Page 40 of Ringer
In Chapel Hill, her classmates would be drinking bad coffee in the cafeteria, finishing last-minute homework assignments, sweating through pop quizzes, ducking outside to smoke weed behind the music building.
She had to get up. Her stomach hurt. She had to use the bathroom. There was a bad smell permeating the air; she realized that it was coming from the filthy cloth still tightly wrapped around her hand.
She had to get out of the well. Not tomorrow. Not when—or if—someone found her. Now. Today.
She kicked through the rubble at the bottom of the well. Wood splinters. A soda can—that got her interest, that was good, it meant there were other people who came this way, hikers or picnickers, and she couldn’t be that far from help. She found a textbook, too, from someone’s history class—the pages warped, the type blurry and mostly indecipherable. That almost, almost made Gemma smile. She and April had hurled their biology textbooks onto the train tracks once, just to watch them get mowed over, even though both of their parents docked themallowance for the cost of a replacement.
There was no ladder. No booster rocket. No flare gun, or charged cell phone. Big surprise.
The well walls were moss-slicked but studded with rocks that made decent handholds. She wished now more than ever she’d been allowed to participate in gym—her mom had always insisted she be excused, claiming a weak heartbeat, concerned that Gemma might flatline in the middle of a game of dodgeball—and that she’d learned rock climbing during the aerial unit last fall. She couldn’t climb one-handed, anyway, but when she tried to use her left hand, thinking that with four good fingers, she’d be okay, the pain was so bad she nearly peed herself and stumbled backward, gasping.
So. She couldn’t climb.
She thought of piling all the rotted wood together, stacking it carefully in a cross-hatch pattern, hoping that by some miracle of geometry she would be able to climb the pile like a footstool and reach the top of the well. But the wood was soft and rotten and there wasn’t much of it to begin with: it boosted her barely a foot. Her voice was still shot, still coming out in a bare croak, like the throaty wail of a dying frog.
Stretching onto her tiptoes, she managed to get a hand around a root exploding through the rot between stones. Maybe she could climb it, brace her feet against the walland get some leverage—it would take her only a quarter of the way toward the top, but a quarter of the way was better than nothing.
But here again, she failed. She could barely support her weight with one arm, and her feet slipped as the wood rot crumbled beneath her. She slammed into the wall with a shoulder and dropped on her knees—remembering, at least, to shield her left hand, so she didn’t accidentally put pressure on it.
She sat there, panting, her nose leaking snot into the mud. She was too scared even to cry. She might actually die here. Here, at the bottom of some shitty hundred-year-old well, in a state she didn’t evenlike.She would die a virgin, alone, unloved.
Funnily enough, it wasn’t Pete she thought of then, or April, or even her mom. It was Lyra, the way she looked when Gemma had last seen her: still fragile but also full of life, something hatching. When Gemma closed her eyes, she could hear Lyra’s voice, whispering to her across a distance.
Gemma,her voice said.Gemma.
Gemma’s heart nearly cracked. She opened her eyes again.
But still she could hear Lyra’s voice, louder now.
“Gemma, Gemma.” And Caelum’s, too, a lower, deeper echo of hers: “Gemma, Gemma.”
She climbed to her feet. She couldn’t quite believe it. They were so distant, she almost feared she really had snapped, and that what she heard was just the transformation of her memory into sound. But no—there was an unfamiliar voice, too, a man’s voice. And how could she remember something she’d never heard?
That meant they were here. Close.
Instantly, she was seized by terror: they wouldn’t hear her. They would leave, like the police had left, and no one would ever think to look for her here again.
The rock was still where she’d dropped it, exhausted, after an hour of banging fruitlessly, hoping someone would come. She picked it up again and slammed it hard against the slick wall, and the noise it made was of an old stone mouth, clicking its tongue in disapproval.
Not loud enough. Was it her imagination, or were the voices receding already?
She banged the stone again and again. Now shewascrying, from terror and frustration. How could they not hear? How could they notsee? Of course, she hadn’t seen it either: the well was separated from the houses by a hundred yards, and tucked behind a stand of trees.
She thought of throwing something into the air, in case they happened to be looking in her direction. But it was no use. She could barely lob the rock ten feet in the air, much less hope to break through the wood that Calliope had used to conceal the opening.
The well smelled like her own sweat, like a hard panic. She wasn’t imagining it. Lyra’s voice was receding.
They, too, were going away.
She was shaking and burning hot, too. She shook off the wool vest she’d taken from the farmhouse—a sudden vision of the boy, red-faced, enraged, pointing at her, as the wagon crested the swell of the hill, overwhelmed her—and as she did, the cigarettes and the peeling lighter thudded out of one pocket.
Gemma’s breath seized in her throat.
Could she... ?
It had been raining on and off all night. The wood was damp, although not as damp as it could have been—Calliope had done her this favor by covering the well.
She bent down. The lighter was cool in her hand. She thumbed a flame to life and was shocked by how vivid it was, how bright against the darkness.
