Ella shined her phone on a bird beside Julia’s sneaker, flapping its wings, trapped in tar. And then more phone lights. They lit up this closed, dead-end chamber and Julia could see hundreds of flapping things beneath the shallow stream, all trapped in dense tar: birds and squirrels and possums. Cicadas, too. Seventeen-year and thirteen-year broods and annuals. Every size and breed. They were stuck to the center pile and to the walls and even the ceiling by tar, their bodies glimmering.
Their death made a vibrating hum.
“Is she here?” Dave whispered. Julia turned and Dave Harrison, toughest kid in the Rat Pack, was wiping away tears. “Julia, we have to find her. I hate this place. She can’t stay here.”
Julia started wading, following the water to its deep unknown. She held her Hawaiian shirt and tried not to trample. Pretended these birds and squirrels and household pets were something else. Butterflies in cocoons, about to take flight on a great adventure. It was a field of them, beautiful and terrible.
The sound got louder. A living friction. The current drew her to its inevitable end where it drained, leaving just the living pile, as massive as a killer whale. Shivering and shaking and sick, she scanned the monstrosity. The rest shined their lights. They circled the pile, and yes, even climbed it, despite its wailing pain-song of flapping, mewing struggle.
Shelly.
It was Ella who discovered her on the opposite side of the pile, halfway up. She recognized her Free People skort. The Wildes’ funeral box lay open at her side, a harmonica and a necklace and a Robot Boy and blond hair spilled over her knees.
They had known, of course. There was no way she could have survived. But until now, they had not believed. Shelly Schroeder was dead.
Julia was the first to touch her and she was as cold as the water. The rest followed. They touched her, too, as if to warm her. They wiped away the oil and dirt. They cleaned her arms and legs and face—a thing they could never have done alone, and yet a natural thing to do together. She was cold and still and perfectly preserved. As haunted as she’d been on the morning of the fall.
Shelly Schroeder
Shelly Schroeder.
Shelly Schroeder.
I know what happened to you.
A challenging girl. Smart and kind and fragile and sensitive and wonderful in the ways of wonder. A hero and a villain and a bitch and a savior. Shelly Schroeder, their friend.
They tried to lift her, but the murky pile held her tight. Like cement, it had hardened. But it was Julia and Ella and Charlie and Dave and Mark and Michael and Lainee and Sam, all pulling. Some were scared to touch her, weeping and mewing along with the trapped animals as they did it, but nonetheless doing it.
The muck held tight.
Julia thought about the listening thing that she’d felt all summer. The thing she’d noticed from the very first time she’d come out to the sinkhole. Not a dog. The thing that lived in absence. The lonely thing. It was here now. This was its terrible home, where it trapped the weak and the broken. Because this was Shelly, she lost her fear of it. All that remained was her fury against it.
“You can’t have her!” she shouted.
They pulled again but Shelly did not come free. And then they all shouted it, so loud it echoed through the entire chamber. It pushed out the tunnel and up the hole. It reverberated through Sterling Park. It entered basements and blasted through windows. It went everywhere, each young Rat Pack voice recognizable and distinct and clarion as nothing had been before or ever would be after.
“YOU CAN’T HAVE HER!”
The sound loosened the pile. It shook the chamber and rattled the crevasse. It sent the metal ladder and shoring apparatus singing. It moved even the hole.
Shelly came free.
They plucked her from the murk as if from a watery womb. They carried her out, all hands lifting, even as the secret chamber began to cave. It shriveled upon itself, collapsing in animal screams. As they sped, the crevasse opened for them, liked wilted tulip petals off a bloom, and they were not afraid.
Later, authorities would insist that the children’s collective weight had broken the tunnel’s soft ground, or that their shouting had resculpted the sensitive architecture of the chamber. The children would agree to this, without promoting their own interpretation, that the sinkhole submitted to them, because they had won.
They ferried her back to the opening, as gently as they’d have carried their own bare hearts.
118 Maple Street
Monday, August 2
“You can’t have her!”
Rhea Schroeder woke to those words, and knew. It wasn’t a psychic connection. It wasn’t a mother’s love, though these things did exist. It was simply that she’d known all along that Shelly would be found. Just like that girl, on the floor of the bathroom, her scalp running red.