{November 29}

I didn’t see Bell very much after that day.

I thought about her nearly constantly—every time I’d see her empty bed, I’d think about her; every time we were all assembled somewhere without her, I’d wonder where she was. Every opportunity I was given to think about her was taken up by just that.

After a few weeks, I came to the conclusion that—for whatever reason—she was avoiding me now just like Benji used to.

In those weeks, though, Benji had slowly started to talk to me more. They’d swapped roles, I guess.

I expected to be happy with that change. It had always been a sore spot in the back of my head that Benji hated me. Every time I saw him, I’d remember that night a year ago and it would slam me like a fist in my cheek. Benji making an effort to talk to me should’ve made me happy. It should have shown me that maybe he wasn’t so bad after all.

But I didn’t want his attention.

I wanted Bell.

0 0 0

I asked Cygnus, one day, if he’d seen her.

“No,” he replied. “And I don’t think anyone else has, either. I haven’t seen her in, like, two weeks.”

“You saw her two weeks ago?” That was what I’d gotten out of that.

“Why are you so hell-bent on this?” Cygnus asked. “You’ve been asking everyone about her. None of us know what she’s up to. We never do.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that the rest of the unit would gossip about what I was doing. The idea of it paused my whole brain.

“What is it about her?” Cygnus asked. “You don’t ask about anyone else nearly half as much.”

My default answer to that question was, as always, “She’s cool.”

“C’mon,” Cygnus said, shoving his hands in his pockets. “It’s gotta be more than that. I know as well as you that you’re just saying that because it’s something you already decided to say.”

I flushed bright red. Even though it’d happened a number of times by then, I was never quite prepared to get called out for my habits like that.

“I, um..”

“I mean, it’s not a big deal,” he said, a little lower. “Just curious is all.”

I knew Cygnus meant nothing by it. I knew he had no interest in hurting me.

So I took great care to try and channel all of my nebulous feeling toward Bell into a single statement. The only issue with that was that I lacked the skill or finesse to do that kind of thing.

I stared at the floor hoping my situation would change without thinking.

And after a moment I came to an answer that I figured had to be close enough.

I said, “She just is.”

0 0 0

The next morning I woke up blurry-eyed and dreary. Nothing I did could quite make the fog go away—I rubbed my eyes over and over until they were bloodshot and itch-ridden and I still couldn’t quite restore the world to focus.

It took about thirty minutes for the fog to set in. For the first time in a few weeks, I’d stopped thinking about Bell.

Someone asked me for something as I walked out of the common room without shoes; I don’t remember who it was, only that I ignored them. They were secondary—I had a single unifying concern that grabbed hold of my whole being, and it pulled me along like a limp doll behind it.

I walked downstairs to the lobby of the factor, and then off to the left to find the longest hallway in the building that I knew of. In the past I knew I could read the block-letter sign at the end of the hall—it warned of the dangers of not wearing hard hats on the factory floor. Prochazka left it up because it amused him in the light of what the building had become.

I got to that hall, and I squinted down it looking for the familiar red block letters, and I found I could only barely make out the declaration along the top of the sign.

0 0 0

The next thing I can properly recall is me in Sophia’s office, begging her: “Please fix them.”

I needed it. I needed it more than anything in the whole wide world. I did not exist without them. I did not function without them.

They were the end-all be-all of who I was.

Sophia did not understand. “Erika, you’re fine. You might need contacts. Glasses aren’t really a thing we can do for bruisers, but—”

“Please just fix them,” I begged again, glazed over. Uncomprehending.

Her eyes closed. She pinched the bridge of her nose.

“I don’t know how,” Sophia growled, punctuating every word. “How many times do I have to fucking say that?”

“Please,” I repeated. It was all I could do. All I could ever say.

“Look. You want contacts? I can give you contacts. I’m not actually that strong of a flesh key, Erika. I just went to half of med school so Prochazka thinks I know things. You got a broken bone, you’ve got something cut off or whatever, I can reattach it and fix you up good as new. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with your eyes, and maybe I could try and figure it out but poking around back there is just as likely to make you blind as it is to fix a minor vision problem.”

At the word “blind” I stopped listening. The very pronunciation of it paralyzed me.

“If you’re so worried about it, go out to the factory floor and shoot some stuff and see if your accuracy is still good. So maybe you’re not going to be as good of a sniper as you were a month ago, but I can measure you for some contacts and then you’ll be just fine. Okay? How does that sound?”

In my head I knew that was a perfectly fine plan, and all I had to do was nod and agree and in a few days I’d be back to normal again.

But instead I said, “Please just fix me.”

Sophia paused. Her face snapped up tight in anger, and I cringed pre-emptively because I knew I did wrong, but instead of shouting at me she sighed and said, “This is how I can fix you. Okay? This is as good as I’ve got.”

I wanted to repeat what I said, catatonic, until she waved her magic wand and made me well again, as though that was something I could expect to happen in a reasonable world.

But this was not a reasonable world, and that was not a reasonable outcome.

So instead I forced that stagnant thought out of my head with a serious effort, and I said, “Okay.”

Sophia stood up. “Let’s get this measured, then.”

0 0 0

That night I stole a bottle of one of Benji’s favored craft beers from the fridge and took it with me down to the cafeteria, where I knew nobody would be at fifteen past midnight.

Everything was a little darker than it was yesterday at that time, and I knew no amount of squinting would make it better. In a week I would be well again, but for now I was ever so slightly more disabled, and no amount of positive willpower could shake how weak that made me feel.

It was worse than it was this time a year ago. Last year I could rub it away from my eyes if I did so for long enough. Last year I failed a part of the eye exam that most people fail, but I had passed previously because I had abnormally good eyesight for my age.

I suppose now, in hindsight, I can say that I had sunk to the level of regular eyesight at that time. But regular was weak for me. Anything less than my normal was weak.

So I popped the cap off the bottle and stared down at the black simmering liquid inside. Every liquid was black in the cafeteria. I was lucky to have been able to find a chair without tripping. I didn’t want to turn the lights on, though—I didn’t want to see blurry shimmers. I wanted to pretend that they were just closed, not non-functional, even though they were nothing of the sort and I could obviously still see everything in the cafeteria anyway.

I stared into the bottle without drinking because I knew I was overreacting. I knew what I was feeling was invalid. So what if my eyes were a little worse? Everyone’s eyes got a little worse over time. Loads of people in my old school had glasses. They were all perfectly fine, perfectly functional people. There was nothing wrong with them.

But no matter how many times I repeated those words, I could not make them apply to me. They were alien markings. They held nothing for me; no intentions, no meaning.

I raised the bottle and drank. Screw it. Fuck it.

It didn’t matter.

0 0 0

I finished that bottle and crept back into the room for another—everyone who was present was asleep, and I was small and quiet, so I got away with it.

But in hindsight I desperately wish someone had stopped me.

Again I sat down on that stool and popped the cap, and I stared down into the black of it. And again I reconsidered what I was doing, and again I failed to find a reason not to, and again I downed the whole thing with remarkable speed.

When I stood, the room was spinning.

I decided then that I needed to do something. It was the alcohol talking, for sure, but in that time I didn’t know better, or maybe I just didn’t care.

I wanted to do something that mattered.

So I left the bottles where they were—for only a second, then I turned back and grabbed them, discarding one by placing it gently in the waste bin by the door and filling the other from a bathroom sink on my way out—and I left the factory for the town, beer bottle full of water in my swinging hand.

I walked into town looking for a fight.