Chapter 35: 35 The Shallow Drowned, Part Two

Angharad fount herself really annoyed to realise, all over again, how pretty Josephine was. It wasn't fair.

For a moment they only stood there, looking at each other, and then Josephine laughed and said, "This feels so strange."

"Yeah, I guess."

Finally, that got Angharad to move forward, slow enough to make sure Josephine was still under the umbrella with her. Not that they needed it – the sky remained that weird, sulky grey, but the rain seemed to have finally stopped.

"I wanted to apologise for that thing that happened," Josephine said.

"You already apologised. Like, right after. Whatever, it's forgotten. We're still friends."

"We are?"

"Yeah, like, of course. You've helped me out tons of times. Why wouldn't I want to be your friend? Anyway, like, I basically don't want to talk about that thing ever again, so let's just forget about it."

"If you're sure."

It was probably not great to be distracted by the way Josephine bit her lower lip. "Of course!"

"That's great!" Josephine said, and punched a fist at the sky. "I'm so happy. Ah, and I wanted to thank you as well."

"For what?"

"For speaking to Eleanor about me. That was very nice of you."

Nice? Angharad wasn't sure nice was the word. Could you really call the things you did out of guilt nice? Angharad looked straight ahead as their dormitory building got closer with every step, so she wouldn't broadcast her thoughts straight at Josephine.

"I mean, it's more like she spoke to me, and I just sort of helped her sort her thoughts out? Don't give me all that credit. I mean, come on, you're into each other. It's obviously meant to be," Angharad said.

"No, it was very kind. My heart is warmed by it."

If Angharad could just get swallowed up by the earth in that moment, that would be a kindness.

"Okay. Cool." They were so close to the building. Angharad looked forward to hiding out with Sophie for days, if she could. She made the mistake of looking at Josephine again, and then her mouth opened, and that thing Angharad had been thinking for weeks tumbled out. "Why do you and Eleanor sleep in separate beds? You could totally push the beds together. Doesn't it make you sad? Wait, no, that's super not my business. Wow, like, why did I say that? I'm sorry. Pretend I said nothing."

Josephine hid behind her hair. "You must have been wondering since that day I found you in the hospital and then you accidentally..." Her voice was soft, wistful.

Now Angharad couldn't stop thinking about kissing Josephine again, which wasn't good at all. "We can talk about the weather instead."

They finally reached the edge of the building but stopped outside the door, umbrella still up for no good reason.

"It does make me sad," Josephine said. "But then with rule number two, if we pushed the beds together, well, I'd still be sad and I still wouldn't be able to touch her."

"Oh." Angharad folded up the umbrella, focused on securing it shut.

Josephine touched a finger to Angharad's collarbone, dragged it all the way to the exposed skin of her shoulder, left open to the elements by the gaping neckline of the sweater. All the places she touched felt too hot. "You look nice in this."

Angharad breathed out deep, to reassure herself she could still breathe. "Okay, like, I know I said that thing is forgotten, but I still think maybe that's a little awkward. Wait a week or two before telling me I'm pretty."

She walked into the dorm and didn't look back to see if Josephine followed.

Angharad strode in to the hallway and noticed Mac leaning against a wall in a gigantic hoodie and pyjama shorts.

Mac whistled, loud, and said, "Look at you."

"I mean, I do like to look at me," Angharad said. Winked. "I borrowed it from Tsuyoshi."

The clothes and the attitude were both just his things that she was using for a while until she was ready to give them back.

"It looks better on you. You look hot," Mac said.

"What doesn't look better on me?" She affected a swagger to see if Mac would laugh as she walked past.

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"You know, everyone else is doing that whole bisexuality thing. You've got me wondering if I should give it a try," Mac said.

"An experiment is the best way to test a hypothesis," Angharad said, even if she was a little offended.

"I bet you say that to all the girls," Mac said, her voice a rough rumble.

At her doorway Angharad turned around to look at Mac's teasing face and Josephine disappearing into the room she shared with Eleanor. Smiled at Mac, let her eyes look serious. "Try it with me some time."

Turned and went straight into her room without looking back.

*

Hours earlier Jin walked around in the damp, instead. What was a little water compared to what he'd experienced?

He was getting Angharad's notebook wet. He should have left it in the library, wasn't sure why he didn't. Maybe whatever assurance she got from her pages of cubic roots and coloured-in scribbles would rub off on him.

He wanted to explore, but he went to the dining hall first. People were still in there, waiting out the rain. He noticed Sophie first and she waved at him, face lighting up like sunshine through the clouds. Josephine, head leaned against Eleanor's shoulder, didn't notice him until he was two steps from the table, then immediately sat up straight like he was the boss at the boxing gym she went to marking her on her posture. She must have been distracted – he'd been told before that he didn't step quietly.

Normally he would ask if it was okay to sit down, but he was still annoyed when he saw Mac's face, so he dragged out a chair and let the sound of its feet scraping across the floor announce his entrance.

"What's Jin got in his hands?" Sophie said, voice light and frothy.

He pulled Angharad's notebook under the edge of the table and balanced it on his knees so they wouldn't look at it. How would he explain it? When he tried to think of the words he thought, instead, of Tabitha's eyes heavy-lidded in the library, the way Angharad's wet dress clung to her breasts and the feeling of squinting against the visual distortion of the barrier. The sound of the rain was both a heavy splatter and constant hiss against all three shards of memory. It was still heavy outside.

"It's nothing," he said. "Are you okay?"

"Why wouldn't I be okay?" Sophie said. "Jin is so silly."

He wasn't sure what he'd come there for anymore.

"I think we're all the best we could be," Josephine said. "It's important to maintain a positive outlook in this kind of place."

"I agree," Eleanor said, and nodded. She smiled at Josephine, and Josephine responded to the smile by folding her hand over Eleanor's on the table.

Jin clutched the notebook harder.

He remembered Freya holding his hand in the dark, the way he pushed his fingers between hers just to see how it felt, the way she tangled her fingers between his the first time she pushed him down on a bed.

He remembered finding his sister's severed fingers, outside the charred corpse of what used to be his home.

"I have to go," he said.

He let the chair make that awful scraping sound as he pushed it across the floor again.

Their voices followed him out the door but the rain made them thin and distant as he went deep into it again. He still wasn't sure what he wanted to look for, earlier, so he walked back to his room in that oppressively quiet building he didn't want to call home, its outside walls turned a charcoal grey in the wet.

He put the notebook on the bedside cabinet and took off all his clothes. Left them on the floor, unfolded, when he got into bed, curled up into the smallest ball he could be, shivering even under layers of blankets.

The year before impact passed before his eyes, a series of blurred and fractured images, a busted kaleidoscope dream of the past. The quiet deadness of a flame-scorched space after a de-oxygenation barrier went down, blue-skinned bodies remaining still where they fell. The surreality of a fire fight in a technology museum, with the strange way the sound echoed through the area, the strange way the shattered, warped mirrors made everything look. How surprisingly easy it was to bomb people's houses and shoot the enemy in the back as they ran.

When he woke up his skin was hot and damp.

"Am I sick?" he tried to ask himself, but the sound, muffled into his blankets, came out sluggish and damp.

Breathing hurt.

He wasn't supposed to get sick. He wasn't supposed to be able to get sick.

He pushed himself up, slow, with shaking hands, and forced himself to dress. He'd managed to find a room that nobody wanted to share, so he had to force himself up and out. Nobody would notice if he just stayed in there to die in his own sweat.

He trudged down the stairs and all the way through the hospital doors. Lucky him, when he saw the doctor he didn't have to speak before she grabbed him by the sleeve and took control of the situation.

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