Now Heather registered everything, all at once: the ache in her hands and thighs, the pain in her fingers, the sharp bite of the wind. Natalie looked furious. She was shaking, although that might have been the cold.
“I’m going to jump,” Heather said, realizing, as she said it, how stupid it sounded—how stupid it was. All of a sudden, she thought she might puke.
I’ll be cheering for you, Heather had said to Natalie. The guilt was there, throbbing alongside the nausea. But Matt’s voice was bigger than everything. Matt’s voice, and underneath it a vision of the water stains above her bed; the dull thud of music from the park; the smell of weed and cigarettes; the sounds of laughter, and later, someone screaming, You dumb piece of . . .
“You can’t jump,” Nat said, still staring. “I’m jumping.”
“We’ll jump together,” Heather said.
Natalie took two steps forward. Heather noticed she was balling her fists almost rhythmically. Squeeze, relax. Squeeze, relax. Three times.
“Why are you doing this?” The question was almost a whisper.
Heather couldn’t answer. She didn’t even know, not exactly. All she knew—all she could feel—was that this was her last chance.
So she just said, “I’m going to jump now. Before I chicken out.”
When she turned toward the water, Natalie reached for Heather, as if to pull her back. But she didn’t.
Heather felt as though the rock underneath her had begun to move, bucking like a horse. She had a sudden terror that she was going to lose her balance and go tumbling down the rocky slope, cracking her head in the shallows.
Panic.
She took small, halting steps forward, and still reached the edge far too quickly.
“Announce yourself!” Diggin boomed out.
Below Heather, the water, black as oil, was still churning with bodies. She wanted to shout down—move, move, I’m going to hit you—but she couldn’t speak. She could hardly breathe. Her lungs felt like they were being pressed between two stones.
And suddenly she couldn’t think of anything but Chris Heinz, who four years ago drank a fifth of vodka before doing the Jump, and lost his footing. The sound his head made as it cracked against the rock was delicate, almost like an egg breaking. She remembered the way everyone ran through the woods; the image of his body, broken and limp, lying half submerged in the water.
“Say your name!” Diggin prompted again, and the crowd picked up the chant: Name, name, name.
She opened her mouth. “Heather,” she croaked out. “Heather Nill.” Her voice broke, got whipped back by the wind.
The chant was still going: Name, name, name, name. Then: Jump, jump, jump, jump.
Her insides were white; filled with snow. Her mouth tasted a little like puke. She took a deep breath. She closed her eyes.
She jumped.
SATURDAY, JUNE 25
heather
HEATHER HAD NEVER REGRETTED ANYTHING AS MUCH as she regretted making the decision, on the beach, to enter the game. In the days that followed, it seemed to her like a kind of insanity. Maybe she’d inhaled too much booze-vapor on the beach. Maybe seeing Matt with Delaney had driven her temporarily psychotic. That happened, didn’t it? Weren’t whole defenses built on that kind of thing, when people went crazy and hacked their ex-wives to pieces with an ax?
But she was too proud to withdraw. 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.
She moved as slowly as she could; spent her nights curled up 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.