He’d visited the diner so many times. Sat in her section. She’d felt mildly flattered even while something about him made her uneasy, like whispers along the tender curve of her neck. But who do you mention that to? Who would listen without telling you to appreciate the attention?
Be happy. The guy likes you.
“You don’t want to burn it all up, though,” he said, bringing her attention back into the room.
The room.
It was a cube, maybe twelve-by-twelve feet. Cement walls. Dirt floor. A single door. She craned her neck even though it hurt terribly. Wooden beams on the ceiling. She’d explored it all on hands and knees, and then standing. There were no surprises.
“It’ll eat your oxygen, and you’ll suffocate.” He stepped aside and pointed toward the bottom of the door. It was sealed with a rubber ridge.
He’d planned to bring her here.
Or maybe she wasn’t the first.
“You can’t do this,” she said, her voice cracked and bloody. “People saw us together, I’m sure of it. Saw us talking outside the diner.”
“Kid, if they did, they decided to mind their own business. That’s what most people do, if they’re smart.” He laughed, quick and humorless, then picked up the pots. He moved them to the corner behind the door, directly over where she’d already peed. “One has clean water. The other’s for used.”
He hooked his thumbs into his pant loops. Shadows played across his long, snakelike fingers. She watched as he undid his belt, felt a cold paste filling her veins.
She moved her hands slowly behind her, not wanting him to notice, searching for a rock, a sliver of something sharp, anything to put between her and him.
“Remember,” he said. “You scream, and I take the light away.”
CHAPTER 6
If you balanced parents and doors, Claude had the best tunnel access of our group. Mom and Dad had kept our underground entrance original, a heavy oak door as fancy as our main one, the signature P for Pandolfo inlaid in its upper frame, same as Claude’s. Unfortunately, Mom’s situation made our place a hit or miss. Brenda’s parents were technically the mellowest of the bunch, but one of her brothers—Jerry, I think—got caught sneaking out after he was grounded a couple years back, and Mr. Taft sealed off their basement access. Now their basement door looked like that page from The Monster at the End of This Book where Grover was trying to keep some terrible creature out, all crisscross, knotted boards and heavy nails. Maureen’s basement was so full of storage that it made it a pain to reach her door.
So Claude’s it was.
The four of us had explored most of the tunnel system and knew our section forward, backward, square, and round. We’d even scouted all the way up to the original factory, but those enormous metal doors had long since been soldered shut. We’d never worried we couldn’t find our way home, no matter how far away we traveled, because on the tunnel side, some stops still had the house number carved into the masonry above the door. That was smart, whoever thought of that, so you didn’t accidentally enter the wrong home after a long workday. Some people had chipped theirs off, but enough remained that we never got lost for long.
What we hadn’t told any of the parents was that the same key worked on the tunnel side of more than one of the doors. We’d discovered it by accident when Claude’s mom had locked their basement entrance after we’d gone through it one afternoon. It was before Brenda’s parents had sealed theirs, so Brenda had her keys with. We tried her basement key on Claude’s door, and sure enough, it slid in like butter. Same with every other basement door we tried. It was a glitch in the Pantown design, one we were happy to exploit.
Claude was so excited when I called to tell him about TV tag that he was waiting on his front porch when Junie and I showed up. He bounced down, showing off a new haircut that his mom must have given him. It made him look more like Robby Benson than ever. It was crazy how tall he’d gotten, shot right up like a weed in the sun. He was a cutie, no denying it. I planned to make him run any potential girlfriends by me first.
“Did you remember to invite Maureen?” Claude asked. He’d been trying for a nickname since kindergarten, anything besides Claude-rhymes-with-howdy, which people constantly mispronounced as “clod.” His last name was Ziegler, so his latest request to be called Ziggy was one of his more reasonable ones. The problem was we’d known him his whole life, so we couldn’t help but think of him by his given name.