I laughed, but it came out borderline hysterical. “We’re fucked.”
Amelia’s face twisted. “Don’t say that.”
“What do you want me to say?” My voice rose, cracking. “It’s been days. We have nothing. No food. No fire. No map. No phone. I’m hallucinating cabins now. What the hell do you want me to say?”
Her jaw trembled. “I want you to stop acting like you’re the only one suffering.”
That hit a nerve. A deep one.
I stepped closer. “You think I don’t know you’re suffering?”
“You don’t act like it,” she hissed. “You act like I’m dead weight. Like I’m an inconvenience.”
I exhaled harshly. “Because if I let myself feel how bad it is, I’ll break.”
Her eyes widened slightly.
I hadn’t meant to say that. The truth had slipped out like blood.
Amelia stared at me for a long moment, then her voice dropped, raw. “You’realready breaking.”
I swallowed hard. The forest pressed in around us, quiet and listening.
I forced my face into coldness again, because that was what I knew. That was what kept me from falling apart.
THE PAST
CAIDEN’S CONDITIONING
16 years old
Half a pack of Camels lay crushed in my jacket pocket, though I had smoked none. I had lifted them from my father’s toolbox as an experiment. If I inhaled enough poison, would I become immune to it?
Or would it rearrange the molecules of my rage?
I had learned early, when my father’s voice outblared the television and the taste of blood in my mouth became familiar, that the best way to survive was to preempt pain with pain.
Be the hurricane. Get my fist in first, so the next blow, when it came, was only a dull echo. Only a reminder.
I shouldered my backpack and exited the bathroom, moving through the corridor with the slow, deliberate menace of a predator who knew he could not be stopped.
My body, tall and broad and prematurely muscled, parted crowds in a way that was both satisfying and embarrassing. I hated the attention, but I hated being ignored more.
I watched her from the shadowed corner of the hall, arms crossed, my body thrumming with an anticipation that made my teeth ache in my skull.
Amelia.
She stood at her locker, half-turned to shield her notebook from prying eyes, the tawny river of her hair veiling the delicate line of her jaw.
Even from there, I could sense the anxious flutter of her hands as she rifled through the tangle of loose papers and broken pencils.
I wanted to hate her. I told myself to hate her. Day after day, I sharpened that hatred against the strop of my father’s misery, whetted it to a blade thin enough to draw blood with a glance.
But the truth was softer, sourer, nothing like what I wished it would be.
Sometimes when I saw her smile, rare nowadays, more a flicker than an expression, it hollowed something out from my chest, left a cold ache that lingered long after she had gone.
I woke up thinking about that smile, the way she bit her lip when she was nervous, how the tips of her ears went pink when she was caught off-guard.
