Panic (2 page)
Authors: Lauren Oliver
“TESTING, TESTING. ONE, TWO, THREE.” THAT WAS DIGGIN, testing the megaphone.
The old quarry off Whippoorwill Road, empty since the late 1800s, had been flooded in the fifties to make a swimming hole. On the south side was the beach: a narrow strip of sand and stone, supposedly off-limits after dark, but rarely used before then; a dump of cigarette butts, crushed beer cans, empty Baggies, and sometimes, disgustingly, condoms, scattered limply on the ground like tubular jellyfish. Tonight, it was crowded—packed with blankets and beach chairs, heavy with the smell of mosquito repellent and booze.
Heather closed her eyes and inhaled. This was the smell of Panic—the smell of
summer
. At the edge of the water, there was a sudden explosion of color and sound, shrieks of laughter. Firecrackers. In the quick glare of red and green light, Heather saw Kaitlin Frost and Shayna Lambert laughing, doubled over, while Patrick Culbert tried to get a few more flares to light.
It was weird. Graduation had been only yesterday—Heather had bailed on the ceremony, since Krista, her mom, wouldn’t show, and there was no point in pretending there was some big glory in floating through four years of mandated classes. But already she felt years and years away from high school, like it had all been one long, unmemorable dream. Maybe, she thought, it was because people didn’t change. All the days had simply blurred together and would now be suctioned away into the past.
Nothing ever happened in Carp. There were no surprises.
Diggin’s voice echoed over the crowd.
“Ladies and gentlemen, I have an announcement: school’s out for summer.”
It was starting. Everyone cheered. There was another
pop-pop-pop
, a burst of firecrackers. They were in the middle of the woods, five miles from the nearest house. They could make all the noise they wanted.
They could scream. No one would hear them.
Heather knew she should say something encouraging to Nat—Heather and Bishop were there for Natalie, to give her moral support. Bishop had even made a poster:
Go Nat
, he had written. Next to the words, he had drawn a huge stick figure—Natalie could tell it was supposed to be her, because the stick figure was wearing a pink sweatshirt—standing on a pile of money.
“How come Nat’s not wearing any pants?” Heather had asked.
“Maybe she lost them during the Jump,” Bishop said. He turned, grinning, to Nat. Whenever he smiled like that, his eyes went from syrup brown to honey colored. “Drawing was never my thing.”
Heather didn’t like to talk about Matt in front of Bishop. She couldn’t stand the way he rolled his eyes when she brought him up, like she’d just switched the radio to a bad pop station. But finally she couldn’t help it. “He’s still not here.” Heather spoke in a low voice, so only Nat would hear her. “Sorry, Nat. I know this isn’t the time—I mean, we came for
you
—”
“It’s okay.” Nat reached out and squeezed Heather’s hand with both of her own. She pulled a weird face—like someone had just made her chug a limeade. “Look. Matt doesn’t deserve you. Okay? You can do better than Matt.”
Heather half laughed. “You’re my best friend, Nat,” she said. “You aren’t supposed to lie to me.”
Nat shook her head. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon. The game’s about to start.”
Heather checked her phone again, for the millionth time. Nothing. She’d powered it down several times and rebooted it, just to make sure it was working.
Diggin’s voice boomed out again: “The rules of Panic are simple. Anyone can enter. But only one person will win.”
Diggin announced the pot.
$67,000.
Heather felt as though she’d been punched in the stomach. $67,000. That had to be the biggest pot ever. The crowd began to buzz—the number ran through them like an electric current, jumping from lip to lip.
Shit, man, you’d have to be crazy
not
to play.
Nat looked as though she’d just taken a large spoonful of ice cream.
Diggin plunged on, ignoring the noise, and explained the rules—a half-dozen events, spaced throughout the summer, conducted under conditions of strictest privacy; eliminations after every round; individual challenges for each contestant who made it past the halfway mark—but nobody was listening. It was the same speech as always. Heather had been watching Panic since she was in eighth grade. She could have made the speech herself.
That number—67,000—wrapped itself around her heart and squeezed. Without meaning to, she thought of all she could do with the money; she thought of how far she could go, what she could buy, how long she could live. How many miles away from Carp she could get.
But no. She couldn’t leave Matt. Matt had said he loved her. He was her plan. The grip on her heart eased a little, and she found she could breathe again.
Next to Heather, Natalie shimmied out of her jean shorts and kicked off her shoes. “Can you believe it?” she said. She took off her shirt, shivering in the wind. Heather couldn’t believe she’d insisted on that ridiculous bikini, which would fly off as soon as she hit the water. Natalie had only laughed. Maybe, she’d joked, that would earn her extra points.
That was Natalie: stubborn. Vain, too. Heather still couldn’t understand why she’d even chosen to play. Nat was afraid of everything.
Someone—probably Billy Wallace—whistled. “Nice ass, Velez.”
Nat ignored him, but Heather could tell she had heard and was pretending not to be pleased. Heather wondered what Billy Wallace would say if she tried to wear a scrap of fabric like that.
Whoa. Look at the size of that thing! Do you need a permit to carry that thing around, Heather?
But Matt loved her. Matt thought she was pretty.
The noise on the beach swelled, grew to a roar: hoots and screams, people waving homemade banners and flags, firecrackers exploding like a smattering of gunfire, and she knew it was time. The whistle would blow.
Panic was about to begin.
Just then Heather saw him. The crowd parted temporarily; she could see him, smiling, talking to someone; then the crowd shifted and she lost sight of him. “He’s here. Nat, he’s
here
.”
“What?” Nat wasn’t paying attention anymore.
Heather’s voice dried up in her throat. Because the crowd had opened again, just as she’d started moving toward him, as though directed by gravity—relief welling in her chest, a chance to make things right, a chance to
do
things right, for once—and in that second she had seen that he was speaking to Delaney O’Brien.
Not just speaking. Whispering.
And then: kissing.
The whistle blew—sharp and thin in the sudden silence, like the cry of an alien bird.
Heather reached the top of the ridge just as Derek Klieg got a running start and hurled himself into the air, body contorted, shouting. A few seconds later, a cheer went up as he hit.
Natalie was crouching a few feet away from the edge, her face pale; for a second, Heather thought she heard her counting. Then Nat turned and blinked repeatedly, as though trying to bring Heather’s face into focus. She opened her mouth and closed it again.
Heather’s heart was beating hard and high. “Hey, Nat,” she said, just as Natalie straightened up.
“What the hell are you doing?” Natalie spat out.
Now Heather registered everything, all at once: the ache in her hands and thighs, the pain in her fingers, the sharp bite of the wind. Natalie looked furious. She was shaking, although that might have been the cold.
“I’m going to jump,” Heather said, realizing, as she said it, how stupid it sounded—how stupid it
was
. All of a sudden, she thought she might puke.
I’ll be cheering for you,
Heather had said to Natalie. The guilt was there, throbbing alongside the nausea. But Matt’s voice was bigger than everything. Matt’s voice, and underneath it a vision of the water stains above her bed; the dull thud of music from the park; the smell of weed and cigarettes; the sounds of laughter, and later, someone screaming,
You dumb piece of
. . .
“You can’t jump,” Nat said, still staring. “
I’m
jumping.”
“We’ll jump together,” Heather said.
Natalie took two steps forward. Heather noticed she was balling her fists almost rhythmically. Squeeze, relax. Squeeze, relax. Three times.
“Why are you doing this?” The question was almost a whisper.
Heather couldn’t answer. She didn’t even know, not exactly. All she knew—all she could feel—was that this was her last chance.
So she just said, “I’m going to jump now. Before I chicken out.”
When she turned toward the water, Natalie reached for Heather, as if to pull her back. But she didn’t.
Heather felt as though the rock underneath her had begun to move, bucking like a horse. She had a sudden terror that she was going to lose her balance and go tumbling down the rocky slope, cracking her head in the shallows.
Panic.
She took small, halting steps forward, and still reached the edge far too quickly.
“Announce yourself!” Diggin boomed out.
Below Heather, the water, black as oil, was still churning with bodies. She wanted to shout down—
move, move, I’m going to hit you
—but she couldn’t speak. She could hardly breathe. Her lungs felt like they were being pressed between two stones.
And suddenly she couldn’t think of anything but Chris Heinz, who four years ago drank a fifth of vodka before doing the Jump, and lost his footing. The sound his head made as it cracked against the rock was delicate, almost like an egg breaking. She remembered the way everyone ran through the woods; the image of his body, broken and limp, lying half submerged in the water.
“Say your name!” Diggin prompted again, and the crowd picked up the chant:
Name, name, name.
She opened her mouth. “Heather,” she croaked out. “Heather Nill.” Her voice broke, got whipped back by the wind.
The chant was still going:
Name, name, name, name.
Then:
Jump, jump, jump, jump.
Her insides were white; filled with snow. Her mouth tasted a little like puke. She took a deep breath. She closed her eyes.
She jumped.
HEATHER HAD NEVER REGRETTED ANYTHING AS MUCH as she regretted making the decision, on the beach, to enter the game. In the days that followed, it seemed to her like a kind of insanity. Maybe she’d inhaled too much booze-vapor on the beach. Maybe seeing Matt with Delaney had driven her temporarily psychotic. That happened, didn’t it? Weren’t whole defenses built on that kind of thing, when people went crazy and hacked their ex-wives to pieces with an ax?
But she was too proud to withdraw. And the date of the first official challenge kept drawing nearer. Despite the fact that the breakup made her want to go into permanent hiding, despite the fact that she was doing her best to avoid everyone who knew her even vaguely, the news had reached her: the water towers near Copake had been defaced, painted over with a date. Saturday. Sundown.
A message and invitation to all the players.
She moved as slowly as she could; spent her nights curled up on the couch watching TV with her sister, Lily; turned off her phone when she wasn’t obsessively checking it for calls from Matt. She didn’t want to deal with Bishop, who would lecture her and tell her that Matt was an idiot anyway; and Nat spent three days giving her the cold shoulder before admitting, finally, that she wasn’t that mad anymore.
Time tumbled, cascaded on, as though life had been set to fast-forward.
Finally Saturday came, and she couldn’t avoid it anymore.
She didn’t even have to bother to sneak out. Earlier in the evening, her mom and her stepdad, Bo, had gone over to some bar in Ancram, which meant they wouldn’t be stumbling home until the early hours or, possibly, Sunday afternoon—bleary-eyed, reeking of smoke, probably starving and in a foul mood.
Heather made mac ’n’ cheese for Lily, who ate in sullen silence in front of the TV. Lily’s hair was parted exactly down the middle, combed straight, and fixed in a hard knot at the back of her head. Recently she had been wearing it like that, and it made her look like an old woman stuck in an eleven-year-old’s body.
Lily was giving her the silent treatment, and Heather didn’t know why, but she didn’t have enough energy to worry about it. Lily was like that: stormy one minute, smiley the next. Lately, she’d been more on the
stormy
side—more serious, too, very careful about what she wore and how she fixed her hair, quieter, less likely to laugh until she snorted milk, less likely to beg Heather for a story before she went to bed—but Heather figured she was just growing up. There wasn’t that much to smile about in Carp. There
definitely
wasn’t much to smile about in Fresh Pines Mobile Park.
Still, it made Heather’s chest ache a little. She missed the old Lily: sticky Dr Pepper hands, the smell of bubblegum breath, hair that was never combed, and glasses that were always smudgy. She missed Lily’s eyes, wide in the dark, as she rolled over and whispered, “Tell me a story, Heather.”
But that was the way it worked—evolution, she guessed; the order of things.
At seven thirty p.m., Bishop texted her to say that he was on his way. Lily had withdrawn to the Corner, which was what Heather called their bedroom: a narrow, cramped room with two beds squeezed practically side by side; a chest of drawers missing a leg, which rocked violently when it was opened; a chipped lamp and a varnish-spotted nightstand; clothes heaped everywhere, like snowdrifts.
Lily was lying in the dark, blankets drawn up to her chin. Heather assumed she was sleeping and was about to close the door, when Lily turned to her, sitting up on one elbow. In the moonlight coming through the dirty windowpane, her eyes were like polished marbles.
“Where are you going?” she said.
Heather navigated around a tangle of jeans and sweatshirts, underwear and balled-up socks. She sat down on Lily’s bed. She was glad that Lily wasn’t asleep. She was glad, too, that Lily had decided to talk to her after all.
“Bishop and Nat are picking me up,” she said, avoiding the question. “We’re going to hang out for a little while.”
Lily lay down again, huddling in her blankets. For a minute, she didn’t say anything. Then: “Are you coming back?”
Heather felt her chest squeeze up. She leaned over to place a hand on Lily’s head. Lily jerked away. “Why would you say something like that, Billygoat?”
Lily didn’t answer. For several minutes Heather sat there, her heart raging in her chest, feeling helpless and alone in the dark. Then she heard Lily’s breathing and knew she had fallen asleep. Heather leaned over and kissed her sister’s head. Lily’s skin was hot and wet, and Heather had the urge to climb into bed with her, to wake her up and apologize for everything: for the ants in the kitchen and the water stains on the ceiling; for the smells of smoke and the shouting from outside; for their mom, Krista, and their stepdad, Bo; for the pathetic life they’d been thrust into, narrow as a tin can.
But she heard a light honk from outside, so instead she got up, closing the door behind her.
Heather could always tell Bishop was coming by the sound of his cars. His dad had owned a garage once, and Bishop was a car freak. He was good at building things; several years ago he’d made Heather a rose out of petals of copper, with a steel stem and little screws for thorns. He was always tinkering with rusted pieces of junk he picked up from God-knows-where. His newest was a Le Sabre with an engine that sounded like an old man trying to choke out a belt buckle.
Heather took shotgun. Natalie was sitting in the back. Weirdly, Natalie always insisted on sitting bitch, in the exact middle, even if there was no one else in the car. She’d told Heather that she didn’t like picking sides—left or right—because it always felt like she was betting with her life. Heather had explained to her a million times that it was more dangerous to sit in the middle, but Nat didn’t listen.
“I can’t believe you roped me into this,” Bishop said when Heather got in the car. It was raining—the kind of rain that didn’t so much fall as materialize, as though it was being exhaled by a giant mouth. There was no point in using an umbrella or rain jacket—it was coming from all directions at once, and got in collars and under shirtsleeves and down the back.
“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. 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; his hair responded as though it had been electrified and 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 Trager, 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.