Page 22 of The Dead of Summer

I set my watch to wake me up earlier than the rest of the library.

Just before dawn, when the light is a dishwater gray through papered windows, I sneak down to the common room and find my name on the job board.

I wipe it off and move it elsewhere. After breakfast, I pretend to check the job board alongside everyone else.

Bash heads to the kitchen, Sam heads to help Imogen Pfaff in the infirmary, and I join Elisa at the circulation desk.

Tiff, the traumatized librarian who has sat at this desk since I was a baby, smiles at us in a way that feels like she is dreaming us up. She’s got boxes of books for us to reshelve. According to Willy, doing this job is all that’s between Tiff and a total meltdown.

“I know you switched the names around,” Elisa says plainly.

“What names, dear?” Tiff asks.

“We’ve got a job to do,” I deflect, heaving up the box of books that’s been dropped off for reshelving.

Elisa rolls her eyes, but she grabs her own box and we head to the stacks.

We push the cart along in strained silence until finally Elisa cracks somewhere in the horror section between KO and SA .

“Just say it. Just say I told you so and get it over with.”

I push a pretty blue book into the stacks and ask, “Do you remember our third fight?”

This is a test. Elisa loves a test. She puts her hands on her hips. “Of course. It was the custody battle for our hermit crab, Crabigail.”

Crabigail the Hermit Crab was like one of our many made-up characters, except she was very much a real hermit crab.

Everything else about her backstory—her tragic origins to her rise to stardom to her fall into obscurity, even to her dazzling comeback—was an ongoing fiction we used to imagine together.

But, mostly, she was just a crab in a little plastic carrying case.

“Do you remember how we got her?” I push.

“Yeah, we stole her from Dr. Pfaff when our class visited the institute.”

“Rescued,” I correct.

Everyone who knew the story of Crabigail knew she was being tortured in Pfaff’s secret laboratory.

And the rescue was legendary, too, even among the adults.

It involved a bait and switch—Bash posing as me so that I could go missing, triggering a building-wide search and allowing Elisa to backtrack to Pfaff’s lab, where I’d hidden myself away.

We stole the crab right out from under the distracted scientists, then reappeared in the building’s parking lot just in time for the head count. Elaborate, yes, but ingenious.

“Oh, right, the best heist in the world. Who could forget,” Elisa says, but I can tell she’s forcing back a smile.

The Heist of Crabigail was her favorite of our hijinks.

And for a time, the little pet was a mascot of all the past and future pranks we dreamed up and pulled off.

That’s why I bring her up now. I want Elisa to remember what it was like to work together and take for ourselves what the adults told us was beyond reach.

Elisa doesn’t look inspired, though. Her mood turns blue. “Do you remember how it ended, though? Our custody fight?”

I remember as I feel my way through the answer. “We argued, but then we didn’t make up because … your mom went away.” I’d forgotten that was the same year, just a few months apart.

Elisa slumps to the ground. I join her. She lets our shoulders touch.

“You know what I remember? I remember the day after my mom vanished, your mom came over and hugged me. And after a few days, when my dad fell apart, Gracie came back, and this time she brought you. And we were in my room, and we didn’t know what to say to each other, and then you saw Crabigail on my desk. ”

This part I remember well. I didn’t know how to acknowledge what was happening with Elisa’s mom.

I thought she would come back any minute, even though Gracie had told me she was gone forever.

Forever didn’t make sense, yet I felt how much the time had suddenly revealed its shape, falling into perfectly separated pieces over the blade of before and after.

In Elisa’s room, I knew I wanted to hold her close, but I didn’t know how.

“You said we should just move in together and make it easy for Crabigail. No more split custody, no more fighting.” Elisa laughs. “And then I moved in to Singing House.”

I of course remember when Elisa lived with us, but she has all these memories lined up in a sequence that was mysterious to me. I realize the continuity, for her, is her grief. The loss of her mom.

“When I think of that little hermit crab, I think about how there was a time when my entire world was sinking, when my dad was drowning himself, and when the island that saved me was Singing House. And you, and Gracie, and Bash, and Willy.”

“And Crabigail,” I offer.

Elisa’s laugh has a little more of her familiar heart in it. “Bash took her when you left, you know.”

I know this. I flinch, because I know what’s coming next.

“She didn’t last without you.”

It feels absurd to mourn the death of a hermit crab amid the devastation of maybe the entire world, but like Elisa, that crab was curled at the center of stories, memories, losses, and victories. It was a mascot of not just the Suds, but the particular magic looping around us. And it had died.

Elisa lets me put my head on her shoulder.

“We’ll just have to steal a new crab from Pfaff,” she says. “But we need a name.”

We trade a few ideas, making each other laugh with their absurdity.

Kelly Clawkson.

Clawn Mendes.

Shellvis.

We run out of names. I notice Elisa’s hands are restless. She stands up, pacing.

“You’re doing your thinking dance,” I point out.

“Am not,” she says, but for the rest of the morning I can tell she’s working toward some difficult conclusion. I give her time as we shelve, and finally, after lunch when we’re in the tiny kitchen helping Sam and Bash wash dishes, she throws down her rag and huffs.

“Fine! Jesus. You win, Veltman!”

I could act surprised, I could act smug, but instead I’m just curious. Elisa goes to the door and gently closes it. Now it’s just the Suds. And Sam. But the difference barely matters. If he’s on this side of the door, he’s a Sud.

“Crabigail got me thinking about how good it felt to put Pfaff in her place,” Elisa starts. Sam cocks an eyebrow, but there’s no time to explain. Elisa turns to me. “Ollie, I owe you an apology. Do you remember what you said to me about the island? And my mom’s research, and Gracie’s cancer?”

I have lived in the echo of that fight since this whole disaster began. Of course I remember, but is she going to make me say it?

“I said our island was sick, and that it’s making people sick.” Elisa nods, and like a ladder rung I pull myself up further. “And I think I was right. It’s like the island is being infected by the ocean. And it’s like your mom knew about it first and tried to warn everyone. But then she …”

“Drowned.” Elisa is barely breathing. “Well, after that, when I lived with you, I gave myself a secret mission. I was going to find my mom. I would come here, to the library, and check out any books about the history of Anchor’s Mercy, but something weird happened.

Someone else started checking out the same books and never returning them.

And everything in the archives about Easter Energy—”

“Vanished,” I say, rapt.

“I saved a bunch of my mom’s research, too, in my school binder. Not everything, but enough, because I thought when I got older, it would all make sense. And now it’s starting to, and I hate that I was so wrong when I yelled at you. I guess I’m saying all this because I’m sorry.”

I should just accept this apology, but I’m captivated by little-Elisa and her dossier of pilfered research. “What happened to everything you collected?” I ask.

Elisa looks sick with regret. “One day at the library, I threw it all out. Summer was coming and my dad needed me. And I was mad at my mom. I didn’t want to end up like her. I forced myself to move on, but I wish I kept it. Now it’s probably gone forever.”

We hang in the silence, accepting this dead end, and then a plate smashes on the tile floor.

Bash stands there, hands dripping, staring at Elisa with wide, distant eyes.

All at once it’s like he returns to his own body, drawn into focus by some conclusion that’s caught him off guard during Elisa’s story.

“Ummm. Maybe not forever,” he says. “I think there’s something you guys need to see.”

Bash leads us to the quiet reading room.

As one of the few rooms with doors, it’s being used as a place to sleep, but right now it’s empty.

We step over beds of cardboard and trash bags stuffed with clothes, to the back display, which is a delicately constructed model of a ship atop a shelf carved and painted like a stormy sea.

“Close the door,” Bash whispers. “No one knows about this but me. I found it one day when I was bored.”

Bash does something utterly un-Bash. He climbs atop the back of a chair and wrenches the model ship off the shelf. He hands it to me, and I’m amazed how light it is for something so massive.

“I think we’re gonna need a bigger boat, actually,” I whisper.

“Hush. Just watch.”

Bash’s hands explore the dusty shelf, feeling for something. With a creak, the waves come up as a thin board in his hands, revealing a cavity below.

“This library is full of hiding spots,” Bash explains. “This one was mine, but I haven’t used it in years.”

He pulls out an assortment of very Bash-like treasures. Shark teeth, a sketchbook, and a strange copper device that looks like a biblically accurate protractor.

“It’s a celestial navigation tool. A sextant.” Bash blushes, and I realize he probably stole it from the maritime museum forever ago. Then Bash reaches to the very bottom of the hiding spot and pulls out a bright pink school binder, and Elisa claps her hands over her mouth.

It’s her binder from fifth grade.

Quickly, Bash tries to explain. “Tiff the librarian found a bunch of books in the garbage one day, and this. She asked me about it because Elisa’s name was on all the schoolwork inside.

I said I’d deliver it, but I kept it here.

The books, too. I knew we weren’t supposed to talk about what happened to Doro, so this just seemed safer. Then I forgot.”

The binder has the heft of a holy relic.

He hands it to Elisa and it pulls her down to the floor, where she slowly unzips it.

We all lean forward. Inside are school worksheets neatly completed in her loopy handwriting.

She flips to the very back, where a divider marked DO NOT ENTER hides a packet of stained pages titled “Mercy, Madness, & Malignance” by Doro D’Oliveira.