Page 70 of Our Crooked Hearts
“The pool is half the reason I chose this house.” Her shirt went over her head. “It’ll make it easier.”
“Make what easier?” But I was already stripping.
“Into the pool,” she said when I was done.
The water was spit-warm and deeper than it looked. Wet leaves churned around my ankles as I regained my feet. Marion bobbed beside me, blue-lit and unreadable.
“I’ve thought about this a lot.” She sounded a little breathless. “If you’re in water, I think that’ll help.”
She put the box into my hands. Even against the lucent water it held its own light. “It’s dangerous, yeah?” I asked hoarsely. “Whatever’s inside this?”
She nodded.
“How do I open it?”
“Blood.” Marion held something else now: a knife. She must’ve pulled it from the butcher block in the kitchen. Her eyes were wide, their irises flattened to nothing by the moonlight. “Want me to do it?”
“No.”
I gripped the golden box and I was not the girl I’d known myself to be. Not cautious, not full of fear. I was hungry, I was burning, I was ready to dive. I took the knife, gouged its tip intothe fattest part of my thumb, and pressed the bleeding place to the golden box. “Like this?”
But I already knew.
The box didn’t glow or hover or hum. It just warmed to my skin, loosening like a tablet of wax. I could see the seam now, and the catch, as easy as if they’d always been there. There was another body treading water beside mine but she was far away from me now, apart. I was alone.
I slid one nail into the seam, my guesses flickering like a shuffled deck: old letters, photos, a notebook written in my mom’s illegible hand. A magic button, colored rings. I didn’t feel like Pandora, I didn’t fully believe I was on the verge. I still thought what lay inside the box was something I could pick up and hold.
I undid the catch and lifted the lid.
And woke up.
