—————PART NINE—————

  “You’re not still talking to her, are you?”

  Chandler is staring through my head to remember his order. Toby is talking to the waitress he’ll never work up the nerve to ask out, even though she would obviously say yes to him. She hasn’t once mentioned the food he wants in the past five minutes.

  “Why would I still be talking to her?” I say.

  “Because you wanna be a rebellious little shit?” Chandler suggests. “I don’t know.”

  “I think there’s probably an obviouser reason than that,” Toby says without looking, interrupting his own conversation.

  “You did that on purpose, right? I don’t have to tell you that isn't a word, because you already know that ‘obviouser’ is not a word… right?” Chandler says, also without looking.

  Toby ignores him as I ignore both of them.

  I haven’t stopped, and I don’t plan on stopping. Chandler’s judgement will not change that, but it’s clear that he believes me when I lie to him about it. That makes me guilty, but only a little. Toby’s judgement is meaningful to me, but usually forgivingly biased because of our friendship. Chandler’s is not. No matter how long we’ve known each other, he will tell me if I’m being a bad person. His judgement is not meaningless, but it’s not big enough to destroy this. Not this time.

  Not now. Not like this.

  “You’re addicted, idiot. It’s okay,” Chandler says. “As long as you know that you are.”

  I’m not. That’s not what this is. You don’t know what this is.

  “Yeah… I hear you,” I’m lying. “I would um… tell you if I relapsed.”

  “Relapsed?”

  He will be told by someone else, because I am lying and I cannot stop lying. I will never have the opportunity to tell Chandler the truth again. I start to consider the possibility that my way to avoid lying to Chandler has always been to not divulge.

  “Gross choice of words.”

  I start to consider that my way to avoid lying to anyone is to not speak.

  Toby’s flatbread can’t be made properly because they’re out of avocado. He pretends he’s scratching cocaine itches, then orders a breakfast burrito instead. The waitress giggles at him wildly as Chandler finally snaps out of his lethologica.

  “Tuna Melt!” He turns and calls like a game show contestant. “Unless you’re out of cheese and bread…”

  She laughs at Chandler, to which Toby frowns despite the obvious circumstance. Her smile quickly disappears as she turns to me.

  “What can I get for you?” She says with a professional bluntness, as if I haven’t sat in this exact same seat every Thursday for four years.

  I’m never surprised, though. I don’t get surprised by women anymore, because they don’t do anything surprising when I’m there. The first time I was surprised by a woman was my mother. The second, and last time, is my current deceitful tryst that will eventually destroy the only true family I have left. I know that will happen, because Hannah told me it will.

  And I believe her word more than anyone’s.

  But I can’t stop, and I don’t want to. So I tell Chandler I’m spent of motivation this morning and force him away from my bed, before he and both his parents leave for the day. I drag myself to her house, barely conscious. I skip classes with her and sit in her room for hours. Sometimes holding her, sometimes talking about a life without much to speak for, sometimes just staring at her. Her eyes are the most petrifying thing I’ve ever seen. She makes me breakfast at 2:30 PM, when it’s the first thing she’s eaten since midday Wednesday. We spend a full hour “eating” before I call Toby, telling him I’ll meet them at Cotton’s in twenty minutes. When I do, I will tell them both nothing about her. As we eat, I will tell them both nothing about her. As we all go back to the house, I will tell them nothing about her.

  For the next two and a half years of continuous equivocating, I will tell them nothing about her.

  I look back up to the waitress.

  “I’m not hungry. I’ll just have a water.”

  Cody Camargo: Fifty-six days in.

  Mind the gap. I’ll fill in what’s important as we go, but catching you up on every little detail is not entirely important right now. All you need to know is that I hadn’t been able to find a new notebook for a while. So, I let it go. I was trying to test my mental grit with the absence of what had clearly been becoming a vice.

  I was okay without it too. It was kind of nice.

  However, I have now forced myself to focus on finding one. What happened yesterday was something that needed to be talked about, so I’ll start there.

  Let me explain.

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  Somewhere around 11:00 AM of my fifty-fifth “cataloged” day, I tossed a widowed loafer through the air, as Kanata vaulted over a bench to catch it in her teeth. She planted gracefully onto the ground, and snarled as she thrashed her head violently, decimating it in her grasp.

  “That thing doesn’t bleed, you know…” I said to her as I passed.

  She trotted back to my side, still gnawing at the shoe as we walked down our route.

  Natalie’s iron fist had softened ever so slightly towards Kanata, as the threat of her being exiled was, albeit inappreciably, backpedaled on good behavior. I had done my best to help keep Kanata on a short leash, figuratively and literally. I still had days where I would go out on my own, but I mostly brought her along with me now. Once outside the gate, I tried to let her run as energetically free as I could.

  Natalie and I didn’t speak much about Kanata anymore, mostly for the sake of not fighting. We both tried to avoid conversing in general for that same reason. That was often difficult, given our new… uncomfortable situation… but let’s get into that later.

  Natalie had told me one day that she had firmly stated my effort of Kanata-mitigation to Elizabeth, and demanded for her to do the same. Seeing as Kanata hasn’t been made into shish-kebabs yet, I assume Elizabeth had responsibly agreed to be a more vigilant pet owner. I wouldn’t know, as I hadn’t seen a hair on Lizzie’s head since that day in the cell, due to what was no longer my complete captivity, but certainly wasn’t complete freedom.

  None of that is worth talking about right now either…

  As we walked, Kanata had her time to frolic aimlessly, but my happy willingness to have her with me was much deeper than my desire to make sure she was tired out. It was just good to have a second set of eyes and ears, especially ones that were much more keen than my own. If Kanata ever heard a noise that was outside the now familiar skidding of cart wheels, she would… well…

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  I stopped the cart and myself immediately as Kanata planted herself in front of my path, looking in the direction of the disruption she had detected.

  I crouched down and carefully slid out the pole from the giant bin on the cart. It had been returned to me as a reward for going a week without asking about my phone. In my opinion, it was kind of weird to have my access to a defensive weapon be a reward , but I didn’t complain about having it.

  I stayed silent, trying to feel out the air for the disturbance that Kanata had felt. I couldn’t hear it, but I usually couldn’t until it was right on top of us. I was used to Kanata being my satellite. A minute later, Kanata was still on guard, so I knew we were still in the grips of it. I slowly creeped away from the path, and nestled myself into a closet. Kanata hung away.

  “Trent?! Is that you?” I called before hiding myself behind the coats.

  I had reunited with him twice out here. One of those times was with Kanata, and I’d practically had to rip her away from him (she had possibly sensed the fact that I didn’t like him very much). When no response came, I heard Kanata follow our next step, knocking over a vase that shattered far away from my position. Silence hung, as we waited for the excited wet footsteps to dash towards the sound of the explosive pottery.

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  Nothing. For five whole minutes, nothing.

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  Kanata’s nose poked into my leg suddenly as I stepped out of the brush.

  “You sure?”

  She didn’t yip, and still seemed pretty tense. She was most definitely not sure. I recognized that, but didn’t exactly have the time to be camping in a closet for the next half-an-hour. I returned to the cart and warily began moving again, slipping the pole back away.

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  “RUFF!”

  I let go of the cart and shot around to her.

  “Hey! What the fuck?! Shhh!”

  Kanata was turned to the left, and began growling.

  “Kanata!”

  “RUFF! RUFF RUFF RUFF!”

  She dashed away out of my sight. I ripped the pole back up and chased after her.

  “Kanata!” I no longer whispered. “Stop!”

  She wasn’t acting this way because of a Staff member. She had never done this before. I whipped around displays, hopelessly trying to just keep a pace with the dog that could probably still outrun me with a broken leg. If I ever went too far off of the path, my sense of direction was stubbornly inept at retracing its steps. Obviously I could find my way to the Café, or back to R&E, but some random point on the ground where I’d left the cart might be harder to find. That is to say, I tried to avoid ever straying too far, but something was wrong with Kanata, and I found myself valuing the importance of that over my job. That was probably dumb, as I should have just trusted her to exhaust her interest in whatever was bugging her, and eventually find me again. I was risking a serious pummelling right now.

  Yeah, it was dumb, but I’m glad I let myself be dumb that day.

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  “Kanata!” I practically screeched as I finally caught up to her.

  She was planted in the middle of a spacious oasis of a living room, just looking up at the “sky”.

  “What is going on?” I said between catching my breaths. “Could we not have just played tag on the way to the-…”

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  It was so faint, but I had the same reaction she had had ten minutes ago. A sound that I had never heard in here was coming from… somewhere. Why is it so hard to tell what direction it’s coming from? Where is it?

  I looked towards Kanata again, still looking in the same direction she had been looking all this time.

  “What?”

  I slowly looked up.

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  “What the fuck…”

  A drone was hovering something near 300 feet above us.

  I could barely see it, but it was black against the empty atmosphere, and I could see that it was not a normal drone. Not with four propellers on each corner and a torso in the middle. No, it was shaped like a small plane, like a UAV, but it was just drifting there in the middle of nothing. There was a whirring turbine’s loud ambience emanating from it.

  Was it… watching us?

  I was sort of paralyzed, and I didn’t even know what it meant, let alone what I should do. Kanata had an idea.

  “RUFF RUFF RUFF!”

  As almost an immediate response to her, it suddenly oriented itself in a different direction, and shot away into the distance. I almost fell onto my face as I tried to run in the direction it had blasted. Within ten seconds, it was so far into the distance of the endless horizon that I couldn’t even make it out anymore. I stopped running in frustration.

  “What the hell?! What the hell what the hell what the hell…”

  I turned around to see Kanata still back in the living room. She hadn’t even tried to chase after the ridiculous speed of the craft, as she stayed stuck to the spot.

  What was it doing? Who was controlling it? If it was watching us… who was on the other side of the screen?

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  I jumped out of the secondary paralysis and looked towards Kanata.

  “Come on! Now!”

  She ran to me as I found the direction of Return & Exchange, and immediately started dashing back towards it.

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  I reached the gate in fifteen minutes, surprising myself with the desperation of my stamina. It was reminiscent of my first time running to this gate, right down to my screaming as I got there.

  “TIM!” I screamed at it as I approached the clearing. “TIM OPEN THE GATE! IT’S ME-YOU’VE GOTTA LET US IN! TIM COME ON!”

  I bashed the pole against the front wall as Kanata began barking behind me. Tim finally looked over the edge.

  “Cody?!” He yelled down. “It’s not even 11:30 dude, what’s going on-“

  “-I SAW SOMETHING! I SAW SOMETHING INSANE-I’LL EXPLAIN INSIDE-COME ON!”

  Even from this distance, I saw his face drop to white as he turned around.

  “Connor!” He yelled. “Hit the alarm!”

  I backed away as I heard the latch of the gate being removed from the other side. It began to slowly crawl open as I stood at its entrance.

  “Cody!” Carolette yelled from one of the hooks as she saw me. “Go back and put your hands-CODY-BEFORE I SLAP THE SHIT OUT OF YOU!”

  I ignored her, shoving myself through the crack as Kanata followed. I threw down the pole on the ground and ran to the center of the courtyard.

  “MOTHER FU-“ Sean screamed, practically leaping away from the other hook. “I SWEAR TO GOD-“

  “-DO WHATEVER YOU WANT-JUST LISTEN TO ME!” I screamed back.

  “What is going on?!” Roman yelled behind me as he entered the courtyard.

  “He came back!” Sean yelled. “Lord fucking knows why, but here he is!”

  Kanata began circling around my legs like a revolving force-field.

  “Cody, what is it?!” Tim said as he jumped from the ladder. “Where’s the cart?!”

  “Forget about the cart, there was a goddamn-“

  “-Who was it?” I heard Natalie say.

  I spun around to see her entering the courtyard with Tracy beside her. Tracy was a girl that had shown up to the gate around lunch time on my forty-eighth day. Tracy was currently stuck in the stage of Natalie carting her around everywhere to keep an eye on her (though it was clear that she would be free from it long before me).

  “Who did you see out there?” Natalie added. “Did they follow you? How many were there?”

  Her face wasn’t mad in the slightest, she looked horrifyingly serious. Almost… scared? No way…

  “Huh?” I said. “No, there-… no one was-“

  “-why aren’t we closing it?!” Connor yelled as he finished climbing down the scaffolding, much slower than Tim had basically jumped straight down it.

  You don’t know Connor really at all. You might remember his name from the post-it note I’d mentioned in the bathroom. I came to learn that he was the one who delegated the cleaning schedule of most major buildings in R&E, and assigned the shifts of distributing the duties equally to everyone. I had spent most of my off days filling any blank spaces in those schedules…

  Natalie had temporarily assigned him to the Gate-Formation in the sudden absence of two of its previous members, but even I recognized that he was not really matching the vibe.

  “Connor, it’s the middle of the fucking day,” Sean said. “If you can’t see one member coming, you’re as oblivious as the boy who cried wolf over here-“

  “-Sean, shut up,” Natalie commanded. “Cody, who was out there?”

  “No goddammit!” I said. “You don’t understand, it wasn’t-“

  “-Should I be informed about something?” Robert said as he stepped into the courtyard.

  “Jesus Christ , here it goes …” Carolette moaned. “You’re not supposed to be responding to the alarm Rob-“

  “-Yes,” Natalie interrupted, spinning around to him. “Cody saw someone outside.”

  At this point, I had still told none of them about Trent.

  “I DIDN’T SEE ANYONE!” I screamed.

  Natalie slowly turned to me with the rage that I had expected her to enter the courtyard with.

  “What?”

  “To be fair…” Tracy spoke up as we all looked towards her. “None of you gave him the chance to say he didn’t. You kept talking over him…”

  She trailed off as everyone collectively glared at her. We all stayed silent for a moment before the others’ glares moved appropriately back to me.

  “Why the fuck are you back here?” Natalie demanded.

  “Listen,” I said. “I saw a drone out there. Just hovering in the middle of the sky, watching.”

  “What?” Roman said. “What is the… you mean like one of those remote controlled ones?”

  “Yeah, dude,” I said. “But it was-“

  “-you’re joking, right?” Natalie interrupted again. “You saw a toy drone? That’s why you came back? You came back in the middle of a run for that?! Did you dream about giving me an aneurysm last night?! What is wrong with you?!”

  “Is that not serious?! It was watching us! It heard Kanata bark and it shot away! Someone had to be using it-“

  “-Hang on, Natalie,” Carolette said. “It could be-“

  “-It’s not. Why would he need…”

  Natalie trailed off as I looked at her, grilling her with my gaze. I mean… trying to grill her. I lost my ephemeral concern as the questioning continued towards me.

  “Wait wait wait…” Tim said. “What did it look like? How was it shaped?”

  “It was like a paper airplane, but you know, like those… I don’t know, pre-made ones? The ones that are more cardboard than paper, and they’ve got little designs and your kid just slides the pieces together?”

  “Sounds like a real pressingly important U.F.O. there, guy,” Sean said.

  “Nonono, it was just that shape,” I said. “It was black, and it obviously had more body to it. It was high, really high, like a hundred meters or something, maybe more, I couldn’t tell but it was big enough to notice even that high up-“

  “-Black? And that shape?” Tim said. “That might be military-“

  “-Military?!” Sean said as I looked at Robert. “Timothy, would you listen to yourself? Don’t buy into anything he’s saying!”

  Robert stayed silent, the same as Natalie seemed like she was trying her hardest to.

  “Seriously!” Tim insisted. “That sounds like a Reaper! If Cody saw one-“

  “-that’s what I was saying!“ Carolette pressed. “Someone’s gotta be controlling that, right? I mean, who would even have access to that kind of thing? If we don’t know who it is, who’s to say if-“

  “-Well yeah, I don’t think that a model like that would just fall out of thin air,” Tim said. “You can’t just buy that kind of surveillance vessel. Anywhere. No reasonable person in here would use that if they were running the risk of it getting caught in a divide shift, not unless they didn’t know about it altogether.”

  “You’re generalizing,” Roman said. “A regular person on their own wouldn’t realize that kind of thing was happening.”

  “Di-… divide shift?” I said.

  “EVERYBODY SHUT THE FUCK UP!” Natalie screamed.

  We all looked at her as she looked at me.

  “What did it do?” She said.

  “I… it just flew off.”

  “And then what did you do?”

  “I fucking ran here!”

  “Immediately?”

  “YES!”

  “So where’s the cart?”

  I went silent as she approached me.

  “Where’s the cart, Cody?” She prodded.

  “I… I don’t know, who cares? It’s empty. But like… it’s on the trail, so I could easily just-“

  “-So you saw some bird or plane or Superman flying through the air, then you and Underdog abandoned the cart in the middle of nowhere to run back and tell us this AFTER it had already flown away. What exactly were you expecting us to do about it?”

  Natalie didn’t sound completely angry, but there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I had suddenly stepped into a conversational minefield. She was angry, but she needed a second to properly charge it up.

  “Okay okay okay I…” I began. “I thought it was important, yeah. What if it is the military? What if they saw R&E?! Now they finally know we’re here! They can send someone inside and… Jesus I don’t know, get Area 51 to turn this place off-“

  “-turn this place off? You think this place can just be turned off-“

  “-I’m just making an example! Goddammit dude, stop!”

  “How exactly do you think the armed forces operate?”

  I suddenly lost my desire for surgeon’s precision. I paused Kanata with my ankle, and stepped towards Natalie myself. Everyone was silent around us.

  “Do you see one of those things everyday?! No! You don’t!” I yelled. “Why would I not think that’s important?! Alerting the plane that’s flying over the desert island?!-“

  “-It’s gone. You failed to alert it, and now you’ve returned to tell us about your failure-“

  “-we don’t know that I failed, it reacted to us! It could just be returning to base or something! Also, I came to tell YOU because I thought you would care! I could say there was a mother fucking tank crushing down walls out there and you wouldn’t bat a goddamn eye because it came out of my mouth! You just never listen to a word I-“

  Natalie shoved me onto the floor.

  “You wanna do this again?” She said. “In front of everyone?!”

  “Hey,” Roman said as he stepped towards us. “He’s an idiot, we know. We don’t have to-“

  Natalie shot him a glare that immediately froze him in his tracks.

  “The FUCK are you so scared of Roman?!” I yelled. “You think this stupid bitch could take you bare-handed?!”

  Her eyes shot back to me.

  “SHE’S A FUCKING JOKE!”

  Her teeth bared as she threw herself on top of me, and pinned my arms down in the process of me throwing them towards her. I struggled against her, as her knee pressed into my groin. Kanata started growling before Carolette ran to pull her back.

  “Don’t interfere!” I screamed. “Let her show you how hungry she is to prove she’s in control! Let her kill me right here to show you that she’s so powerful!”

  I said this, but was trying incredibly hard to force my strength against her. Natalie was, of course, much stronger.

  “You didn’t even see it, did you?” She began almost calmly on top of me. “How the hell am I supposed to lie down and believe the endless supply of gibberish that comes out of your mouth? Do you know how ridiculous you sound? Am I supposed to go outside and chase it down because you think you saw it?! Is that what I have to do to not be the bitch that won’t listen to a word you say?! Call me a bitch again when you can fight back! Go ahead! Get up! Fight back!”

  She kept pressing as I struggled against her.

  “You can’t!” She began to yell. “You’re such a pathetic little earwig, but you wanna call me a bitch?! You wanted to make a scene, and now everyone is watching me pin this little bitch to the floor!”

  I kept struggling, openly growling like I was Kanata. Like I was a bitch.

  “Take a cheap shot, idiot!” She screamed. “Knee me in the crotch!”

  I blushed a little as her power forced me all the way to the ground. She brought her face closer to mine, her spit dripping onto me.

  “You’d never do it! You probably think this is round two, but that wasn’t a fight! I bet you keep calling it a fight because of that one little sissy ass punch! That didn’t make it a fight, you were just running scared the entire time, because that’s what you are! You’re so scared! Say it! Tell me you’re horrified of me! Say it! ”

  The look in her eyes was borderline manic. Like she had been on withdrawal from a serious argument between us for the past month. This was her euphoric relapse.

  “SAY IT!”

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  I saw the feet of Robert walking up to us.

  “Get the fuck out of here, Robert!” She snarled. “This little mental-case didn’t see anything! Don’t waste your time with him!”

  Robert didn’t move.

  “What have we told him?” He said calmly.

  Natalie stayed like a vice-grip on my wrists, but looked up to him.

  “Leave. Now,” She spat venomously.

  “Does he even know what’s going on here?”

  She looked back down at me.

  “Shut up,” She said coldly to him.

  “I know you’ve told him nothing. Is that what we want for someone we’re relying on?”

  “He doesn’t need to know anything.”

  “Is that what you think? Or are you just saying that because you’re on top of him.”

  Natalie’s face crumpled with anger.

  “Robert-“

  “-What if I started telling him things? And I bet I could stay away from the meat and still tell him more than anyone here would have ever been willing to let him know. Hell, Cody, what do you wanna know? Anyone ever told you that the Staff haven’t always been here?”

  …What?

  “He’s lying,” Natalie whispered with hostility. “He’s fucking lying.”

  “Of course, tell him everything is a lie unless it comes out of your mouth.”

  “What did he just say?” I spoke for the first time in what felt like years. “What did he just say?!”

  In response, Natalie relinquished her control over me. She stood up and brushed herself off, kicking my ankle as she began to walk away.

  “Whatever,” She said to Robert as she passed him. “Tell him whatever you want. Revelation is lost on this little dumbass.”

  “HEY!” I screamed to her as she exited the courtyard. “WHERE ARE YOU GOING?!”

  I scrambled up and was about to run after her before Roman grabbed my shoulder.

  “Dude,” He said. “Please stop. If you get pummeled, you know she’s not gonna let Sandra help you. Just leave her alo-“

  I ripped myself away from him.

  “Would YOU leave her alone after that?!” I said. “And don’t fucking answer that because obviously you would-God I’m so sick of this!”

  “I know, Cody, Jesus. But you’re just making it worse. You’re being exactly what she wants you to be.”

  “Well she…” Tracy spoke up. “She probably still wants him to follow her orders, not disobey her.”

  I spun around angrily.

  “TRACY! SHUT THE FUCK UP!” I screamed carelessly. “I AM THE ONLY PERSON THAT EVERYONE HATES MORE THAN YOU! THAT’S TERRIBLE!”

  I turned away from her to see Carolette giving me a reprimanding eyebrow. I knew it wasn’t about Tracy.

  Jesus. Whatever, mom.

  I began storming away as Robert raised a similar eyebrow at me.

  “What are you looking at?!” I spat.

  He silently crossed his arms with a scowl as I passed. I’d expected him to try and hammer home his aggravation now with Natalie gone, but he seemed to just calmly let it go. I’m not sure why, but it didn’t sit right with me. I hate to say this, but I held Natalie’s word over anyone’s. If I had to rank it somewhere, I would logically say that Robert‘s angry rambling is probably the word I valued the least . Yet, his body language had almost made me double-take when he’d resigned. Robert would never let me get a last word in, let alone stand down from an argument. Instead, he just shut up, like he didn’t care whether I believed him or not.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Yeah, that just wasn’t Robert.

  It’s not that I distrust Robert either, I just don’t like him enough to invest any trust in him. I felt like I’d known him long enough to know that this wasn’t normal behavior for him. I tried to forget it, and focused on following Natalie back towards the house.

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  I wanted to burst in the door, but I had already seen through the window that she wasn’t in the “living room”. I re-assessed my plan of action as I gently entered the house, and slowly climbed the stairs. I found her bedroom door open, as I entered it to see her holding her face in her hands, back turned to me.

  “Natalie?”

  I heard her guffaw into her palms.

  “You actually followed me back. I cannot believe that is real,” She mumbled with a deranged bubble in her voice.

  “Look I… I’m sorry I called you a bitch, but I’m not sorry I yelled at you. What was Robert-“

  She spun around so quickly that I was surprised her skin stayed on her body.

  “Imagine I have the gun held up to your head right now. That’s what you want, right? If you admit that you’re scared of me, I’ll admit that you are the most professionally effective instigator I’ve ever met. Like it’s honestly a skill, so go ahead and be proud of yourself. Is that a good enough reward from me? Do you have enough attention now, sweetheart?”

  I fought off the urge to blush again by fantasizing about punching her a second time.

  “Listen, I came back to tell you . I only started saying it to everyone because they were there, and Sean and Carolette wanted to kill me. I only cared about telling you -“

  “-I probably wouldn’t care about being told, Cody! I DON’T care! You know that! You KNEW that! Why did you come back?!”

  “Is this not serious to you? Take yourself out of the possibility that what I saw wasn’t accurate, and just trust something I say for thirty seconds. Is that sighting not eventful?! Why are you just brushing this off-“

  “-WHO CARES?! I AM! SO WHY WOULD I TELL YOU?!”

  She turned around and went to her dresser drawer. She pulled out a nail clipper, and crouched over a bag-less trash can. Natalie’s room was always far more homey than I expected it to be. Every time I saw it (and I barely saw it), I expected to see heads on sticks at the corner of her bed frame.

  “You need to go find that fucking cart,” She said. “As much as I’d love to make you get caught out there in the middle of the night, you’re not gonna have time to get back and forth to the Café, so just go get it and bring it back. You’ll go out tomorrow instead, AND the day after that.”

  I had gotten pretty good at understanding how to not be commanded by Natalie. I knew my guidelines, and didn’t leave them unless she was slowly cutting another restrictive belt off of my citizenship. I did all that I could to avoid having to ever be instructed by her. Anything to avoid hearing her voice in that authoritative growl. It made me want to do so many horrible things.

  She looked up at me, as I had been standing there silently.

  “Is there a problem with that?”

  Yes.

  “When am I gonna get to learn combat?”

  She squinted and shook her head in utter confusion.

  “Is this the time to ask about that, Cody? Now? Right now?!”

  “If I knew how to fight them, I might be okay to travel closer to nighttime.”

  She blew a raspberry.

  “That’s a joke, right?”

  It was definitely unrealistic, but I wasn’t joking.

  “So, what if I ask you tomorrow?” I said. “What would your answer be then?”

  “I don’t know-Oh my God! Whenever I can free up both Tim and Carolette at the same time, so I don’t know ! Not fucking now!”

  “Can’t Roman teach me? The pole is more similar to a sword than it is to an axe-“

  “-you shouldn’t be using that stupid pole as a weapon anyway, and Tim and Carolette are the ones who taught Roman-“

  “-I seriously doubt that Roman needed to be taught-“

  “-Cody, I’m mad at you right now! Unbe-fucking-lievably mad! You can see that, you can hear that! Why are you pushing harder?!”

  “Do you think that fighting me made you look tough in front of Tracy?”

  She threw down the clippers and stood up.

  “I don’t care about Tracy! Do you wanna do it again?! Here?! Where nobody’s watching?!”

  Yes. Yes. Yes.

  “No.”

  “Then get the fuck out of here!”

  I didn’t move. She smiled wildly, rubbing her forehead in mania.

  “You goin’ for the full combo here? Ask about it. I fucking dare you. Ask me about it right now.”

  The ph sound was on the tip of my tongue… or… lips I guess. We stared each other down as she twitched with an anger I was incredibly surprised she was managing to control. I finally backed down and turned away, stomping down the stairs like a five-year old. I thought about what Roman said, and realized I very much didn’t care. I didn’t care if that was what she wanted. I didn’t care if it meant she’d win in our little battle. I wanted to make her explode. I wanted her to go all the way.

  I wanted her to do something she couldn’t take back.

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  Can I tell you what sharing a home with Natalie Shachiro is like?

  Imagine you’re a migratory duck who was previously living large by some random lake in North Carolina. Come November, you fly to a supple marshland off the gulf coast. It’s nice, but the wildlife that inhabits the area is not very fond of you at all. Within a week and some change, the ravenous miscreants have gnawed off both of your wings. However, you adjust, and eventually find yourself somewhat comfortable staying to the ground. Then one day, The Deepwater Horizon rig explodes and the runoff infiltrates your already quite delicate ecosystem. You move into a high ground area, but it’s still never dry. The oil is everywhere. It spoors and chases you like it has legs of its own. Now you’re living in oil.

  That’s me.

  I feel like my entire life has been covered in oil. The house is clean, but that doesn’t matter, nothing matters except the oil. I sleep covered in oil. I dream covered in oil. I wake up covered in oil. I get dressed in oil, putting oil soaked clothes over my naked oil-coated body. The floor is covered in oil. The stairs are covered in oil. The ceiling is dripping with oil. The handles of the doors are glossed-over in oil. The couch cushions are soppy with oil. The fridge is overflowing with oil. The windows are all tinted and stained by waves of oil. It’s mixed into everything I drink, and it’s like a sauce over every single thing I eat. I am swimming in an ocean of oil.

  But I’m swimming, and while it’s disgusting, it’s just oil. I’m sure it will eventually be so much that it replaces all the fluid in my bloodstream, but until then, I’m just swimming. It’s just oil. It’s easy. You know, it would be. My life would be so much more serene if Natalie Shachiro wasn’t a permanently lit match.

  But she is. Natalie is a sentient matchstick that waves her stupid, beautiful flaming head around every inch of the most flammable wasteland imaginable, and here I am, the most flammable organism imaginable. I can’t get out of the oil, I am the oil. I think I used to be something else, but now I’m just this vulnerable pool of pending ignition, being constantly hunted by the apex predator.

  Simply because I’m the only animal who’s dumb enough to fuck around with the head of a lit match.

  ——————

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  Um… I think I got lost in the weeds of that metaphor a little. You get it… right?

  Oh, also, I’ll tell you later how I learned her last name, but for now, you have to be mad at her with me, and pretend the name doesn’t sound so cool.

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  I stormed through the “living room”. I opened the front door, preparing to slam it before immediately pausing. Kanata was sitting there, patiently waiting for me on the doorstep. I kneeled down and scratched her ear.

  “They couldn’t catch you, huh?”

  She panted proudly. Her leash was still with the cart, wherever it was. It would not help for Natalie to realize that.

  “…I’m gonna go back out, but you should stay here for the rest of the day. I’m sorry to cut it short, but I probably gave you enough excitement with all of that, right?”

  She stopped panting, tilting her head in anticipation of the name I was about to say.

  “Can you go back to Elizabeth for today, please?”

  She whimpered.

  “Give me today and tomorrow. I’ll take you back out after that, and we can have a race or something… deal?”

  She lunged forward and licked my face excitedly.

  “Alright alright alright, a simple ‘sure’ would have sufficed.”

  I laughed and scratched her scalp. As I stood, she gave me a small enough yip for Natalie not to hear, and turned to bound away from me towards wherever Amelia’s house was. I mentioned to you that I hadn’t seen Lizzie again since my second “interview”. I had never seen Amelia’s house, and been told that the second I went near it would be my head. I understood that threat, as it was the house where three of the five children of R&E lived, and I had genuinely said to Elijah once that I could have returned for the express purpose of disemboweling said children. However, my inquiry of why Lizzie was one of those three was ignored every time I asked. The whole crux of me being granted re-entry was based on Lizzie being Robert’s adopted daughter. Why was she not living with him? The only person I feel like I haven’t asked about that was Robert himself. Look, I’m shameless, but would you ask that guy that kind of question if you had our relationship?

  In general, I’ve recently been putting forth a fairly vehement effort to completely snuff out the bulk of my curiosity. Today was a poor deviation.

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  I walked back down the outside path, searching more for the drone than the cart the entire way. I saw nothing.

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  As I retrieved the cart what was not even a third of the way to the Café, I paused before making my way back.

  I swayed my head back and forth, gave myself five minutes to completely memorize all of the noticeable landmarks of my position, and immediately abandoned the cart again. I departed from the path and began searching through every display I could in search of a new notebook.

  I found your current home in the nook of a linen closet.

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  It‘s a better replacement for its predecessor than my first choice of a new bedside table would have been, but I don’t really like it.

  I don’t like the feel of the pages, and it’s slightly smaller than the last. Also, it’s a little hardcover one, not back-wire bound. The spine is kind of stiff, so it’s not that easy to keep open when I’m actually writing in it, and I can’t write all the way to the end of the margin unless I nestle my hand into the fold to finish every eleventh word.

  Who cares, the important part is that it’s back.

  You’re back.

  ——————

  Uhhh, important isn’t a good word…

  ——————

  Don’t take any offense to this, but I was probably better off being away from this practice for a little while.

  I’m sure that everyone will find this ridiculously hard to believe, but I used to have a pretty bad habit of talking to myself too much. I got somewhat over it after moving fully in with Chandler and Toby, but I’ve noticed that those mannerisms have kind of resurfaced beside these journal entries. These couple of weeks I had spent without a full-mental-echochamber to run to, they were strange, but healthy. Sometimes, your internal monologue is just as far as some thoughts need to go. Intrusive thoughts are fine, but at some point quite early on into following that thread in any capacity, you’re making it concrete.

  The basic synopsis of this journal is just me giving myself way too much tether to ruminate on incoherent anger.

  I don’t know, I’m trying to find a balance. I think it could be a healthy outlet if I started using it right. Simple stream of consciousness definitely doesn’t make every thought excusable, but everybody has an internal monologue. It’s just what your brain does. It doesn’t make you a monster.

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  Wait… that’s not really true, is it? Not everyone has one. I don’t know, I’ve never understood aphantasia. Those people can obviously still think, it’s just that their mind’s eye is a little impaired, they don’t have a voice inside their head, and I think that most of them essentially have face-blindness.

  Now that you mention it, is there a way I could induce myself with that affliction?

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  Jesus, see what I mean? Anyway, that’s why we’re reunited.

  Alright, back to writing.

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  I returned to R&E around 3:15 PM, slamming my hand against the wall, only now realizing I’d abandoned the poll in the chaos of arguments. Carolette’s head popped over the wall this time. I backed away, staring at her as I put my hands up slowly. Even without being able to see her body from the neck down, I could tell she was folding her arms in well-earned obstinance.

  “Are you gonna stay there if I open the gate?” She called down to me.

  “Yes,” I said sincerely. “And I’m sorry I made you want to slap me this morning.”

  She tilted her head back and forth as if to say it was nothing. At least, not her main concern.

  “How about Natalie?” She said. “Did you apologize to her?”

  As hard as I really did try to avoid it, I still ended up rolling my eyes.

  “I triiiiied …”

  “Cody…”

  I softened.

  “… I will… try harder.”

  She sighed, before her head disappeared.

  Moments later, the gate began to crawl open as Roman, Tim and Connor wrenched it around. Carolette walked out past them, as Roman followed behind her. I kept my hands raised as she stopped in front of me, placing her hands on her hips. Roman walked up and began patting down my sides. I was, surprisingly, not immediately thrown to the floor by this.

  “I’m glad you’re not dead,” Carolette began. “I was prepped for the trauma of witnessing your murder this morning.”

  Roman slid my backpack over my arms. He rummaged past the flashlight that was always there, to find the new notebook. Once he made sure there wasn’t a switchblade shaped hollow in it, he dropped the bag over my arms again.

  “I told you,” I said to her. “She’s a wimp. Treating me like a doormat is not the physical achievement she thinks it is.”

  Carolette looked past me, as Roman and her shared a glance that I couldn’t see his end of. I would assume it was her way of pressuring him to speak up.

  “Uhhh… look,” He reluctantly said behind me. “You guys are doing good. You need to get yourself into the homestretch of cutting that shit out. You think you’re the only one here that’s got a problem with her? She’s the closest thing we have to a leader. You’d probably find more people on your side of that argument than you would hers.”

  I could tell he didn’t like using the word “leader” to describe her.

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said. “But I bet you that all of those people don’t have to sleep thirty feet away from her. Until they do something stupid, they can just pretend she doesn’t exist. I have to constantly be reminded by her that my choosing to exist is incredibly stupid.”

  Carolette sighed as Roman finished his pat-down. I finally dropped my arms.

  “What he’s saying, Cody, is who cares?” She said. “Who cares what she thinks of you? If you get past this incessant refractory period, all you have to do is not commit any spontaneous act of terrorism. If you do something harmlessly stupid after serving your time with her, she’ll probably brush it off, because to her, that’s just what an idiot Cody is . Then you can shift your problem with authority to Roman instead. She wants it to be over just as much as you do.”

  I laughed.

  “Wrong. She likes it, and incessant is an understatement-there IS no end to the refractory period,” I said, stepping back to speak to both of them. “She doesn’t want there to be. Like, be honest with me, Tracy’s already out of it, isn’t she?”

  “What does that even mean, Cody?” Carolette said tiredly. “No one is ever ‘out of it’. You’re talking to two people that have an occupational commitment to regard Natalie about 15000% more rigidly than the rest of this town. We need a Natalie. Things fall apart without a Natalie. It’s just her job to be a bitch… so don’t… tell her I said that…”

  I looked away, not wanting to listen to Carolette’s ever-articulate voice of reason, but I knew that I was listening.

  “Also,” She added sternly. “You can’t talk to Tracy like that again.”

  I looked back.

  “Why? You know I’m right. Everybody was in such a race to start talking over me back there, but everything went dead quiet when I stepped up to that plate.”

  “That doesn’t mean you can say it, dude,” Roman said. “I don’t know, she seems like the kinda girl that got bullied a lot. You can relate to that, right?”

  I blushed and got immediately flustered.

  “I… what?! What makes you think I got bullied in school?!”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “… I was talking about here.”

  Goddammit.

  “Anyway,” He continued. “You never know who’s gonna snap and go Chronicle . Just don’t be a dick. We’re all annoyed by her, we don’t hate her. We don’t hate anyone.”

  “Teh, that’s what you think,” I said as I began walking back to the gate. “No two people here are ever using the same ‘we’. You don’t even know what that word means.”

  “Cody,” Roman called as I turned around.

  “What?”

  He stared at me for a second before speaking.

  “We don’t hate anyone .”

  Him and Carolette were both looking at me the same way. I tried to say something meaningful in response, but I was too busy being stubborn. I hoped that my extended trouble to turn back around was enough for them to recognize what I wanted to say, and left it at that. Crumbled was the iron bastion that was previously safeguarding my resistance to nurturing a relationship with anyone here, but I was still trying to act like I was allergic to friendship.

  I was about to get lost in my head about it, before Tim scared the absolute shit out of me and my daze.

  “Yo, man-“

  “-Jesus!”

  “Sorry,” He said as he kicked off from the gate. “I wanted to ask you more about the drone.”

  “Tim, I-… dude, I kinda gotta be somewhere… I barely even remember the thing now-it’s been totally overshadowed by the impromptu WWE Smackdown.”

  “Fair, closest thing to primetime television I’ve been able to catch in a while. I just… will you keep looking for it when you go out?”

  “You kidding? I probably won’t be able to take my eyes off the sky for months.”

  “Heard that,” He said with a smirk.

  Tim’s interest was frankly much too adorable for me to be wound up about it.

  “You guys could probably see it from the gate if it does show up again,” I said as his eyes lit up even more. “It didn’t matter how high it was, that thing is so easy to see in this air.”

  “Dope. Was it fast?”

  “See how far the edge of the horizon is?”

  “No.”

  “Exactly. It was there before I even had the chance to realize it was going that far.”

  “That’s so fucking sick…”

  He said that more to himself than me.

  I’d gotten the opportunity to interact with Tim and Carolette a lot more over the break.

  Tim’s family in Bien Hoa had sent him to live with his Aunt and Uncle in Jacksonville, Florida when he was five. They weren’t really his blood relatives, just close enough friends from a time that his parents had called them brother and sister. Tim said that most families in his birth-city had those same merits of camaraderie. With familial separation being a notably common occurrence, your family was often just whoever you were the closest to.

  It took me up until about eight days ago to notice and be told that Tim had a prosthetic left leg. A birth defect (Fibular Hemi-something?) had caused him to only be born with half of the limb.

  (“I think the lamest thing is that I didn’t get the chance to lose it myself,” He said. “Like, I missed out on the opportunity to lose it rescuing children from a house fire. Imagine the building collapses and trapped me under rubble, but they pull me out a one-legged hero!”

  “You ever tell someone that it was something like that, though?”

  He raised an eyebrow and smiled.

  “It’s never gotten me any leg, if that’s what you’re asking.”)

  I’d quickly decided that I kind of loved Tim.

  He was bullied for it from middle through high school, even having his old prosthetic stolen and burned by some asshole classmates with not-so-repressed racism. Those things are expensive too, but his school never offered to replace it, let alone help to facilitate legal action towards the families of the little fuckers, so there was a two month period where he walked on crutches without one. You can imagine that it didn’t help his already torment-able image. Despite that, the one that finally replaced it is the same one he moves around with now.

  Moves isn’t a good word, trucks is better.

  Seeing the way he’s able to keep up with Carolette is even more astonishingly impressive with his handicap. While she knows her place about striking that nerve, Carolette does still pick her moments to make fun of him for it, and Tim seems to have mostly put any trauma about it behind him. I guess he has more pressing unfinished business to focus on, like the debt collectors that are surely hounding his relatives for the debt of his unfinished Georgia Tech automotive technology degree.

  He had called it from burn-out in the Fall semester of his third year, finding a place to move in with some buddies near campus. The plan was to work off the debt for his Aunt and Uncle, begging them to never let his parents hear a word of it. Of course, he didn’t really get to move into that new apartment when he was sidetracked by the new storage shelves he was trying to find… don’t think I need to tell you what his hold up was…

  “You know,” He began. “This is obviously a pretty ridiculous long shot, but could you see if you can find a telescope or something out there? Even if it’s like a toy one, as long as it magnifies at some capacity. It would just be fun to try and keep some kind of look out for it from here.”

  “Oh hell no,” Carolette said as she walked between us. “The peg-leg isn’t enough for you? You need the spyglass to match?”

  “Don’t judge,” He said. “I’m livin’ in a material world, captain.”

  Carolette ignored him and began climbing up the ladder to the crow’s nest. Tim turned back to me with a half smile.

  “I’ll see what I can find,” I said.

  “Thanks a million.”

  “Don’t thank him too much,” Carolette called down. “He’s being an asshole today.”

  “Thanks a… hundred,” He corrected.

  “Better,” She said as Tim began following her up the ladder.

  As much as she scolded me, I was more than fine with Carolette.

  On the other hand from Tim, she’d been pretty content with never touching a college campus. She was smart enough to know that it was a sign-up sheet for a monetary ball/chain that would grip her for the next thirty years. Looking back, she obviously wishes she had chosen that over this, but she’s still proud of never signing herself away.

  Living in Chicago, she got a job as a Taxi-driver, which apparently has far more red-tape of exam and license requirements than I would have ever guessed. While she claimed it had paid way better than you’d expect, it understandably made up for it with its more than fair share of drunks, creeps and both. Carolette estimates that she might’ve been in the triple-digits for how many bottles of pepper spray she bought in just two years.

  After her mom hadn’t stayed around for very long into her childhood, she and her father had shared a small uptown apartment into her adulthood. She had wanted to get her own place with friends right out of high school, but her dad’s Huntington’s had kept her at home. She stayed with him until the unfortunate close, only then working up the motivation to try and leave when she couldn’t bear to stay in that memory-riddled space alone.

  Her poison was a partition divider. Seems like it would have been less expensive to get something like that off of Temu, but I have a feeling she doesn’t have to hear that from me.

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  Once the two were gone, Connor waved to me from the gate door.

  “Hey dude,” He began.

  I did not like Connor the same way I did Tim and Carolette. Most of that was probably unfair, but I associated him with most of the janitorial duties I had performed in the past month, even though I knew it was Natalie that forced him to assign them to me.

  Didn’t care.

  I actively knit my brow and ignored him, continuing to walk away. If I ever saw myself becoming a stable member of R&E, I probably didn’t want to have a bad relationship with the guy that makes the cleaning schedule, and that’s smart and all, but I still valued my unlikable persona over my intelligence. I didn’t like talking to Connor. Also, listen. Saying things like that isn’t as easy for me as you think it is. Just because I like someone, doesn’t mean I like talking to them.

  Case in point:

  “You know that I have to ask you where you’re going, right?” Roman said behind me as I stopped my retreat.

  I turned around to see The Thing holding the cart in front of him. I had just walked away from it after arguing with him and Carolette. I was being an asshole today.

  “Look,” I said. “It’s not something that’s gonna get you in any deep shit, alright?”

  He rubbed his neck.

  “Listen, I totally trust you believing that, it’s just… I don’t trust you to know the margins of what will and will not get me into deep shit.”

  I began walking towards him to take the cart, but he actively stepped back with it as I stopped. I rolled my eyes and turned around.

  “You know, if she finds out, whatever happens to you will be nothing compared to me,” I said as I began walking away. “I think you can handle it, string-bean.”

  Haha.

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  Maybe that was true. Or maybe more body is just more ground for her to cover.

  I didn’t know how long Natalie had been here, but I knew it was a lot longer than most people. I imagine that her and Roman have had plenty of time to get into heated debates. He seemed like someone that could absorb a lot more battery than I could, and I briefly imagined a scenario of him being the central pincushion of Natalie’s frustration…

  Very briefly. I quickly finished and told myself that he could get the fuck over it.

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  The door opened, leaving the only separation to be the glass screen between Sandra and I. Her face scrunched hard enough that I was surprised it didn’t implode.

  “Why are you here?” She said promptly through the screen door. “You were here yesterday.”

  “Well, my run got a little disrupted today,” I replied. “So, I’m going out tomorrow instead, but also the day after that… I was hoping you could see me now?”

  She stared at me in disbelief before rubbing her forehead.

  “Are you sure she’s not following you? You know there’s no privacy here, right? I heard that argument from all the way over here.”

  “Oh, so you do know why I’m here?”

  “Cody, with the way she was yelling at you, I think you should consider the possibility of her being on high-alert mode for the rest of the day.”

  I looked behind my back, as truthfully, I hadn’t considered that. Now that I was considering it, rest of the month seemed far more likely.

  “If she is, you can tell her I threatened you,” I replied as I turned around.

  “With what weapon?”

  I patted my empty post-Roman-pat-down pockets.

  “Do you… have a weapon you can loan me?”

  Sandra sighed and unlocked the screen, walking away out of sight. I did another double take around before sliding into the entrance of the infirmary, closing the door behind me.

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  She ran her hand over the stitches as I lightly winced.

  “No bleeding, right?” Sandra asked.

  “I wouldn’t bleed from this arm if you paid me,” I replied.

  She swished her lips impatiently, prodding at the area a little.

  “You shouldn’t be so sensitive still, that’s not the best sign… but I’m confident in your granulation besides that. Let’s hope it’s just because you’re a wuss.”

  The day I came back from my first run with Kanata, I had made the decision to entrust Elijah with the knowledge of the bite, begging him not to tell Natalie. He flipped shit, but eventually agreed.

  HOLY TOLEDO, DUDE! YOU TRYNA DO AN IMPRESSION OF GODZILLA’S TEETHING RING?!

  I think that‘s a proficient paraphrase of his reaction.

  He beseeched Sandra like a pharaoh, panhandling to let me receive undocumented-treatment for the ridiculous wound my stupidity had attracted. She abstained for two days before she caved, but promised she would hold it over both of our heads for as long as we lived, and of course, Elijah claimed his groveling efforts as a token of scale-tipping that he could hold over my head for our next five-hundred points of contention.

  Sandra had given me a beautiful row of stitches to suture the wound. We had become more than comfortably acquainted that day, as I had involuntarily shown a childishly weak (and hysterical) side of myself to her, more than I thought was possible to show to anyone in my right mind.

  Ever gotten stitches with no numbing agent? It kind of tickles.

  “Does it still feel like there’s a cavern in your arm?” She said. “You need to tell me if it starts randomly hurting again. Have you had anything like that?”

  “No, it’s just consistently a little throbby. No random bursts.

  “You haven’t been itching it, right?”

  “No. Itching or picking.”

  “Is that a lie?”

  “I don’t lie to you.”

  She looked away to consider believing me.

  “And…” I said. “I would like to avoid walking around with the cone on my head.”

  Her eyes shot back to me, as she suddenly took my arm in both hands, holding it up to her nose. She deeply inhaled as I cringed in awkward discomfort. She thought for a second before returning my limb to me.

  “Inflammation isn’t gonna show its face again at this stage. I think you’re doing really well. You can start coming every fourth day. To be honest, I wouldn’t mind that being once every week . I want you here as little as possible.”

  “Really? That felt like a pretty open invitation to come see you when you’re off work.”

  She glared at me and stood from her chair next to the examination-Lazyboy.

  “How are you breathing lately?” She said.

  I instinctively took a deep breath to make sure I still could. I did that every once in a while whenever I remembered my couple weeks of tar-lung. Like getting stuck manually breathing, but with a way more dramatic startup.

  “Fine,” I said. “But if I do end up coughing, it’s bad now. Sharp… around the chest.”

  “Might just be a mucus buildup, keep me updated on that.”

  “Okay… I’ve been running with Kanata a lot.”

  “That’s good. Do more of that.”

  She walked over to a cabinet and retrieved a small wash cloth.

  “How regularly did you exercise before showing up here?” She asked.

  Every night at about 11:45.

  “Regularly enough… twice a-… week, maybe. But we should definitely clarify that it was exercising… not ‘working out’.”

  “I didn’t need you to clarify that.”

  Ouch.

  She grabbed a bottle of water and soaked a small slosh into the cloth, sitting back down across from me.

  “You worked in an office, right? Were you sitting down all day?”

  She began dabbing and gently rubbing the cloth around the wound. Enough pressure that it wasn’t pleasant, but not enough to where I was so physically distracted.

  “Well I… I was at home more than I was at the ‘office’. ”

  “Did you go for walks a lot?”

  “I tried to. Just to combat tension headaches.”

  She nodded.

  “A worker-bee is the neurologist’s daydream.”

  “You make it sound like they’re scam artists.”

  “They are. Hacks if anything. Doesn’t mean I think they got there easily, and a neurosurgeon is a different story, but the computer, ironically, is the neurologist, not the human. Unless the practice has gone archaic in the time I’ve been here. I still doubt that anyone would notice if it did.”

  I had come to know Sandra to have a quite dry sense of humor. Her smile and laugh were present, but only within the tones of her responses, as she never actively let them reach the surface. She is constantly stressed, but not by workload rather than general unease. Sandra is always waiting for something unfathomably horrible to occur every next second she’s awake. Whether it’s to herself or to the citizens around her is irrelevant, she just always seems to be barely on the edge of her current plane of sanity. Personally, from my time with her, I have reason to believe she would handle that slip quite gracefully, but despite her general civility, it can sometimes be incredibly exhausting to be in a room with her. I often feel guilty for not being on the same mild panic-high that she is constantly blitzed with.

  She also shares a first name with my parole officer, so I’m trying to force myself to absolve her from that association.

  “Think they say the same thing about doctors?”

  She looked up, shooting me an eyebrow.

  “They think they are doctors…” She responded before looking down. “… and I mean… they are… legally…”

  I also think Sandra is… strangely attractive.

  “Do you want to look at the cut on my stoma-“

  “-no. Let it get infected.”

  KnockKnockKnock

  We both shot around as there was a sudden rapping on the door.

  “Goddammit, Cody.”

  “I don’t think that’s-“

  “-Guys!” An overly-hyper voice breathed through the door. “Let me in before someone sees me and reveals our secret hideout!”

  Sandra groaned and stood. She slumped towards the door, opening it to reveal Elijah’s already smiling face on the other side of the glass.

  “Please don’t let him in…” I said.

  She stared at me coldly as she stepped away from the still unlocked screen door, which she constantly had to remind me to lock on my way in. Elijah noticed my negligence as he entered it happily.

  “Now you two can both leave together,” She said in monotone.

  “Agreed!” Elijah called as he took Sandra’s previous seat next to me. “Wanna eat something? Late afternoon lunch slash early dinner? It would… be your only dinner.”

  “Do I have a choice?” I said. “They’re gonna make me stay in the kitchen for the rest of the day, aren’t they?”

  “Would you rather go back to the cell? You must feel just a little homesick from it, right?”

  “I’m not that sentimental.”

  His smile widened ever-further.

  “Come on,” He said. “Roman told me you had a bad run, so I asked Margo if she could make you lunch.”

  “Oh, you uh-… you didn’t have to do that .”

  “I didn’t do it, Margo did. I just told her to slip some bleach powder into it.”

  Elijah and I had gotten… kind of better. I still think he’s annoying, and the day I stop thinking that is the day the cabin fever has started eating my prefrontal cortex. However… sometimes the nice side of Elijah is just… nice. Margo had inspired me to try and appreciate it while it was there.

  “Were you with her all morning? You never showed up to the gate when I first came back.”

  His smile disappeared a little.

  “I actually went there first just now, but you were already here.”

  That felt like a subject-change I didn’t want to latch onto.

  “Well, I thought I was gonna see you there when I got back, since Sean wasn’t there anymore,” I said. “Where’d he go?”

  “You think I have any clue what that guy’s up to? Maybe he’s shaving his head to go beat up some middle schoolers? I don’t know, he’s probably with Natalie.”

  I’m sure I flinched a little. I tried so hard not to, and I immediately felt angry that there was no way he hadn’t seen. He was surely about to say something before Sandra unintentionally saved me.

  “Elijah!” She yelled. “I need you out of here! Genetta is going to be here with Evelyn any second. You know the kind of mouth she’s got. Get him and go!”

  I looked over to her.

  “What’s up with Evelyn?” I said.

  “What’s up? What isn’t up with-“

  She paused and turned back to the drawer she was rummaging through, realizing she’d been speaking without a filter.

  “Every fourth day, Cody. You can handle that thing on your own if she doesn’t cut it off once she catches you.”

  I gave Elijah an eyebrow, as he drummed on his legs and stood up swiftly, exiting the infirmary before I even reached my feet. I got up to open the screen. I poked my head out to make sure no one else was there, then briefly leaned back in.

  “Thank you, Sandra.”

  She stopped rummaging but didn’t turn around.

  “Don’t mention it, just stop doing dumb things.”

  I smiled as I slipped out of the infirmary, knowing there was absolutely no feasible way I could submit to that agreement.

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  “I don’t see the logic.”

  I took a bite of my Caesar-salad-waffle : the special dish that Margo had assigned to me (…per my request).

  Yeahhhh, I liked it. It was weird, and I liked it.

  “You feel bad about spiders getting killed though, don’t you?” Elijah said.

  Margo pitched a tent with her elbows, squishing her cheeks as she kicked Elijah gently under the table with her swinging legs. Elijah sat to my left. Allen sat silently in front of me with his nose in “Endless Steppe” (God knows if he was actually reading that thing).

  “Well, yeah. I don’t know. The micro-shits are different,” She replied. “Like, does something that small even know that it’s alive?”

  Elijah ticked.

  “I mean… some lovecraftian monolith somewhere in the universe could be saying that same thing about you,” He said. “Hell, someone on Earth could say that about you .”

  She kicked him a little harder than the usual.

  “Very funny, giant.”

  Cute.

  As the three had joined me to eat my lunch, Margo had started talking about seeing a fruit fly yesterday for the first time in about eight months. Since the produce seems to just spawn out of obscurity, there isn’t really any chance for grubs to set up shop in fermented cubbies. Chances are, any bug who showed up the same as we all did, it probably wouldn’t reach a Café in triple its lifespan. That makes for one beautiful bullet-point on the lonely pro’s list of living in an infinite IKEA.

  No bugs. Usually.

  “I just wonder if it got the chance to lay eggs,” She said, tracing a figure-8 on the table with her finger. “If it did, it basically still lived a full life, despite getting trapped here. There’s no way it even noticed what happened to it. It must be nice to be unbothered by something like that.”

  “Well, that’s sweet, but let’s go ahead and hope it didn’t,” Elijah replied. “You killed it, right?”

  “Terminator over here did,” She said, throwing a thumb towards Allen.

  “That is one of my mission parameters…”

  “Lazy one, Al.”

  “Wait,” I interrupted for the first time in the conversation. “You killed it?”

  Margo shot me a strange look.

  “Did you wanna name it? It’s a fruit fly, Cody.”

  “I’m sure he was just confirming,” Elijah said. “He just told me he isn’t very sentimental.”

  “It’s not like it’s Kanata,” Margo added. “It wasn’t nearly as cute, so I’m sure you would have done the same.”

  “Uhhhh, maybe not if it helped me save a kid,” I said, trying to brush off my somewhat unintentional outburst.

  I pulled on the fabric of my long-sleeve, waiting for Elijah to poke a joke about a fruit-fly nearly ripping my arm off in a parallel timeline.

  “Have you guys uhh…” I began before he could. “Have you guys seen Lizzie since then?”

  There was a small silent argument about who would answer me.

  “Well yeah,” Margo lost and said. “We’ve never threatened any children so…”

  I glared at her.

  “… She’s doing okay,” She said.

  I looked back to my waffle, gently poking it to death.

  “Would you tell me if she wasn’t?”

  “I uhh… I guess so.”

  “Honestly,” Elijah agreed. “You might be one of the first people I told… though, I don’t really know if that’s so much in the ballpark for Liz. She’s strong.”

  “Strong for a human or strong for a kid?”

  “Both, but I mean…” He said. “You should know from experience how strong she is-“

  “-Elijah!” Margo steamed as I heard another hard kick.

  “What?” He defended. “Elizabeth is fine, dude.”

  “She’s not fine,” I said firmly as I looked up to him. “ I’m not even fine after being down there. How could she be fine after that?”

  He tilted his head back and forth.

  “You’d be surprised. Humans are damn resilient. Especially kids.”

  I wanted to retort, but instead, looked back down at my plate.

  “You think?”

  I felt his fingers tapping around the underside of the table.

  “ ‘When our sun explodes, we’ll just make brighter flashlights’. ”

  I felt my head go sideways.

  “I think there’s a small snag in that somewhere.”

  He laughed.

  “It’s more of an optimistic maxim than an actual critique on human perseverance. My dad just used to say it.”

  “Did your dad know how stars work?”

  I cringed at how unknowingly insensitive that statement might’ve been, even as I heard Margo giggle a little.

  “Maybe he was a little misinformed,” He said. “You know what’s funny, actually? He and my mom were both obsessed with stars. Just space in general I guess but jeez… those two had a serious constellation fetish.”

  I looked up, trying to hide my once-a-day Elijah-smile.

  “They were into space?” I said. “They weren’t religious then?”

  “You can be into space and be religious at the same time,” He said, a little sarcastically. “Atheism and The church of Scientology don’t fucking own Space.”

  “No I just… they named their kid Elijah so-

  “-what does that have to do with it?” He said, laughing. “The Bible steals all the cool names and now my parents are Jesus freaks for trying to repurpose it for their sexy antichrist-son?!”

  Margo laughed out loud. Allen moaned a little. Neither Sexy nor Antichrist were words I would use for Elijah. Check back on “antichrist”.

  “How’d your parents choose ‘Diego’ ?” Elijah said suddenly.

  I dropped my fork and looked at him with my face red.

  “Dude! Shut up!” I whispered-yelled.

  “What, man?!-Margo already knows.”

  “Does Allen ?!”

  “He does now! What’s he gonna do? Tell Natalie? She’s the one that told me.”

  “I know but… Jesus, I just don’t want anyone using it.”

  “Awww, I think it’s a nice name,” Margo teased. “They thought you were gonna be a little explorer. And look! They were right!”

  She waved a palm around the air as I sat back with my arms crossed.

  “Diego means ‘Saint Jacob’,” I said.

  “Ohhh okay,” Elijah said. “So your parents were the ones that were Bible thumpers.”

  “Where’d ‘Cody’ come from then?” Allen mumbled behind his book as my eyes widened .

  “That is a great fuckin’ question, Allen!” Margo cheered word by word. “Yeah, tell us! Was that your teenage rebellion call-sign?”

  I scoffed a little and looked towards the kitchen. I saw Nikko passing by in the doorway, carrying dirty trays. I stood up.

  “Can I go help Nikko clean?” I asked Margo.

  “Awww what?! Wait, I wanna know too!” Elijah said. “Is it short for something?”

  “ ‘Cody’ ? I don’t know, not to me. Maybe Dakota, but that sounds pretty feminine.”

  “And? I think it suits you,” He said. “Mind if I start calling you that?”

  I couldn’t tell if that was a genuine request or playful banter.

  “Can I start calling you ‘cocksucker’ ?”

  He smiled.

  “You don’t already?”

  I ignored him and looked back to Margo, silently restating my request.

  “Yes, Cody. You may,” She said in a motherly tone.

  I nodded and began walking away from the table, hearing Margo scold Elijah further about his comment on Lizzie’s strength. I didn’t care, I think I deserved it for letting it happen, but the joke had already been told by God at my expense. It didn’t sound any more clever coming from Elijah.

  I curled around the serving line and entered the kitchen. Nikko was at the running sink, scrubbing away at a pan that seemed to have once been filled with mashed potatoes. Two clean ones were sitting to his right. His left was occupied by about twenty. I walked up to him.

  “Hey,” I said.

  He turned around and gave me a “sup?” head flick.

  “You get tired of playing footsies with Allen?” He said.

  I frowned.

  “Margo said you were gonna come and sit with us before cleaning anything.”

  He turned back around to the sink.

  “You got a crush on me or something? I’ll eat with you next time.”

  I had grown to really like Nikko. I hoped he liked me too, at least a little. He was like Elijah, but much more… hang on, maybe I shouldn’t describe him that way. He was like a male Margo. That’s… kind of okay, I guess.

  I walked up to his side.

  “You know,” I said. “If someone is gonna be doing all the dishes alone, it should probably be the guy on work-release.”

  He looked annoyed as he stopped scrubbing.

  “How about you just help me with them, Tory?”

  He slid to the side, making room for me to grab a tray and a sponge beside him.

  “What happened to you today, anyway?” He said. “I heard you came back screaming that the sky was falling.”

  I wasn’t embarrassed about the event, but I didn’t really want to keep talking about it with everyone.

  “I just… thought I saw something flying around. It was stupid, maybe.”

  “Yeah, that sounds pretty stupid.”

  “Like you’d know. You never leave this fucking room.”

  “Okay, maybe not stupid… you could be going crazy, though. Do you feel like you’re going crazy?“

  I ticked.

  “Like, am I even real?” I said, sarcastically. “Are you even real? Are we both figments of each other’s imagination?! And if so, does that mean we don’t have to wash these dishes?”

  “Shut up, dude. The dishes are real.”

  “Yeah. Seems that way…”

  I handed him my “finished” tray.

  “You know that isn’t done,” He said. “Hand me another one.”

  He handed mine back to me, as I handed him a new one.

  “Do you ever feel crazy?” I said. “Feel like you’re losing yourself a little?”

  “Who are you? René Descartes? I was joking, man.”

  “I’m serious. Do you really believe a place like this is possible?”

  He sighed.

  “… Ummmm… thing is, like… no? Not really. But… I think I’m stuck a little too deep in it by now for that to be meaningful in any way. You think this place gives a shit if I believe that it’s real or not?”

  “It could . What if you’re in a coma, and the only way to wake up is to confront the fact that you’re in one?”

  “And you think that just works ? Is that how people wake up from comas nowadays? That seems pretty theatrical.”

  “Maybe. I don’t think you’re always dreaming in a coma, though. I think it’s actually pretty rare that you are, so it’s probably pretty theatrically horrific whenever it happens.”

  “Yeah, but I know damn well that not every coma is a bad one. I’ve heard way too many stories of people coming to, and thinking they lived a whole second life with this beautiful family. They wake up in that hospital and lose their fuckin’ marbles, begging to go back, feeling like they abandoned their real selves.”

  “So you think you’d feel that way? You would feel like you’re abandoning your real self when you can’t wash dishes with me anymore?”

  “Yeah, I’d be just heartbroken, Confucius.”

  I smiled.

  “How’s this look? Before you run out of philosopher names,” I said, showing him my tray.

  “That’s good,” He said as he took it.

  I grabbed another.

  “I think I’d be okay,” I said. “If I went back right now.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Probably. Wouldn’t be going back to the nicest welcoming committee… but I could re-adjust.”

  I heard him swishing around his spit.

  “How long have you been here again?” He asked.

  Nikko was on his fourth year.

  “Calm down, let’s not have a dick-measuring contest over who’s more traumatized. I’m sure you’d win.”

  He smiled victoriously.

  “Yeah, true. Although… I still think I might be alright if I left. That’s the thing. I really… don’t feel crazy. Don’t feel like my social skills have even suffered, you know?”

  “Well… mine were never stellar.”

  “Ya don’t say?”

  “Whatever, rabbi. I’d love to watch your traumatized ass step outside and be the socially-inept spectacle of every room you walk into.”

  “Ohhh I see, I wouldn’t be able to tell, because I’m insane.”

  “Yeah, dude. I’m sure some crazy people know they’re crazy, but they can’t all know. I bet half of em’ walk around thinking they’re Harvey Specter.”

  “Alright, well I think we know which half is which between the two of us.”

  “O-ho-ho yeah?! And I’m the crazy crazy one?!”

  “You’ve got yourself surrounded, dickhead. You’ve constantly got like three mental breakdowns cooking in one oven.”

  “And look at how well I’m managing it! You know how much skill it takes to be constantly multitasking like that? I’m a goddamn artist!”

  “And every good artist is famously out of their COMPLETE fucking mind. I am fine with not having a creative bone in my body.”

  I stopped scrubbing for a moment and thought about not saying this.

  “You know, you’ve got a pie or two in the oven yourself.”

  He kept scrubbing but looked over to me.

  “What’s that ominous ass shit supposed to mean?”

  Two raises of the eyebrows. He stopped scrubbing and grabbed my tray, putting both of ours in the clean stack.

  “Move on, Cody,” He said as he reached over me to grab a dirty one. “You’re out of your line with that.”

  “I know. That’s why I didn’t say anything just yet. I want you to say it.”

  “I’m not talking to you about it, dude-“

  “-I’m not gonna tell anyone-“

  “-You won’t have to if she walks in. She’s sitting like fifty feet away.”

  I smiled maliciously.

  “Pussy.”

  He glared at me.

  “Guess that’s what I am,” He said calmly, as he returned to scrubbing.

  Oh, I thought that would work. Hang on, I’ve got more ideas.

  “Margo’s not stupid, Nikko. You don’t think she already has an idea?”

  He didn’t look at me, but stopped scrubbing for a moment.

  “I hope she doesn’t,” He said as he continued scrubbing. “I like Elijah. I don’t wanna… you know… rock any sort of boat. But… whatever, it’s shitty.”

  I knew what he meant, and it sucked.

  “But you know you’re not shitty, right?” I said as he waved me away, splashing dirty water on me. “You can’t help the way you feel.”

  “You can try to, and I’ve fucking tried… it’s harder to start a connection in this place than you think. You’d think everyone would be so desperate that we’d all just kind of fall into it, but that kind of thing is hard here. There’s a pretty thin line between spoken for and so off the deep end socially that your half in it would be manipulative.”

  Funny, Elijah seems to fit both of those some days.

  “I’m happy for them, and I mean that,” He continued . “I’m happy they both have someone in this but… shit man… I’ve had thoughts before. Never anything I would EVER act on but just… imagining what it would be like if things changed between them… no matter what that means…”

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  “I mean… maybe you’re clearheaded,” I said. “But if you’re not crazy, you’re definitely a psychopath.”

  He laughed and elbowed me so hard that it still feels sore as I’m writing this.

  “…thanks for listening, you freak” He said. “You’re better at consoling than you are at cleaning.”

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  Elijah had snuck me into a bathroom visit before escorting me home, telling me to “not get used to cutting the line”. I returned to the house around 5:15. Natalie wasn’t there. I didn’t feel like being creative. I didn’t rummage through any of her things, anticipating that she had a proximity mine stashed somewhere under a dresser she never touches. I didn’t explore the living/kitchen , and I tried to not even think about “alone time” (no way I could ever do that in this house).

  I went to my room and picked up the book that Elijah had lent me. He said he checked it back in and out under my name, and that I could reward him the delivery fee at a later date. It was the one that he and Margo had already read.

  “She’s Come Undone”

  It’s fine. Not exactly the fantastical fiction that I would usually be degenerately attracted to. No pictures of Japanese women. Haha (Jesus Christ I swear that was supposed to be a joke, please believe me).

  I used to read a lot, but I think it just got kind of… ruined for me. I tried to focus on the unbelievably gripping story of mild 1950’s domestics, but I really was just constantly listening for Natalie to barge in the door. She never did though. The lights had gone out and she still wasn’t here. I wasn’t extremely tired, and focusing on trying to sleep was even harder with her potential entrance still looming.

  But she never came back that night, not to what I remember anyway. That was even more nerve-racking than her being here, of course. Eh, it’s a close match.

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  I thought about her as I was falling asleep. I obviously spent that whole night thinking about her returning, but that’s not what I mean. I was just thinking about what she does all day. She’s gone tonight, where usually she seems to take joy in making sure I’m caught in a corner somewhere. I wonder what she’s doing right now. She must have a “job”, right? Responsibilities that only she fulfills?

  I guess I’d like to know what kind of headache she has to deal with outside of me and the obvious danger of this world. She said I have no idea, and she’s right, I don’t. Realistically, would it make me less of an aggravation to know? That’s just about 50/50.

  I don’t know… sometimes…

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  …it would just be nice to know what’s going on in her head.

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  (Continued in 2/3)