Page 15 of The Dead of Summer

For a moment there, I thought we were lost. The anger is all still between us, but there’s hope here, too. Elisa is tough, but she has always, always had her reasons.

“Hey, guys?” Sam jogs up behind us. “Sorry to interrupt but Bash had to head out to check on Pizza Monster. What are you guys up to?”

I try to think of where my mom might be at this hour, and surprisingly I have the answer. “Gracie told Willy she’d help with brunch at the Last Hail Mary this weekend. She’s probably drowning in mimosa orders by now.”

“Then you’d better go fish her out,” Elisa says. She does something strange then. She hugs me. “Make up with your mom, okay? That’s a good place to start. Then we’ll do the rest.”

I nod, waving her off. Sam salutes. We start walking toward the Last Hail Mary.

He barely acknowledges the fight—the fights —he’s just witnessed, which about justifies sainthood in my eyes.

All he says is “My mom says people only fight about what they care about, and only with people they care for.”

“Sounds like something my mom would say, too.”

Like yesterday, the brunch craze has turned downtown into a war zone. Handmade signs in restaurant windows plead CASH ONLY . People crowd Hail Mary’s doors and the air is loud with complaining. There’s music, too, though I can’t see any drag queens dancing. It’s just loud .

“It’s a bit early for this, isn’t it?” A woman holding a pug speaks to a little man in a massive sun hat.

He responds, “Oh, it’s been going like this since last night. They were supposed to open for brunch an hour ago, but no one can get in.”

I feel a flutter of worry. The same flutter that I felt on the ferry, in the soft skin behind my ear.

I address the man. “Excuse me, what’s happening here?”

“I was already in bed last night when I heard the bars were shutting down. Who cares? Not me. But this morning I was in the garden and I heard my neighbors. Evidently Hail Mary’s never managed to close.

Got overpowered right away. A mutiny! Imagine that?

Some people just don’t know what’s best for them. ”

“Imagine!” the old lady pipes up. “Making a bar stay open just so you and your girlfriends can butcher karaoke.”

“But the doors are locked? With people inside?” I ask.

“Or barricaded,” the man offers.

People push to look into the windows, trying to get a glimpse around the dropped shades.

A mom holds up her little girl who wants to see.

The little girl has a rainbow painted across her nose, and she cups her hands to protect it even as she presses her forehead to the glass.

Sam and I push to the front of the crowd, where a man I think is the manager of Hail Mary’s is wrestling a key into the lock of the large, wooden double doors.

Nothing happens. When he removes the key, a glistening strand of goo trails after.

The flutter behind my ear turns into an insistent hammer.

“Don’t unlock that door,” I tell the manager.

He shrugs at me. “But it is unlocked.”

The door jolts open, and out flops a pale arm mottled with bruises.

I jump back into Sam. Inside, light from a disco ball reveals a crowd of bodies standing still.

Then one rushes forward. A woman. She stumbles out the door, clutching shoes to her chest. I can’t help but read her shirt— WIFE OF THE PARTY —barely legible beneath a grime of dried blood.

“Going to the chapel,” she sings. “Goooooing to the chapel.”

Her eyes are huge and shining, and in the dark of the doorway, they reflect like silver coins. Her face is streaked with cried-off makeup. She looks at the crowd and smiles. Smiles big .

The manager steps forward. “Miss? Are you okay? What’s happening in there?”

“I’m gooooonna get married,” the bride-to-be sings.

“Look at the burn on her arm,” Sam whispers.

The woman finally steps into the sunlight and the crowd gasps. A riot of blisters crawls up her arm, hard and shiny like the boiled skin of a bagel. She examines herself, not at all concerned, then she looks up into the light, closes her eyes, sighs.

“That tastes … that tastes goooood,” she says in a singsong cadence.

She needs a hospital, not a chapel, but at the same time I’m not sure I’ve ever seen someone look happier. It reminds me of Aunt Maddie yesterday—

Sam grabs my wrist. “It’s spreading!”

And it is. The blisters are expanding across the woman’s shoulder. New patches bubble up on her thigh and calf. The tight, shiny skin weeps an oily iridescence that tints the light around the woman as she twirls, evidently delighted by her affliction. The crowd hails her with comments.

“Someone help her!”

“I’m not touching that. Looks contagious.”

“Poor thing. Looks like sun poisoning.”

The manager steps forward. “Miss? My car is right up the street. How about we get you to the clinic—”

It’s slow, the way she moves, but that’s how she gets so close.

Before the manager can sidestep her, the woman has him in a hug.

A few bystanders try to pry her off, but the struggle rips open her blisters and out sprays a fine, pearlescent fog.

The manager must get a mouthful, because even as he reassures the people who saved him that he’s okay, he begins to cough.

“She just surprised me. I’m fine. I’m—” He coughs harder. His eyes bulge like he’s not getting any air. “Just … some water.”

Someone rushes forward with a bottle. He chugs half of it and then doubles over, clapping his hands over his mouth.

Sticky mucus balloons between his fingers.

At first it looks like he’s in deep agony, but then he stops moving altogether.

He just stands there, his bloodshot eyes shedding humongous, lugubrious tears.

Then he smiles.

Other people are coughing now, too. The thumping music from inside the bar fragments with cries for help in the street, and the lone giggling of the bride-to-be as she squirms against the pavement.

“Goooing to the chapel!” she sings.

A chorus of voices comes from within the dark bar, answering her call.

“GOOOONNNA GET MAAARRRRIED.”

Another girl wobbles out into the light. Then another. Then three more. The same shining tears fall from their wide, gleeful eyes. One has bright red hair and she wears a familiar sash: MAID OF DISHONOR .

Poor Dakota.

That’s my last thought before the doors burst open, unleashing a parade of shining limbs, gargled giggles, and voices raised in song. A choir , I think as I turn to run, singing away any hope of the best summer ever on the island of Anchor’s Mercy.