I flinched. She gave me no ground, keeping her gaze locked on mine.
“Bad things happened to you. It doesn’t mean you deserved them. You have earned the right to protect yourself. You don’t owe the world anything. It owes you.” She adjusted her jacket. “Let’s go.”
She stalked off. I followed, half dazed. Guilt and doubt had been my constant companions for decades. I didn’t know if I could let them go. Cass didn’t understand. She couldn’t. She knew what she’d seen—she had the certainty of her own memory. And maybe it should feel horrible—the knowledge of what I had caused with my words. That wasn’t the kind of weight you should just be able to leave behind. Was it?
“There it is,” Cass said at last.
The boulder had been dropped here millennia ago by some glacier and settled into the landscape to stay. Soil had built up above it, letting the forest grow over it, forming a gentle hill. Only the face of the stone was visible, gray and craggy. It reached about a foot above my head. At its base was a seam of shadow. It seemed impossibly small.
I knelt by the seam and bent down, shining the flashlight into the gap. All I could see was dirt and stone; the shape of the boulder obscured the area beyond. “We’re going to have to go in,” I said.
“Liv’s not here. There would have been some sign of her. We should just go,” Cass said.
“We have to be sure,” I insisted. Liv could be in there. And even if she wasn’t, I needed to see. Ever since Liv had spoken the name, Persephone had been haunting my thoughts. Part of me needed to know that she was real—that she wasn’t just part of the game we’d played.
Cass didn’t budge. I set my jaw. Fine. I dropped to my stomach and carefully wriggled my way under the lip of stone, into the narrow gap beneath. Rock scraped my back. This had been easier at eleven.
The dirt floor sloped away as soon as you were inside. I levered myself down bit by bit and then I was past the lip of stone and the space opened up into a miniature cave, barely three feet tall.
Cass squeezed down behind me after all, and the two of us sat with our backs to the entrance, breathing hard, my flashlight beam fixed on the middle of the chamber. On Persephone.
She was exactly as I’d seen her last. I hadn’t been back since that day, but here she was, and the past twenty years collapsed into nothing, into an instant.
She lay curled on her side. Her hands were curved in toward her chest, like she’d been cold, but the skull faced upward—toward the single shaft of light that fell from above, as if in the moments before her death she had turned her face to seek the sun.
Her flesh had long since rotted away, her clothes been reduced to rags. They had clung to her until our clever fingers plucked them away from her arched ribs, from the long, pale bones of her legs. Our whispers still seemed to fill this space, caught echoing between its walls.
Trinkets and treasures lay scattered around her. Our offerings. Beads and coins and jewelry, a crystal ballerina three inches tall, a river stone with a hole worn through it. We’d laid them down around these bones, to worship and to claim her.
“Persephone,” I whispered, and the whisper joined the other echoes.
Something touched my hand. I jumped, but it was only Cass. She laced her fingers with mine. “The flowers,” she said.
I nodded. There were flowers set in the skull’s gaping eye sockets. Lilies. And they were fresh.
The past wasn’t the past anymore. It was lying in front of us, and we were eleven years old again, and we were still playing the game.
There’d been a fire at the mill that summer. A faulty bit of wiring had thrown a spark, and with all the sawdust, that was all it took. There wasn’t much damage, but it was all anyone was talking about—the what-if of it all. What if Cassidy’s dad, Jim, hadn’t been working overnight. What if the lone employee working with him hadn’t noticed the orange glow across the yard. What if Jim hadn’t called it in right away, not bothering to confirm if it was in fact a fire, knowing that flames in this place would spread fast enough that seconds counted.
It would’ve only hastened the inevitable. The mill would close eight months later. A fire at least would’ve gotten the Greens a fat insurance payout. But to the three of us, the fire at the mill didn’t signify a risk to jobs or money; it was an omen of greater things.
Our games had been fragile in the days since school. We all sensed an ending, and we weren’t ready to let go. But it was only after the fire that Cassidy suggested the Goddess Game.
The forces of nature were out of balance, she informed us, having gathered us in our usual clearing in the woods. We had to put them right by performing a series of rituals in the name of the goddesses—otherwise, great calamities would befall us.
“What calamities?” I remembered Liv asking.
“Oh, fires, floods, plagues, the usual,” Cassidy said with relish.
“Frogs,” I offered helpfully, sullenly standing with my back against a tree. I was angry about something. I was angry most of the time, back then.
Cass picked out our goddesses and assigned us tasks. As Hecate she would design the rituals, of course, and Liv-Athena would do research for us, and as Artemis the huntress I would find things. Magic things. Important things. Whatever my intuition told me the goddesses needed us to find.
We would need to do seven rituals, she’d said. Liv had objected, and I tried to compromise on four—four was better for Liv and her fixation on numbers as omens—but Cassidy insisted. Seven. No arguments. It would be fun, she said. It would be our game for the summer, and we’d take it seriously. She didn’t say one last time, but we all knew what she meant.
The first few weeks weren’t so different than any of our other games. I brought “treasures” from my dad’s collections or things I found out in the woods—a few things I stole from people in town. Liv read up on myths, and we rewrote them to suit our own sensibilities. Cass led us through the first “ritual,” which involved reciting what she claimed was a genuine prayer to Hecate while walking through the woods in a solemn procession, carrying lit candles.
We almost believed again. We were close. Standing on the edge, wanting to fall forward.
And then there’d been the fight. It wasn’t the first, not by a long shot. They started over any little thing. Liv would fret and try to make peace, and Cass and I would rip into each other.
I don’t remember what it was even about. I do remember the anger, the thorns of it in my veins, the heat of it in my skin. Cass, blond, beautiful, perfect, stood there with her arms crossed, and I wanted to crack her nose with my fist.
“You’re such a stuck-up bitch sometimes!” I screamed at her. “You think you can tell everybody what to do!”
“I’d rather be a stuck-up bitch than live in trash,” she yelled back, eyes fever bright.
I knew she didn’t mean it. She was just trying to get me to break. To hit her, so she could hit me back. There wasn’t anyone else to hurt, and we had to hurt something.
Sometimes I gave in to the fight we both wanted. Today I ran. She shouted after me, but I kept going. I had to spend this energy somewhere, and the other option was breaking her pretty face.