Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

“It is total bullshit, though. You agree.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It’s just inconsiderate. I mean, I know I’m not the most considerate, but one awkward conversation and I’m the freakin’ devil? That’s the thing about their family. They’re so kind and caring, but it’s all conditional. I do not envy that household.”

“Of course not. Please don’t cut yourself.”

“I won’t.” Aubrey curls her fingers over the intact half of the cucumber, knuckles pressing down. Aubrey knows about knife safety. Basil and his dumbass boyfriend are the ones who need to learn about knife safety. 

Behind her, he turns over one of his many pages. The sound ripples thinly through the air. Aubrey scrapes her knifeblade across the cutting board, relocating her cucumber slices, and turns around. Unfolded newspaper pages make a patchwork of Basil’s kitchen table. He leans over the one in front of him, dragging the back end of his red pen over each line of a long article. Aubrey probably shouldn’t distract him. 

“Your newspaper doesn’t help, either,” she says. “With the family spotlight and everything, acting like they’re the people everyone else in town needs to look up to.” She rolls her eyes. “You’re supposed to, like, expose hard truths or whatever. That’s what they say about journalists.”

“Well I’m not a journalist,” Basil replies. “I’m an intern. Exposing hard truths isn’t really my job.”

“Not yet.” Aubrey points at him with the tip of her knife. “And can’t you, just, I dunno, slip a couple hard truths in there? Like subtextually. Taking it down from the inside.”

“No.” Basil leans closer to his page, squinting. The pen flips in his hand. “But I can slip an ‘r’ into the words ‘food pantry,’” he mutters, marking it.

Aubrey sighs. “Playing it safe, like always. Faraway Town’s just too soft to handle one single sexual reference, or the tiniest notion that their golden family is actually just a bunch of assholes.”

That gets him to look up. “Wh— it’s not a— it’s a typo, Aubrey, I-I’m—” His cheeks go puffy with indignance. “A-and Kel’s not— he and Hero are our friends. I’m not gonna…” He frowns. “Uh, subtextually insult them and their parents.” 

“Kel’s our friend,” Aubrey corrects. “Hero’s probably the one who ran to his mom crying, going oh, please don’t invite Aubrey and Basil to Thanksgiving this year, they’re weird and I don’t like them anymore.” Her Hero impression could use some work, she admits. But to be fair, she hasn’t been spending a lot of time with him recently. 

Basil’s head tilts. “Okay. And, so, just to make sure I understand, you did get an invitation last year, and you did completely ignore it.”

Well, yeah. But it’s the idea of the thing. “Maybe,” Aubrey scoffs, turning back to her vegetables. She balances the knife, replaces her fingers. “What are you, some kind of journalist? Get your shit off the table so we can eat.”

With a small exhale, Basil clicks his pen closed, and clears his shit from the table. He folds the newspaper back together, transporting it and his pen and his other miscellaneous knickknacks to the couch. Aubrey goes back to chopping her cucumber, and even gets another quarter of the way through before the phone rings. 

Across the room, Basil starts, squeakily, “I’ll—” but Aubrey’s already there. She plucks the phone from the receiver, raises a shoulder to press it to her ear, and picks up her knife again.

“Hey,” she says, because nobody ever taught her any manners. And because she’s in a weird mood, and has the absurd, nagging thought that it could be Kel, calling to say actually, you should come over! We all want you here. Don’t eat a salad and instant mashed potatoes and an apple pie from a crushed cardboard box for Thanksgiving dinner. That’s really sad! 

And she’d say no, of course, because she hates his dumbass family and the dumbass way they talk to each other, and she hates the thought of Hero staring at her all tired and sad from across the table like he did this summer, but that doesn’t matter. The line stays quiet for a few seconds, so it’s not Kel. 

“Uh, this is Aubrey.” Her knife moves slower, now.  A pot crackles on the stovetop, under a whirring fan. “I can get Basil if you need him.”

A few more seconds of silence. She finishes the cucumber off with some careless slices, varying in size. There’s a shifting noise, a small intake of breath, and Sunny says, “No. I should tell you, too.”

“Oh, it’s you.” She lets go of the knife, tossing chopped vegetables by the fistful into the large, floral-patterned bowl next to the cutting board. “Geez, Sunny, can’t you bother with a hello, at least?” 

Basil all but materializes beside her, then, with wide eyes and a sly movement towards her shoulder, for the phone. She throws a piece of celery at him. It misses. But his resulting flinch gives her space to lower the phone between them. They crowd close to the speaker in time to hear a hesitant, muffled, “Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize,” Basil says. “Aubrey’s just bullying you. She doesn’t know how to answer the phone, either.” 

“I said ‘hey.’” She puts a hand on the side of his face and turns him away, to stop him squinting at her like that. “Anyway, what’d you need to tell us?”

“Right.” Sunny’s voice blends with static. She can imagine him parsing out the words, slow-blinking while he moves them to his mouth. She cools with anticipation, removing her hand from Basil’s cheek and scooping a last assortment of vegetable debris into the bowl. She picks at some stray pieces, after, tossing them in one-by-one. Basil stares at the phone instead of helping. 

Finally, Sunny says, “I’m moving out.”

Aubrey flicks a green onion from her finger. Much less life-altering than she’d been expecting. 

Basil doesn’t seem to agree. “What?” He asks, grabbing the phone before she can intervene. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” comes the reply. “Closer.”

“Oh.” Basil cradles it, cupped in his hands. Can he do anything normally? He bites his lip, and glances at Aubrey, and makes himself ask, “Um, y-you mean, to us?”

“No, to all his other friends,” Aubrey says.

Sunny either ignores or doesn’t hear her. “Yes.”

“Oh,” Basil repeats. He pries at a seam in the plastic with his thumb nail, like he could take the phone apart and find Sunny already waiting inside. “Wow. That’s— that’s really good to hear. I’m— that’s great. I— uh, um, y-you—” He trips over his words, and his deranged little smile lilts away at the sides, and suddenly his head jerks up. “U-um, Aubrey, is something burning?”

Ah, shit. Aubrey rushes to the stove and snatches away their potatoes. However else Basil manages to embarrass himself, she doesn’t hear it over the commotion, the sound of sizzling and the sting of smoke in her eyes. 

She avoids sleeping in his room as often as she can, but it isn’t very often. 

He traps her, most nights. Sits in his bed and talks to her, or lets her sit on the floor and talk to him, until one or both of them is too tired to move. Then he tosses down a pillow and some blankets, and turns out the lights before she can escape. She rarely even complains about sleeping on the floor, those nights. She rarely even thinks about this being the room where she found Basil’s destroyed photo album, six years ago, the room where she yelled and watched his face crumple, where she hit him for the very first time. 

Some nights he calls her here. Aubrey doesn’t go home much anymore. She’s only ever as far as the living room couch, and some nights Basil stands in the doorway after all the lights are off, or he raises his shaky voice across the hallway. She pulls her blanket over her shoulders and follows him or follows the sound. When he points at nothing and asks her to tell him what’s there, she does. 

Your bookshelf, Basil. Just your wall. The pair of shoes I left in the corner. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, she says, and tries not to think about the bottle of pills she found hidden in the very back of his medicine cabinet. The dust she thumbed away from the label to read an expiry date long-past, and a prescription name she didn’t recognize. She looked it up on the computer Basil’s boss sent him home with, which he never used except to send the occasional email. It was clunky and slow, and it took forever to load, and she worried any second he’d come back inside from the garden and see her scanning the search results. Antipsychotic. Commonly used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar, depression, and related symptoms. 

Some nights she stays awake for hours, until his breathing changes, until he stops sniffling, just to make sure he can’t do anything stupid. She keeps herself awake thinking about Sunny losing his eye in this room, lying about where she lies, now, and thinking maybe she should call somebody. Maybe she should tell someone before anything else happens, before Basil hurts himself, but who would she call? Who would she tell? 

Who, that wouldn’t just send him away from her?

Other nights, she can just tell he’s going to need her. After their below-average dinner of undressed salad and burnt potatoes and a pie containing milk and eggs that Basil eats anyway, out of pity, he’s still shaky. Jumpy. He goes back to his work, but his pen skips over the page, jolts across innocent, inoffensive words. He puts it down and clasps his hands together, and says he might just go to bed a few hours early. Aubrey’s set up on the floor before he finishes brushing his teeth. 

He climbs under the covers. She sits against his nightstand. After a long silence, she says, “I thought you’d be happy.” It’s the sort of thing that’d really piss her off if somebody said it to her. She says it anyway, because otherwise she’d say nothing. 

“I am. It’s nice.” The ends of his words drift away from him. “Uh, it’s sort of… It’s like when dogs eat their owners.”

She blinks at him. The sun has set but he hasn’t unplugged his lights. They tangle around his ceiling, in dying-firefly-clusters between dried plants and nature photographs, throwing uneven shadows over his face. “What?” she says.

“Sometimes when a person dies in their house and no-one finds them, their dog eats the body. Cats do it, too.”

…Gross. “Okay.”

“It happened, um, a few towns over? Like ten years ago. I was reading— they have a lot of old articles at the, uh. At the— yeah. I get bored some days.” He picks at his nails. “And you’d think— you’d think it was because the dog got hungry, but h-his food and water were both full, and they got an animal behavior scientist, and she said maybe— maybe the dog just loved his owner too much. Like, he saw him die a-and knew something was wrong, and so— so he bit him, to wake him up, and kept biting, and…” He swallows. “And then he tasted blood, and couldn’t help himself anymore. Because— because his owner was right there, and a dog is really just an animal.”

The lights hum overhead. Aubrey’s stomach turns. She blinks again at Basil, who stares glassy-eyed above himself and shreds his own nails into the bedsheets. She tugs on the corner of his blanket. He pauses, looks at her. 

“If we ever get a pet,” she says, “It’s gonna be another bunny.”

His eyebrows raise. A moment later, he smiles. The shadows lighten. “Yeah. Good plan.”

She wakes up to voices in the other room, and Basil’s empty bed. Pale sunlight streams through the window onto his neatly-folded comforter. She blinks for a while at the translucent, golden quality of the morning. Unwillingly, she remembers how the reverend used to talk about heaven. Unwillingly, she remembers a late night this summer, following Basil’s voice to stand beside him and stare at the full moon above the trees, leaning close to hear him whisper. I was right here, he said. I really could have done it. 

But if she remembers anything about church, she remembers that light triumphs over darkness. If she remembers anything about that night, she remembers her hand between Basil’s shoulders, the feeling of his still-beating heart, the oscillating pressure of his lungs.

One of the voices is definitely his. Aubrey slides out from under her blanket and stands, grabbing a hair tie from Basil’s nightstand in attempt to make herself look presentable. 

She walks into the living room, and is unsurprised to see Kel on the couch. He gestures to the newspaper Basil left there the evening before. 

“This one’s fine,” he’s saying. “But nothing special, y’know?”

Basil stands across from him, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m… not sure how you expect them to make a picture of a new stop sign special, Kel.”

“I’m just saying you could do it.” He lets the paper fall into his lap. “You could use, like, lighting and stuff. Composition.”

“Do you know what that means, or are you just repeating words I’ve said before?”

Kel doesn’t answer. “You’re talented, dude! I’m gonna keep looking for your name in all these papers ‘til I see it.”

Basil does blush, at that. “Okay,” he says. He notices Aubrey in the doorway. “I, um, appreciate you guys’ support, e-even if you don’t understand how an internship works.” 

“Your stupid internship doesn’t understand how you work.” She yawns into the back of her hand.

Kel spins around, facing her. “Oh good, you’re up!”

She rolls her eyes. “And you’re already in my house.”

“Yep,” he says, giving her a weird look she doesn’t fully register. It disappears as quickly as it’d shown up. “I gotta tell you my plan.”

“We’re not doing any more yardwork for you. It’s almost December.” She crosses to the other side of the couch and sits next to him. 

He waves his hand in the air, shaking his head. “No, no, it’s a way better plan than that. Promise.”

Aubrey folds her arms. She tilts her head at Basil, but he only shrugs. “Alright. Go ahead, then,” she says. 

Kel grins. He clasps his hands together. “So, Sunny called you guys yesterday, too, right?” They nod, and he continues, “He called me right after. And he told me he’s moving out, but he doesn’t know where yet, and I thought, well, why not Nearby City?” He’s still smiling, looking especially proud of himself, now.

“You mean—” Basil chokes. “Like, where you go to school?”

He nods. “For sure! That’s totally where everyone thought he was going, when his mom said ‘the city,’ anyway.”

“So… he’d live with you?” Basil turns pale. Paler than average.

Kel slumps the tiniest amount. “Ah, no.” He forces a laugh. “I sorta… got a little excited, when I asked, and I guess I scared him.” He pauses, humming under his breath. “But, I did get him to agree to visit! Just to check it out sometime next semester, or something. And then I thought since it’s so close, maybe you two would wanna visit, too. You could even, I dunno, like, ease him into it. He’d probably be less scared, if we were all there.”

“There as in ‘your tiny-ass college dorm’ there?” Aubrey asks. 

“Aw, it’d only be for a couple nights! And my roommate leaves most weekends, so I bet we could even use his bed.”

“Uh-huh.” Still bad. Still tiny. 

But it wasn’t so awful, really, sleeping on Sunny’s bedroom floor this summer. It wasn’t so terrible, half-remembering the thrill of sleepovers, bickering over pillow forts and waking up next to other people. The dull spark in Basil’s eyes, now, and the much more apparent, eager spark in Kel’s— those aren’t terrible, either.

She tightens her arms around herself, fingers digging into her biceps. “How would we all even get there? You’re not allowed to bring your car to school.” Even if he was, the over-twenty-hour round trip to pick up the two of them and Sunny (not to mention dropping them off again) sounds like the premise of a horror movie, or a highly-unethical science experiment.

Kel curls a finger against his lip. “There’s a train that comes right to me from Sunny’s city, but…” His eyebrows furrow. “Not one that goes anywhere near Faraway Town, I think. And the bus doesn’t come anymore, either.”

Aubrey knows that. Every time Kel’s gone to and from college, so far, Hero’s driven him. She doubts he’d extend the same courtesy to herself and Basil. She extra-doubts he’d do it in the middle of the semester. 

Kel and Basil both turn to her, with the same begrudging, pleading look. Like they choreographed it, or something. 

“I dunno,” Kel says, hand falling from his face. “Don’t you know anyone else who drives?”

Aubrey frowns, biting down on the inside of her cheek. 

Because, technically.

She has the decency to steal a chocolate croissant from the pastry display at work, the morning before she asks. When she slides it across Kim’s dining room table, that afternoon, she’s met with a less enthusiastic response than she would’ve liked. 

“Bribing me with desserts. Now I know you want a favor.” Kim picks at the brown paper napkin it’s wrapped in. “You know I’m not twelve anymore, right?”

Aubrey seems to remember food-based-bribery working on her as recently as a couple months ago, but sure. “Can’t I bring you free food as—” She stutters, incriminatingly, and settles on, “—as a friend?” 

Kim narrows her eyes. A familiar, fed-up frown tugs at the corner of her lips, and yeah, Aubrey deserves that. ‘Friends’ isn’t the best word, considering. 

…Considering a lot. Considering that Aubrey intentionally did not stop at home (Basil’s house) before she came here, so that she’d still be wearing her work uniform, stupid green visor and all, because one time Kim said it looked cute on her. It makes you look like a strawberry, she joked, and flipped the hat the wrong way on Aubrey’s head, and poked her in the plastic nametag. And when Aubrey thinks about it, she’s not sure if she’s wearing the uniform as part of the bribe, or if she’s wearing it because she sort of liked being called cute, and made fun of, and—

No, obviously that can’t be it. Guys come up to the counter all the time and say she looks cute in her uniform, or try to joke with her, and she spits in those guys’ coffee while they aren’t looking. Or she crumbles in some leftover grounds, or puts on the lid wrong so it spills as soon as they take a sip. 

This is solely for bribery purposes. She doesn’t care if— She told Kim she’s not— She doesn’t— 

“You told me you’d get fired if you kept taking these,” Kim says, tearing off a corner of the croissant. 

“So? I’m gonna get fired for a lot of reasons.” Like spitting in the customers’ coffee. And taking unauthorized breaks to help Basil carry an entire newspaper editorial staff’s orders across the street. And loudly arguing with Kel whenever he stops by, because if he’s gonna pour fucking orange soda into his drink again, he should just stay home instead of torturing her while she’s on the clock. 

“Uh-huh.” Kim waits, rolling her piece of croissant around on the napkin.

Aubrey watches her push it back and forth. She glances up from Kim’s bony fingers and chipped nail polish, to the literal pieces of trash tied around her wrists, knotted strings and plastic straw wrappers. Then to her face. Bored expression, eyes downturned behind her smudged glasses. Her hair, mullet-like, both sides shaved by some girl she met in her college intro seminar, who Aubrey doesn’t think about. 

“I do need a favor,” she says. “Sorry.”

“A big one?” Kim finally takes her bite, and balances her cheek in her palm, chewing thoughtfully.

“I don’t know. It depends, I guess.” Aubrey should be honest with her. Straight-up. She deserves that much. “I need you to drive me to Nearby City. To— Kel’s school.”

Kim swallows. “Okay. When?”

“Sometime in January, he was saying. Maybe February. We—” Shit, wait, she should probably say that part, too, that’s the part Kim’s not gonna like. “Oh, uh, and by drive me, I mean drive me a-and, um. Basil.” She bites back a wince. “Sorry.”

“Hm.” Kim doesn’t quite succeed at keeping her lip from curling. “Kel doesn’t want to chauffeur you guys around anymore?”

“He’s got classes, I think. And we’d be going to him, so…”

Kim folds the napkin back over her pastry, pushing it to the side. “I have classes, too,” she says. 

“Yeah, but you still live here. And I swear you barely ever go to them.” 

“Of course I don’t.” She leans back in her chair and bites her bottom lip, deliberating. “It might be a good excuse to skip more, actually. What days would we be gone?”

We. Aubrey didn’t expect— Obviously Kim would be allowed to stay there, in Kel’s tiny-ass dorm room, but Aubrey never expected that she’d want to, instead of just making the drive and dropping them off. Kim still spends a lot of weekends with her, though, and this is another weekend, and Aubrey’s not going to tell her no. She hates telling her no. 

Kim tilts her head to one side, waiting on an answer. One hand rises, fiddling with a new ear piercing, and Aubrey hates to tell her no even though she does it all the time, now, every single time they see each other. I need time to think, she says, softening her words like she does for no-one else, like she’s still speaking into that greasy payphone, whispering across hundreds of miles. It’s not your fault. I just can’t give you what you want, right now.

“Friday through Monday, probably,” she says. “I’ll ask him again.” She pauses. It really, really isn’t Kim’s fault. “I’m not— If you seriously can’t, it’s fine. You’re not obligated to help me, or anything.” Her throat closes. Her face warms. Aubrey’s sure she likes Kim, even though Kim so often makes her small and stupid, and mysteriously incapable of speaking her mind. 

Kim huffs a laugh, locking her fingers together on the tabletop. “Obviously I don’t have to,” she says.

But they both know she’ll do it, anyway.

Two months pass too quickly. Kel goes to school, and comes back, and goes to school again. He gives Basil his mom’s old and largely-unused digital camera as a Christmas present, and Basil takes some photos around town that never show up in his newspaper. Aubrey’s manager catches her forgetting to tell every single customer about their new seasonal drinks, and chastises her, but doesn’t fire her just yet. 

She goes to church on Christmas Eve. She tells Basil he can stay home. He doesn’t. But he does stay in his seat after, so she can be on her own in the graveyard. That’s what he tells her, at least. She wonders if he’s ever visited Mari, even once, and snaps at him about it before she walks out the door, and apologizes when she gets back. He says it’s fine. He says he used to bring flowers, but he hasn’t been doing it as much lately. He says he knows it’s selfish, and inconsiderate, and Aubrey doesn’t disagree with him. She sleeps on the couch that night, tossing and turning in the glow of his Christmas tree.

On New Year’s she thinks about calling Hero. She decides against it. The seasonal drinks get taken off the menu. Aubrey smuggles home the last of the peppermint-flavored cake pops. She hates them, but Basil likes them, on days he chooses to stretch the definition of veganism. Kim thinks they taste alright. 

Snow falls and melts, and falls and freezes into a slick layer of ice, and melts again. Sunny calls about once a week. Aubrey doesn’t get any better at answering the phone, but neither does he. Aubrey doesn’t get any better at cooking, either, and maybe even gets a little worse. She sears all sorts of food into their pots and pans, leaving permanent burn marks and scratches. But the phone rings and the days pass, and at the end of January it’s Kel calling, instead, saying Hey, next weekend works, right?

Sort of. It’s too late for Aubrey to ask for the day off, so she calls out sick the morning of, and feels guiltier over it than she expects. Maybe some of the guilt is preemptive, is the guilt that gets trapped inside her while riding in Kim’s passenger’s seat, unable to escape over the loud hum of her pickup truck’s heater. She wants to apologize, or to thank her, or another pointless, stupid thing, but Basil’s already straining his voice to give directions, and it’s impossible to slip any unnecessary words between that, and the vehicle’s chorus of thrumming and wailing, and the radio static that is occasionally a country station, because Kim says it won’t turn off all the way no matter what she tries. Aubrey picks at a peeling patch of fake seat leather. She examines the shaved side of Kim’s head and thinks about running her hand over it. She tries to catch Basil’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but he stares at his roadmap with unswerving focus. 

The drive is less than an hour, though. Aubrey barely has time to complain. They park in front of a skinny row of naked trees that does little to obscure the train station across the street. The covered back of Kim’s truck juts out crooked from its parking space, but there’s only two other cars in the lot, so whatever. The sky shines with pearlescent, icy clouds. Basil takes a cautious step down from the back seat, and zips up his jacket. He frets with a knit hat while they walk to the train platform. 

Kel said to meet him there, and sure enough, he’s one of three people milling around between the benches. He sits on one, bouncing his left knee restlessly underneath an old clock. The hour hand hangs just underneath the ‘3.’ 

He notices them the minute they step foot under the canopy roof. It’d be hard not to, Aubrey guesses, with her bright hair and Basil’s neurotic movements and Kim also being there. 

“Hey!” he calls out, with a hand waving in the air, like they could ever not-notice him, either, in his eye-searing orange puffer jacket. He jumps off his bench and jogs over, stopping in front of them. “Wow, you actually made it! You guys are pretty early, too.”

“It helps having somebody who doesn’t break the car.” She grabs Kim’s shoulder, delights in the crooked smile that pulls at her cheek, the flash of eye-contact. 

“Ah, I’m sure she would’ve found a way after seventeen more hours.” Aubrey opens her mouth, intent on explaining that Kim actually tends to avoid driving into potholes and broken glass and other cars, and so do most people, and Kel is uniquely terrible at having a license. He interrupts before she gets the chance. “Anyway, yeah. The train’s not supposed to be here for another, uh.” He pulls down his sleeve to glance at his watch, which reads about five minutes earlier than the station clocks. “Twenty minutes, it looks like. So…” He glances around the empty station. A cold breeze blows through, scattering leaves and loose gravel over the train tracks before them, making Aubrey shove her hands into her jacket pockets. She narrows her eyes at Kel’s basketball shorts, because he’s somehow still wearing basketball shorts. She shivers just looking at him. 

That’s not necessarily the cold’s fault, though. He shrugs and sways on his feet, and says, “I saved a bench for you guys.”

The freezing metal bench in question only fits three people. Kel offers to stand next to it. He blabs on about the weather and about the area, but the blabbing mostly amounts to It’s cold! and Nearby has all the basic features of a city! so Aubrey tunes him out. She watches Basil twist and stretch the hem of his hat around his fingers until a thread snaps. He startles at the noise, tucks it under his legs, and settles for biting his lip and stuttering over one-word responses to Kel’s occasional questions.

Kim kicks rocks and trash towards the platform edge. More and more people climb the steps and take their places under the canopy. Aubrey hears at least one of them muttering about some asshole’s truck taking up half the parking lot. Kim’s paying too much attention to the pebble that almost, almost made it onto the tracks to notice.

“It’s right on the yellow line,” she says, when she catches Aubrey staring. “If one of these idiots would just kick it a little.”

“I think that’s the thing about the yellow line. That you’re not supposed to step on it, y’know,” Aubrey replies.

“Whatever, dude.” Kim knocks their shoulders together. 

But there’s not much else to do besides watch the rock, and tense up whenever somebody’s shoes pass in front of it, only for it to remain stationary, unchanged. Aubrey thinks, more than once, that she should stand up and go kick it herself, but maybe that’s not the point. Maybe that’s not what Kim wants, out of this. How’s Aubrey supposed to know? She’s not the one who made up the rules.

She feels the train before she sees it. Or, she sees the pebble vibrate against the chipped yellow paint, and becomes aware of the vibration she’s also feeling, on the bench, and the low noise from somewhere off to the right. The noise grows, and Kel stops talking, and several more people disobey the warning sign about keeping themselves away from the tracks. The train sputters closer. It crawls along, dull gray beneath the overcast sky. The city air sours, turns smokier in time with the screech of brakes. A loud, completely indiscernible announcement shrieks through the overhead speaker system. 

Basil jumps out of his seat. The train sweeps into the station, and sweeps his hair across his face. His hat falls on the ground. Aubrey picks it up, dusting it off, and stands next to him. 

“Don’t pass out,” she tells him.

“I won’t.” He frowns. He adds, quieter, barely audible against the slow rumble of the train in front of them, the commotion of footsteps around them, “I wish this wasn’t so terrifying.”

“Tough luck.” Aubrey stores the hat under her elbow. There’s no time to say anything more before the train stops. There’s no time to say maybe if you hadn’t covered up his sister’s murder, it wouldn’t be. She’s sure he knows already. 

After a breathtaking, motionless pause, the doors squeal open. Several sets of doors at once, all up and down the platform. 

She turns to Kel. “You don’t remember which car he’s in.”

He chuckles, rubbing the back of his neck and looking away from her. Great. 

The ensuing search is about as hellish as she’d expected. The crowd froths around them, loud and uncaring. Aubrey loses and reunites with both Kel and Kim multiple times. Basil clings to her elbow, and simultaneously pretends not to be hiding himself behind her, and it's sort of annoying, being hid behind, but if he’s gonna do it he should at least commit. A middle-aged guy rolls his gigantic suitcase right over Aubrey’s shoes, and then backtracks, and somehow also slams the side of it into Basil’s shins. She considers yelling after him, but the cloud of cologne and body odor is so intense that if she tried to open her mouth, she’d probably gag.

She grips the end of Basil’s sleeve and pushes through. Kel stands half a head taller than the rest of everyone, so he’s not difficult to locate. She follows him through to a small and slightly clearer section, and he’s already yelling. 

“Sunny!” he calls, with his hand back in the air. “Hey! Over here!” 

Aubrey pulls Basil through into the semi-clearing, standing between him and the few people trailing off to the stairs. They pass, revealing another, smaller person a couple feet away. Darkly dressed, distinctly unmoving. He blinks into the sunlight like he’s just woken up. 

Kel approaches and loops an arm around Sunny’s back, mindful of the duffel bag he’s clutching at his side. Sunny hardly reacts. He might squint some more. 

“Alright, bud.” Kel pats his shoulder, scanning out over the top of the crowd. “Let’s get somewhere else first, okay?” 

The two of them join Aubrey and Basil, and they all head for one of the staircases. They recover Kim there, too, backed up against one of the canopy’s support poles, scrubbing at and grumbling over the coffee somebody spilled down the front of her bomber jacket. 

“Ugh, what a dick,” she says, when they reach her. “Learn to press the freakin’ lid on right.”

Aubrey shrugs. “Maybe he hit on his barista.” And, in the face of Kim’s confusion, “Nevermind. We’re going back to the car now.”

Kim takes one look at Sunny, and another look at Basil, and doesn’t question it. 

The parking lot is still crowded, but not nearly as much. Noise dissipates into the open air. Their group slots into the slanted gap between Kim’s truck and a smaller, sleeker black car to its immediate left. The space isn’t really big enough for five people, but Aubrey guesses they’re going to have to get used to that. Kel takes Sunny’s bag from him and busies himself storing it in the truckbed. Basil hangs off of Aubrey’s shoulder, still, and Sunny collapses across from him, his back braced against the truck’s back door. He lets out a heavy breath, and his left eye closes, and his right eye— doesn’t, really. Not all the way. The lid stops short, flinches upwards, and it’s not that noticeable. 

Unless somebody’s standing right beside him. Kim puts her hand on the driver’s side door handle, looks at him for about half a second, and says, “What’s wrong with your eye?”

Aubrey ignores the quiet, pathetic whimper from behind her, and grabs her shoulder. “Kim.” 

“What?” She glances from Sunny, to the hand on her shoulder, and back to him. She scowls, and it's the same scowl as when they put the keychains at Hobbeez in a locked glass case because she kept stealing them, utter confusion, and damn it, how long has it been since she’s actually seen Sunny? She can’t have seen him since he moved, and she wouldn’t have seen him in the days before, either, and oh, shit—

Sunny helpfully chooses this moment to bring his fingers to his face, and pop the eye out of its socket. 

“What the fuck?” Kim’s voice cracks, and god, somebody really should have told her, and probably that person is Aubrey, but at least Sunny seems too exhausted to care. He drops the eye in his coat pocket and rubs at his eyelid, and Kim opens her mouth to say something else, and Aubrey grips her tighter and says, “Get in the car.”

The beginning of her next outburst morphs into a small, subdued, “okay,” and a vague nod of the head. She tugs open the door, climbs in. Basil jumps at the noise, when she pulls it closed again. Over the last couple seconds he’s adopted a fixed grimace, squinting, biting at his knuckles. He hasn’t broken skin, though, and Sunny’s with him in a partial sense, so Aubrey says, “I’ll be right back,” and loops around to the passenger’s seat. 

Inside, she’s met with the re-opening of Kim’s mouth, a twitch of her eyebrows and an immediate, intensely-whispered, “Uh, Aubrey, what the hell was that? Would you tell me what the hell that was?”

Aubrey holds up a hand. “Hey, chill out, okay? Just calm down.”

“Your—” Kim sputters. “Sure, I’m calm. One of your crazy-ass boyfriends just popped his eyeball out of his head, but I’m calm.”

“Don’t— He’s not—” Aubrey pinches the bridge of her nose. “It’s a prosthetic, Kim. Sunny’s missing his eye. I forgot to tell you. Sorry.”

“Missing? As in he fucking— misplaced it? Or what?” 

“No, he…” Oh god, how did no-one ever tell her? Isn’t this the sort of thing they put in the news? Then again, Kim probably doesn’t read newspapers, and she’s complained to Aubrey before about hating small-town gossip, or maybe just hating her mom’s gossip, and so tuning all of it out on principle. Aubrey stares at the truck's gear shift. “He, uh, got in a fight.”

“A fight? With wh—?” Her jaw clamps shut. She whips around to look out the window. “Oh.” Her eyes widen in the reflection.

“You knew they both went to the hospital,” Aubrey says.

“And Basil came back with some bruises, yeah. Was I supposed to just assume Sunny got his entire eye ripped out?”

“…No.” Aubrey crosses her arms, and adds, stubbornly, “And Basil didn’t rip it out. He had, y’know.” Pruning shears feels too stupid to say, somehow. Just because Aubrey’s admitting to her best friend’s history of violent psychosis doesn’t mean she has to also admit to his history of being a massive loser. Who kills themself with gardening tools? “A weapon.”

“Oh, great. Awesome.” Kim faces her. “So all of your friends stab people.”

Huh. “Mostly just those two.”

“Good thing we left them alone out there, then.”

“It—” It’ll be fine, Aubrey wants to say, but that doesn’t sound super reassuring, and it’s pretty unfounded, because how does she even know it’ll be fine? All she knows is Sunny and Basil were friends once, but they were also accomplices once, and another time they almost killed each other, and Basil hasn’t taken his meds in god-knows-how-long and Sunny’s pretty out of it, and she can’t bring herself to be concerned, somehow. Maybe she just doesn’t care if they hurt each other again. Or maybe—

She realizes it with a plunging sensation in her chest, a deep dread. Maybe she trusts them not to hurt each other again. 

“Kel’s out there, too,” she says. It doesn’t make the feeling go away. 

“Kel has no clue what’s happening. He hasn’t even figured out I have to be the one to unlock the truckbed.” Kim fidgets with the keyring in her hand, presses a button. There’s a soft thunk from behind them, and Kel’s muffled voice. Ah, there it goes!

Aubrey sighs through her nose. She’s running out of arguments, and she doesn’t even want to argue with Kim. So she just sighs, and leans back in her seat, accepting her temporary defeat. In the silence, they hear more voices. 

…eight hours. I’m not supposed to wear it that long. 

Oh. Or else it, um. Does it… hurt you?

A pause, the length of a head shake. It’s uncomfortable. Like a rock in your shoe. But in your face.

Okay. The wind catches Basil’s hair. It twists against the gray sky, in the bottom corner of the driver’s-side window. I think— Y-you might’ve really scared Kim just now.

She tenses at the mention of her name, elbow jerking towards the button to roll down the window. 

Aubrey catches it. “Stop that.”

“I’m not scared.” She rolls her eyes. Flops into her seat. “I was just surprised. I dunno.” 

Cars around them have begun to move now, shifting around the lot, bumbling off into the larger city. The train station empties in front of them. The trunk closes, and Kel’s head appears around the side of the truck. 

“I should’ve warned you,” Aubrey says. She’s saved from her debate over adding sorry, by the abrupt opening of the back door. 

Sunny lifts himself inside first, and slides so he’s sitting behind her. After a brief hold-up, Kel climbs in, then Basil. A short silence sinks around them.

Kim pats her steering wheel cover. “Can I assume you know the way back to your dorm, or…?”

“Oh! Yeah.” Kel leans forward, elbows on his knees, a hand on his chin. That’s never a good sign. “Hm, well, my roommate actually has class until 4:30 today, and he promised he’d be out of our way by five, so.”

Aubrey finishes the thought for him, out of the goodness of her heart. “So we’re stranded for the next two hours?” 

“So we have an hour and a half to hang out.” He nods, pleased with himself. He manages not to notice Sunny slumped against the window beside him, giving him a minor death-glare, looking vaguely like a bug somebody squashed into a tissue. “Ooh, I know just what to show you guys! Here, Kim, I’ll give you directions.” 

Kim’s knuckles press white against her skin, fingers tight around the wheel. Her face pinches, and her lips fight for another scowl. She nods anyway, blinking at Aubrey before motioning him to continue. 

The local mall is not as disastrous of a layover as Aubrey predicted, when they pulled into the parking lot and its massive triangular entrance towered above the trees. It’s crowded on a Friday afternoon, which anyone besides Kel could’ve guessed at, but the tall ceilings and endless walkways give them much more room than the train station. 

They camp out in one of the big department stores on one end, for the bright lights and calmer atmosphere. Middle aged women shop wordlessly, without paying a lot of attention to Aubrey, or her depositing Sunny on one of the display beds at the back of the first floor. Kel quickly goads Kim into this stupid game where they race up the down escalator, which she agrees is stupid up until the first and only time she beats him. At that point she laughs in his face, and demands a series of rematches to prove it wasn’t a fluke. 

Sunny and Basil seem uninterested in the escalators. Aubrey herself is uninterested in seeing any of her friends throw up, and so hangs back in the furniture section with them. Sunny slouches on the edge of a hot pink zebra-print-patterned duvet, leaning sideways against the sign attached to the headboard. 20 percent off on all twin-sized bedsheets! His eye sags half-closed. The end of his long black jacket pools around him. Aubrey makes Basil browse the table lamps and decorative ceramic pots with her, to give him space, but they keep him in their line of sight. Basil peers anxiously around a lampshade.

“This is kinda cute,” Aubrey says, poking at the pink pot of a fake plant.

Basil hums without looking. Then his eyebrows pull together, and his head turns. “What?” he says, frowning at the plant. “No it’s not.”

“Sure it is. I’d put it in my room,” she shrugs. Not that she has a bedroom anymore, really. Not one she spends any time in. 

“C-come on, be serious.” His frown deepens. 

“I am serious.”

“I— I’ll give you a plant, Aubrey. A not-plastic one.”

“I just meant the pot was cute.” She could stop there, and annoy him a little less. Basil’s gaze wanders, threatens to stretch across the display table again, and then he’ll get weird and pensive and hard to talk to. A woman holding a pack of dish towels strolls past, eclipsing the hot-pink-zebra bed. Basil goes rigid. 

“And if it’s plastic, I wouldn’t have to take care of it,” Aubrey says, miming dismissiveness.

“What?” Basil pivots. He looks disgusted. “You’re kidding me.”

Her eyebrows lift. She hadn’t expected that to work so well. “Um, no?”

“It’s a— succulents are so easy! A-and I have like a million of them. You barely have to water them.”

“They all look the same, don’t they?”

“No, no, it’s not the same.” He shakes his head. “You’re just being disrespectful, now. Y-you know I— I’ll show you how to water it, okay?”

“Geez, calm down. I know plants are like your thing, or whatever, but I didn’t know you were so pretentious about them.”

“I’m not being— you’re— I—”

The woman with the dish towels chuckles under her breath. Aubrey squints up at her. She’s in her forties like all the other customers, hiding a grin behind her wedding-ringed hand.

“Sorry,” she says. “I don’t mean to eavesdrop. You two are just so spirited. You make such an odd couple.”

Aubrey’s fingers curl into her palms. She can’t help baring her teeth, can’t help opening her mouth, and she doesn’t know what she wants to say before she’s saying, “He’s my brother.”

The woman’s smile shrinks, like she’s trying to tuck it behind her lips. She stammers through a clipped, bashful apology that Aubrey can’t make out the actual content of, and then she hurries off to the kitchenware section. Aubrey watches her flee with a gratified thrumming behind the ribs. 

Basil moves at the edge of her vision. He tilts his head. “Why’d you say that?”

She breaks eye contact, adjusts the fake plant on its display. “I dunno.” That’s true, she thinks. She doesn’t know why she said it. She and Basil aren’t… family. But they’re more family than they are couple, and she needed that woman to know she was wrong, somehow. Even if she doesn’t know what’s right. 

“I don’t know,” she says again. “That kinda stuff annoys me.”

“When people think we’re dating?”

“Yeah. Doesn’t it just piss you off?”

He purses his lips, like he’s never seriously considered it. Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he’s used to living lies, giving false appearances, letting people believe what they want about him. 

“I guess not,” he says. Easily, almost thoughtless, and Aubrey half-expects to be pissed at him, too, but she isn’t. The other half of her understands that it might be better, generally, if people are wrong about them. “We’re together all the time now, so…” He smiles wickedly. “Well, it all looks the same, doesn’t it?”

Okay. Now she’s pissed. “Shut up.” She kicks at his ankle without any force. “I was just being annoying. I totally respect your flowers, or whatever the hell you want from me.” She takes a step backwards, flipping her hair out of her face so she can get a clearer assessment on the pink zebra bed. Sunny’s still sitting there, but he’s definitively sitting now, instead of caving in on himself. He swings his legs over the edge. Aubrey relaxes somewhere she didn’t know existed, to see this small proof of life. 

“Alright, let’s go,” she tells Basil, who is, predictably, already looking. “Sunny seems like he can probably walk on his own again. I’m gonna take him to Hot Topic.”

Basil makes a face. “I don’t like that store.”

Aubrey pats him between the shoulders. He’ll get over it. 

If she underestimated the mall, she severely overestimated Kel’s dorm room. They make it to the building well after six, after spending too long in Hot Topic, and even longer figuring out which garage Kim is allowed to park in. Any vitality Sunny had regained, flipping through band t-shirts and trying on fingerless gloves, vanishes after a fifteen minute walk down a series of dark sidewalks, with an added climb up three flights of stairs. Irritation grates up the back of Aubrey’s neck, fingering across her scalp as Kel drops his key for the second time in a row. 

And then, of course, the room itself is tiny. Aubrey had fully expected this, and it still surprises her, just how small it is. A mall that put their pathetic shopping center back home to shame, and a city-sized campus that could fit at least five Faraway Towns inside its borders, and they could barely afford Kel ten square-feet of his own. 

Standing in the doorway, Aubrey could take five steps forward and end up with her nose pressed to the single window. Lights glitter outside, taunting. The amber sheen of streetlamps, endlessly repeating, the glowing yellow rectangles of a hundred other windows in buildings that stretch far above theirs, a goddamn water tower with a spotlight facing the letters written across the side: NBCU. An entire other world worth of space, and still Kel has to shove their suitcases in his closet so they can all stand next to each other. 

A flat, white light buzzes on the ceiling, flickering onto the pale beige walls and dark carpeted floors. Lofted beds stand parallel, pressed into the back corners. The foot of Kel’s— identifiable by the rumpled orange bedspread and posters of sweaty men in sports jerseys stuck to the surrounding walls— points towards the door. The other bed, tucked to the right of the two desks that occupy the space under the window, bears dark green sheets, and a plaid blanket clinging to one half of the mattress. Most of it drapes onto the dusty floor. Kel frowns. 

“Aw, man.” He makes it to the desks in two strides, picking up a miniature trash can on his way. He sweeps a few empty cans from the surface of his roommate’s desk into it. “Sorry guys. I asked him to clean up a little before he left, but I guess he forgot.”

“Or he was already mad about you kicking him out so that four strangers could sleep on his floor, and didn’t bother,” Aubrey says. 

“Nah.” Kel puts the trashcan back, and slides a textbook titled Introduction to Business into one of the desk drawers. “He’s a chill guy. He goes home most weekends, anyway.”

Aubrey eyes the right half of the room. The only item of decoration on the wall is a big American flag, but instead of red, white and blue, it’s three different shades of camo. 

“And you can take the bed if you want, Aubrey. He won’t mind,” Kel adds. 

A sticky note on his bedpost reads Isaiah 40:31 in messy handwriting. Aubrey thinks she’d rather not stare at that while attempting sleep tonight, trying and failing to remember how the verse goes. “Basil and Sunny can have it.” 

Kim snorts, from somewhere behind her, even though it wasn’t a joke. From somewhere else behind her, Basil launches into a bout of stammering. 

“It’s— th— it’s too small, isn’t it? F-for both of us.”

“You’re both small dudes. No offense. This one’s not any different from Sunny’s bed, back at his apartment.” Kel crosses over to it, and does his best to straighten the blanket. 

“U-um.” Basil’s voice shakes, badly, and for her own sake Aubrey doesn’t look over her shoulder at him. “Why— wh-what does that— i-is that, uh, relevant?”

“Well, yeah.” Kel doesn’t even pause what he’s doing. “You shared that one.”

And then everywhere behind her is quiet. Kim stops laughing. Basil stops arguing. Sunny steps forward and stands next to Kel. 

He hesitates, drawing his eye up and down the length of the bed, before stretching out an open-palmed hand and pressing it firmly to the mattress. A couple seconds pass.

“Three,” Sunny says.

“Huh?” Kel’s still got the edge of the comforter, like he means to straighten it some more. “What was that?”

Sunny blinks. “Nothing.” He retracts his hand. “These sheets have crumbs on them.”

Kel makes a low, dissatisfied noise. His cheek puckers inward. Then he changes course completely, piling the blankets into the center of the bed and reaching across to untuck the bedsheets. He wraps them up around the blanket, and pulls off the pillowcase, too. “That’s okay. We’ll take them to the laundry room.” He balls it all together, holds it in place with his elbow, and retrieves a bottle of detergent from under his own bed. Sunny tags along behind him while he maneuvers to the doorway again. 

“Be back in a sec!” Kel says. “You guys make yourselves at home.” Then he’s in the hall, around the side of the doorframe and past the bulletin board with tips on responsible alcohol use. 

The room falls into an abrupt, uncomfortable pause. Basil is the first to break out of his stupor. Wide-eyed and red-faced, his breath catches. “H-how…? Kel…?”

And Aubrey just doesn’t have the patience to explain to him that Sunny only using half of his empty bed, the last three mornings they spent at his apartment, was actually very noticeable. She gives Basil a blank stare. He glances between her and Kim. 

“I’ll, uh— I’ll go w-with them, too.” he says. Then he leaves.

He leaves them alone. Kim barely waits for him to get out of earshot. 

She rounds on Aubrey. She takes the courtesy to whisper, at least. “And they’re gay?”

“What?” There’s not nearly enough space in this room. Aubrey steps back. “I don’t know.”

“C’mon, be serious,” Kim hisses. “Sunny’s wearing nail polish. And Basil is—” She rolls her eyes, crosses her arms. “Well, you know. He’s your best friend.”

“What is that supposed to—?” Aubrey groans. “Why does it even matter?”

“It doesn’t. I’m just surprised. You just didn’t mention any of this.”

“Any of what? It’s not like they’re actually dating. They’re just— weird. Am I supposed to tell you every time my friends act weird?”

“I don’t know,” Kim says, very quickly. Her mouth presses into a frown. She pushes her glasses up along the bridge of her nose, turns her face away like a scorned puppy. “I don’t know. Sorry.”

The apology twists under Aubrey’s skin, writhes corrosive in her stomach. She swallows nothing. She wants to remind Kim never to apologize, because they’re not the kind of people who apologize, and they never have been, and not everything needs to change at once.

“It’s fine”, she says, or else she’ll be the one saying sorry to Kim, and if she starts she might never stop. Her shoulders sag. “Let’s clear up some floor space.”

Kim lets out a slow, heavy breath. She uncrosses her arms and nods. 

Neither of them want to touch the mess of dirty laundry under the roommate’s bed, so they reorganize the mess of storage containers under Kel’s, instead. Aubrey expects to find something living down there, but all that’s in the boxes is extra school supplies and heavy winter clothing, and some crumpled worksheets and protein bar wrappers that missed the garbage can. A smaller shoebox behind his minifridge catches her attention. She lifts the top to find a disorganized stack of old papers, holiday and birthday cards, folded notebook pages with handwritten messages. She flips through some, and sees her own name, and then stops, tucking the box back into hiding. 

She helps Kim roll out the sleeping bag they brought, smoothing the top half into the new space under the bed. They also steal one of Kel’s pillows, to sacrifice to the floor. The results are uninspiring. Aubrey’s seen military bunks less depressing than this. 

“…Maybe I should’ve asked, before forcing you onto the floor with me,” she tells Kim.

Kim winks. “Force me wherever you want,” she replies, sharply, a pinprick straight to all the strange stuff inside Aubrey’s chest. “I don’t care.” Sudden and icewater-cold.

Aubrey recoils, and she also smiles, and she also brings her hand up to ruffle Kim’s hair. Her thumb skims over one shaved side, and her fingers tangle. The motion of it jostles Kim’s glasses crooked. She laughs. She pretends to push Aubrey away, and gives up very quickly. Sighing, letting Aubrey’s hand settle at the nape of her neck. 

Kim’s pulse races beneath her fingertips. Her breath shudders. She’s never been very good at pretending. 

Aubrey has some trouble sleeping that night. Their flayed-out sleeping bag provides little cushioning against the scratchy carpet. The darkness feels paler than it should be, gray and lifeless and unconcealing. Kel’s minifridge hums beside her head. Kim snores, on the other side. 

Her snoring isn’t particularly bad, though. Not like the loud, wall-shaking breaths from above them. Kim snores softly, inconsistently, buried into her half of the pillow. Aubrey could live with this, if she had to. She stares at the dark spill of Kim’s hair over the pillowcase, the curving shape of her shoulders beneath the thin white blanket they found in the closet. She thinks she remembers this blanket draped over the back of Kel and Hero’s couch, a million years ago. 

She turns away, and blinks up at the wooden slats under the bed until sleep claims her. 

It rescinds the claim pretty quickly. Most do, when it comes to Aubrey. She blinks awake to more, lighter gray. Dryer-lint, tapwater gray. Kim’s curled further in on herself, somewhat, and a stray limb hangs over the edge of the mattress above them, signalling some passage of time. Aubrey peels half of the old throw blanket off of her legs, and slips out as gracefully as she can. 

She finds her footing in the middle of the room. Pale sunlight froths along the edges of the window blinds. The alarm clock on Kel’s desk reads, in red LEDs, 6:34. 

She takes stock of the dorm. Kel’s sprawled in his own bed, and Sunny sleeps flat-backed, like a cadaver, in his roommates’, with Basil clinging parasitically to his left arm. Aubrey tiptoes to the closet, reaches into her backpack for socks and toiletries, then moves on to the main door. She turns the handle, slow and silent, kicks aside one of Kel’s stray tennis shoes, and ventures out into the hall. 

He gave them a brief tour of the building last night. To point out the bathroom and vending machines, the common area and balcony, the room belonging to a girl who snuck in her pet hamster, and another room belonging to two guys in his required math course who invited him to lunch once and haven’t spoken to him since. All the important places. 

Aubrey steps into the bathroom. She goes through the motions, brushing her teeth and fixing her hair while the sun shifts yellow through the tiny, propped-open window at the end of four other sinks. Cracks branch from the corners of the long, rectangular mirror. The heater isn’t turned on high enough. Cold air and cleaning products sting her nose, singe the points where her eyelids meet her eyes. She squints at herself. Small and sour-faced, the first millimeters of black starting to show at her scalp. Bluish-green bathroom tiles repeat endlessly around her. Her eyes look soft and smudgy. Like tired, bleeding charcoal. 

Not tired enough for the movement at the doorway to go unnoticed. A dark shape blocks the fuzzy artificial hallway light, and pauses behind her. Her eyes flick up. 

“This is the girl’s bathroom, Sunny,” she says. 

He doesn’t respond. He stares, his shoulder braced on the wall outside, a hand curled around the doorframe. And Aubrey hadn’t really noticed his hands before, but now she sees that he is wearing nail polish. Or, he’s wearing the remnants of nail polish, all chipped off in uneven clusters. Aubrey feels around in the little bag she brought with her. 

“Here,” she says, holding her own bottle out to him by its cap. “You should fix that.”

He leans forward, zeroing in on it like a cat tracking an insect. He blinks, and pads over. He’s wearing one checkerboard-patterned sock, and one purple. Slowly, he takes the nail polish, and sets it on the rim of the sink next to her. 

Aubrey does her best not to watch him, while he takes his toothbrush from his back pocket. He brushes his teeth. The faucet drips onto a browning water stain on the porcelain below. She guesses she must’ve woken him when she left. She occupies herself with her eye makeup, so she won’t be tempted to gawk at him putting in his prosthetic, or scrutinize the way he picks off the remaining black on his nails, and carefully unscrews the bottle she gave him.

For all her efforts, she sees everything in the mirror, anyway. She quickly runs out of distractions, and hesitates for a while with a lipgloss wand an inch from her lips while he squints at his nails. He manages the left hand okay. Shakily, with a noticeable struggle to line the brush up to the bottle, but he does manage. The right hand gives him more trouble. He paints a stripe up the side of his thumb, and his eyebrows twitch with minute frustration. 

“Do you need help?” Aubrey asks, and cringes, because she hates it when people ask her that. 

But Sunny is different from her. Sunny’s the kind of guy who follows his friends into communal bathrooms, so he won’t have to brush his teeth by himself. He nods, and offers up the nail polish, and his hand. There’s a part of him, Aubrey thinks, disconcertingly, that will always remember being a younger brother. 

She holds his hand, flat-palmed on top of hers. She paints his nails. She says, “I used to do this for Basil, too.” Instead of saying, Mari used to do this for me.

“Used to?” Sunny whispers. 

Well obviously she can’t do it anymore. But that’s not the part he’s talking about. “Yeah. I guess his job doesn’t like it. Professionalism, or whatever. He’s told you about his job.”

“His internship,” Sunny says. Is he correcting her, or just saying it?

She finishes his nails with practiced accuracy. She slips the bottle into her bag, and is about to put back her eyeliner, too, but Sunny tilts his head at her, and it, and she makes the split-second decision to twist off the cap. She takes his chin between her thumb and pointer finger. He complies, and barely even flinches this time when she brings the tip to his eyelid. 

“So are you like, emo now?” She can’t keep herself from asking. On weekends she works with a high schooler who sort of reminds her of him, with darker eyeshadow and blacker clothes. It’s hard to imagine Sunny with a face piercing, though, or dying stripes into his hair.

He shrugs. She finishes with his left eye, and sweeps his bangs out of the way of his right. 

“Okay.” The pen tip ghosts over his scar, jumps across the odd millimeter of waterline where his eyelashes won’t grow back. Black glass reflects the motion of her hand. He doesn’t flinch at all, on this side. 

His hair slips between her fingers. “Y’know I get that you’re missing an eye and stuff,” Aubrey says, backing away. “But maybe it’d also help if your hair wasn’t in your face all the time. You and Basil are both so lazy. It’s like neither of you owns a pair of scissors.”

He faces the mirror. Aubrey does, too, to better assess his hair, which splays thin, partway down his neck and over his ears. His bangs cover his eyebrows

“Or you could try actually styling it once in a while.” Because maybe it’s a good thing, if he and Basil don’t own scissors. Aubrey combs her fingers over the top of his head. She tucks his hair behind his ears and parts it away from his face, and attempts to smooth his cowlick, to no avail. Still, that should be—

She looks in the mirror and is stunned, momentarily, by the neatness and the length of his hair, the vaguely feminine upturn of his eyes, beneath the makeup. The fact that he’s standing next to her. He was gone almost as long, alive in only the occasional glimpse, the incidental conversation, and here he is. At her side.

He speaks as plainly as ever. “I look like—”

“Yeah. I know.”

His reflection reaches up, untidies his hair. It falls over his forehead again. Aubrey reminds herself to breathe. 

“I did this before,” he whispers. “Once. Mari had a school dance, and she had to dress fancy and do her makeup. So she wanted to practice on me, first.” He looks aside, to the tiny window weeping sunrise onto the walls and floor. “Our parents got really mad.” 

In the onset of morning, shadows in the corners lighten to purple, and fade away. 

“You can be angry at me,” Sunny says.

“I’m not.” And she really isn’t. 

He frowns. He doesn’t believe her. Aubrey guesses she wouldn’t believe herself, either. 

The sink drips. “I think I’m just more sad, than angry,” she says. “And when I act angry, it’s just because I’m so— frustrated, that I still feel like this. I’m just so frustrated that there’s nothing I can do. I don’t know.” She crosses her arms. “I didn’t really mean all that stuff I said to you back then. You know that, right?”

“When I came outside?”

“No. In the hospital.” She weaves a strand of hair between her fingers. “It’s not— I mean, it is your fault, but you don’t need me to tell you that. I don’t know what you need.” She swallows. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Sunny says, barely above a whisper. He examines his nails. “I don’t know, either.”

“Mhm.” Maybe she should feel lighter, for saying it. She mostly feels the same. Angry and sad. Sad and angry. An endless feedback loop. She follows his gaze.

“They’re probably good, now,” she tells him, and somehow it helps. Somehow it always helps to tell him things. “It’s the quick-dry stuff, so.”

He nods. He closes a fist around his toothbrush while Aubrey finishes up. She doesn’t take long, giving herself a once-over in the mirror before walking out with him. The two of them round the side of the doorway and come face-to-face with Kim. Seeing them, she jumps up from her position leaning against the wall. She meets Aubrey’s eyes from beneath her eyebrows, above the rim of her glasses, her chin tucked guiltily to her neck. 

Aubrey chooses not to ask her how long she’d been eavesdropping. She puts forward a stiff “good morning,” and then walks by. 

Kel’s extended advertisement of Nearby City lasts the entire morning, and into the afternoon, without even a single glance in the direction of an apartment available for rent. Instead, he takes them across way too much of his college campus, pointing out four different dining halls, a tall glass skywalk between two buildings he doesn’t know how to get into, and a bench he once took a nap on. 

“It was a really good nap,” he says, shrugging, when Aubrey finally interrupts to ask him what the hell they’re still doing here. It’s not like Sunny’s gonna enroll at his giant, peppy college. Aubrey honestly doesn’t think Sunny graduated high school. 

She doesn’t say any of this, but Kel gets the message. He ushers them off-campus, finally, to the first in a series of every pointless landmark the city has to offer. 

The seasonal hot chocolate stand is passable. It reminds her a little too much of work, watching the bored attendant assemble paper cup and plastic lid and cardboard sleeve, and it’s like nine in the morning, which is absurdly early for hot chocolate. 

It does warm her up, though. Past the work memories, she’s reminded of snow days. Crowding too close to Hero and Mari at the stovetop, scolding Kel when he tried carrying all six mugs down from the cabinet at once. And Sunny and Basil would tuck themselves away at the corner table, and the city is all dull and wintry grey-blue-beige, but Basil’s reaching into his pocket, touching the side of his cup to Sunny’s.

“You too,” he says to Aubrey, because she’s standing so close. She toasts to them, and waits for Basil to position his digital camera above their drinks and their trinity of gloved hands.

Click. Flash. 

This city’s park is much bigger than the one where Sunny lives, and much more… decorated. 

They stand in front of one of several war memorials dotted along the main pathway. This one features a tall stone pedestal with a weathered metal plaque, topped with an even taller, even more weathered statue of some guy in a jacket and a pointy hat, a rifle propped over his shoulder. Kel leans forward, scanning the engraving with his chin held in the crux of his thumb and pointer finger. 

“...Guess he won a battle here, or something,” he’s telling Sunny, who stands next to him, looking severely uninterested. 

“The statue’s kinda cool, I guess,” Kel continues. He stands taller. “Some of them have horses, though, and that’s more fun. Maybe if you were into history and stuff…” He turns to Sunny, and smiles. “Hey, I know what you might—”

Basil shifts at Aubrey’s elbow, pouncing fast and silent on the image of them framed by the plaque. 

Click. Flash. 

Kel assures them no cars drive on the road under this overpass, and even though Aubrey saw the traffic cones and road work signs herself, she’s not gonna walk right down the middle of the street. The concrete rumbles and echoes above them. Clinging to the walls presents some problems of its own. Aubrey slips on the frozen puddle that’s pooled in the corner, and grabs Basil’s arm and nearly takes him down with her. One of his legs shoots out behind himself, to balance, and he kicks Kim in the shin. Kel treks on, oblivious to all of this, and oblivious to Sunny white-knuckling the fabric of his jacket shoulder.   

“Here, this one’s really good,” he says, pointing to one of the concrete walls. Intermittent graffiti of varying quality spatters the dusty gray. Aubrey sees lots of people’s names, lots of initials framed with hearts. An abundance of dicks. She follows the line of Kel’s finger, which directs her eyes somewhere between a pretty mural of some koi fish, and a short phrase spray-painted in messy, dripping red. 

“Justice for sluts,” Aubrey reads aloud.

“What?” Kel looks over his shoulder. “No, I— what? I meant the fish.” He squints. “Uh, I think the other one’s new.”

And the fish are impressive, when she looks at them. The blue background is blended well, and the curved outlines of their fins are thin and even, which Aubrey knows must’ve taken skill. She always screws up the first outline, and has to go over it at least twice more before it doesn’t look like shit.

Sunny, for his part, glances over the fish in favor of another piece in the corner, right at the edge of the tunnel. Weeds push through the cement and concrete, covering the back half of a wobbly, animal-esque figure. Sunny secures his feet on solid, ice-free ground, and crouches down to the drawing. He flinches from the echo of his own shoes, scraping pebbles below him. 

A bright light spasms across the darkness. 

Click. Flash.

“Come on, it can’t be that good.” Aubrey flicks at Basil’s hair. One of the weird strands that hangs in front of his ears. 

Basil curls away from her, closer to Sunny, shielding the open book between them. “It’s interesting,” he defends, weakly. Sunny slips the rightmost page from under Basil’s thumb and turns it, while he’s talking. “I know you’re not a big reader, Aubrey, but—”

“I read,” she says. She crosses her arms, leaning to the side against the bookshelf. Her shoulder meets a section of paperback spines, sliding them to the back of the shelf with a muted clunk. The laminated sign attached to the top row proclaims, nonspecifically, “Fiction.” The rest of the bookstore is similarly modest, especially compared to the other downtown storefronts they’ve passed. It’s all warm shades of brown, a heater humming in the front corner, classical music percolating through the building, the earthy smell of old paper. 

Of all places to meander in, it’s not the worst. But also, it’s been a while, and Aubrey’s starting to get hungry, and sick of listening to Kim and Kel disagree about the test they took on Frankenstein in senior year, even though she knows neither of them actually read the whole thing. 

“Comics don’t count,” Basil says, with a small shake of the head. 

“Sure they do,” Aubrey replies. The fact that this store has none of them doesn’t mean anything, aside from the owner being pretentious. 

“They do,” Sunny adds simply, not taking his eyes off the book. Basil purses his lips. He looks stupid when he does that. Aubrey stands straight, angles her head around the side of him. She spots the corner of Kel’s mom’s old camera poking out from his jacket pocket, and darts forward, snatching it. 

“Hey!” He notices immediately. “What are you doing with that?”

“I dunno.” She backs up, locating the power button, waiting for the screen to come to life. “Same thing you do.” It blips on, blurring and focusing on the scene before her. 

Aubrey only hesitates for a moment, to see it. The camera frames them, and the book between them, and there are some images she knows by heart. She can’t help thinking of a different camera, a different book, a different them. She can’t help thinking of a different person on the other side of the picture. 

Basil gives her a wondering smile, and Sunny finally lifts his head, and she stops thinking about it. She presses the shutter button. 

Click. Flash.

What the diner apparently lacks in edible food, it makes up for in decor. Aubrey feels like she’s in Grease. But a lot less crowded, and with a lot less yelling from the other room to turn off that musical shit, already. 

They sit at a table right next to a big window that faces out toward the sidewalk, in all its dull noontime glory. Kel pores over the menu in front of him. 

“None of it’s really that great,” he says, within earshot of their waitress. “But it’s cool if you like fifties stuff, so I thought I’d bring you.” He beams over to Sunny, next to him. Sunny’s eyebrows twitch into that indeterminable space between why do you know that and why do you think you know that. 

Either way, he’s confused, so Kel illuminates. “It’s like that movie you really liked. You made me and Hero watch it at your house, and I asked why the older kids were dressed so funny, and you said it’s the fifties, Kel.” His impression of Sunny is far too deep, and not nearly mumbly enough. “You said it just like that. I remember.”

Sunny, evidently, doesn’t. He stares at Kel.

“Was it— that movie with all the songs and stuff?” Aubrey says, even though she knows the title.

“No, it was the one with those four kids, and they were going to…” Kel stops, gaze falling to the menu again. “Well, it doesn’t matter, I guess.”

They lapse into a short silence. Aubrey sips from her water glass and considers the black-and-white pictures hung up on the walls. Old cars and smiling people. She pokes at the bottom edge of her menu, where the plastic’s peeling up, and wishes someone would put on some music in here. Cars horns honk and engines whir, somewhere unseen. Basil swings his legs under the table next to her. The whooshing of air makes her nervous, and slightly colder. 

“That’s a tall dog.” It’s the first thing Sunny’s said since they got here. Aubrey looks up. Sure enough, a person on the sidewalk is holding the leash of a particularly lanky animal. It lowers its long head, sniffing at a crack in the pavement.

“Oh,” Kel says. “Wow.” And then, “Hey look, the owner’s got a NBCU keychain on his bag! Let’s go say hi!”

He grabs Sunny by the wrist, pulling him up and out of his seat before he or anyone else can protest. Together they shove through the windowed door at the front of the restaurant. The hanging “open” sign clatters against glass. Aubrey is left alone with Basil. And Kim, in her extra chair pulled up to the end of the table. The door clicks into its frame. Kel and Sunny reappear in the window. 

Aubrey hesitates. Silence stretches. She hears Basil inhale beside her, feels his legs still, notices the timid opening of his mouth. 

Kim’s chair scrapes the black-and-white checkered floor. “I’m going to the bathroom,” she says, and walks across the empty dining area.

The bathroom door squeals. “Huh.” Basil’s shoulders lower. “I was gonna…” He shrugs it off, fidgeting with his bendy straw.

Outside, Kel speaks. He and the other student exchange cheery expressions and pleasantries muffled to incoherence. Their companions eye one another down. The skinny dog strains to the end of its leash. Sunny strains to the end of Kel’s outstretched arm. But slowly, in the haze of casual conversation, they shuffle closer. Sunny’s non-captured hand leaves his side, reaching. The dog’s head lowers. It sniffs at the air around his fingers with small, visible puffs of breath. It takes two steps, nosing at his knuckles. Sunny flexes his hand before moving it upwards, giving the dog an awkward pat on the top of its head. It eyes him suspiciously, like it could still choose to bite. 

There’s a strange, shifting motion in the dog’s face, then. Fear sweeps through Aubrey’s chest. But it’s only Basil turning from his drink, one of his eyes and the curve of his cheek phasing translucent onto the glass. The corner of his mouth appears, too, smiling as Sunny boldens, petting down the dog’s neck. Its whip-thin tail wags. It wasn’t ever going to hurt him. Aubrey knew from the moment she saw it. 

Even if she’s never owned a dog. Even if nonaggression is a dangerous assumption to make of any stranger, any animal with teeth and claws. 

“Are you—” She asks, unsure how she plans to end the question. Basil turns at the sound of her voice, hungry undercurrents dimming from his whirlpool eyes. “Are you okay?” Aubrey ends up asking. And it’s a stupid question. He’s never okay.

“I’m fine,” he says. Behind him, the dog drops to the sidewalk, flipping over to expose its belly. Its legs tangle above itself, four dark, thin shapes like tree branches. Sunny puts his hands on its stomach. It trusts him so easily.

“The city’s really nice,” Basil continues. “I didn’t expect to like it so much.” He glances back outside, and begins digging through his coat pocket.

“Yeah,” Aubrey says. Distantly. Because home is nice, too.

Basil positions the camera. 

Click. Flash.

That night, Aubrey dreams of sleeping for a hundred years. She wakes up to a shitty, abandoned dorm room with cracked walls and a sagging ceiling. Vines unfurl through gaps in the foundation. Kel’s roommate’s flag vanishes into overgrowth. Sunlight shines emptily through the shattered window. She blinks up from a spongy, spore-filled carpet, and the wooden slats have rotted above her, and everyone else is gone. 

That’s what she notices first, really. She lets her head fall to the side, but nothing’s there. It’s moss and concrete dust. It’s a world that’s carried on without her. 

The second time she wakes up, to an appropriately dark, intact shitty dorm room, she checks again. Her mouth goes dry, to see the other, unoccupied half of the pillow. She pushes onto her elbows. 

Kim’s already up. She sits up just past the edge of the loft bed, one of her legs bent at the knee. She interrupts her staring across the room with a glance over the shoulder. It takes a few seconds for Aubrey’s vision to adjust. Her eyes anchor onto Kim’s t-shirt sleeve, the edge of it lit up red in the alarm clock glow. Aubrey blinks, rubs the sleep out of her eyelashes, and sits up next to her. 

“You’re awake,” Kim states. 

“Uh-huh. Weird dream.” Aubrey tucks her hair behind her ears, smooths it down the back of her neck. It’s easy to tell her friends to get haircuts. Easier than doing it for herself. She blinks across a pale strip of light that runs from the door, pointing to the other bed. The plaid duvet twists around the posts at the foot of the bed, peeled all the way back, revealing the deserted mattress. 

“Where are they?” she asks. 

A muscle in Kim’s jaw pulls taut. “Where’s who?”

Aubrey resists rolling her eyes. Snoring reverberates from Kel’s bed, and clearly the other one’s empty, and obviously Kim knows what she’s talking about. “Basil and Sunny,” she says. “They’re not here. Do you know where they are?”

“No.” A noise almost like scoffing, and a crooked flash of teeth. “Probably either fucking or killing each other.”

Aubrey sneers away from her, feeling like she’s been shoved into the first shocking, stinging seconds of a freezing-cold shower. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“Nothing.” Kim wraps her arms around her knees, and hides her face behind them. “It doesn’t matter. The same thing that’s always been wrong with me.”

“That’s not true. You keep acting all weird and jealous, and it’s stupid, because I know you’re not like that. You— you don’t have to make things weird, Kim.”

There’s a muffled, frustrated sigh. Kim rearranges herself, resting her cheek on the fold of her arms, her eyes shining amber in the low light. She bites her bottom lip. She says, “Y’know, sometimes I wonder if you even like me.”

The pinprick, water-stream feeling cools to arctic temperatures, grows to the size of a snowstorm. “Of course I like you.”

“Yeah,” Kim huffs. “But not— like—” Her hands ball into fists. “Do you remember when we were kids? Like really young, I mean. And I’d be at the park with Vance, and you’d be with your friends, and I’d take like twenty minutes to even get the courage to talk to you, to call you over and show you something, or play some stupid game, or whatever I wanted. And sometimes you’d listen and sometimes you wouldn’t, but even when you did, I could tell you didn’t really care. Even when you came over, you’d always go back. You remember that?”

Aubrey doesn’t. She stays quiet.

“Vance used to tease me about it. But I just couldn’t help it. I thought you were so cool, and nice, and pretty. I still…” She swallows. “And I know you were probably happier back then. I know you were probably a better, kinder person, or at least the kind of person who was easier to be.” She squints at the empty bed. Aubrey notices she’s not wearing her glasses. “But you weren’t my person.”

The feeling in Aubrey’s chest is close to fear, but more slippery, more impossible to pin down and look in the face. “Don’t be an idiot,” she says. “Having other friends doesn’t mean I hate you. It just means I have other friends.”

“Yeah, but you’re friends with them ‘cause you like them. You’re only friends with me because something terrible happened to you, and I was the only one there.”

“It meant something, that you were there.”

“Only because Mari wasn’t.”

One day, Aubrey won’t stiffen at the sound of her name. It won’t wring all the air out of her lungs, or make her remember all those times she thought about what it’d feel like— no longer needing to breathe. She lowers her voice, whispering cold and deliberate. “Don’t say that. You don’t know anything about that.”

Kim matches her whisper, close and cutting. They’ve taught each other so much, after all. “Of course I don’t.” She hugs herself, curling her body small against the bedpost. Her teary eyes close tight, drawing dark shadows across her red, agitated face. 

“I’m sorry,” she continues. “I don’t even know what I’m talking about.” Her lips tremble. “I just wanna upset you. I just— want you to—” She presses the heels of her palms against her eyelids and groans. Quietly, so she won’t wake anyone up. 

Laughter echoes from the hallway. It’s a Saturday night or a Sunday morning and voices muffle together, coming and going in waves. 

“Nevermind,” Kim whispers. “This is dumb. I’m just being weird.” Her palms slide away from her eyes, fingers knitting through her hair, knitting together at the back of her head. “We can go back to sleep.”

Aubrey likes to think she’s not a coward. But she can barely even wait ten seconds before saying, “Okay. Whatever.” and lying down again. 

Kim joins her shortly. She lies flat, stares at the ceiling. Shadows extend under her eyebrow. The alarm clock blinks behind her. Aubrey remembers the mottled red-purple of an old black eye, a half-hour after school spent in Kim’s bathroom. The rest of their friends waited on the porch. They hadn’t even been friends that long, but already there was an implicit understanding that sometimes Kim and Aubrey were to be left alone. 

Aubrey stood with her, but didn’t do much. She sat on the counter beside the sink, avoiding wet spots. She watched Kim clean out a cut on her arm, where the other person had scratched her open. 

“Do you really care that much when people say that stuff about you?” Kim could still be hard to read, sometimes. “Enough to fight them?” 

Kim shrugged. She peeled off the plastic backing of a bandaid. “Not really. I mean, look at me. I’m kinda asking for it.” She placed the bandage over her cut. Both ends poked out from under the little gauze pad, fresh and red and angry. She rolled her sleeve down to cover them. She shifted closer to the mirror, poking at the most swollen, discolored part of her lower eyelid. Aubrey thought of her mother. “But I like fighting. So it’s fine.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.” A lot of people might not find Kim’s pointed, lopsided smile all that interesting. Aubrey was pretty sure she liked it. It was so hard to be sure of anything, now. “I’ll fight anyone.”

“Even me?” She wondered if it might feel good, to be fought with. 

But Kim’s nose crinkled, upsetting the trail of dried blood that ran to her lips. “No,” she said. The answer came out confused. “No, I don’t think I’d ever fight you.”

In the hallway, the students laugh again. Aubrey wonders what could possibly be so goddamn funny. Maybe everything’s funny when people are drunk, and in college, and when they know they’re going to make something of themselves instead of dying in a Starbucks. 

She knows Kim hasn’t fallen asleep yet. They’ve had enough sleepovers. Snoring radiates. Voices come and go. Aubrey’s not a coward. She moves a hand out to the side, tugging on the very end of Kim’s shirtsleeve.

“I do like you,” she says. So much it scares me. So much I don’t know what to do with it. “But there are things I can’t tell you. There are things I can’t do for you.” She pauses. “I think I might be stuck in town forever,” she says, tentatively, to try out the words. They’re lighter than she expected. “But it’s not even that I’m stuck, really. It’s just that I need to be there right now, and Basil needs me there, I think, and it’s not all bad. God, it sucks, but it’s not that bad.” There’s lots of things that piss her off back home, but she assumes that’d be true anywhere. And anywhere doesn’t have her ridiculous emo coworker who makes shifts bearable, who reminds her of herself just a couple years ago, who she gets weirdly proud of when he actually makes a drink the right way. And anywhere doesn’t have the reverend who always tries to have conversations with her, even though she only just stopped being a total bitch to him whenever he made the effort. And nowhere else has Basil. And nowhere else is quite as haunted as Faraway Town, but maybe Aubrey needs to be haunted a little more. 

Maybe Mari was the type of person who’d tell the creepy girl at the bakery that her hair looks nice, or adopt one of those stray cats even though it might eat her one day, or finally wake up early enough to help weed the garden out back, on the weekends. Maybe she is that type of ghost, that irritating, unfinished impulse under the surface of Aubrey’s skin.

Or maybe not. Maybe she’s still just dead. Aubrey thinks she wants to find out either way. 

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I just don’t want you to feel like you have to wait for me to leave. I don’t want you to waste your whole life waiting for me to be ready.” 

She can’t tell who takes whose hand first. Suddenly they are holding hands, though, fingers locked together, and neither of them seems inclined to move. 

“Okay.” Kim speaks very softly, almost beyond hearing. Her grip tightens. “That makes sense,” she says.

Because they both know she’ll do it anyway.