Lauren Oliver - Panic

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 breath, 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.

“Please.” She cinched her hoodie a bit tighter. “Cut the holier-than-thou crap. You’ve always watched the game.”

“Yeah, but that was before my two best friends decided to go batshit and join.”

“We get it, Bishop,” Nat said. “Turn on some music, will you?”

“No can do, my lady.” Bishop reached into the cup holder and handed Heather a Slurpee from 7-Eleven. Blue. Her favorite. She took a sip and felt a good freeze in her head. “Radio’s busted. I’m doing some work on the wiring—”

Nat cut him off, groaning exaggeratedly. “Not again .”

“What can I say? I love the fixer-uppers.”

He patted the steering wheel as he accelerated onto the highway. As if in response, the Le Sabre made a shrill whine of protest, followed by several emphatic bangs and a horrifying rattle, as if the engine were coming apart.

“I’m pretty sure the love is not mutual,” Nat said, and Heather laughed, and felt a little less nervous.

As Bishop angled the car off the road and bumped onto the narrow, packed-dirt one-laner that ran the periphery of the park, NO TRESPASSING signs were lit up intermittently in the mist of his headlights. Already, a few dozen cars were parked on the lane, most of them squeezed as close to the woods as possible, some almost entirely swallowed by the underbrush.

Heather spotted Matt’s car right away—the old used Jeep he’d inherited from an uncle, its rear bumper plastered with half-shredded stickers he’d tried desperately to key off, as though he had backed up into a massive spiderweb.

She remembered the first time they’d ever driven around together, to celebrate the fact that he had finally gotten his license after failing the test three times. He’d stopped and started so abruptly she’d felt like she might puke up the doughnuts he’d bought her, but he was so happy, she was happy too.