Zoe sent Val ten texts to pass the time. Three of them were about caving, five were about X, and two were about yogurt pretzels. Val must have been with Gloria—on the weekends, they often got in bed with a ton of food, hacked into Val’s brother’s Tinder account, and swiped right on all the girls they thought were hot—because she wrote Can’t talk and (when Zoe wouldn’t leave her alone), New phone who dis.
After that, it seemed as if even time itself had gotten itchy and bored, and decided to nap. Zoe padded down the damp hallway toward the pools, and told one of the lifeguards he could go home. That killed about ten minutes. She returned upstairs and stretched her legs, which ached from the cave. That killed about eight.
As Zoe dragged herself back to the front desk, she cast her eyes over the monitors. Everything was empty. The halls and stairways were newly mopped. The vending machines glowed silently. A ghostly cloud of vapor hung over the pools.
She was about to sit when her eye caught on something.
The upper left-hand monitor. The big pool.
Somebody had snuck in.
The man’s back was to her. He was in the water, but wearing a knit hat pulled down low over his ears. The tiniest bit of scruffy hair spilled out from under it.
Zoe called Lance on the locker-room phone—he sounded out of breath from Pilates, as her mother had predicted—and told him to kick the guy out. She checked the monitor again. She saw Lance come into the frame and call out to the guy in the water. The guy didn’t move. He ignored Lance entirely—which was not a thing Lance sat still for.
Lance was a preposterously big, broad dude. He lived for confrontations. His only complaint about being a security guard was that no one had the guts to stand up to him. More than once, Zoe had seen him swat at a fly and say, “Yeah, you better run.”
She watched as Lance went to the edge of the water and knelt on one knee, like the former football player that he was. Zoe closed her eyes. She just wanted to go home. She didn’t want to watch Lance administer a beatdown.
When she opened them again, she got a jolt—Lance was staring right at her in the security camera. His face filled the screen. He gestured for her to come down to the pool.
Zoe’s stomach clenched. She slipped on X’s coat, locked the front door, and walked to the stairs as slowly as she could.
By the time she made it outside, the stranger had swum to the far side of the pool. He was obscured by the darkness and the rising steam. He was just an outline, really—a head, shoulders, and hat glinting above the water.
Lance stood by the door, looking annoyed.
“What’s going on?” said Zoe.
“The dude says he knows you,” said Lance.
Zoe peered at the man in the water. The mist looked eerie tonight. It curled around him like a wreath—as if he’d summoned it. She didn’t know the guy. No way. She was about to tell Lance to get rid of him when the stranger spoke.
He said just one sentence, but it stopped her cold: “Your name’s Zoe—and you love X.”
Zoe walked slowly around the pool.
She drew near to the man. He had dropped some clothes by the water. She couldn’t quite make them out in the dark. They lay tangled like a nest of snakes.
She tried to think of something to say but the stranger spoke up again—and stunned her a second time.
“That’s X’s coat, right?” he said. “Kinda big for you.”
She crouched for a better look at his face. He was in his late 20s. Handsome in a battered sort of way—but shaky somehow. Unhealthy. The whites of his eyes were streaked with red.
He smiled up at her. His friendliness made him seem all the more menacing.
She inspected him closely, without speaking.
He had dark, crescent-shaped bruises near his eyes.
They looked like X’s bruises.
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m Eric,” he said. “’Sup?”
The sunniness of his voice was freaky.
“X never mentioned anybody named Eric,” she said.
“X doesn’t use my real name,” he said.
He drew an arm out of the water—he had a wild sleeve of tattoos almost identical to X’s—and lifted his hat the tiniest bit. Zoe winced. His forehead was horrifically bruised.
“He calls me Banger.”
He’d come with a message from X, he said.
Zoe couldn’t tell from his face if it was good news or bad. The anticipation was awful.
She told Lance and the remaining lifeguard that they could leave. They looked shocked. Still, they reluctantly headed up the stairs.
Zoe waited for Banger to speak, but he seemed to enjoy her impatience. He was an odd sight in the water. He’d taken off his shirt but he was still wearing his hat and his jeans, which were so drenched they clung to his legs. He floated on his back to the center of the pool, and gazed up at the bright needlework of the stars.
“What’s the message?” said Zoe. “Tell me.”
Banger smiled, and floated even farther away in the dark, his white belly shining. He never took his eyes off the sky.
She followed him around the pool, picking up dirty towels and stray flip-flops as she went.
“Don’t mess with me, Banger,” she said. “I don’t care if you’re dead—I will seriously injure you.”