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The man behind the convenience store counter took all of fifteen seconds to find and scan the barcode on Stevie’s bottle of Mello Yello, waving it under the red until he heard a beep. Ada was patient as she waited to put down her bag of chips, crinkling them with every slight twitch of her fingers. The two of them made the half-mile trip for snacks every few days or so. The man had never once seemed to recognize them. He focused intensely on placing the dollar bills Ada handed him into the register, which made Stevie jump as it sprang open.
“How are you girls?” he asked. His jawbone had a mind all its own, shuddering when he wasn’t speaking.
“Fine, how are you?” Ada recited.
“Hot,” he said. Stevie could smell the wet scent of the paper money in the drawer from where she stood. It didn’t seem to bother him. “But that weather’s turning. Are you staying around here?”
“Just visiting,” Stevie told him, as she did every time. He held out a quarter and a penny cupped in his palm like they were about to drip through his fingers.
“It’s our last summer,” Ada told him, pinching the change from his hand. His face couldn’t support the heft of his grin.
“Ever?” he quipped.
“Yeah,” Stevie said. She rustled the plastic bag off the counter loud enough that they couldn’t hear what else he said as they waved and walked away—doubly so when the automatic doors trundled open as though begging for death.
Outside, the exhaust mirage that wavered from an idling truck choked them. They bowed their heads from the sun and crossed the gravel toward the sidewalk, the hot air pushing a silence on them. Ada avoided the grooves in the pavement. Stevie was sure to step on each weed that had forced its way up through the cracks only to wilt and turn brown in the heat. It hadn’t rained in over three months. This was why the distant charcoal sky had set the town buzzing. If you looked one way you’d see the clouds playing mountain range, dark and heavy. Turn to the other and the sun would twist your face. Stevie’s grandmother hadn’t turned the TV from the Weather Channel in 72 hours. Hope Ridge was finally getting a storm.
Any other year and it would be ceaseless all summer. The roads would flood. Kids would race paper boats that would melt to pulp and blink into the storm drains. The grass would be so wet they’d find blades of it trailing up their calves like ants to be swatted and picked away. But this year there’d been nothing but unrelenting sun. The Great Hope Ridge Drought, the old folks would joke as they did their evening walks around the neighborhood, coming up to chat with Stevie’s grandmother when she sat on the porch.
“Did you get batteries?” Grandma Randall asked the girls, getting up from her chair the moment before she heard the screen door screech.
“We have enough batteries here,” Stevie said. “And we have our phone flashlights too.”
“Well, you didn’t even check?”
“They were sold out,” Ada replied, always the quick thinker. “Sorry, Mrs. Randall. I think everybody had the same idea.”
“Lord, you’re probably right,” she said. “Well. We’ll just pray we have enough. Shut that door before you let the air out.”
They were only inside long enough to get Ada’s backpack, which held their remaining stash of mini-sized liquor bottles. They’d overpaid her older brother to buy them a grab bag to fend off the flattening and stretching of time they’d come to expect in Hope Ridge. They were down to the last shots of 99 Apple. Their usual spot was at the edge of the dead-grass front yard, where they would lay on beach towels and hold their phones up to block out the sun as they scrolled.
Hope Ridge had once been a punishment. Stevie and Ada met at Vacation Bible School when they were eight years old and immediately planned an escape from the church bus to the McDonald’s exactly 1.3 miles down the road. No one could find them for nine hours. A disgruntled cop discovered the two hiding in the bubble-windowed play area tunnels.
Stevie’s parents decided that the only woman who could straighten out such foolishness was Grandma Randall, who lived two hours away in the dead center of Georgia. Stevie still remembered Ada’s mother sighing in relief when her parents offered to send Ada off too. That was a decade away now. They’d returned to Hope Ridge for at least a week out of every summer since. High school was over. Their eighteenth birthdays had not transformed them. But even still it seemed that they couldn’t go two steps without stubbing toes or knocking elbows against corners. The one-bedroom house had never been so small. That first summer they could fit well enough on the couch to sleep through the night and wake up before sunrise.
“I might fall asleep, actually,” Ada mumbled, laying back against her towel and slinging the crook of her elbow over her eyelids. Stevie twisted the cap of her soda, the cracking sound of it rousing Ada from the stillness she’d just settled into. “Wait,” Ada said, her voice straining and her chin doubling as she did a sit-up to rise again. “Sip?”
Stevie took the first, then handed the bottle to Ada. Her hand came away cold and wet from the condensation and she dragged her palm over her forehead. Ada held the bottle out in front of her after each tiny sip to check for just the right amount of room at the top of the bottle, before dumping in the shot and swirling it around in the soda.
“They’ll judge you for drinking this shit in college,” Stevie said, leaning back onto her palms, letting her face rise to the sunlight.
“Hunter’s frat brothers basically mix rainwater in the punch.”
“He goes to State,” Stevie snorted. “It’ll be different in Connecticut.”
“College is college,” Ada shook her head, grimacing. “Here.” She let Stevie take the first sip once the tiny tornado of bubbles she’d formed had passed. That might have been the most they’d spoken about what was coming—about what had been drawn down between them. Ada’s acceptance to a tiny, stuffy New England private school had shocked everyone. Not a soul knew she’d even applied.
Stevie had believed Ada for a long time. Before every test, she would lament how screwed she was, how she hadn’t even studied. She would insist that she’d waited until the last minute to do the homework. She’d laugh in the face of extra credit and promise that tomorrow she’d skip out early even if she never did. She was only doing Model UN because her mom made her. She was only on student council because she thought the faculty advisor was hot. Stevie didn’t quite put things together until she realized Ada was salutatorian. She was going to a school that no one in their town had ever heard of on the merits of her hard work and dedication. Stevie was going nowhere. Ada cheerfully insisted that the void stretching before her was a gap year. That they still had all the time in the world.
Across the street, a set of keys jingled. Their heads turned toward the sound on a synchronized swivel. Stevie gasped, sitting up straight to peer into the neighbor’s yard.
“Is that her?” she whispered.
“I don’t know,” Ada said, craning her neck. “I can’t see.”
Shelly Marie emerged from around her brand new, cherry red Camaro, struggling to roll her garbage can in a straight line down the drive, keys still chiming as she went. She wore a white rhinestoned tracksuit, something out of a music video before the days of YouTube. She didn’t glance at the girls from over her large sunglasses as she turned back toward the house, dodging the various cat traps placed around the yard with ease. This wasn’t unusual. It was generally believed that raccoons and other creatures in Hope Ridge were somehow bolder and more accustomed to humans than anywhere else in the world.
Shelly Marie was Grandma Randall’s longtime neighbor and could’ve been anywhere from two days to two decades younger than the town’s average elderly resident. Her home stood apart from the other brick ranch houses that enforced the neighborhood’s mid-century sedateness. She’d torn down whatever was there before and built her modern farmhouse. It loomed above the rest of the street, angular and gray. Ada was already pulling up Shelly Marie’s TikTok before the woman disappeared from view.
“I’m obsessed with her,” she told Stevie as she let the first video play out loud. It was a review of an Amazon luggage set, filmed in a pristine monochromatic beige living room with wood floors that shined under an all-glass chandelier. It was the same luggage she was now rolling from her house to the trunk of the Camaro.
“Turn it down,” Stevie said as she watched her return.
“She can’t hear it from over there,” Ada shook her head, but she turned the sound off anyway. She scrolled through video after video with Stevie looking right over her shoulder, glancing up at the woman as she tossed bag after bag into the car.
Every post was the same: subtitles introducing another must-buy online product slapped over some clips of Shelly Marie using said product in her museum of a living room.
“It’s like if I couldn’t see her right now, I wouldn’t believe she was real,” Ada whispered. “Like it looks like no one even lives there. Like it’s a set.”
“Where is she going?” Stevie wondered aloud, watching as the woman finished packing the car. She would’ve believed it if someone told her Shelly Marie was moving out for good. A single drop of rain fell onto Stevie’s shoulder. The girls saw their shadows disappear as the clouds rolled in.
“God, I would love that,” Ada sighed, taking another sip. “She basically gets paid to get free stuff. And like, a million followers? It’s insane.”
“Where does she keep everything?” Stevie asked. “Her house is so empty in all the videos.” They watched the car disappear down the street. A breeze picked up. They could hear raindrops start to patter one by one on the concrete driveway. Across the street, one of Shelly Marie’s windows remained open just a crack. Stevie was about to point it out when another raindrop landed just beneath her nose, rolling down the side of her upper lip. She wiped it away.
“Should we go in?” Ada asked. They downed the rest of the Mello Yello in a few quick gulps. Inside, the swirl of the weather radar map glowed orange on the TV, animating the storm’s path through Hope Ridge on a loop.
It was less than an hour before the power was out and their eyes had adjusted to the dark. Without the hush of the overworked AC, they could hear only a clock ticking from somewhere in the house. Grandma Randall seemed to be sinking further and further into her armchair, fast asleep.
The two of them watched one of Ada’s crime shows on the tiny rectangle of light that glowed from her phone, sharing Stevie’s headphones with an earbud for each of them. The battery was dead before the first episode ended. Ada crossed the living room to peek through the blinds out at the street. The rain and dark blurred the view.
“What if we went over there?” she asked.
“What?”
“What if we just…took a look at her house? I’m curious,” Ada insisted. “Power’s out. No one’s there. We could do it.”
“That’s called breaking and entering.”
“I want to know what her house is really like. Come on, it’s like our last chance. Our last…whatever, you know,” Ada said, unable to look Stevie’s way, even in the dark. “A story for the grandkids later.”
“It’s pouring,” Stevie said.
“Yes, so no one will see us,” Ada countered. Stevie said nothing, simply trying to peer through the beads of rainwater on the window. “It’s our last summer,” Ada pressed. They slipped on hoodies that would be worthless against the rain and pulled on the well-worn flip-flops that had gotten them through their walks to the convenience store and back.
“This way,” Stevie pulled on Ada’s sleeve to direct her to the side of the house, where she’d seen the open window. It was low enough to the ground: a perfect portal.
“Oh my God,” Ada said. “I told you. It’s a sign!” They pushed the window up and Stevie lifted Ada’s ankles like they were running the wheelbarrow race on field day, tipping her through the window. Stevie crouched in after her with her chin tucked to her chest. They’d come in at the end of a hallway, where rain accumulated in a dappled sheen across the windowsill and puddled at the floor below. Ada shut it behind them, sealing the house from the storm’s noise. The sudden quiet made them stiffen.
Stevie couldn’t help but expect lights to flash and alarms to blare. Ada looked like she was in a theme park haunted house—like if something were to jump around the corner to get her she’d delight in it once the fright was over.
“Do you have your flashlight?” Ada whispered.
“Why are we whispering?” Stevie replied as she held her phone up to light the way.
Ada shouted, “Hello?”
Stevie flinched, but nothing shouted back. The house was the movie set they’d imagined. They started down the hallway to the kitchen and living room they recognized from the videos. The decor looked glued down. There was a cloying manufactured smell in the air. Something floral, but also something else. Stevie wrinkled her nose to keep from sneezing.
“Come on,” Ada said, nodding toward the hallway. At the end of it, three doors remained closed. The strong floral scent that seemed to coat the house gave way as they approached.
“What is that?” Ada asked, sniffing. It was rancid but still faint enough not to deter them. Ada opened the door to the next room, gasping before she’d even gotten it all the way open. It held piles upon piles of every product imaginable, never opened or used. Three different stand mixers. Two treadmills. Kids toys. Computer monitors. Thirty different sets of tableware from Pottery Barn. Ada wedged herself through the door but couldn’t get more than a few feet in for how the boxes were stacked. Stevie watched as Ada picked up an expensive blow dryer still in the box to shake it like a wrapped present. She pulled the neck of her hoodie up over her nose. The rotten scent was getting stronger.
The final two doors remained on either side of the hallway, revealing similar stacks of boxes. In the bathroom, products were stacked to the ceiling inside the tub and on the toilet lid. They couldn’t tell if the rooms were getting smaller or more stuffed. The stench remained, impossible to ignore.
“Jesus, is there mold or something?” Ada asked. Stevie had the sudden urge to run from the house. She fought the spinning fear and kept her feet planted.
Ada turned to shut the bathroom door and investigate the final room. She swung it open to reveal the hellish source of the stench, which rose to smack them. It had the strength of something cooped up that was now escaping at a sprint. The girls froze as though held at gunpoint, refusing to breathe.
They couldn’t see the floors for the cardboard and styrofoam, mountains of it, that formed strange shapes in the dark. When Stevie held her phone flashlight up to the room the floor undulated—roaches skittered from the shine of light. Garbage bags, stacks of newspapers, piles of old linens, and broken clothing hangers formed a hilled labyrinth. There was a bed underneath the chaos, only half of it uncovered, revealing burgundy sheets pulled back, as though someone had simply forgotten to make the bed. At the other end of the room, a gigantic birdcage sat on a card table, among stacks of envelopes and coffee mugs piled three high in unstable towers. When Stevie finally had the mind to point her flashlight at the birdcage, its metal bars glinted in the harsh light. Ada stepped back, unable to do more than whisper under her breath.
“Is that—?”
At least a dozen dead birds lay at the bottom of the cage: pet store parakeets and captured pigeons, some no more than bones, some of them just masses of half-rotten filmy feathers. The room went dark.
“My phone just died,” Stevie hissed. She tried to take a step back but her shoe came down and squished into something soft, causing her to almost slip to the floor. For a moment, they were in the pitch dark with only the retching sounds. Stevie was sick before she could stop herself.
Ada felt her way in the dark until she found Stevie’s shoulders. She pulled her hair back from her face, tucking it into the collar of her pullover. Stevie regained her breath, clutching her neck as though she’d been strangled. The two of them ran from the house like it was burning.
They spent the next few days refusing to speak and pretending that the house across the street did not exist. They waited for a knock at the door, an accusing finger, something to release them from the waiting and wondering. They’d never be found out.
When Shelly Marie returned to a house full of raccoons, the entire neighborhood came around to watch the scene. The story was that the rain must’ve driven them inside. Maybe they were lured through the window she’d left open by the smell of some thrown-out food. The old folks would talk about the jumpsuited pest control employees carrying them out one by one for years. The number of raccoons would go up every time someone told the story. It was a dozen. It must’ve been nearly twenty. I swear to God—they pulled out fifty of those suckers.
Ada and Stevie threw out the clothes and even the flip-flops they’d been wearing. They spent the rest of their last Hope Ridge summer taking long scalding showers hoping to burn it away. But even years later, from a certain breeze, or at a certain time of day, it would arrive again.
Ada wouldn’t escape it in the tiny closet of her dorm. Stevie would roll the windows up whenever she drove, swearing she could smell it on the road. Burnt food and nail polish remover, expensive perfume, or the mold on the flowers left too long in the vase. It didn’t matter. Everything eventually turned to that old familiar reek, which time had done nothing to fade.
