“One step at a time,” Reyva murmured ahead of her.
“I know,” Claire whispered back.
“I can hear you panicking. You’re stressing me out.”
“Sorry. I’ll panic quieter.”
Mariana spoke up. “You can’t tell me you’re all chill about this, Reyva.”
“I’m not chill,” Reyva said. “I’m controlled. There’s a difference.”
Climbing over another rock, Claire kept a tight grip on her phone and hoped the battery didn’t die while they were down here. The cave wasn’t a nice, friendly tunnel with a flat floor for tourists to walk along. It was a jumble of boulders with roots dangling between them.
“So whatdoesmake you freak out?” Mariana said.
“We’re back to this?” Reyva asked. “Why do you want to know what scares me?”
“Well, I don’t really. Just want to get to knowyousince we’re together in this.” Mariana climbed over another rock and ducked beneath a root.
Claire tried not to think about all the rocks pressing in on them or how much earth and rock was above them. It felt like it wanted to squeeze them in a fist of rocks. What if it collapsed? Cave-ins happened all the time. What if they dislodged a key support and caused the cave-in?No one would ever know how we died, she thought.Or eventhatwe died. We’d be missing.Another set of faces on TV. An unsolved case.
She thought of her parents. Maybe they’d started to worry—she hadn’t checked in or texted to tell them she’d arrived safely or that she hated the food, hadn’t made any friends, had poison ivy and a million mosquito bites, and could she please come home. What would they do when they realized she wasn’t coming home? How long would they search for her? She wondered if they’d blame themselves, or each other, for sending her here. Truthfully, she kind of blamed them. And herself. She wished she’d told them what she really felt, that she didn’t want to go, rather than assuming—like she always did and like everyone always made her feel—that what she felt was wrong or irrelevant.
“Come on,” Mariana said. “Fill the silence. I hate silence. Especially this one. It’s not a nice, companionable silence. It’s an ominous silence. Talk to me. What’s your greatest fear?”
Mariana was right about the silence, Claire thought. It pressed in on them as if it had its own weight. Like the darkness beyond their phones’ lights. The darkness and the silence had a thickness to it that could smother.
“Death,” Reyva said.
“Nope,” Mariana said. “You barely flinched at the corpse.”
“Hugs,” Reyva said.
“More plausible. Keep going.”
Reyva huffed as she scrambled over a boulder. “You know when you run into someone you know but don’t really like and they go for a hug? You try for a wave, but no, they’re just going for it, and you can’t dodge, and so there you are. And it’s no A-frame hug either. A full-body squeeze. You imagine drop-kicking them into the sun, but you know what your parents would say if you did that. So you’re just stuck until they decide they’re done. Horrifying.”
“So you fear intimacy,” Mariana said.
“Not exactly what I said.”
She doubted that was what Reyva really feared. She’d noticed that Reyva cut herself off whenever she talked about life before the Lake House. So, for that matter, did Mariana.
Claire heard pebbles skitter, and she froze. “What was that?”
The others stopped. Listened.
“What?” Mariana asked.
She didn’t hear anything else. “Must have just been loose rocks.” But she shivered. The air was damp and chilled within the cave, and it smelled musty, like wet chalk. It was like crawling through a dusty refrigerator, thick with the miasma of rotten food.
“Your turn, Claire,” Mariana said. “Greatest fear?”
“Me?”So many to choose from, she thought. They really didn’t want to know the litany of things she feared. It was far better if they thought she had a normal number of ordinary fears. “Guess I’m not a fan of the dark.”
“Yeah, no one is,” Mariana said. “Try again. Deep down, what do you fear?”
Deep down... I’m afraid I’m made of fear, Claire thought.Instead of bones: fear. Instead of blood: fear. Instead of a heart and lungs: fear. I’m afraid I am just faking being a normal person, capable of dealing with things in a normal way. And my greatest fear is that someone will see that. My greatest fear is that you’ll see me for who I am.But she obviously wasn’t about to say any of that out loud. At best, she’d sound melodramatic. At worst... Well, they wouldn’t understand regardless. No one ever did. Not her parents. Not her friends. Maybe her grandfather would have, but he was gone and she’d never asked him. “Can we not talk about this right now? In fact, probably better if we’re quiet.”
