“DID YOU DO it, man?” Akil faced Tristan as they drove. “Did you give their stuff away?”
“Some of it.”
“Why?”
Tristan reached down, raised a bottle from the floor. Vodka, with a pattern of migrating geese on the glass. He took a drink, handed it to Akil. “You know how it is. You’ve got to deal with these things.”
In the backseat, Pearl felt Hadley stiffen beside her; they were Quinn’s words, from the day of the regatta. Had he overheard the whole conversation? Pearl remembered all that had been said, the insensitivity of it, the flippancy she’d ignored while busy trying to pump the girls for information.
Akil drank, swore softly, looked out the window. “I saw them working on that house. Out in the garage. Cassidy was trying to get Joe into all that little stuff she liked.” He was quiet. “I gave her shit about it. Said dollhouses were for kids.”
“Miniatures,” Tristan said, “are for people who need the illusion of control. A world where they get to decide everything.”
On Pearl’s right, Bridges sat silently, tie loosened, hand open on the seat. He took the bottle as Akil passed it back.
“She had OCD,” Tristan said. “And an anxiety disorder. Did you even know that?”
Akil paused, said stubbornly, “She didn’t act like she did.”
“Because she was medicated. She had panic attacks that should’ve kept her off the stage, but it turns out they have pills for that, too.” He fell silent, downshifting as they reached the curve that led toward the waterfront, then spoke again, more quietly. “What better therapy than building a scale model of your life that you can smother under a sheet every night.”
Bridges spoke up. “But . . . she didn’t do any shows last summer. She actually got to hang out.”
“Do you know why last summer happened?” Impatience in Tristan’s voice. “Cassidy’s psychiatrist told our parents they had a choice. Let Cassidy take some time off now, or accept the possibility that she might not have a musical career beyond the age of seventeen. Burnout. Last summer was a test. Cassidy got a little length on her leash, that’s all.” He glanced at Akil. “You were a part of that. You think my father tried to get between you two? He tolerated your presence as a part of Cassidy’s treatment.” When he spoke next, his tone was soft, dismissive. “You were a tool.”
The silence was heavy. Something bumped Pearl’s knee, and she looked over to see Bridges holding the bottle out to her. She took it by the neck, her nostrils tingling with fumes.
Tristan pulled into the yacht club parking lot and cut the engine. Akil stared straight out his window.
“It wasn’t just the dollhouse,” Pearl said. “The vases and the Swiss clock, those came from your house, too. Stuff that survived the fire. You tricked people into buying their dead friends’ things.”
“They weren’t our friends. They were followers.”
She remembered the women in the bathroom, the casual, gossipy way they tore the Garrisons to shreds while freshening up. These were the friends who Sloane had lunched and shopped with, served on boards and committees with, whose husbands golfed and shot skeet with David.
“It’s good stuff.” Bridges’s voice was low, and she remembered the bottle in her hand. “It won’t make you cough or anything.”
She knew the attention of the front seat was on her, too, though in the rearview mirror she could see that Tristan’s eyes were on the dark water. She put the bottle to her lips and sipped, already anticipating the burn as she swallowed, the vapors flooding her sinuses. No big mystery there; she’d smelled enough of the stuff on Dad’s breath to know what it was like. She stuck the bottle back through the seats, and Akil grabbed it as he got out of the car, slamming the door behind him.
Hadley climbed out and lingered by the Bentley, letting the rest of them walk ahead toward the docks. “For real, where are we going?” She reached down and tugged at the sandal strap around the back of her ankle, laughing uncomfortably. “I mean—we’re going out on a boat now?”
“Yes.” Tristan didn’t turn.
“Yeah, you’ll never believe it, Had.” Akil tucked the bottle inside his jacket. “Boats come with these things called lights.” Backing up Tristan, as usual, as if Tristan hadn’t just cut him to the bone. Akil gave an impatient gesture for her to come on; when she caught up with him, he slung his arm over her shoulders.
They were taking Tristan’s speedboat. Pearl grabbed Bridges’s hand as he helped her aboard. “You guys?” Pearl said. “You didn’t answer her question. Where are we going? Or are we not supposed to ask?” No immediate response. “You really like your secrets, don’t you?”
“We do?” Bridges said, facing away from her as he untied the lines.
“The way you took off after we left the party on Little Nicatou? Into the darkness, under a shroud of mystery.” She sat down on the bench seat, studying the three of them.
Tristan turned the key in the ignition, where he’d apparently left it dangling since the last time he’d gone out. “She’s curious, Bridges.”
Bridges didn’t smile. The bottle had come back to him, and he sat beside Pearl, taking a long swallow. “You’ll see,” was all he said.
They cut through the bay, the only boat on the water, as far as Pearl could tell. It had been a warm night back onshore, but out here, the wind had bite, and she wished she were wearing anything but this dress.
They passed black, silent Little Nicatou, the boat headlights providing a ghostly flash of tree trunks and rocky cliff side. Akil still had his arm around Hadley, brushing his face close to hers, trying to initiate something that Hadley seemed reluctantly interested in. Before long, they were kissing.
Pearl glanced away, half expecting Bridges to follow Akil’s lead, but he was distracted, looking down at the curds of foam rising along their hull, taking occasional sips from the bottle. He passed it back to her. She drank once, handed it off.
Tristan drove for nearly half an hour. When he finally killed the ignition and steered the boat up alongside a sheer cliff, Pearl had no idea where they were. Tristan dropped anchor, tied off on a rocky outcropping, bent to open a storage box beneath one of the seats. The only sound was the sloshing of water against the hull.
Hadley pushed Akil back, slightly breathless as she looked around. “Where’s this?”
“A special place.” Tristan brought out three Maglites, tossing one to Akil, another to Bridges.
Pearl looked up at the cliff. “If I’d known we were going rock climbing, I would’ve worn my stilettos.” Beneath the words, her own unease mixed with the furred sensation the vodka had left on her tongue, and she felt vaguely sick.
When the flashlight beams hit the rocks, it was obvious that the wall wasn’t sheer after all. There was a cave opening, at least twenty-five feet across, the blackness inside swallowing what scant moonlight filtered down to the base. Akil swung one leg over the side of the boat, feeling for the rocks, lunging off as Hadley caught her breath.
He made it, though the force of his leap sent the boat drifting sideways, away from the outcropping, and Tristan had to haul on the line to pull them back. There was a scraping sound as the hull rubbed rock, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. “Bridges, help Hadley.”
“That’s okay.” Hadley sat up straighter, pressing her back against the seat. “I’ll wait for you guys here.”
“Nope. Doesn’t work like that.” Akil laid his flashlight down, put out his hands. “You come with us, you’ve got to take the challenge. That’s the deal.”
“The challenge?” She looked at his hands for a moment, then took them and stood, weaving slightly with the motion of the boat. Bridges boosted her over the side onto the rocks, where she stood hugging herself, shifting from foot to foot.
Bridges was next. Pearl glanced at Tristan, surprised to find him holding a waterproof jacket out to her. “You look cold,” he said.
“Thanks.” She put it on, tugging the zipper to her chin. Bridges’s gaze was on her, she could feel it, but she focused on getting herself across the divide, Tristan close behind.
Tristan moved around her so that he was first through the arch, his Maglite beam cutting through the blackness. Akil finally seemed to notice that Hadley was shivering and held out his jacket. She put it on, folding her arms tightly and dropping back to bring up the rear.
Pearl spoke to Bridges as they walked side by side. “So. This is where you guys go at night.” She glanced up, listening as her words echoed up to a vaulted ceiling she couldn’t see.
“One of the places.” Bridges’s voice was quiet, colorless.
The walls of the cave were bumpy and rough-hewn, the floor glistening with moisture and algae left by the tide. Seawater trickled in through small cracks and runnels at their feet.
“Does this place fill up at high tide?” Pearl barely saw him nod. “Kind of like Thunder Hole.” Everybody on MDI had been to the tourist attraction in Acadia National Park at least once, an inlet with a small cavern beneath a ledge, where, when the tide came in, water and air were forced out through a blowhole in an explosion of spray.
“This cave is way more badass than that,” Akil said, taking a run at the wall, dashing up a few feet before rebounding to the floor. “Like, you have no idea.”
Tristan said, “Be quiet,” pausing, listening; the air was full of dripping water, small echoes. “It’s starting.”
“What is?” Hadley stopped, her voice rising slightly. “Bridges?”
“Shhh,” Bridges said. “It’s okay, Had.”
“Look, this is cool and everything, but I think I want to go back now—”
“There’s no going back,” Tristan said. He had led them to a fork. It was more than a cave: it was a system, two broad fissures appearing before them in the rock like gaping mouths. “There’s only right or left. You choose.”
“Me? I don’t—”
“I want to hear you make a decision. By yourself.” His voice had that edge again. “And then you have to live with the consequences of your choice. Do you think you can do that?”
The faint outline of her profile was perfectly still. “Yes.” Her voice was soft.
“Which way, Hadley?”
“Left.”
“Then you lead.” He stood back to let her pass, training the Maglite on the left tunnel. Hadley went, stepping gingerly, slipping and catching herself more than once as she led them through the passageway eroded by wave action and time. There was a sound; Pearl could hear it now, somewhere up ahead, a rushing that cycled on and on.
There was a slight vertical pitch to the tunnel, and Pearl put her hands out, touching the cool, moist walls. “How did you guys find this place?”
Bridges: “Tristan read about it online. Some site on sea caves.”
Hadley stopped, glancing back. “I don’t”—she lifted a shoulder helplessly—“which way?” Again, two more fissures opened to their left and right.
Enough; Hadley reminded Pearl of a little kid, waiting for permission to move. “Okay, what’s this big challenge, if we choose to accept it?”
Tristan turned to look at her. “Finding your way out.”
He switched off his Maglite. In nearly the same instant, the other boys followed suit.
Absolute blackness. Hadley cried out—“You guys!”—but the only sounds were footsteps over stone, the rush of bodies brushing by. Pearl nearly fell, her shoulder landing heavily against the wall. She clung there blindly, counting the seconds until a light switched back on, until someone called off the joke.
Hadley shouted, “You guys! Come back!”
“Hadley, wait!” Pearl took a step, slipped again, cursed. “Wait for me, okay?” She walked with her hands out until she collided with Hadley, groping for her arm. “Do you have your phone? We can use the light—”
“No, it’s in my bag!” Back on the boat. Which was exactly where Pearl had left hers. Hadley sniffed, shouted, “Bridges!” to a cacophony of echoes.
“Shhh! They’re not coming back.” Pearl’s own panic came out as frustration, her airways choked with the smell of subterranean dankness, bringing with it claustrophobia, a feeling of being buried miles, not yards, from fresh air. “Look, we didn’t walk that far from the opening—let’s just turn around and—”
“How? We can’t see anything! Bridges!”
“Stop yelling!” Hadley yanked her arm free, and this time Pearl did fall, catching herself on her hands and knees with a whoosh of breath. The other girl’s footsteps moved away, shuffling and uneven. “Hadley, no—you don’t know where you’re going.”
The sound of Hadley’s hysterical breathing disappeared behind a wall of rock. She’d gone through one of the fissures ahead, and now Pearl was the one yelling, begging Hadley to stop, to stand still and she’d come find her. Somehow.
Nothing. Pearl sat up in the blackness, her heart trying to escape her chest. What if the boys were hiding up ahead, waiting for the moment to switch on their lights and laugh at her, sitting here, helpless, fighting tears? She folded her arms across her knees, the waterproof material rustling. Tristan’s jacket.
She dug into every pocket, and found something. Hard plastic, cylindrical. After some fumbling, hardly daring to hope, she hit the strike. A small jet of flame shot into existence.
A lighter. Now the clue seemed so obvious—what could be less Tristan-like than noticing when another person seemed cold? He’d planted the lighter in the jacket so she’d have it when the time came.
Almost giddy with her ability to see, Pearl went to the fissure on her right, peering in. The passageway stretched off to the right and left. She called Hadley’s name.
If there was an answer, it was so distant that it was covered by her own echoes. She didn’t want to go in there. She wanted to turn around and the follow the tunnel back to the cave arch, breathe clean air, wait for the boys to get bored with their game. But Hadley. She was down there somewhere, hysterical, totally blind.
Pearl chose left, still calling for the girl. Something crunched beneath her sandal, and she jerked the lighter down—a sea urchin, left behind by the tide.
The rushing sound was still there, growing louder. Whatever it was, she was heading right for it. At this point, anything seemed better than following an endless, curving rock wall, stumble-stepping over an unpredictable floor.
At first, she thought she was imagining the change in the darkness before her, the quality of pitch-black fading into deepest twilight. She let the lighter flame recede.
Another arch lay ahead. Pearl went through the opening. The chamber held a pool beneath the ledge where she stood, filling with tidewater from what sounded like a hundred unseen passages. As she watched, bluish light spread across the surface of the water, amorphous, fluctuating.
She sank into a sitting position, exhausted, for a time full of nothing but the light. She became aware of his presence gradually, a tightening of the skin at the back of her neck, an instinctive knowledge that she wasn’t alone.
The silhouette stood and made his way around the ledge to her, switching on his flashlight so that the beam swung at his feet. Tristan sank into a crouch beside her, and they both stared at the light below.
“What is it?” Her voice was hoarse.
“Bioluminescence. I think they’re ctenophores, comb jellies. They’ve been down there almost every time I’ve come.”
The light stretched and separated, living tissue pulling itself through the water by tiny cilia. She felt too exhausted to stand, too damp and chilled and sick of being underground. “We’ve got to find Hadley. She ran off before I could stop her.”
“It wasn’t your responsibility to stop her. She had a chance to prove herself and she failed. She panicked, exactly like I knew she would.”
“Why’d you give me the lighter?”
“Because I knew you’d have the presence of mind to look for it.”
Pearl turned to him, choked with all the things she wanted to say. Speech seemed impossible, pointless. Even if she slapped him, he’d just look back at her, impervious, filing her actions away for further consideration. All she could manage was, “Hadley’s terrified. She could be anywhere by now.”
Tristan exhaled through his nose, straightening up. “The cave system isn’t that big. Six interlocking passages. Between all of us, it won’t take long to find her.”
He walked back through the arch, and Pearl followed, gripping the lighter in her fist in case he tried to lose her again. Tristan blinked the flashlight three times in the tunnel, then again when they reached the opening Pearl had come through earlier: a signal for the other boys to come back from wherever they were hiding.
Pearl reached out and grabbed the flashlight. “How about I carry this.” He didn’t argue.
It wasn’t long before footsteps came up behind them. As the boys’ flashlight beams fell on Tristan and Pearl, Bridges said, “They didn’t stay together?”
“Obviously not,” Tristan said.
“She just ran off? By herself?” Bridges swore. “I knew she’d freak. Crap. We better find her.”
Pearl didn’t turn or slow down, ignoring all three of them as she pressed forward, running her free hand along the wall to keep from slipping. The floor was noticeably wet now; the tide was coming faster, little streams running along the rocks, soaking her already numb bare toes.
Pearl tried not to think about the water rising higher and higher, about what it might be like, trying to get out of here with it up to their waists, their chins, over their heads. The passageway sloped upward, curved left. They walked on. Pearl sloshed through water now ankle deep, and when she glanced up, it was into a white face, all sightless eyes and keening mouth.
It fell on her, clinging, fingers digging into Pearl’s arms. Pearl gasped, her mind registering a moment too late that it was Hadley, of course it was, and she dropped back against the wall to keep from collapsing under the girl’s weight.
“Had, it’s okay—it’s okay, we’ve got you.” Bridges tried to pry her free. Hadley was shuddering uncontrollably, her fingertips ten icy pinpoints, her breath gusting against Pearl’s neck.
Tristan said nothing, watching as the rest of them, even Akil, tried to talk Hadley down. Finally, her hyperventilating became sobs, and she let Bridges put his arm around her.
Once they reached the cave entrance, rising water was sloshing over the outcropping beyond the arch. It was a struggle to get back into the boat, and Hadley had to be carried. She sat hunched beside Bridges, refusing to speak as he rubbed her back and asked repeatedly if she was okay, to please say something. There was blood trickling down her shin from a gash on her right knee, and her palms were scraped. Akil sat across from her, watching the scene uneasily.
Pearl, meanwhile, still gripped the flashlight. She didn’t let go until Tristan moored at the yacht club landing, at which point it dropped from her stiff fingers and rolled across the deck.
Bridges looked up at Tristan. “I think maybe she needs a hospital.”
Tristan turned, folding his arms over his chest, studying Hadley. Then he went to the storage box, brought out a first-aid kit, and knelt to apply alcohol to the cut on her knee. She winced, her eyelids fluttering. “It’s shock.” He opened an adhesive bandage and applied it, then reached into his pocket and handed Bridges his car keys. “Take her home. She’ll be fine.”
Bridges looked at him for a long moment, finally saying quietly, “Don’t you even care?”
Tristan gazed back. “Any sensible person would’ve followed the sound of running water to the chamber. She could’ve been out of the tunnels in minutes.” He tilted his head slightly, regarding Bridges. “You managed to figure it out. Didn’t you?”
Hadley watched as Tristan walked back to the bow, her eyes wide and wounded.
Pearl got off the boat, leading the way down the dock, too furious and half-numb to look at anyone. She only glanced back when she heard the Rivelle’s engine roar to life. Tristan, going out again by himself, onto the bay.