Panic(7)

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.