlobe. I raise my eyebrows at the darkness above.
“What was that for?” I ask.
“I told you a story. Return the favor.”
I scratch my cheek while I think.
“Nothing?” he says. “Really? Exactly how boring is your life?”
“That’s an excellent pep talk. Have you ever considered a career in motivational speaking?”
“I’d tell everybody to fuck off and leave me alone, so I’d be out of a job pretty damn quickly.”
“You don’t think people would want to hear that? Shocker.”
He snaps his fingers somewhere that feels distinctly close to my face. “What’s with the silence?”
“So far I’ve gotten the impression you prefer it. I’m having trouble acclimating. What do you want to know?”
He lets out an impatient huff. “I don’t know. Fucking anything. Favorite food. Last time you fell on your ass. First crush. Whatever.”
“Abigail Jones. We were seven.”
Nick shifts a little under me before settling again. “That’s a good age for a serious commitment.”
“Oh, I was all in, so the emotional stakes were ridiculously high.” I grin.
“Obviously.”
“I made her a Valentine’s Day card, and not, like, a normal one. Nope. I went all out. I folded it into the shape of a heart. I origami’d that fucker.”
“Romantic.”
“I know. It really set the tone. And inside, I wrote this long message.”
“How long are we talking?”
“Multiple full sentences.”
“Wow.”
“I gave it to her at recess,” I say.
“In person?”
“Well, yeah. How else do you gift a meticulously crafted Valentine’s Day card?”
“That’s kind of badass, actually,” he says.
“She opened it right there in front of me.”
I can hear the smile in his voice. “What did you write?”
“That she had a nice backpack and that she was good at drawing horses.”
“Everything you want in a girlfriend.”
“Once again, you have to have standards.”
“And?” he prompts.
“She finishes reading, and I’m waiting for… something. Like, for her to compliment my penmanship at the very least, you know? I worked really hard on that.”
“It’d be the bare minimum.”
I nod. “Instead she told me Beck Hamilton gave her cookies for Valentine’s.”
Nick lets out a quiet laugh.
“I said, ‘Okay.’ She folded the card up again and handed it back to me. I was jaded for a long time after that.”
His smile makes his eyes spark.
“A whole month, at least,” I say. “Forever in seven-year-old years.”
“Is that like dog years?”
“Yeah. But the opposite. I mean, time moves faster in dog years but slower in seven-year-old years.”
The silence that follows is broken by the sound of my stomach rumbling.
“Hungry?” Nick asks.
“I don’t know.” I frown, because a stomach rumbling is such a very ordinary thing, and this situation doesn’t feel like it should have ordinary things in it. “Maybe?”
I try to figure it out for a bit, but I don’t come to a conclusion. I don’t feel hungry, but I also haven’t eaten since… this morning? I was too pissed off earlier to think about food, but I should be hungry by now.
“Right. Get up,” he says, voice all business.
He turns on the light on his phone and sweeps it over the shelves.
“Hold this,” he tells me, and hands me the phone.
For the next little while, he goes through the containers and picks out things to eat.
Turkey slices and cheese. Hard-boiled eggs.
There’s a container with cut melon cubes and another one with blueberries.
There’s even a crate of bottled water. Only when he hands one of the bottles to me do I realize how thirsty I am.
We set everything up on the floor like we’re having a picnic.
After, he tries to call for help again, but there’s still nothing, so we settle back in in the darkness, sitting side by side, shoulder to shoulder.
“You have dressing on your chin,” he says.
I wipe my fingers over it to check, but there’s nothing. “Dick,” I say.
He laughs. It peters out eventually. And then I miss it.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t get back to sleep.
Nick does for a bit. He dozes off in small fits. His head falls against my shoulder. His breathing softens. He jerks and wakes up again.
The air keeps getting warmer. Not by a lot or all at once, but bit by bit, the fact that it’s so stuffy in here becomes a more often occurring notion. It’s uncomfortable no matter which way I turn myself. The air starts to have a taste. It shouldn’t, but it does. It’s faintly sour in my mouth.
I use my inhaler again.
It helps less this time.
Or maybe not at all.
I can’t tell.
I’m pretty sure the fridge is shrinking. It feels smaller. I know it isn’t. It can’t be. But every time I shift, there’s less room than I remember.
The battery icon on Nick’s phone turns red.