Swaying in the chilly kitchen, she went to the phone, fitting shaking fingers into the rotary slots. With each spin of the dial, her stomach seized up a little tighter, a wire coil constricting.

“Hello?” A woman answered.

“Is…is Erik there?”

“He just left,” the woman said, then, “may I ask who’s calling?”

Tessa’s heart dropped.

“Donna,” she said, pulling her friend’s name out of the air, picturing her fondly—not that she’d seen her this summer now that Donna had a job…and the attention of most of the boys in their class.

“Oh, Donna!” The woman’s voice brightened. “Erik’s on his way to pick you up. It was such a pleasure to meet you at dinner.”

Tessa stared at the receiver, which felt almost crushingly heavy in her hand. She was vaguely aware of the faint buzzing of the woman’s voice: still polite, still cheerful, repeating the name, the answer, the end of everything: “Donna? Donna? Donna?”

Tessa hung up the phone, her breathing ragged, steadying herself with a hand on the counter. A fat black pot crouched in the drying rack like a dark toad, so shiny she could see her own reflection in it: unattractive, wretched.

Stifling an angry cry, she strode back through the house to the den and directly to the cupboard of records that faced the bookcase. She flipped through them with such force that she stirred up dust, grabbing the one she was looking for with vehemence.

“Neil Diamond,” she scoffed, “no wonder their kid is so weird.” She reached inside to find the key where she knew it would be, taped to the inner cardboard. Without hesitation, she ripped it out, gripping the key so tightly in her hands that its delicately filigreed head left a mark on her palm.

The key was surprisingly heavy, not like last time, but she jabbed it into the cabinet’s lock and turned it. The case swung open with the softest of creaks; she caught her own reflection and gasped at how hollow-eyed she looked.

Steeling herself, Tessa ran her hand along the line of bottles on the top shelf: orange, green, purple, red and the emptiness of the last one. Each full bottle seemed to hum with energy, with motion, with life, and she could almost hear a tone: a perfection in four parts.

“In these bottles, Alice,” she said aloud in a creaky, theatrical voice, almost like a witch, although she wasn’t sure why, “is everything.”

Without looking over her shoulder or pausing, she selected—green—and lifted the bottle to catch the light.

Everything in the room seemed to stop: the lacy, creeping fingers of the ferns ceased to flutter; her breath froze in her throat, a solid thing, a cube of ice, an arctic frog. The weak light through the half-open blinds sparkled and shot through the green liquid, dancing, alive, and the humming she could almost hear grew a little louder.

She half-expected to be caught at this point, so close to her goal, but no one was there, no one came. With just the barest trembling in her index finger and thumb—a pulse, really—she grasped the cap of the bottle and turned with enough force to break a dove’s neck.

Tessa heard a little crack, then a sigh, like a log in a fireplace, shivering into flames, and the strangest scent: sharp but sweet, an aroma both medicinal and yet alluring. The humming intensified and the bottle seemed to twist, to move, in the curve of her hand. She yanked the recalcitrant top off and the bottle breathed—a whisper, a gasp, escaped the slender neck. Quickly, she raised it to her lips and threw back a quick bolt, glass clinking against her teeth, and the taste—the taste—peppermint and chocolate and lime and rust, with little undercurrents and edits of other flavors she couldn’t identify. It was delicious, and she felt it soak in, all the way into her bones.

Tessa opened her mouth, coated now thoroughly with the cordial, and appraised the bottle again. Only a little was missing—surely she could fill it with water undetected. She rolled her tongue—feathered mint green now, she imagined, like a parrot—and threw back another sip, enjoying the sweet burn, the energy bubbling and boring through her chest.

Still clutching the bottle, she stomped back into the kitchen. Tessa grabbed the phone and dialed a number both familiar and foreign, her insides uncoiling with the warmth of the drink, a thrill rising deep within her to meet the next greedy sip she took.

“Is this Erik’s mother?” she slurred.

“Donna? Are you all right? Isn’t Erik there yet?”

“Donna’s dead,” she laughed, feeling the liqueur coursing through her veins: her fingers felt aflame. “And so’s Erik.”

“What?” the mother gasped.

“And so are you,” Tessa added matter-of-factly, holding the receiver in front of her face, staring into all the tiny black holes, the pin pricks in the throat of the phone, and through the wires, the veins, that separated them.

The line cut off. Tessa went to hang up the phone, but something was wrong—the receiver had melted, was just a swirl of tan plastic like soft-serve ice cream, shapeless and hot and stinking.

She let it drop and took another sip before stepping outside. The wail of a siren—not that far off—cut through the heat, and she watched, impassively, as an ambulance raced down the street.

“Get out of the pool, Stephen,” she called.

“It’s the ocean,” he grumbled, his voice deep now, unforgiving. Without a doubt, he would tell his parents everything she had done.

“Get out of the pool,” she repeated.

“It’s the ocean, my ocean,” he said, still using that strange voice, one she had never heard before from him.

“Stephen,” she shrieked, her voice blending with the scream of the ambulance.

“I hate you,” he said.

“Fine, you hate me,” she said, her voice still spiking and crackling with power. “Fine, it’s the ocean, goddammit.”

Tessa finished the bottle, the bubbles rushing faster and faster and burning her throat and eyes, her mouth and nose full of the scent of crushed mint, of wet leaves, of wind and moss and lovingly cut wood and something deeper, some ancient spice, perhaps, that no one could pronounce. 

At the sight of the bottle, recognition dawned in Stephen’s eyes and he gasped, with a blink becoming just a little boy in a plastic pool again, but this time she wasn’t fooled.

“I’m not going to wait any more,” Tessa growled. 

She stepped forward, grabbing his shoulder even more roughly than the first time, so roughly that she almost thought she had drawn blood, but it wasn’t blood, but something different, something amber, something like honey. He tried to twist away; she could smell the fear on him, how it pulsed with every one of his rapid heartbeats, something woodsy and sweetly rotting and as sticky as sap.

Stephen cried out as the bottle dropped from her other hand, and she clawed at him, deadly set on mastering him even as he tried, slippery and moaning, to escape her grasp.

Tessa slipped on the wet grass, tumbling forward, as he shrieked again, not the cry of a child in pain, but of something else, something cheated, something wounded, and her hands were soaked in the sticky stuff as she splashed down into the pool, down below the surface, to where there was no bottom.

Tessa splashed upwards, sputtering, the shock sobering her—the overwhelming smell, the overwhelming burn was gone. All she could smell, all she could taste was the salt water lapping all around.

“Where are we?” she choked, trying to stand but there was no plastic floor on which to stand, just fathoms and fathoms of dark, cold water. Endless amounts of water, of sky, below, above, in front, behind, for miles and miles. The water broke over her head and face roughly as she tried to breathe, screaming again and again as she clutched at Stephen, fighting to keep her head above water: “This isn’t real! This isn’t real!”

But somehow, in her arms, Stephen wasn’t there anymore—just a strangely carved piece of wood, all scratched and knotted, sanded and smoothed, about the size of a small child, bobbing in the surf.

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Jonathan Riggs is working on a short story collection and several screenplays. He lives in Los Angeles.