Fury (33 page)

JD groaned faintly. “Em?”

“Hi. Hi, JD. I’m here. I’m going to get you out of here.” He didn’t respond.

She saw a red welt on his forehead, leaking blood—the pipe must have struck his head before crushing his leg. He must have
come to rescue her—or the Furies had led him here. She cursed them and whatever power they came from. Her vision flashed as bitter anger flowed through her, taking over her thoughts. Hate. Hate. She hated them for what they were doing to her. She despised them for dragging JD here. This wasn’t justice. This was cruelty.

She had no idea if the Furies would still be waiting for her when she emerged, but all she could focus on now was JD. She was getting him free. Her muscles burned, but she didn’t let up. She pushed harder.

“Just hold on,” she said, as much to herself as to him. “Just hold on, JD.”

And then, with a final heave, the pipe slipped off JD’s leg. Em’s back and arms burned from the effort. Blood soaked through JD’s pants. She looked up at the mixer. One end of it was ascending into the sky. They were about to be buried alive.

She rolled JD over onto his side, and he winced painfully. “Okay, we’re gonna move. JD, I’m going to move you, all right?” His eyelids were fluttering, but she thought she saw the vaguest of nods.

She grabbed his right arm and threw it around her shoulders. Unsteadily, she got to one knee, and then, with both feet on the ground, she lifted from her thighs, standing up with JD’s full weight on her left side. She was gripping his
wrist in front of her chest, holding him tight. She felt his heart beating through both their bodies. She felt the blood from his thigh soaking into her jeans. She took one awkward step forward, and then another. Every cell in her body throbbed with urgency. He was so tall that his feet were dragging behind them. She breathed and stepped. Breathed and stepped. He was groaning again, into her shoulder blade. The alien distribution of weight made her feel like she was walking on the deck of a storm-thrown ship. Then they were at the wall.

She couldn’t climb a wall with JD on her back. She scanned the facade for a solution. It was so loud. And so dark. And he was bleeding, this boy who had always protected her.

There was a pile of rubble in the corner; it reached almost halfway up the wall. It took her four more arduous steps to reach it. JD was fading in and out now. Barely responsive. Em’s lungs were burning with the strain. She wondered if the Furies were watching her, amused—if this was just added entertainment on top of their master plan. But she pushed the thought from her mind. She had to focus.

“I need you to help me, JD,” she huffed. “I need you to stay right like this.” And she maneuvered him to the top of the pile, sitting upright like a broken doll. His head lolled to the side. She held his face tenderly and wiped a streak of blood from his temple. For the first time, she took in what he was wearing—
dark jeans and a long-sleeved lumberjack-plaid shirt. No hat. No weird jacket. No deer sweatshirt. This is what he’d worn to the pep rally. He’d gone out of his way to look average for her. The realization was a stake stabbing into her heart.

“JD, listen to me. Just hold on.”

She reached her hands to the top of the wall. Then she pulled with her arms and pushed off with her legs, vaulting herself up. She landed with the edge of the wall digging into her stomach; she felt her left elbow rip through the sleeve of her sweater.

One leg up, like a frog. Onto her knees, scraping them through holes that had suddenly appeared in her jeans. Then turning around, facing the pit again, getting back onto her stomach, now reaching her arms down toward him. Shouting, shouting, not even recognizing her own voice.

“JD! JD! If you can hear me, lift up your arms.” She felt desperate. “JD—we’re going to do this together and then we’re going to eat barbecue pizza and play board games and go swimming together all summer long. I’m going to kiss you so many times. In the moonlight and in the water and against the oak tree that your dad thinks is on your property but that my dad insists is on his. Just please, JD, make this happen.” She was babbling, blubbering, tugging at the collar of his shirt, as far as she could reach.

Somehow, with strength she didn’t even know she had, she was able to raise the right side of his body enough to
get her hand under his arm. She yanked it until she could do the same on his left side. And then, with her hands, and then her elbows, tugging at his torso, she was able to get him fully upright.
I love you.
Pull.
I love you.
Pull.
I love you.
Sweat beaded along her hairline; her nose ran and dripped onto her lips.

There was a loud mechanical screeching as the concrete mixer began unloading its contents. The viscous gray glop sank into the foundation, around the pipes, slowly filling in every crevice. She pulled harder, coming around onto her knees again to gain more leverage.
Please,
she prayed.
Please let me do this.
And then, with a final pull, just as the concrete started to cover JD’s Converse sneakers, she heaved him aboveground, on the far side of the hole. She leaned over him, blanketing his body with hers, sobbing with relief.

“JD,” she said, shaking his shoulders. “JD, thank god. Thank god. It’s going to be okay. I’m going to get help.”

She put her ear to his mouth. His breathing was shallow. She felt for his pulse. It was weak.

She whirled around, wild with grief.

“Where are you?” she shouted into the night. “Where did you go?” She was frantic and furious. “Ali! Meg! Ty! Come here! Tell me! What now?”

There they were, off to the side, in the shadows. All three of them appeared to be flickering now. And Em knew, somehow,
that they were about to vanish. And once they left, Em knew JD would be gone too.

“Wait. Stop.” She stood up, stumbling with weakness, dirty and crying and bleeding from her knees. “This is wrong. You know it. You must know it. This is not justice. This is not karma. This isn’t
helping
anything. You’re not
teaching
anything.”

Ali and Meg were barely visible. They were practically translucent. But Ty was still hovering nearby. Em could make out the whites of her eyes, the white in her hair. It was entirely creepy—like they’d only ever appeared for this moment. Em moved toward the Furies and grabbed for Ty’s arm.

“Ty. Please. What you did to Chase—what you’re doing to me. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not right. This isn’t how the world should
work
.”

The words seemed to vibrate between them, taking on a shape of their own. And finally, with an expression in her eyes that looked almost human, Ty stepped forward, away from her sisters.

She held out her hand and opened her palm to reveal five gleaming red beads. They looked like berries, or round pills. Like the orchids, they had a crystalline quality.

“If you swallow these,” Ty said to Em, “you can save JD. But I’m warning you—there are rules, and there are consequences.”

Em looked at Ty, at the seeds in her palm, and then back
at JD, whose breath was now coming in desperate rasps. She hesitated. Was this a trap? Would these five tiny pills just poison her, kill her along with JD?

She thought of the promises she had made to him. The things they would do together.
I’m going to kiss you so many times.

“What kind of rules? What kind of consequences?” Em demanded, her heart in her throat.

“They will bind you to us forever,” Ty said simply, her smile shimmering as she wavered in and out of Em’s vision. “And you can’t tell a single soul about them, or about us, or about tonight. JD will be in danger all over again—worse danger—if you tell him what happened.”

“So what will he think?” Em was filled with a sense of desperate hopelessness. “What will he remember?”

“That’s not for you to know,” Ty said. “Are you going to take them, or not?”

The decision was easy. She would save JD—or try as best she could.

The seeds felt smooth and cold as Ty passed them to her. Like tiny stones. Em put all of them in her mouth at once.

“Swallow,” Ty said. “Whole.”

Em did, feeling the beads against her tongue, sliding down her throat, which was raw from screaming. They tasted bitter. She could almost feel them settle inside of her, sending a hot sting through her chest and stomach.

And then she heard a rustle behind her. JD shifted. His eyes fluttered open. He opened his mouth, coughed slightly, and whispered, “Em?” She watched, jaw agape, as he propped himself up on his elbows. His breathing was normal again. He blinked and looked around. He was coming to.

“Oh my god.” Em turned around in amazement, about to ask Ty what had just happened. But they were gone. All three of them had disappeared.

Em didn’t have time to think about it, because just then JD moaned again. She went over to kneel beside him. He struggled to sit up, then collapsed backward onto the ground.

“It’s okay,” she said, leaning over him, one hand on his chest, the other in his hair. “I’m here.”

And yet she had the strangest sensation of somehow being
elsewhere
, too. The air around her was heavier than usual—rusty and burnt.

Then JD’s hand was on hers, and he was asking her what had happened. Em was looking at him, weeping, begging for his forgiveness.

“It’s all over now,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry, JD. I’m so, so sorry.”

Two weeks later

Gabby’s mom was forecasting a mild, snowless spring. Winter had come so fast and furious that year:
It was like there was something else in the air,
Marty Dove was fond of saying. It’s not that the month of January wasn’t supposed to be cold—it was—but . . . it was like this cold had no
point
. It was freezing, without any beautiful, snowcapped reward.

Days came and went. Mostly, Em and Gabby went straight home, doing deep-conditioning treatments, watching crappy rom-coms, and scouring the Urban Outfitters catalog for new wardrobe splurges. They didn’t speak of Zach, who had transferred last week, courtesy of his stepdad’s string-pulling, to the New Hampshire boarding school he used to attend himself. Better stepping-stone to Yale, he had told the football team. Em knew it had more to do with
his failing math grade than anything else. But mostly, she was relieved to realize she didn’t care anymore what the real reason was for anything Zach did.

Em spent a few afternoons hanging out with Drea, and she was reading as many of her books as she could get her hands on.

Em’s dreams were filled with dark spaces, cavernous gaps between reality and nightmares that threatened to swallow her whole. In the dreams, she was constantly on the verge of stepping into an angry abyss, one that was reaching inside her even as she teetered above it. Sometimes Chase was there, sometimes JD. Sometimes Ali and Ty and Meg. Sometimes Zach. She woke up some nights with a scream swelling in her throat.

When she couldn’t sleep, she went to her window and looked outside. She saw shapes—no, she didn’t
see
them as much as feel them, sense them. The Furies, like the ice, wouldn’t melt. Patches of them were frozen in her memory.

And JD . . . well, that view was just as cold. His blinds had been closed since the night she’d called 911 at the Behemoth. The morning after she saved his life, she woke up to see that the string between their windows had snapped—weighed down, probably, by heavy icicles. He left for school before she even woke up—math-team practice, his mom told hers—and their routes never converged in the hallways. She texted him,
sent him chats; his responses, when they came at all, were perfunctory.

Em was trying to understand it. She knew the Furies must have somehow made him believe something that wasn’t true . . . but she didn’t know what. And she couldn’t tell him what had really happened, of course; she’d vowed to keep it all inside. She could tell he was mad at her—it was the Furies’ fault, she had no doubt. But how could she defend herself? How could she begin to explain? How could she risk putting him in danger again?

Everything in her ached, as she slowly realized that even though she’d gotten him from dying, it didn’t mean she got the old JD back. It was like she’d chosen, by swallowing those pills, to sever their connection. It was unbearable. It was insurmountable. The few times she caught his gaze, his eyes looked kind but flat. Not full of the feeling they used to hold.

Em knew that the Furies had gotten exactly what they came for after all. She had not defeated them—in fact, she had somehow bound herself to them for life. She didn’t even know how, or what that meant. And in the meantime they’d broken her heart.

But at least JD was alive. And as long as he was living and breathing, he might someday love her again. In this way, it was like Em and the Furies were engaged in an invisible tug-of-war. At least Em still had a piece of the rope.

Some mornings, as she watched the sun rise, filling in the sky from behind stark branches, she thought about how she
could make amends. Tell him what happened—that night and all the nights leading up to it—how she’d felt, knowing finally that she loved him. She could tell him what Drea had told her. Make him understand. And then . . .

And then what? Her thoughts always shredded apart here, full of longing and hope and uncertainty. Sometimes the frustration was so great that she wondered which was better—to live with love always just out of her grasp, or to know that it was gone forever?

Ty’s words reverberated in her head, as they frequently did:
I’m warning you—they will bind you to us forever.
She didn’t know by what chains she was bound. But she would escape them.

She was going to teach the Furies a lesson about getting what you deserved.