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The grate didn't budge with their attempts to move it. The bolts were screwed on so tight that they barely even rattled under the force of both the girls shaking it.
"Fuck," Evie didn't want to cry, but she was so tired and and she was so close to being out of that fucking cave and all that was standing in her way was a metal gate? She was going to go nuclear.
"Hello?" Cindy called up through the opening. They were right in the middle of the kitchen. There was a chance that the other counselors had taken all the kids into the Mess Hall once Danny had reached above ground. "Can anyone hear me? Hello?" She was getting progressively more panicked the longer she was ignored.
The two of them sat there, both trying to force the grate off the hole. It seemed like no one was in the cafeteria at all. It was eerily silent, surely someone would have heard them screaming.
Evie slumped against Cindy, who didn't stop shaking the bars. "Please! Anyone!"
There was a loud thump and they both froze for a moment before sitting up and opening their mouths. "Hey!"
"Help us!" There was someone there. They could hear heavy breathing and foosteps and Evie needed to be found so desperately that she almost didn't care if it was by Danny.
Carry on my wayward son, there'll be peace when you are done. Lay your weary head to rest, don't you cry no more.
"What the fuck?"
Cindy almost would've laughed if it weren't so upsetting. "Carry On Wayward Son" was now blasting through the speakers and, based off the echo, it was also going through the PA.
Instead she just screamed.
Evie was almost catatonic, she was just sitting there, dirt clenched in her fists. Cindy was banging and screaming over the noise.
"Evie," Cindy turned to her. "Eve!" She turned and grabbed Evie's shoulders.
"What if we die down here?" Evie sounded so small, so scared that Cindy had to shake her for a second.
She laid down beside Evie. "We're not going to, come on," she raised her legs up above her head and kicked at the grate. "Evie, please." She kicked up again.
Evie looked down at Cindy's face. They had known each other for so long, and it had caused her such grief. Cindy had ruined her, in a way, because she knew that she would never be able to recover from that night. That she'd never be able to recover from their final summer together, and that even if they both lived past dawn it would always remain so. Cindy would go off to college and Evie would continue living in Shadyside, living and breathing and dying for it just as everyone else had for the last three hundred years.
Cindy and Evie could never truly be friends. There was always something there that toed the line between resentment and love. Cindy had so much Evie wasn't destined for, and even though she had told her that it didn't matter anymore, Evie worried that one day it just might. That in twenty years, she'd look over at Cindy and realise just how different they were.
