“What did … what did they say?”
Jessica shrugs.
I take a few steps over.
“Jessica, what did they say?”
“She said that she hoped you could swim. Like, that’s all she said. On repeat. It was creepy the first time, but then it just got annoying.” She glances up at me. “You better tell whoever it is to stop calling. Mom and Dad won’t be happy if it continues when they’re home.”
“Did she say who she was?” I ask.
“Nope—believe me, I asked,” Jessica replies. She looks up from her phone then and truly looks at me. “Should I be worried?”
Of course that’s what she’d ask. Should she be worried. Like she’s the parent and I’m the child. She’s always the smart one, the good one, and I’m the one messing up. It makes me want to scream that my little sister thinks she has to take care of me.
Normally, I would have done just that, just to put her in her place. But this is far from normal.
“No,” I lie, trying to keep my voice calm. “Like you said, it’s just someone pulling a stupid prank.”
She nods.
I turn and head up the stairs, think that maybe if I face Rachel, maybe if I go on this boat trip, she’ll leave me alone. Or at least leave my family alone. I can’t imagine she’d want to hurt or involve anyone here. She always got along with my family. Heck, she was often the one trying to involve my sister in our tea parties or outdoor adventures. Rachel viewed Jessica as a sister, and I’m pretty certain Jessica wished Rachel was her sister in my place. I still remember the fight Jessica and I had when I learned she’d been texting Rachel behind my back, after our falling out. I’d made her swear never to speak to Rachel again.
No, Rachel never had any reason to be angry toward anyone else in my family. Just me.
I have to believe Rachel, or whatever Rachel’s become, will leave them out of this.
The moment my foot hits the stair, the home phone rings again.
I freeze at the sound of the phone.
Jessica looks over at me. Then to the plug, which is definitely not connected to the wall.
Her wide eyes say it all:
Did we mistakenly hear that?
Are we hallucinating?
The phone rings again and I nearly jump out of my skin.
“How?” Jessica gasps.
I take a step toward the phone. I reach out, my hand shaking.
Like the phone is electrified.
Like it’s a live spider.
Jessica nods at me.
I pick up the phone just as it rings a third impossible time.
“Hello?” I ask.
“You’re home,” Rachel says. Her voice is gravelly. “We were worried you’d decided to run.”
I swallow. I had thought of running away. Many times. I just didn’t think it would work.
“What do you want?” I ask. I try to make my words stern and commanding. Instead, they shake as much as my hand.
Rachel just laughs.
Then the phone clicks, and I swear the dial tone sounds like voices screaming underwater.
I hang up immediately.
“Who was that?” Jessica asks.
I consider lying, but my brain can’t come up with something fast enough. Besides, this might be one of those rare occasions where the truth is harder to believe than any lie.
“Rachel,” I reply.
“Impossible,” Jessica says. She picks up the dangling phone cord. “It didn’t sound like her. And how could she call when the phone is unplugged?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “I think … I think something is wrong. Something happened to her, Jessica. I don’t think … I don’t think she’s fully human. Not anymore.”
I don’t know why I say it. The words fall from my mouth before I can stop them, but the moment I speak I’m hit with a wave of something I didn’t expect to feel—relief. Relief that I’ve finally told someone. Relief that maybe now I won’t have to face Rachel alone. Jessica has experienced the impossible, just like I had. She has to believe me.
She has to help me figure something out. She’s always been the smart one of the two of us.
For a long while she just stands there in silence. Faintly, I hear her own phone buzzing and beeping in the living room with whatever game she forgot to pause. She doesn’t seem to notice. She just stares at the unplugged phone, her face blank.
Then she looks up at me.
“I don’t believe you,” she says.
My heart drops.
“What?”
She drops the cord and squares her shoulders to face me.
“Did you really think I’d fall for that? You haven’t spoken to Rachel in over a year and now you’re trying to pretend she’s, what? Some sort of monster hunting you down?” She sighs in frustration. “I’m not falling for it. Whatever sort of stupid prank this is. I bet you did something to the phone and got one of your bully friends in on it. Well, it didn’t work.”
“But, Jessica—”
Jessica holds up her hand, cutting me off. I want to slap it away, but I can’t seem to get my body to work. It is numb with shock.
“No. You’re a horrible person, Samantha. I don’t know why I ever thought you could be different. I’m not falling for one of your cruel pranks again. You just better hope you didn’t mess up the phone, or Mom and Dad will kill you.”
Before I can say anything else she stomps up the stairs to her bedroom.
Like the kids at school, she pushes into me as she passes.
Like the kids at school, I don’t push back.
I stand there, staring at the unplugged phone.
My sister thinks I’m making it up. She thinks this is one more mean thing I’m trying to do to her.
I didn’t ever really think she’d help me, or even know about this, but having her turn against me just hammers in the unavoidable truth:
Rachel has turned everyone against me.
Rachel has already won.
I’m up in my room trying to distract myself with TV when my dad gets home. I hear him ask Jessica why the phone is unplugged. She blames me. I assume he plugs it back in.
I mute my TV.
Waiting for the phone to ring.
Waiting for Rachel to continue her torment.
Silence stretches on.
I hear Dad rummaging around in the kitchen, getting ready for dinner.
I hear Mom coming in a while later from her yoga class. She comes upstairs. Starts the shower. She must be too relaxed to yell, and that feels like the only good thing that’s happened today.
Downstairs, Dad starts playing music while he cooks.
Jessica watches TV. I hear sitcom laughter on repeat.
And I sit there, on my bed, the TV muted before me, waiting.
Waiting.
It feels like I blink and it’s bedtime.
Probably because I spent all of dinner watching the phone from the corner of my eye. Waiting for it to ring. Trying to think up some sort of excuse to unplug it again.
It never rang.
That was worse.
The waiting was much worse. I kept expecting Jessica to mention that I’d been having someone prank-call the house. I bet she was waiting for the phone to ring just so she could prove that I was up to no good.
The fact that it doesn’t ring probably only confirms her suspicions. She probably thinks that I called the prank off. That she was right.
Even though she is terribly wrong.
I know Rachel didn’t just decide to leave me alone for good.
She’s biding her time.
She’s making me sweat.
She probably even knows that in doing nothing, she’s distancing me from the only person who might have believed me, even though it was a very small chance to begin with.
At least it had been a chance.
Now I sit in my pajamas and try to focus on the cartoon on my bedroom TV, but I can’t. My body is exhausted, but my brain is in overd
rive. The show I’m watching is set to low volume, just barely a hum. Background noise. Normally my parents don’t let me have the TV on this late. But it’s Friday night and it’s not like I have to be up early to go to a theme park tomorrow or anything.
For once, though, that anger is the furthest thing from my mind. It’s hard to be angry at Rachel when I’m currently terrified of her.
If anything, I’m actually a little angry at myself for letting this all happen.
I close my eyes and settle farther back into my pillows.
And that’s when I hear it.
A rushing sound.
Faint, but near.
Like a running river.
I open my eyes
and yelp in shock.
Water spills from the top drawer of my nightstand like a waterfall.
I leap out of my bed, the sheets dangerously tangling my feet, and I suddenly remember waking up wrapped in seaweed. Only this isn’t a dream. This is real. This is real. The water is freezing cold around my bare ankles, and it rushes so fast it’s already covered the entire floor of my bedroom. I panic. I try to open the nightstand drawer, but it’s jammed, and water continues to pour from it at increasing speed.
For a moment, I just stand there in shock.
Then I realize the water is now rising past my ankles. Shock turns to action, and I turn and slosh my way toward my bedroom door. I have to get out of here. I have to get my parents. I have to—
My door is locked.
I twist the handle, but it doesn’t budge.
Panic rises like ice water in my chest while the actual ice water rises up past my shins. Why isn’t it seeping out from the crack below my door?
It’s like I’ve been sealed in.
Trapped.
I bang my fists on the door, but there’s no response.
I yell out for my parents. Scream for Jessica.
For someone, anyone, to help.
I hear only the rushing water in response.
They don’t hear me. Or worse, they hear me, but they don’t want to help.
They probably think it’s better this way.
I deserve it.
My fists hurt from pounding on the door, and the water rises to my knees, and I turn from the doorway and make my way to the window, pushing aside floating toys and teddy bears. My fingers are purpling from the cold, and they shake so hard I can barely grasp the windowsill.
I try to open it.
Just like the door, it won’t budge.
I cry out in defeat and slam my fists against the window, fully intending to break it and leap out if I have to, because the water has hit my waist and it is freezing cold. So cold. I can barely breathe it’s so cold. But the window doesn’t break. The glass is like steel.
I grab one of my trophies and slam it hard against the window.
It bounces off like a rubber ball, sending a shock of pain up my arm. I drop it, and it splashes in the water that’s now to my chest. Tears run down my cheeks as I pound at the window, hoping that someone will look up and see me, a girl with water rising about her and panic on her face. Someone passes, walking their dog.
They look up to me and wave, then continue on.
No.
I turn from the window. Make my way toward the door one last time.
I have to open it.
I have to get out of here.
Keeping my hands up above the water because I don’t want them to freeze off, I half swim, half slosh my way to the door.
Something wraps around my ankles.
Drags
me
under.
I have just enough time to yelp before I go down and water closes around me, so shockingly cold that my vision goes white for a split second before bleeding back in.
I struggle numbly against whatever is wrapped around my feet. I can just make it out in the flickering gloom.
Seaweed.
I kick my feet and wave my arms, but I can’t rise up, can’t get above the water that’s now almost to the ceiling. My lungs scream and burn with hunger for air, but I can’t get free. Can’t get out.
I see the ceiling fan submerge, my entire room filled completely with water, and I know I’m doomed.
Toys and dolls float slowly around me. Suspended in freezing, clear water.
I can’t feel my feet anymore. I can’t feel my hands.
All I feel is the pain in my chest as the water presses in and the last of my oxygen gives out.
The light fades.
My lungs scream.
My mouth wants to open, but I keep it squeezed shut, keep it from letting in any more water even as tiny bubbles escape from my nose.
My room goes dark.
Save for countless white eyes burning in the blackness.
The countless bodies of the drowned.
I open my mouth and scream as they race toward me, scream as water fills my lungs, scream as the last bit of life leaves me.
And I jolt up in bed with a gasp.
My lungs burn and my skin is soaked with sweat. But I am alone, and my room is dry, and the cartoons on the TV babble along mindlessly.
My heart races so fast I fear it might actually shoot out of my chest.
Did that just happen?
I can’t stay here. There’s no way I’ll fall asleep again. I no longer feel safe. Maybe the sofa, or maybe I’ll even do what I haven’t done since I was a little kid and try to sleep in my parents’ room. I just know I can’t stay in this room a second longer.
Rachel is everywhere.
When I sidle out of bed, my feet land on paper.
I look down.
Rachel’s sketchbook is open on the ground by my bed. To a new page.
A blank, waterlogged page.
Blank, save for three menacing words scrawled in thick black ink.
I don’t dream again.
I don’t sleep.
I sit with my back against the headboard, the sketchbook at the foot of my bed, all thoughts of trying to escape vanished. There is no escape.
I watch the sketchbook.
Wait for it to flood.
Wait for something, anything, to happen.
I wait until sunrise, until I hear my parents start their morning routine, until the birds are singing and it feels safe.
I know it isn’t safe.
Especially because the moment I let my eyes flutter closed, just for a moment, my cell phone begins to buzz with texts.
The cell phone that I know I turned off last night.
Every text reads the same.
Every text is from Rachel, and I know I blocked her number months ago.
Jessica clearly doesn’t want to speak to me when I get downstairs. She must still think I was playing a prank on her yesterday.
She stands from the table the moment I come in and heads up to her bedroom, leaving me to eat my cereal.
I feel entirely alone.
Hours drag by as I watch TV in the living room. I keep waiting for something to happen, for my phone to ring with an ominous message or for a soaking hand to burst from the TV screen. About the only excitement is the fight I hear Mom and Dad having upstairs.
Finally, a little before noon, when Dad is sitting beside me watching a talk show, I ask him if it’s okay for me to leave. I lie. Tell him I’m going to the library to do my homework.
I can see the question in his eyes—I’ve never gone to the library on my own before. But I also know that he knows the truth.
I don’t have friends who I’m going to go hang out with in secret. Everyone I hang with is at the theme park without me.
For once, my being a bully has come in handy. He probably thinks I don’t have anywhere else to go. I almost want him to prevent me from going. To say that I need to stay here where they can see me do my homework, that they have to make sure I’m not out having fun.
The look on my face probably convinces him that I’m definitely not expecting to have fun.
Maybe he’s abou
t to say no, but then Mom yells something from upstairs, and he winces.
“Sure, pumpkin,” he relents. “It’s probably a lot quieter there.”
I swallow.
“Are you sure?”
He opens his mouth, but Mom calls out again, telling him to come up there.
“I’m sure,” he says.
He slides from the sofa and heads up the stairs, leaving me alone.
I don’t bother pretending to pack my bookbag. With my swimsuit on under my normal clothes, I head out the door to what feels like my own funeral.
Despite the sun shining in the sky and the late summer heat sticking to my skin, I feel frozen the entire walk to the lake.
It’s too cheerful out here. The birds are too happy, the sky too blue. Well, it’s blue for now. The far horizon is black with storm clouds. I keep hoping that they’ll come in quickly—that way, this whole mess will get rained out.
But of course the storm doesn’t come on time.
I make it through the woods and out to the lake without seeing anyone, then walk the long trail around its perimeter to reach the docks at the far end. I don’t see anyone else out here or hear any music. I thought she said that this was Bradley’s party? Did she trick me into coming out on my own? I don’t see anyone at the docks, and there aren’t any other boats on the lake.
Something is wrong.
The cold that I felt coming here is worse—goose bumps stick out all over my skin, and when I pause and look around, I realize that the world has gone silent.
Completely,
utterly
Silent.
No gentle waves lapping against the shore. No wind in the trees. No birdsong or chipmunk chatter.
And then a noise.
Splash.
Despite my every survival instinct, I step toward the lake.
Farther out, maybe twenty feet past the shoreline, is the center of the ripple. The wave spreads out toward me, lapping against the grass at my feet.
The Undrowned Page 7