She slaps me. White-hot pinpricks of pain flash across my cheek. Tears spring to my eyes, and my mouth yawns open in a silent cry.
Lyla shoves a cloth into my mouth and hauls me up straight again, arms twisted painfully behind my back.
“You know, you’re actually getting off easy.” Lyla’s breath is hot on my ear. “Sam had to burn because of you. Can you imagine what it would feel like for your skin to be on fire? Count yourself lucky you’re going this way. I could have cremated you.”
Dread sinks into me, hollows me out. I scream into the bitter, salty rag, fighting to free myself with everything I have left. But her grip on my arms is strong, pinching on my skin, blunt fingernails digging sharply into flesh.
“So here it is,” Lyla says. “Your final dare. Although, I do have to say, this one is going to be pretty hard to win.”
Something clobbers me on the side of the head, and I tumble, clattering hard into the casket. A hot flash of pain slices into my skull. The last thing I see is the lid coming down.
Oh playmate, you would not play with me,
So take your dollies three, climb down my apple tree,
Climb up my rain barrel, out through my cellar door,
And we’ll be jolly friends
No more no more no more.
—Schoolyard chant derived from Saxie Dowell’s “Playmates”
I wake to a soft thump thump sound.
I’m lying on my back in a dark so penetrating I might as well not have opened my eyes at all. Everything hurts—my head has its own heartbeat, my body is so cold it’s almost numb, and my lungs are tight from breathing in the close, musty air. I try to cry out, but my jaw feels soldered open and bitter with strain. It all comes flooding back.
I’m in the coffin.
My heart lurches into my throat, a surge of adrenaline racing through my body. I tug at the cloth and feel it tumble wetly out of my mouth.
“Help!” I cry. But the close air and lying on my back make my voice come out in a gravelly, harsh whisper.
I frantically pat all around me, meeting walls on all sides. No. No, no, no, this can’t be happening.
But it is. I’m in a coffin. I’m buried alive.
A dark weight presses on my chest. My lungs cinch, and I cough, breaths jerking in and out with my panic.
No, I can’t panic. That’ll only make it worse, it’ll only make me use up what little oxygen is down here faster. I need to breathe slowly.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Dirt landing on the coffin.
I’m gulping, gulping for air. Can’t breathe. I blow out a pressurized breath, swallow hard.
Be calm, be rational. Don’t think about what a screwed-up, hopeless situation you’re in.
Help. I need help.
I reach for my purse, but it’s not there at my side. Lyla, I remember with a flash of horror. She took it in the car. She has my phone. She has my inhaler too.
I hit the lid of the coffin. I’m going to die down here. She’s going to get away with this. Mom, Jenny—they’ll never know what happened to me. I always knew I would die young, but I never thought it would be like this. In a violent way, the victim of a crime.
I think of Hartley, swinging from her neck in the factory, a piece of dead meat. We left her there. We drove away while she was dying in that place. God, God, God. How could Lyla do it?
“Help!” I call again, but it wouldn’t matter even if anyone could hear me. I’m alone out here, with her. No one is coming to save me.
An overwhelming sense of déjà vu descends on me, and I’m suddenly eleven again.
I woke up feeling sick. Mom was working at a correctional facility, a brand-new job she’d gotten only weeks before. She was thrilled to have landed a job where she could put her social work degree to good use, plus it paid twice what she was used to and came with benefits. She didn’t want to take a day off unless she really needed to. I told her to go, that I was fine. I didn’t want to be the reason she got in trouble at work, and besides, if she stayed home, she’d make me sleep and refuse to let me play on the computer or do anything else remotely fun.
But by lunch I knew something was wrong. There was a tightening in my chest that wouldn’t go away no matter how many hits of the inhaler I took, and I was starting to panic.
I called Mom twice, but there was no answer. She was in a meeting, I later found out. I considered calling 911, but I felt stupid, embarrassed. So I hunched over the porcelain and fought to work up the mucus blocking my throat. If I could just get it out…
I coughed and hacked until my face felt hot and tingly. My legs went out from under me, and I barely missed clipping my head on the side of the counter. My cries for help echoed off the bathroom tile.
It was four hours before Mom came home from work and found me pitched over on the floor with my face smeared into a congealing puddle of puke. I couldn’t get up.