Buckle your seatbelts kids. This one kind of hurt to write.
Again, for clarity's sake, this chapter revolves around a young Blaise Corso.
Blaise is playing with Kelly's doll when she hears it- the yelling. She doesn't look up, though. It's far too familiar for it to be alarming anymore.
Instead she continues playing with the doll. Kelly will be mad if she finds out, but it's not her fault that her sister gets all the best toys. She knows the doll is from her sister's fourth birthday, just before she herself was born. She had hoped she might get a doll for her fourth birthday, too, but it had come and passed a few weeks ago and all she'd gotten was a dumb coloring book and four crayons. She couldn't even color anything properly with just four colors.
So she decided to borrow her sister's doll. It's not like Kelly even ever plays with it anymore. She says she's far too cool for dolls. So it really shouldn't be a big deal if Blaise plays with it. Or at least, that's what she tells herself.
The yelling continues. Blaise gently brushes the doll's hair as she wonders if she's ever even heard her dad talk at a normal volume. She thinks maybe she might have when she was really little.
The door bursts open and slams against the wall, and Kelly stands there. The doll falls from Blaise's hands and she stands, mouth already open to defend herself.
"I was just-"
"Sh!"
She's caught off guard as Kelly grabs her first, then the doll, and drags them toward the closet. Blaise struggles against her sister's grip and begins to protest, but Kelly only claps a hand over her mouth and keeps dragging her forward.
"No, no, no!" Blaise tries to say around her sister's hand. The closet is dark and scary, and Blaise just knows a monster lives in there. Kelly's the one who told her about it, and now she's about to feed her to it for playing with her doll.
"Be quiet!" Kelly hisses in her ear. Blaise tries to kick at her as Kelly drags her into the closet, but stops when her sister slams the door shut behind them. Then Kelly grabs a blanket off a shelf, pulls Blaise even deeper into the closet, and throws the blanket over the two of them.
"Shh," she says. Blaise can't see her, but she imagines her sister holding a finger up to her lips.
"What are we doing?" she asks, instinctively keeping her voice at a whisper.
"We're, uh…" Kelly trails off. In that moment, Blaise hears the yelling again. She's heard yelling plenty of times, but this time it's different. She can't quite tell how it's different, just that it is. She listens to a shrill scream that she knows is definitely not her father's.
"We're explorers," Kelly says finally, and Blaise turns her head back to where she heard her sister's voice come from. "We were checking out some cool, ancient caves, but then there was a rock slide and we got trapped."
"Oh," Blaise says. It's weird, but she just shrugs. "What's ancient mean?"
"It means really, really old. Older than even Grandma," Kelly says. She feels, rather than sees, her sister reaching out to her, so Blaise reaches out as well. Her hand comes in contact with the doll, and after only a moment's hesitation, she takes it.
"Well, how are we gonna get out of the cave?" Blaise asks, cradling the doll.
"That's a really good question," Kelly says thoughtfully. "Maybe we can dig through the floor?"
"Isn't the floor made of rocks?" Blaise asks.
"That's a good point," Kelly concedes.
"Maybe we could move the rocks trapping us inside?" she suggests.
"We could try," Kelly says, "but they're so heavy. We have to work together, and it's gonna take us a while."
"We can do it!" Blaise exclaims, and Kelly quickly shushes her again.
"If you think so," her sister whispers to her. "Let's try it."
It takes all of their combined strength to move even one rock at a time, and there are a whole bunch of rocks to be moved. Blaise isn't sure how much time they spend picking up heavy rocks and moving them out of the way so she and Kelly can escape. By the time they're free, the doll has been dropped on the floor and long forgotten, and the blanket covering them has fallen aside.
"I can see the light!" Blaise says at a normal volume, and Kelly doesn't shush her this time. She also notices that it's eerily quiet in the house, no more yelling or screaming, not even from her mom.
"Teamwork saves the day," Kelly says quietly. "I should go out first, though."
"Why do you always get to go first?" Blaise demands, stomping her foot.
"Don't you remember the beast that chased us through the forest into the caves?" Kelly asks. "I'll check it out and make sure it's gone. You stay here."
Blaise obeys, but she doesn't like one second of it. She crosses her arms and pouts, then feels silly when she remembers no can see her right now. She heaves a sigh and continues pouting out of spite, and when Kelly comes back she only screws up her face even more.
"The coast is clear," her sister tells her. "We're alone."
"Alone alone?" Blaise asks.
"Yeah," her sister says, and Blaise can't figure out why her sister looks so sad about that.
"Well, that's a good thing, right?" she asks. "No more monster?"
"Yeah, he's gone," Kelly says. "And I don't think he's coming back, ever."
"Good," Blaise says firmly. "Good riddance. No one likes mean monsters anyway."
"That's right," Kelly says, and Blaise doesn't hear how empty her voice sounds.