Chapter 16: Sink or Swim

Hannah picked her up at eight, with the windows down and the heater on full, which was the kind of thing only Hannah would do in October.

She was in white from head to toe. A white dress, white tights, a pair of small feathered wings strapped to her back that kept catching on the seatbelt, and a halo on a headband, bobbing above her head on a little wire.

“Get in, you handsome devil,” Hannah said. “I brought your horns.”

They were red and glittery and slightly too big. Hannah reached over and settled them on Eliana’s head herself, fussed with them for a second, and sat back.

“Perfect,” she said. “You look devilish.”

“Thank you.”

“Well, it is a compliment.”

“I know.”

Eliana put her hand in the pocket of the red dress on the drive over, and kept it there. The pick was at the bottom, right where she’d left it.

Melanie’s house was at the end of a cul-de-sac on the hill. You could hear the party from the street. By the time they got around the side of the house to the backyard, the bass was coming up through the soles of Eliana’s shoes.

The yard was strung with lights. Hundreds of little white ones, wound through every branch of the trees along the fence and hanging low over the patio, so it looked like the whole yard was under a net of stars. Someone had put carved pumpkins along the patio steps. A long table by the house was covered in bowls of candy and a plastic cauldron full of something bright green.

And past all of it was the pool.

Melanie’s pool was long and rectangular, lit from below so the water glowed blue. The heater had it steaming in the cold air, thin white wisps drifting up off the surface and curling through the lights. The far end didn’t have a wall. It just stopped, and the water spilled over a smooth edge into darkness, so it looked like the pool ran straight off the side of the hill and into the night.

Eliana stood at the top of the patio steps and looked at it.

“Okay, Mel outdid herself this time,” Hannah said happily, beside her.

“Yeah,” Eliana said.

“Eliana! Hannah!”

Tessa was coming across the patio toward them, and for a second Eliana didn’t recognize her. She had on a long, tight black dress that dragged on the stones, and a black wig parted down the middle, and white powder all over her face, and so much dark lipstick that it looked like a bruise.

“Okay,” Tessa said, posing. “Guess.”

“You look amazing, Tess,” Hannah said warmly.

“I’m Morticia,” Tessa said, before anyone could guess. “Morticia Addams. From The Addams Family. She’s, like, the original goth icon. Very dark. Very mysterious.” She looked at Hannah’s wings and Eliana’s horns, and something small and satisfied crossed her face. “I just think it’s a little more sophisticated. You know?”

“It really suits you,” Hannah said, and meant it, or did a very good job of seeming to.

Tessa beamed and swept off toward the cauldron, the dress dragging behind her.

Eliana watched her go. She had seen Tessa wear that same wig two years ago, as a witch.

Hannah bumped her shoulder gently with her own.

“Be nice,” she said quietly.

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it really loud.”

Lexie had been at the party for eleven minutes, and she had already been offered three drinks, two of them by the same guy in a hot dog costume.

“No,” she told him, for the second time.

“It’s a party!”

“I’m aware.”

He wandered off. Lexie went back to her corner, which was a patch of patio between the fence and a potted tree, where the string lights didn’t quite reach. She had her back to the wall and her arms crossed, and she was wearing exactly what she wore every day: black jeans, her boots, her jacket, the studded belt, the bracelet ticking against her wrist every time she moved. The only concession she had made was the werewolf mask, which was pushed up on top of her head like a pair of sunglasses, because it was too hot to actually wear.

Mika had disappeared into the party the second they got through the gate. Every so often, Lexie saw a flash go off somewhere in the yard, and Mika’s voice, very happily saying “Hold that. Hold that. Perfect.”

The bass was coming out of a speaker on the patio the size of a small refrigerator. Lexie could feel it in her back teeth.

“Wolf girl.”

Ajax had appeared beside her. He was wearing a bedsheet with two holes cut in it, pulled back off his face like a hood, and he was holding a red cup.

“You crashed,” Lexie said.

“I attended.” He leaned against the fence. “Lisa told me not to come. Which is how I knew I had to.” He looked out at the party, at the lights, at the steam drifting off the pool. “You know what a Halloween party is, though?”

“Don’t.”

“It’s the one night everybody agrees to be somebody else. And then they all dress up as exactly who they wish they were.” He pointed his cup at a girl in a tiara. “Princess.” At a boy in a football jersey, who was a football player. “Himself, but more.” He looked at Lexie’s mask. “And you came as a monster with its face pushed up so everyone can see it’s just you.”

Lexie stared at him.

“Deep,” she said.

“But think about the other way around.” Ajax swirled his cup. “All the people who walk around acting unlike themselves every single day. Not on Halloween. Just, like, a Tuesday.” He took a sip. “And then one day they decide they’re done with it. They stop. What do they turn into?”

Lexie didn’t answer.

She was looking across the yard, at a girl in a red dress standing by the snack table with a cup she wasn’t drinking from.

Ajax didn’t seem to need an answer. He nodded to himself, like he had settled something.

“Anyway.” Ajax nodded across the yard, toward the far end of the pool. “You’ve got a twin, by the way.”

“What?”

“Other werewolf. Over by the edge.” He squinted through the steam. “Same mask. Pushed up, same as yours.”

Lexie looked. Past the pool, where the water spilled off into the dark, there was a white plastic chair by the fence. Nobody was standing near it. A werewolf mask was lying face down on the seat.

“There’s nobody there,” she said.

Ajax looked again. He shrugged.

“Must have gone inside,” he said, and wandered off toward the cauldron.

Lexie watched him go. Then she felt it.

It came in under the music, quiet, the way it had in the basement. A pressure, low in her chest, like the moment before a song drops. The hair on her arms lifted under her jacket sleeves. At the corner of her eye, past the pool, something gray seemed to move along the fence, and when she turned her head there was nothing there but the lights.

She uncrossed her arms.

It’s just the speaker, she told herself. It’s just a lot of bass.

But she knew this feeling. It wasn’t from the speaker.

She pushed off the wall and went to the snack table, because it was the closest place with people and light, and she needed a reason to be standing somewhere.

Eliana was there.

She was standing alone by the bowls of candy in a dark red dress, with glittery red horns on her head that were slightly too big for her. She was holding a cup of something that looked like water and not drinking it. When Lexie came up beside her, she glanced over, and her face did the small thing it did in the hallway.

Lexie looked at the horns.

“Nice horns,” she said.

Eliana looked at the mask on top of her head.

“Nice face.”

Lexie almost laughed. Then she lowered her voice, and reached past Eliana for a handful of candy corn she didn’t want, so it looked like that was why she’d come over.

“You feel that?”

Eliana didn’t look at her. She looked at the pool.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Since we got here.”

By ten, half the party was in the pool.

Eliana watched them from the steps at the shallow end, with her feet on the top step and the water lapping at her ankles, which was as far as she had gone. It was warm. Warmer than she expected, warm like bathwater, with steam rising off it into the lights.

She kept her feet exactly where they were.

There was an inflatable unicorn floating in the middle of the pool. It was big, almost the size of a real pony, white with a rainbow mane and a golden horn, and it was turning slowly in the water like it was looking around.

Hannah was standing at the edge in her white dress, with her wings off and her halo still bobbing. She put her hands on her hips.

“Melanie Lawrence,” she said, in her best mom voice. “Tell me you did not buy me a new float.”

Melanie looked over from the patio. “Hmm, I really didn’t.”

“Then whose is it?”

“I thought Vivian brought it.”

“I didn’t bring it,” Vivian said, from somewhere behind her phone. “It’s cute, though. Hannah, get on it. That’s content.”

Hannah didn’t need to be asked twice. The unicorn float had been hers since freshman year, at every one of Melanie’s parties, and everyone knew it. She kicked off her shoes and waded out until the water was at her waist, and somebody pushed the unicorn over to her. She hauled herself up onto it, laughing, while somebody whooped.

“Eliana!” she called. “Come in! It’s so warm!”

“I’m good,” Eliana called back.

“You’re always good!”

“Maybe later!”

Mika was crouched at the edge of the pool with her camera up, shooting. The flash went off, and Hannah threw her arms up, halo crooked, perfect.

Ajax had drifted over to the steps beside Eliana. He was looking at the unicorn.

“It’s staring at me,” he said.

Somebody nearby laughed. Then a few more people did.

“It’s a pool float, man,” the guy in the hot dog costume said.

“I know what it is,” Ajax said. “I’m just saying. It’s staring.”

Eliana looked at the unicorn. Its big painted eyes were turned toward the steps, toward her.

Then the float turned slowly in the water, and it was looking somewhere else.

Across the pool, by the fence, Lexie had come out of her corner. She was standing at the edge of the patio, very still, with her arms at her sides, and she wasn’t looking at Hannah. She was looking at the water around the float.

The jets along the side of the pool pushed the water toward the shallow end in a slow, steady current. Every float in the pool was drifting that way, the inflatable doughnut, two pool noodles, a beach ball. All of them were sliding gently toward the steps.

The unicorn was moving the other way.

It was drifting against the current, slow and steady, toward the far end, where the water spilled over the edge into the dark. And Hannah was lying back on it with her eyes closed and her arms hanging over its sides, trailing her fingers in the warm water, and she hadn’t noticed at all.

The pressure in Eliana’s chest went from a hum to a fist.

It happened so fast she almost doubled over. The air went thick. At the edge of her vision, gray shapes slid along the fence and the lights and the steam, too many to count. Under the bass, under everything, something was pressing against the world from the other side.

Out at the far end of the pool, the unicorn’s head turned.

It turned all the way around, slowly, to look back at the party. And as it turned, it changed.

It was still a unicorn, for the most part. It was still white, still the size of a pony, still shaped like the thing everyone had laughed at. But the shine had gone out of it. The plastic looked damp now, soft, like skin that had been underwater too long. The seams along its sides had turned into something that looked like ribs. And the rainbow mane had gone limp and dark, the colors bleeding out of it, hanging down its neck in wet green strands that dripped back into the pool.

Weed. There was weed in its mane.

It hadn’t stopped being a unicorn. It had just stopped being good at it, like a costume that didn’t fit right anymore. From the patio, through the steam and the lights, it probably still looked like a float. From the steps, it looked like something that had chosen that shape because it knew what people would climb onto.

The painted eyes were gone.

In their place, set right into the plastic, were real ones. Big, dark horse’s eyes, wet and glossy, with a thin rim of white around them and long lashes that stuck together in the damp. They didn’t belong in that cartoon face. They sat in the shiny vinyl like something that had been pushed in from the inside.

They blinked, slowly.

They were looking right at Eliana.

Hannah opened her eyes.

She looked down at what she was lying on. Eliana watched her face change.

She tried to sit up and couldn’t. She tried to push herself off its back, and her hands didn’t come with her. They were stuck flat against its hide, both of them, like it had glued her there. She pulled. Her arms strained. Her hands didn’t move.

“Eliana?” Hannah said, very small.

Then she screamed it.

“Eliana!”

The float sank.

It didn’t dive. It just went down, slow and smooth, like something lowering itself into a bath. The water closed over its back, and over Hannah’s legs, and then her waist. She was screaming now, a real scream, high and awful, still trying to pull her hands free. The water reached her chest. Her shoulders.

Then her face went under, and the scream stopped.

The surface of the pool closed over both of them. Her halo floated up a second later, bobbing on its little wire, and turned in a slow circle on the water.

For a moment, nobody moved.

Then somebody on the patio laughed.

“Oh my god, Hannah!” someone yelled. “That’s so good!”

“Is she doing a bit?”

“Vivian, are you getting this?”

Vivian was. Her phone was up, recording, and she was grinning.

The music was still going. The speaker on the patio was pounding out the same bass line, over and over, so loud that Eliana could feel it in the step under her feet. People were cheering. She heard another whoop.

And under the water, in the deep end, there was nothing. No bubbles. No movement. Just the lights on the bottom of the pool, shining up through a long, dark shape that was sinking toward the far edge.

Hannah couldn’t swim.

Eliana didn’t decide to go in.

She was on the steps, and then the horns were gone from her head, flung somewhere behind her, and the cup was gone from her hand, and she was in the water up to her chest, and then her feet left the bottom of the pool and she was swimming.

It was warm. It was so warm. And for one second, as the water closed over her shoulders, it wasn’t Melanie’s pool at all. It was the school pool, cold and bright, with something made of fire tearing the surface open in white lines behind her, and Lexie’s hand locked around hers, and the alarm going on and on.

She kept swimming.

The deep end was dark. The lights on the bottom of the pool lit up the water in long blue columns, and in between them it was black. She took a breath and went under.

She saw Hannah first.

The pool lights were below her, shining up from the bottom, and Hannah was sinking down toward them with the light behind her. Her white dress had come loose around her and spread out in the water on either side, wide and pale and rippling, like a pair of wings. Her hair floated up around her head. Her arms were stretched out in front of her, and her hands were pressed flat against the long pale shape underneath her, which was carrying her down, slowly, into the deepest part of the pool, where the light ran out.

Hannah’s eyes were open. She saw Eliana. Her mouth opened, and a stream of bubbles came out of it.

Eliana grabbed Hannah’s wrist and pulled. Nothing. Hannah’s hand didn’t move at all. It was like pulling on a hand that had been set in concrete. She got her fingers under the edge of Hannah’s palm and tried to pry it up, and the hide underneath was soft and cold and pressed under her fingertips, like wet clay, and held on.

Her lungs were burning. She kicked for the surface.

She came up gasping, and Lexie was right there, crouched at the edge of the pool with her boots already off and the werewolf mask gone.

“Where is she?” Lexie said.

“Under. Her hands are stuck. I can’t get them off.” Eliana spat water. “It’s pulling her down.”

“Can’t she swim?”

“No!”

“I thought you two were lifeguards!”

“We wanted to be!”

“What?”

“Hannah failed the first swim test!”

Lexie stared at her for one second. Then she rolled her eyes so hard it looked like it hurt, swore once, very loudly, and dove in over Eliana’s head.

Eliana took a breath and went back under.

Lexie was already on it.

She had swum straight down to the pale shape and grabbed hold of its mane in one fist, and she was hitting it. Not slapping, not pushing. Hitting it, with her whole arm, the way Eliana had seen boys hit each other behind the gym. Her fist slammed into the side of its head once, twice, and the water carried the sound of it, a dull, wet thud.

The kelpie bucked. It twisted under Hannah and swung its head around at Lexie, and its eyes, its real eyes, rolled white.

Lexie hit it again.

And her fist stuck.

Eliana saw it happen. Lexie drew her arm back to swing, and her knuckles didn’t come with her. They were stuck to its cheek, the same way Hannah’s hands were stuck to its back. Lexie yanked. Her whole body jerked against it. Her hand stayed where it was.

Now there were two of them stuck to it, and it was still sinking.

Eliana’s lungs were screaming. She kicked for the surface again and came up beside the ladder at the deep end, gasping, choking, with her hair plastered across her face.

She didn’t have a guitar.

She had nothing. She had a red dress and a pick in the pocket of it, and Hannah was drowning, and Lexie was drowning with her.

She shoved her hand into the pocket. Her fingers closed around the pick, and it was warm, even in the water, warmer than it had ever been.

The ladder was right there. Two long steel rails, curving down into the pool, shining in the underwater lights.

Eliana grabbed the rail with one hand, and with the other she brought the pick down against it as hard as she could.

It should have made a clang. A flat, ugly clank of plastic on metal.

It didn’t.

It rang. It came out of the steel like a chord, deep and full and ringing, the low E that had shaken the concrete in the basement. She hit it again, and the rail gave her the next one, exactly the note she needed. She didn’t know how. She didn’t care. She hit it again, and again, the way she had played it at the studio and in the basement, back up, back down, and the metal rang with every strike, and the sound went down the rails and into the water.

She thought about Hannah’s eyes, open, looking at her through the water.

She didn’t want to push it away. She wanted to hurt it.

She brought the pick down one more time, harder than she had ever played anything in her life.

The whole pool jumped.

The water lurched, all at once, like something enormous had kicked it from below. A shock went through it that Eliana felt in her teeth, in her ribs, in the rail under her hand. People on the patio screamed. The surface of the deep end heaved up into a swell.

And the kelpie came up with it.

It broke the surface in a rush of water and weed, thrown upward like something spat out, with Hannah still stuck to its back and Lexie still stuck to its face. For a second it was half out of the water, white and wet and wrong, and then it thrashed, and the whole deep end churned white around it.

It was trying to go back down.

Eliana felt it in the rail. The water was pulling the other way, heavy and dark, dragging at the kelpie, and the kelpie was leaning into it with all its weight, trying to roll, trying to get Hannah under again. Hannah’s head was above the water now. She was coughing, choking, gasping for air, her face white, her hands still stuck flat to its back.

Eliana hit the rail again.

Back up.

It came out of the steel like a slap, and the kelpie jolted upward, and Hannah got another breath.

Back down.

Again. Her hand was shaking. The pick was slippery with water. Every time she hit the rail, the kelpie lurched back to the surface, and every time she paused for breath, it started to sink. She couldn’t stop. If she stopped, it would take them both under, and this time it would stay down.

“Lexie!” she screamed. “I can’t hold it!”

Lexie was being thrown around like a doll. Her stuck fist was the only thing keeping her attached, and every time the kelpie bucked, her whole body swung out across the water and slammed back against its side. She had swallowed half the pool. Her free hand was clawing at the water, grabbing for anything.

And then, out of nowhere, in the middle of all of it, a line came back to her.

Cece’s handwriting, small and neat, in a column at the bottom of a page she had read at one in the morning.

It cannot be fought in the water. It can only be ridden. Put a bridle on it, and it is yours.

A bridle.

Lexie looked down at herself, at her soaked black jeans, at her studded belt.

She grabbed the buckle with her free hand. It was wet and her fingers were numb, and it didn’t want to come open. The kelpie bucked again, and she lost it. Found it again. The kelpie rolled, and for one awful second she was under, the water roaring in her ears, and she got the buckle open by feel, blind, with her lungs burning.

She came back up and pulled.

She got it out of her belt loops in one long, furious yank, the studs flashing in the lights. She threw it over the kelpie’s neck, missed, and threw it again. This time the end came around the other side, and she caught it, and pulled it tight with everything she had left.

The kelpie stopped.

All at once, completely, like someone had cut its strings. It went still in the water, with the studded belt pulled tight around its throat and Lexie holding the end of it in her fist.

“Let her go,” Lexie said. Her voice was raw. “Now.”

And Hannah’s hands came free.

Lexie felt the kelpie let go of her at the same moment it let go of Hannah.

Her fist came free of its cheek all at once, so suddenly that she went under again for a second. When she came back up, the bandage on her left hand was gone. She could see it, a pale scrap of gauze still stuck to the side of the kelpie’s face, where her knuckles had been.

Behind her, there was splashing, and coughing, and Eliana’s voice saying I’ve got you, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, over and over, towing Hannah toward the ladder.

Lexie didn’t look. She had the ends of the belt wrapped twice around her fist, and the kelpie was floating in front of her, perfectly still, with the studs biting into its wet white neck. Its real eyes were on her. They weren’t rolling anymore. They were just watching, dark and wet and patient, the way a dog watches you when it’s waiting to be told what to do.

It is yours.

Lexie’s throat was raw. She didn’t know if she was supposed to say it a certain way, or sing it, or what. She was too tired to care.

“Go back,” she said. “Wherever you came from. Go back, and stay there.”

The kelpie lowered its head.

Then it started to deflate.

There was a soft, long hiss, like air escaping from a valve, and the kelpie began to sag. Its back went slack under the studs of the belt. Its sides caved in, slowly, the way a pool float does at the end of the summer, folding in on itself in loose white wrinkles. Its head drooped lower and lower until its chin touched the water.

Then the wrinkles stopped looking like vinyl.

They went clear, and wet, and loose, and ran. The whole sagging shape melted out from under the belt into the pool, until there was nothing where it had been but water, and the mane slid off in long dark ropes of weed and spread out across the surface.

Its eyes were the last thing to go. They looked at her the whole time, until there was nothing left around them, and then they sank too, and were gone.

The belt went slack in her hand.

There was nothing in the water but weed. Long, dark tangles of it, far more than could ever have fit inside a pool float, drifting on the surface. And all of it was moving the same way, slowly, against the jets, toward the far end of the pool, where the water spilled over the edge into the dark.

Lexie watched it slide over the edge and disappear.

The music was still going. Over everything, the speaker on the patio was still pounding out the same bass line. The pressure in Lexie’s chest hadn’t gone. Something on the other side of it was still pushing.

Then the music stopped.

Lexie looked up. Across the patio, Mika was standing by the speaker with her hand on the cord she had just yanked out of the wall, breathing hard, staring at the pool. Her camera was hanging forgotten around her neck.

The pressure went out of the air like a held breath.

For a second, the whole yard was silent except for the water lapping against the sides of the pool, and somebody coughing.

Then everyone was talking at once.

“Oh my god, is she okay?”

“The jets just went insane.”

“That float tried to eat her, I swear to God.”

“Dude, you’re so drunk.”

“Somebody get a towel!”

They were all running toward the ladder, toward Hannah, who was lying on the deck in her soaked white dress with her halo gone, coughing up pool water while Emily held her hand and Melanie wrapped her in a beach towel and Vivian said oh my god, oh my god over and over. Somebody was asking if they should call someone. Somebody else was asking where the float went. Nobody answered.

Nobody was looking at the deep end.

Lexie swam slowly to the edge and hauled herself out. She sat on the tile with her legs in the water and her belt in her lap, and she looked down at her left hand.

The bandage was gone. In the underwater lights, the brand on her palm stood out red and clear. Three rings, and the lightning bolt behind them.

She closed her hand over it.

When she looked up, Eliana was sitting a few feet away, at the edge of the pool by the ladder, soaked to the bone, with her hair plastered to her face and the red dress clinging to her and the pick still clenched in her fist. She had gotten Hannah out. Hannah was surrounded now, by everyone, and Eliana was sitting outside of it, alone, breathing hard.

She was looking at Lexie.

Lexie looked back.

Neither of them said anything. Behind them, the whole party was crowded around Hannah, and in front of them, the pool had gone still, the water glowing blue and empty and calm, with a few last strands of weed caught in the filter.