The merge with the East couldn’t come soon enough. Without carbs, we were bodies without bones. Most of the last two days had been spent in a state of lethargy. Even walking to the poophole was a challenge. When we weren’t foraging for food, we were sprawled out in the shelter, trying to escape the sweltering heat or floating listlessly in the warm ocean water.
Kenzie and I had decided not to talk about our spat. It seemed easier to pretend like nothing happened than to deal with the larger issue at hand; and honestly, I had no idea what that was or why we had been arguing in the first place. The fun, flirty side of our conversations returned, but I sensed a level of tension coming from her end. She was more restrained when I got playful with her, removing my hands from places she hadn’t minded them being before.
Sometimes when she thought I wasn’t looking, I’d catch Kenzie staring at me with that dreamy far-off look in her eyes. Clearly she felt something for me, but for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why. This was a girl who had her shit together. I was the complete opposite: immature, lazy, essentially unemployed, and suffering from serious abandonment issues. I’d never had a relationship last more than six hours.
The quick (and obvious) answer would be that Kenzie liked me for my DNA, but that argument didn’t hold true, seeing as she fell for my slacker act well before knowing my connection to Jake. Nope, as far as I could tell, she liked me for me.What the hell?If Kenzie were smart, she’d run as fast as possible in the opposite direction. Warning her seemed the responsible thing to do; yet the selfish asshole in me wasn’t ready for her to leave. I liked having someone devoted to me for a change. Maybe I was leading her on, like Dale said… or maybe… I wasn’t. Could it be that I actually liked this girl? Certainly, I wasn’t immune to her earthy charms. Kenzie was a pretty girl, and I’d have been lying if I said some of her flirty antics didn’t get a rise out of me. And strangely enough, even though neither one of us was becoming more eye-catching as the show went on, I was inexplicably finding myself more drawn to her every day.
It was midday, and the sun was beating down upon the shelter, trapping us all under a blanket of humidity. We’d been lounging around for over an hour doing nothing more than bemoaning our lack of food and feeling sorry for ourselves, when I saw something scurry through Kenzie’s hair.
“Kenz?” I murmured in a low and emotionless tone of voice.
“Yeah?” she answered back, with even less enthusiasm than I’d just managed to muster.
“There’s a bug in your hair.”
No response.
“There’s a bug in your hair,” I repeated a little louder.
“I heard you the first time. Could you take it out, please?”
I could, but that would require exerting energy, of which I had very little.
“It’s probably just going to scamper away on its own,” I offered feebly.
“I swear, Kyle. If you don’t take it out, the next time you get stung by a jellyfish, you’re peeing on it yourself.”
“That was on the back of my leg. I couldn’t have reached it and you know it.”
“The point is I did it. Now you owe me.”
“Uggghh,” I huffed. “Fine.”
I maneuvered my body up and rested on my elbow as I started picking through her hair for the offending insect. This is what we’d been reduced to… a family of orangutans, lazing around all day, foraging through each other’s hair for bugs.
“If Kenzie’s hair bug is big and meaty, I call it,” Dale announced.
“Dammit,” Carl exclaimed. “I wanted it.”
“Yeah, well, I called shotgun.”
“I thought you didn’t kill living things, Carl,” Kenzie called him out.
“That was before I was starving to death. Now I’m not ruling out cannibalism.”
We all chuckled, but it was a pathetic sound. It was as if our voices couldn’t muster the enthusiasm required for a genuine laugh. My eyes followed the bug’s path through Kenzie’s hair. He was a quick sucker, much quicker than my shaky fingers could catch. I made a quick movement and jabbed Kenzie in the back of the head.
“Ow!” she protested.
“My bad. He’s a slippery sucker. Oh, wait.” I captured the bug between my thumb and pointer finger. “Got it,” I called out proudly, holding up my creepy crawly treasure.
“You got a size or species?” Dale asked, sounding incredibly apathetic.
“I don’t know. It looks like a beetle.”
“Gross,” Kenzie complained.
“It’s dime size and impressively plump. Probably got a good greasy meal in Kenzie’s hair before I caught it.”
