Panic

Panic Page 4

“Please.” She cinched her hoodie a bit tighter. “Cut the holier-than-thou crap. You’ve always watched the game.”

“Yeah, but that was before my two best friends decided to go batshit and join.”

“We get it, Bishop,” Nat said. “Turn on some music, will you?”

“No can do, my lady.” Bishop reached into the cup holder and handed Heather a Slurpee from 7-Eleven. Blue. Her favorite. She took a sip and felt a good freeze in her head. “Radio’s busted. I’m doing some work on the wiring—”

Nat cut him off, groaning exaggeratedly. “Not again.”

“What can I say? I love the fixer-uppers.”

He patted the steering wheel as he accelerated onto the highway. As if in response, the Le Sabre made a shrill whine of protest, followed by several emphatic bangs and a horrifying rattle, as if the engine were coming apart.

“I’m pretty sure the love is not mutual,” Nat said, and Heather laughed, and felt a little less nervous.

As Bishop angled the car off the road and bumped onto the narrow, packed-dirt one-laner that ran the periphery of the park, NO TRESPASSING signs were lit up intermittently in the mist of his headlights. Already, a few dozen cars were parked on the lane, most of them squeezed as close to the woods as possible, some almost entirely swallowed by the underbrush.

Heather spotted Matt’s car right away—the old used Jeep he’d inherited from an uncle, its rear bumper plastered with half-shredded stickers he’d tried desperately to key off, as though he had backed up into a massive spiderweb.

She remembered the first time they’d ever driven around together, to celebrate the fact that he had finally gotten his license after failing the test three times. He’d stopped and started so abruptly she’d felt like she might puke up the doughnuts he’d bought her, but he was so happy, she was happy too.

All day, all week, she’d been both desperately hoping to see him and praying that she would never see him again.

If Delaney was here, she really would puke. She shouldn’t have had the Slurpee.

“You okay?” Bishop asked her in a low voice as they got out of the car. He could always read her: she loved and hated that about him at the same time.

“I’m fine,” she said, too sharply.

“Why’d you do it, Heather?” he said, putting a hand on her elbow and stopping her. “Why’d you really do it?”

Heather noticed he was wearing the exact same outfit he’d been wearing the last time she’d seen him, on the beach—the faded-blue Lucky Charms T-shirt, the jeans so long they looped underneath the heels of his Converse—and felt vaguely annoyed by it. His dirty-blond hair was sticking out at crazy angles underneath his ancient 49ers hat. He smelled good, though, a very Bishop smell: like the inside of a drawer full of old coins and Tic Tacs.

For a second, she thought of telling him the truth: that when Matt had dumped her, she had understood for the first time that she was a complete and total nobody.

But then he ruined it. “Please tell me this isn’t about Matthew Hepley,” he said. There it was. The eye roll.

“Come on, Bishop.” She could have hit him. Even hearing the name made her throat squeeze up in a knot.

“Give me a reason, then. You said yourself, a million times, that Panic is stupid.”

“Nat entered, didn’t she? How come you aren’t lecturing her?”

“Nat’s an idiot,” Bishop said. He took off his hat and rubbed his head, and his hair responded as though it had been electrified, and it promptly stood straight up. Bishop claimed that his superpower was electromagnetic hair; Heather’s only superpower seemed to be the amazing ability to have one angry red pimple at any given time.

“She’s one of your best friends,” Heather pointed out.

“So? She’s still an idiot. I have an open-door idiot policy on friendship.”

Heather couldn’t help it; she laughed. Bishop smiled too, so wide she could see the small overlap in his two front teeth.

Bishop shoved on his baseball hat again, smothering the disaster of his hair. He was one of the few boys she knew who was taller than she was—even Matt had been exactly her height, five-eleven. Sometimes she was grateful; sometimes she resented him for it, like he was trying to prove a point by being taller. Up until the time they were twelve years old, they’d been exactly the same height, to the centimeter. In Bishop’s bedroom was a ladder of old pencil marks on the wall to prove it.

“I’m betting on you, Nill,” he said in a low voice. “I want you to know that. I don’t want you to play. I think it’s totally idiotic. But I’m betting on you.” He put an arm over her shoulder and gave her a squeeze, and something in his tone of voice reminded her that once—ages and ages ago, it felt like—she had been briefly head-over-heels in love with him.

Freshman year, they’d had one fumbling kiss in the back of the Hudson Movieplex, even though she’d had popcorn stuck in her teeth, and for two days they’d held hands loosely, suddenly incapable of conversation even though they’d been friends since elementary school. And then he had broken it off, and Heather had said she understood, even though she didn’t.

She didn’t know what made her think of it. She couldn’t imagine being in love with Bishop now. He was like a brother—an annoying brother who always felt the need to point out when you had a pimple. Which you did, always. But just one.

Already, she could hear faint music through the trees, and the crackle and boom of Diggin’s voice, amplified by the megaphone. The water towers, scrawled with graffiti and imprinted faintly with the words COLUMBIA COUNTY, were lit starkly from below. Perched on rail-thin legs, they looked like overgrown insects.

No—like a single insect, with two rounded steel joints. Because Heather could see, even from a distance, that a narrow wooden plank had been set between them, fifty feet in the air.

The challenge, this time, was clear.

By the time Heather, Nat, and Bishop had arrived at the place where the crowd was assembled, directly under the towers, her face was slick. As usual, the atmosphere was celebratory—the crowd was keyed up, antsy, although everyone was speaking in whispers. Someone had managed to maneuver a truck through the woods. A floodlight, hooked up to its engine, illuminated the towers and the single wooden plank running between them, and lit up the mist of rain. Cigarettes flared intermittently, and the truck radio was going—an old rock song thudded quietly under the rhythm of conversation. They had to be quieter tonight; they weren’t far from the road.

“Promise not to ditch me, okay?” Nat said. Heather was glad she’d said it; even though these were her classmates, people she’d known forever, Heather had a sudden terror of getting lost in the crowd.

“No way,” Heather said. She tried to avoid looking up, and she found herself unconsciously scanning the crowd for Matt. She could make out a group of sophomores huddled nearby, giggling, and Shayna Lambert, who was wrapped in a blanket and had a thermos of something hot, as though she was at a football game.

Heather was surprised to see Vivian Travin, standing by herself, a little ways apart from the rest of the crowd. Her hair was knotted into dreadlocks, and in the moonlight, her various piercings glinted dully. Heather had never seen Viv at a single social event—she’d never seen her doing much of anything besides cutting classes and waiting tables at Dot’s. For some reason, the fact that even Viv had showed made her even more anxious.

“Bishop!”

Avery Wallace pushed her way through the crowd and promptly catapulted herself into Bishop’s arms, as though he’d just rescued her from a major catastrophe. Heather looked away as Bishop leaned down to kiss her. Avery was only five foot one, and standing next to her made Heather feel like the Jolly Green Giant on a can of corn.

“I missed you,” Avery said, when Bishop pulled away. She still hadn’t even acknowledged Heather; she’d once overheard Heather call her “shrimp-faced” and had obviously never forgiven her. Avery did, however, look somewhat shrimplike, all tight and pink, so Heather didn’t feel that bad about it.

Bishop mumbled something in return. Heather felt nauseous, and heartbroken all over again. No one should be allowed to be happy when you were so miserable—especially not your best friends. It should be a law.

Avery giggled and squeezed Bishop’s hand. “Let me get my beer, okay? I’ll be back. Stay right here.” Then she turned and vanished.

Immediately, Bishop raised his eyebrows at Heather. “Don’t say it.”

“What?” Heather held up both hands.

Bishop stuck a finger in her face. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, and then jabbed at Nat. “You too.”

Nat did her best innocent face. “Unfair, Marks. I was just thinking what a lovely accessory she makes. So small and convenient.”

“The perfect pocket liner,” Heather agreed.

“All right, all right.” Bishop was doing a pretty good job of pretending to be angry. “Enough.”

“It’s a compliment,” Nat protested.

“I said, enough.” But after a minute, Bishop leaned over and whispered, “I can’t keep her in my pocket, you know. She bites.” His lips bumped against Heather’s ear—by accident, she was sure—and she laughed.

The weight of nerves in her stomach eased up a little. But then someone cut the music, and the crowd got still and very quiet, and she knew it was about to begin. Just like that, she felt a numbing cold all over, as though all of the rain had solidified and frozen on her skin.

“Welcome to the second challenge,” Diggin boomed out.

“Suck it, Rodgers,” a guy yelled, and there were whoops and scattered laughs. Someone else said, “Shhh.”

Diggin pretended he hadn’t heard: “This is a test of bravery and balance—”

“And sobriety!”

“Dude, I’m gonna fall.”

More laughter. Heather couldn’t even smile. Next to her, Natalie was fidgeting—turning to the right and left, touching her hip bones. Heather couldn’t even ask what she was doing.

Diggin kept plowing on: “A test of speed, too, since all the contestants will be timed—”

“Jesus Christ, get on with it.”

Diggin finally lost it. He wrenched the megaphone from his mouth. “Shut the hell up, Lee.”

This provoked a new round of laughter. To Heather it all felt off, like she was watching a movie and the sound was a few seconds too late. She couldn’t stop herself from looking up now—at that single beam, a few bare inches of wood, stretched fifty feet above the ground. The Jump was a tradition, more for fun than for anything else, a plunge into water. This would be a plunge to hard earth, packed ground. No chance of surviving it.

There was a momentary stutter when the truck engine gave out, and everything went dark. There were shouts of protest; and when, a few seconds later, the engine gunned on again, Heather saw Matt: standing in the beam of the headlights, laughing, one hand in the back of Delaney’s jeans.