My breath is coming out in angry spurts. I’m so used to shoving a lid on the angry pot until the boiling stops, anything to avoid spilling over and making Ruth feel any worse. But I want to tell her how unfair she’s being. She did so ditch me. She’s free to go get a tattoo, but I can’t take a walk without her yelling at me?

“Where are you?” she says.

Then in the distance, I see Ruth emerge from the tattoo parlor, pacing back and forth with her phone up to her ear. She doesn’t see me.

“I…” I hesitate. I suddenly don’t want to tell her where I’ve been. Photographing the cemetery feels like mine. Like a Treasure Hunt I came up with all on my own, that I’ll be ready to share only at the right time. Maybe I’ll be ready to tell her more when I give her the crow’s feather later tonight. I step back into the cemetery, behind the arch and gateway. “I’m just a couple blocks away.”

“Ellie called,” Ruth says. “I told her we’re at the cemetery and they’re coming to pick us up.”

I sigh. “Fine.”

“Meet me there right now.”

“They’re going to be upset,” I say, thinking of whatever she’s just inked on herself.

“Just freaking get there, okay?”

“Okay, okay.”

I hang up. It feels unsatisfying, and for a second I wish I had one of those old flip phones so I could at least have hung up with a snap.

She was worried about me. She was a brat about it, but at least she was concerned. That’s something. But she shouldn’t be able to talk to me like that, should she? So much of it feels unfair. Anything I might say back would just make things worse.

A couple of blackbirds land in the tree above my head. I stand at the cemetery entrance, waiting for Ruth.

We all got scuba certified the summer I was ten, right before Mom got offered a job at the University of Tennessee and we learned we were leaving California. Despite weeks of lessons and practice dives in the training pool, we never got the chance to go diving at Wreck Alley before we moved away from the ocean.

The lessons were toward the end of the school year, right at the beginning of summer. Those weeks were the beginning of Ruth’s really bad days. When I look back, that’s when I think the depression first started showing itself, though she wasn’t officially diagnosed until a short while after our move. That was the summer I first started noticing The Pit.