Chapter
TWENTY-FIVE
Em’s fear was ice, stilling her heart. JD was about to be smothered in thick cement. Suffocated. Trapped.
She took off, tearing across the debris-strewn expanse, heading toward the machines. She saw the mixer churning. Soon it would be raised, tipped over, emptied. She yelled, “Stop! Stop! ”
waving her hands frantically, but she might as well have been invisible. The worker was too high off the ground. The wind rushed around her, whooshing in her ears, mingling with the laughter of the three ethereal girls. At the edge of the foundation, she dropped to her knees, peering into the underground chamber.
There he was. JD. She could see his hair and a plaid shirt.
He was on the ground, about five feet down, lying prone. His left leg was crushed beneath a metal pipe. His eyes were open but unfocused. Em couldn’t tell if he could see her.
“JD. JD.” She choked out his name. She needed him to
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answer her. Now. “Please, JD. I’m here. Oh god, JD. Please.”
He didn’t answer. He just lay there. The mixer churned above her.
It came to her, crystal clear, the purest thought she’d had all night. Her punishment wasn’t death. It was heartache. Loss. She was going to lose the one she loved.
The Furies were going to break her heart.
A sob racked Em’s throat and she felt dizzy. She couldn’t see through her tears, through her rage.
No. No, this wasn’t her fate. Her thoughts came in staccato.
She was not a victim. She would not let the Furies win. Possessed by an unfamiliar and powerful adrenaline, Em crouched to the ground and leaped into the depression between pipes, feeling a shock travel up through her feet and legs as she landed.
She sprinted over to where JD lay, and with a heft and a grunt, she shoved at the pipe. Threw her whole weight against it. Her thoughts were singular now and running in a loop. Marching to a heavy drum. Move the pipe. Get JD out. Move it. Get him.
Save him.
JD groaned faintly. “Em?”
“Hi. Hi, JD. I’m here. I’m going to get you out of here.”
He didn’t respond.
She saw a red welt on his forehead, leaking blood—the pipe must have struck his head before crushing his leg. He must have come to rescue her—or the Furies had led him here. She cursed them and whatever power they came from. Her vision flashed as bitter anger flowed through her, taking over her thoughts.
Hate. Hate. She hated them for what they were doing to her.
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She despised them for dragging JD here. This wasn’t justice.
This was cruelty.
She had no idea if the Furies would still be waiting for her when she emerged, but all she could focus on now was JD. She was getting him free. Her muscles burned, but she didn’t let up.
She pushed harder.
“Just hold on,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “Just hold on, JD.”
And then, with a final heave, the pipe slipped off JD’s leg.
Em’s back and arms burned from the effort. Blood soaked through JD’s pants. She looked up at the mixer. One end of it was ascending into the sky. They were about to be buried alive.
She rolled JD over onto his side, and he winced painfully.
“Okay, we’re gonna move. JD, I’m going to move you, all right?” His eyelids were fluttering, but she thought she saw the vaguest of nods.
She grabbed his right arm and threw it around her shoulders. Unsteadily, she got to one knee, and then, with both feet on the ground, she lifted from her thighs, standing up with JD’s full weight on her left side. She was gripping his wrist in front of her chest, holding him tight. She felt his heart beating through both their bodies. She felt the blood from his thigh soaking into her jeans. She took one awkward step forward, and then another. Every cell in her body throbbed with urgency. He was so tall that his feet were dragging behind them. She breathed and stepped. Breathed and stepped. He was groaning again, into her shoulder blade.
The alien distribution of weight made her feel like she was 320
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walking on the deck of a storm-thrown ship. Then they were at the wall.
She couldn’t climb a wall with JD on her back. She scanned the facade for a solution. It was so loud. And so dark. And he was bleeding, this boy who had always protected her.
There was a pile of rubble in the corner; it reached almost halfway up the wall. It took her four more arduous steps to reach it. JD was fading in and out now. Barely responsive. Em’s lungs were burning with the strain. She wondered if the Furies were watching her, amused—if this was just added entertainment on top of their master plan. But she pushed the thought from her mind. She had to focus.
“I need you to help me, JD,” she huffed. “I need you to stay right like this.” And she maneuvered him to the top of the pile, sitting upright like a broken doll. His head lolled to the side.
She held his face tenderly and wiped a streak of blood from his temple. For the first time, she took in what he was wearing—
dark jeans and a long-sleeved lumberjack-plaid shirt. No hat.
No weird jacket. No deer sweatshirt. This is what he’d worn to the pep rally. He’d gone out of his way to look average for her.
The realization was a stake stabbing into her heart.
“JD, listen to me. Just hold on.”
She reached her hands to the top of the wall. Then she pulled with her arms and pushed off with her legs, vaulting herself up.
She landed with the edge of the wall digging into her stomach; she felt her left elbow rip through the sleeve of her sweater.
One leg up, like a frog. Onto her knees, scraping them through holes that had suddenly appeared in her jeans. Then 321
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turning around, facing the pit again, getting back onto her stomach, now reaching her arms down toward him. Shouting, shouting, not even recognizing her own voice.
“JD! JD! If you can hear me, lift up your arms.” She felt desperate. “JD—we’re going to do this together and then we’re going to eat barbecue pizza and play board games and go swimming together all summer long. I’m going to kiss you so many times. In the moonlight and in the water and against the oak tree that your dad thinks is on your property but that my dad insists is on his. Just please, JD, make this happen.” She was babbling, blubbering, tugging at the collar of his shirt, as far as she could reach.
Somehow, with strength she didn’t even know she had, she was able to raise the right side of his body enough to get her hand under his arm. She yanked it until she could do the same on his left side. And then, with her hands, and then her elbows, tugging at his torso, she was able to get him fully upright. I love you. Pull. I love you. Pull. I love you. Sweat beaded along her hairline; her nose ran and dripped onto her lips.
There was a loud mechanical screeching as the concrete mixer began unloading its contents. The viscous gray glop sank into the foundation, around the pipes, slowly filling in every crevice. She pulled harder, coming around onto her knees again to gain more leverage. Please, she prayed. Please let me do this.
And then, with a final pull, just as the concrete started to cover JD’s Converse sneakers, she heaved him aboveground, on the far side of the hole. She leaned over him, blanketing his body with hers, sobbing with relief.
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“JD,” she said, shaking his shoulders. “JD, thank god.
Thank god. It’s going to be okay. I’m going to get help.”
She put her ear to his mouth. His breathing was shallow.
She felt for his pulse. It was weak.
She whirled around, wild with grief.
“Where are you?” she shouted into the night. “Where did you go?” She was frantic and furious. “Ali! Meg! Ty! Come here! Tell me! What now?”
There they were, off to the side, in the shadows. All three of them appeared to be flickering now. And Em knew, somehow, that they were about to vanish. And once they left, Em knew JD would be gone too.
“Wait. Stop.” She stood up, stumbling with weakness, dirty and crying and bleeding from her knees. “This is wrong. You know it. You must know it. This is not justice. This is not karma. This isn’t helping anything. You’re not teaching anything.”
Ali and Meg were barely visible. They were practically translucent. But Ty was still hovering nearby. Em could make out the whites of her eyes, the white in her hair. It was entirely creepy—like they’d only ever appeared for this moment. Em moved toward the Furies and grabbed for Ty’s arm.
“Ty. Please. What you did to Chase—what you’re doing to me. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not right. This isn’t how the world should work.”
The words seemed to vibrate between them, taking on a shape of their own. And finally, with an expression in her eyes that looked almost human, Ty stepped forward, away from her sisters.
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She held out her hand and opened her palm to reveal five gleaming red beads. They looked like berries, or round pills.
Like the orchids, they had a crystalline quality.
“If you swallow these,” Ty said to Em, “you can save JD.
But I’m warning you—there are rules, and there are consequences.”
Em looked at Ty, at the seeds in her palm, and then back at JD, whose breath was now coming in desperate rasps. She hesitated. Was this a trap? Would these five tiny pills just poison her, kill her along with JD?
She thought of the promises she had made to him. The things they would do together. I’m going to kiss you so many times.
“What kind of rules? What kind of consequences?” Em demanded, her heart in her throat.
“They will bind you to us forever,” Ty said simply, her smile shimmering as she wavered in and out of Em’s vision.
“And you can’t tell a single soul about them, or about us, or about tonight. JD will be in danger all over again—worse danger—if you tell him what happened.”
“So what will he think?” Em was filled with a sense of desperate hopelessness. “What will he remember?”
“That’s not for you to know,” Ty said. “Are you going to take them, or not?”
The decision was easy. She would save JD—or try as best she could.
The seeds felt smooth and cold as Ty passed them to her.
Like tiny stones. Em put all of them in her mouth at once.
“Swallow,” Ty said. “Whole.”
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Em did, feeling the beads against her tongue, sliding down her throat, which was raw from screaming. They tasted bitter.
She could almost feel them settle inside of her, sending a hot sting through her chest and stomach.
And then she heard a rustle behind her. JD shifted. His eyes fluttered open. He opened his mouth, coughed slightly, and whispered, “Em?” She watched, jaw agape, as he propped himself up on his elbows. His breathing was normal again. He blinked and looked around. He was coming to.
“Oh my god.” Em turned around in amazement, about to ask Ty what had just happened. But they were gone. All three of them had disappeared.
Em didn’t have time to think about it, because just then JD
moaned again. She went over to kneel beside him. He struggled to sit up, then collapsed backward onto the ground.
“It’s okay,” she said, leaning over him, one hand on his chest, the other in his hair. “I’m here.”
And yet she had the strangest sensation of somehow being elsewhere, too. The air around her was heavier than usual—rusty and burnt.
Then JD’s hand was on hers, and he was asking her what had happened. Em was looking at him, weeping, begging for his forgiveness.
“It’s all over now,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, JD. I’m so, so sorry.”
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