Plath left the bathroom, shaky, mind turning back again and again and again, drawn back and never escaping the memories and the reality.
She opened the door to her room. Her cell.
She sat on the edge of her bed and tears came. She wanted to cry without thinking of giant waterfalls splashing over crawling demodex, of the tears briefly refreshing dead skin, carrying fungi and pollen and bacteria and—
“Just cry, goddamnit!” she told herself.
Cry for this miserable room.
Cry for the trap she’d stepped into.
Cry for the loss of simplicity, the loss of the simple notion that a boy’s blue eyes were blue because the sky wanted to be reflected in them, and not colorless and not a million miles deep through a dark tunnel ringed with spasming fibers and—
“Stop it!”
Suddenly she slapped herself. Hard. The fact that it hurt was almost a surprise. The giant hand with its agricultural furrows and bright beads of sweat had hurtled through the air to land on the surface of her face, and the result was a sting.
Sensations shooting through nerve endings, twitch-twitch-twitch, and hello, there: brain says someone slapped us in the face.
A knock. The door.
She knew it was him. She didn’t want to see him. But she couldn’t say no. How did you say no to someone who had spent the day crawling through the folds of your brain?
She opened the door. She didn’t try to hide the fact that she had been crying.
He didn’t try to hide the fact that he’d seen things he would never be able to get out of his mind. The eyes were too wide, the mouth too shocked. Hours had passed, and he still looked like a near-miss victim in a horror movie.
For a moment both of them seemed to forget that they had the power of speech. They just shared their trauma with a look.
And then something simply irresistible took hold of Plath, and she grabbed his head and pulled him to her. Waxed-paper lips on waxed-paper lips. Eyes closed. Fierce. Breathing onto each other’s face. Who knew what horrors on tongues that found each other within a Carlsbad of mouth, a vast, dark cave guarded by tombstone teeth.
And for a time measured only in seconds, they both forgot.
Their hearts accelerated. The blood surged through arteries, delivering it to parts where it might be needed. Diaphragms tightened. Hormones flooded. Fingers searched through hair without thinking of mites or of Seussian forests.
For those few seconds they forgot.
And then, with a shock they were apart.
They stood now with several feet between them. Panting. Staring at each other. Amazed. Bodies still telling them to take a step, to close that space again, to wrap an arm, touch, stroke, taste, stiffen, and open.
Still they said nothing. Way beyond words, the words would only confuse what they both knew at that moment. They had found the way to shut out the horror, at least for a time. A few seconds of time that might be stretched into minutes.
It was Plath who finally broke the silence once her heart was back to something like a normal human rhythm. “How are we supposed to do this?”
He might have made a leering joke of it, but that was not Keats. No, he wasn’t that guy. Not someone to miss a huge and terrifying truth or hide it behind evasions.
“I’ve been inside your brain,” he said. “But I still don’t know you. And now here we are.”
“Suddenly you’re all I have,” Plath said. “My family. My whole life. And now here we are.”
“What are we to each other?”
Plath shrugged. She shook her head, breaking contact with the gesture. She sat back down on her bed. Keats remained standing. “I’m probably not supposed to tell you this, but right now I don’t really give a damn. My whole family is dead. My mom from the usual: cancer. But my dad and my big brother, murdered. By them. By the other side.”
Keats nodded. “I figured that out. I figured out who you are. I think I know your real name, even, I heard it on TV. But I’ll call you Plath, anyway. I don’t want to slip up.”
She looked at him. Her eyes were dry. The demodex could stop trying to swim. The tears were being absorbed into dry flesh and evaporated into dry air.
“It’s a reaction to trauma,” she said. “What just happened between us.”
“We’ve just been yanked way out of reality. Away from our homes … violence … blood everywhere and scared pissless. And this. Things in my head, I feel them still, even when they’re supposedly asleep, I know they’re there.”
She nodded.
“And Jin says that’s it, they’ll be in our thoughts from now on,” Keats said.
“Our little six-legged children.”
That brought a completely unexpected laugh from him. She smiled in response.
“They die, and we go mad,” Keats said. “Maybe … maybe I’m not supposed to tell you, but like you said, I don’t give a damn: my big brother is in a madhouse right now. Chained. Raving.”
Plath narrowed her eyes. “He was part of this?”
“They tell me he was very good. I imagine he was. He was the strong one. The brave one. Me, I was …” He trailed off, sighed, and sat down beside her.
Their shoulders touched. That was all, but she wanted so badly to lean her head against him. This boy she didn’t really know.
“I’m not a vulnerable person,” Plath said.
“Everyone’s vulnerable. I’ve seen that up close.”
“I don’t make friends that often,” Plath said. “I think I’m kind of a bitch.”