And they didn’t wait for an answer—if I’d swim it this time, if I ever even had. We went for the car, but everyone had stops to make first, and at each stop someone new was told and the group got larger. Soon there were snacks and smokes gathered and flashlights and cheap beer from the place in town that didn’t card. Word had gotten out and the handful of kids wanting to swim had expanded. There were more kids going than I could count. Some, I didn’t even know. I’d accidentally instigated a party.
When we hit the rocks on shore, I could barely look at first—at the water. I kept my back to it, took the first beer handed to me, though it was warm and shook-up from the walk in the woods, tried to go for a sip, and sprayed myself with foam instead. Behind me, voices in the water seemed to whisper imperceptible mumbles of things, hardly words at all. I saw how the water was edging closer to the trees than I’d ever seen it, and it seemed somehow darker in the night, if that were possible, and so deep there wouldn’t be just a lost town down at the bottom but a long highway leading down and down, until someone who didn’t need lungs to breathe could find herself emerging with a splash in another lake on the other side of the world.
I didn’t go in. The last time I’d stepped all the way into this reservoir, I’d found a dead girl floating in it.
Tonight, so far, there was no trace of her. Or of my sister.
“Don’t!” Cate shrieked from a pool of darkness, startling me. But she was only goofing off with her friends, saving herself from being thrown in at the last second. She was talking to her friend, not me.
Damien dove in first. Asha made a splash like she weighed three hundred pounds, though she weighed a third of that and no one could figure out how such a big splash had come from her. Vanessa fussed with her bra strap. Some girl I’d never seen before stepped out of her clothes and jumped, and then I couldn’t see her anymore. There was a boat being pushed in; there was a jumble of shoes on shore.
So many people were there—too many.
I got caught up in it. My shoes came off, then my shorts and my shirt. I could cannonball down from the high rocks into the water below; the plunge would have more force that way—I’d hit and sink fast toward bottom. Once under, I’d stay down as long as I could stand it. I’d hold my mouth closed and hope the air lasted. I’d open my eyes and hope to see someone. Maybe a person from Olive would tell me where my sister was.
I was at the edge when a voice rang out, echoing off the water and the rocks and the mountains framing the stars and moon above. Coming from everywhere and from one place only. From one person.
“Chloe!”
Everyone froze. The night slipped to mute, the sounds of splashing wiped clean away, so all that could be heard was the hush of the reservoir as it breathed in and then out again, in and then out. I realized that everyone was looking up at me. Then we heard her slosh as she waded out from a blind spot veiled by rocks and trees, and now everyone was looking at her.
She had her flashlight on high, one of those industrial-strength models that investigators use when fishing through a crime scene. The light found Asha and Cate, Damien and Vanessa. It showed them without clothes, dripping wet and covering what they could. It held tight, revealing them shivering in the suddenly harsh and bitter night.
I spoke up. “Hi, Ruby. I’m up here.”
The beam of her flashlight cast its way across London’s friends one last time. Then it trickled across the other kids who’d joined us, some I knew and some I didn’t, some in the water and some on the rocks, more faces to count when you could see them. It was like everyone from town had come, only because I’d suggested it.
Ruby lit up each face until she reached mine, then she lowered the beam to show everyone my black bra and blue-flowered panties, mismatched and cotton on the bottom, like a little girl.
“You forgot a bathing suit, Chlo,” she called out. She stepped onto shore and waved at the spot beside her, to show I should take my place in it. “I have one for you, in my pocket. Just come down here and get it.”