June 29 was a perfect day. It wasn’t raining. There were no storm clouds. The trees weren’t whispering to one another but stood high and quiet with their arms to a blue sky. The bees clustered fat and drowsy in the fields, and birds pecked at their reflections in the creek. It wasn’t a day for nightmares or scary stories or shadows.
It wasn’t a day for Summer to die.
Meet me in Lovelorn, she texted that morning. It’s time.
At first we thought the whole thing was a joke. That’s what I told myself over and over, what I tried to tell the cops. A joke, or just part of Summer’s storytelling, her way of making things real. We didn’t really think there would be a sacrifice. We didn’t really think she was in danger.
Then why did you go at all? the cops asked.
Because she needed us. Because we missed her. Because it was Lovelorn.
You just said you didn’t think Lovelorn was real.
We knew it was a story. But the story was also coming true.
So did you believe, or didn’t you believe?
That was the question I could never truly answer. The truth was both, and the truth was neither. Like that old idea of a cat in a box with the lid on it, alive and dead at the same time until you look. We believed in Lovelorn and we knew it was just a story. We knew there was no Shadow and we knew that Summer needed us. We loved her and we hated her and she understood us and she scared us.
Alive and dead. I’ve thought about that a lot: when we saw Summer standing in the long field, shading her eyes with a hand to look at us, clutching something—a rug, or a stuffed animal—with her other, that she was both, that somehow what was about to happen to her was already built into that moment, buried in it, like a clock counting down to an explosion.
That’s what I thought the cat was, at first. A rug. A stuffed animal. Not real. None of it could be real.
“You came,” was all Summer said. In the week since school had ended, we hadn’t seen her. I hadn’t spoken to her at all since the last day of school, when, passing me in the hall, she’d suddenly doubled back and seized my hand. I’m going to need you soon, she’d whispered, pressing herself so close to me that a group of eighth-grade boys had pointed and started to laugh. By then the rumors had been everywhere for months: that I hid in the toilet stalls and spied on the other girls changing; that I’d invited Summer to sleep over and then slipped into her bed when she was sleeping.
Summer looked small that day in the field, in a white dress and cowboy boots, both too big for her. Scared, too. There was a stain at the hem of her dress. Cat puke, I later realized. “I didn’t know if you would,” she said, and as we got closer I saw that her face looked bruised and purplish, like she’d been crying.
Then Mia stopped and let out a sound like a kicked dog. “What—what is that?”
That was the thing Summer was holding, the sad, ragged bundle of fur. Except that when she kneeled I saw it wasn’t a that at all, but an animal, a live animal or half-live animal: the helpless staring eyes, the twitchy tail now stilled, the mouth coated in vomit and foam. Bandit: the Balls’ cat. Barely breathing, letting out faint wheezes, hissing noises like an old radiator.
My whole body went dead with shock. I couldn’t move. My tongue felt like a slug, swollen and useless. Mia’s whimpers were coming faster now. She sounded like a squeaky toy getting stepped on again and again.
“What’d you do?” I managed to say.
Summer was busy placing rocks. Bandit was stretched out on his side, stomach heaving, obviously in pain, and Summer was putting rocks in a circle, and she may have been crying before, but now she was totally calm.
“Are you going to help?” she said. “Or are you just going to stand there and watch?”
“What’d you do?” I was surprised to hear that I was shouting.
“We have to save him,” Mia whispered. Her color was all wrong—her skin had a sick algae glow to it, and I remember thinking this must be a dream, it must be. “He’s in pain.”
Summer looked up and frowned. “It’s just a cat,” she said. She actually sounded annoyed. Like we were the ones being unreasonable.
Mia moved like someone was tugging on all her limbs at different times. Jerk-jerk-jerk. Like a puppet. She was inside the circle on her knees in the dirt with the cat. “Shhh.” She was lifting her hand, trying to touch him, trying to help. “Shhh. It’s okay. It’s going to be okay.” Crying so hard she was sucking in her own snot.
“It’s not going to be okay, Mia.” Summer was still frowning. She was done with the rocks and started in with the gasoline. She must have stolen a can from her foster dad’s garage. “The cat’s going to die. That’s the whole point.” A little gasoline ended up on Mia’s jean shorts, and Summer giggled. “Oops.”
“What’d you do?” I took two steps forward and I was standing in the circle and I shoved her hard. She fell backward, landing in the dirt, releasing the can of gas. Glug-glug-glug. It disappeared into the dirt.
“Jesus Christ.” Now she was the one shouting at me. “What do you think a sacrifice is? I mixed some rat poison into its food. The stupid thing was too dumb not to eat it.”
I hit her. All of a sudden, I was burning hot and explosive, and I wound up and balled up my fist and clocked her. I’d been in fights plenty of times before, but I’d never punched anyone, and I’ll never forget the sick, spongy way her skin felt and the crack of her cheekbone under my knuckles. Mia screamed. But Summer drew in a quick breath, sharp, like she’d been startled. She wasn’t even mad. She just looked at me, tired, patient, like she was waiting for my anger to run out.
And I knew then that she’d been hit before, plenty of times, and acid burned up from my stomach and into my mouth.
“Are you going to help me?” she said again, in a quieter voice, and stood up. Then I saw she was holding a knife, a long knife with a sharp blade like the kind used for carving turkeys on Thanksgiving, separating flesh from bone.
“It’s just a game,” I whispered. Even my mouth tasted like ash. I could hardly speak, could hardly breathe, felt like I was choking.
She shook her head. “It was never a game,” she said quietly. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This is the only way.” She looked sorry. In a lower voice, she added, “There has to be blood.”
She looked down to the cat, still shuddering out his life, and to Mia, bent over, trying to whisper him back to health, her long thin neck exposed, stalk-like; her shoulders bare in her tank top, heaving.
I saw: pale skin, life thrumming through her veins.
I saw: Summer with a knife. Summer saying, I’m sorry.
I couldn’t think straight.
“Mia,” I said. And thank God she listened to me. Mia always listened to me. “Run.”