Cassidy couldn’t read Apricot’s expression in the low light.
“I mean, like, did you edit it or something? You can tell me the truth, and honestly you should before it gets out of hand because people are going to question the one in your story, anyhow.”
“What are you talking about, Cass?”
“There was no kid in the video you put in your story, so if you had an edited video or something—”
Apricot pulled her phone from her pocket. “Therewasa kid, or something. You saw it! What are you even talking about? Why would I edit anything?”
In the blue light of her screen, Apricot’s face appeared harsh and angry.
“See? It’s the same …” Apricot began to say but trailed off. In the video, Daisy stepped away from the door and nothing but light poured from the glass door behind her. “What the hell?”
Apricot played the video back, paused it again, then scrubbed through slowly, but still the video remained unchanged.
“If you’re fucking with me right now, Apricot …”
“I’m not fucking with you!” Apricot shouted.
Cassidy stepped back and the group nearest to them quieted.
“I don’t know what’s happening, but I didn’t do anything to this video. You saw it earlier, and so did Daisy and James.”
“But on your story, the video was different,” James said. Cassidy jumped at the sound of his voice, and she wondered how much more of the conversation he’d heard.
“James, this is a private conversation,” Cassidy said.
“You know, I think it involves me, actually. Daisy accused me of posting bullshit online and then you all showed me this video, so if there’s something up, I want to get ahead of it before one of you fucks me over for calling you out at dinner.”
“Look, that’s the only video I took. I didn’t fucking edit anything. I don’t know what’s going on, but I didn’t change it,” Apricot said, stepping toward the man and showing him the phone screen.
Something moved on top of the cliff. Cassidy saw it for just a moment as she turned to face James. A shadow moved at the top of the falls. She wanted to say Apricot’s name, but it got caught in her throat. A small shadow stood on top of the falls, no bigger than a child. Goosebumps rose on Cassidy’s skin and the air rushed out of her lungs, and a small light appeared next to the child and grew brighter. The shadow dashed away quickly—too quickly. If Cassidy blinked in that moment, she might have believed it disappeared into thin air altogether.
“What is that?” Cassidy asked, her voice sounding small. She stepped forward, away from Apricot whose attention remained on the altered video. James followed Cassidy’s gaze, and as she continued to step toward the waterfall, Edie noticed and also stood from her seat on the log next to Rose. Rose didn’t notice her friend step away as she was leaned over to take a bump of something the group next to them brought out.
The light flicked away and the shadow of the child seemed to reappear behind it. Except it wasn’t a child. It was Ryan LeHane with his phone. He somehow managed to scramble up the rocks on to the side of the waterfall and now stood at the top. It looked like he was saying something to the camera, but Cassidy couldn’t hear him. She took a breath, feeling silly for allowing the darkness to have scared her like that, but her relief was short lived.
Ryan took another step closer to the edge and tripped. Cassidy gasped, which caught Edie’s attention and she turned to watch Ryan take another step, and another, stumbling on the wet rock. Cassidy watched helplessly, her breath caught in her throat, and her feet rooted in place like in a nightmare, as Ryan’s body tumbled over the edge of the cliff.
Gravity pulled his slender frame toward the earth headfirst, and his skull hit the rocks with a heavycracklike snapping a thick branch. Ryan’s neck bent at a right angle and his back arched backwards much like the scorpion pose Cassidy used to brag she mastered in yoga. His legs hit the wet rocks loosely and his whole body spasmed in the stream like a fish tossed onto the shore.
Someone close to Cassidy screamed so loudly that she had to cover her ears, but when she looked around for the source, she realized the screams were hers.
“What’s going on?” shouted Rose. Edie grabbed her friend by the shoulders and pushed her toward the path and away from the body.
Several people rushed toward the body, including James, and placed hands on the torso, the arms, the neck. The head rolled far too easily when a man that Cassidy recognized as one of Ryan’s cronies tried to straighten the neck. He quickly stood, falling backwards through the stream of water the poured down on the corpse, and he vomited on the rock face.
“What do we do? Someone get help, I don’t have reception!”
Cassidy’s feet moved of their own accord as Apricot pulled her away from the chaos and into the darkness of the woods, back toward the safety of the beach.
RyanLeHanewasdead,undeniably. James was one of the few who ran toward the waterfall rather than away from it, but once he saw the angle of Ryan’s neck, he turned to direct people away from the scene and back to the trail.
“Go get help!” James shouted at Ryan’s friend as the water poured down on the man. Not that anything could help Ryan now, but someone needed to come for the body. The friend obeyed and took off sobbing through the forest.
“What the fuck just happened?” a tan man in a green plastic vest asked, his fingers buried in his short hair as though he was trying to keep his own head at the proper angle.
“He must have slipped,” said one of the two women that stayed behind. A phone was pressed to her ear. “Does anyone have reception?”
