1 - The Question

[Quarry outside Cedar Falls, Iowa. October 9th. 7:14 AM.]

The rat had been chewing since Cairo was seven. Eleven years of teeth on bone, and not a metaphor, not a flutter, not any of the pretty things people liked to call it. A rat. White-hot. Patient. It had finished the soft parts a long time ago and had been working on bone since somewhere around the sixth grade.

She stood at the lip of the quarry with her toes curled over limestone and looked down.

Blue-green water, still as something dead. The color reminded her of nothing she could name, and that was the trouble with it. A corpse's eye, maybe, if corpses had eyes like that. They didn't. She had looked it up once at two in the morning the way she looked up everything at two in the morning, and what she learned was that eyes go cloudy and flat and the flatness is gray. So the comparison was wrong. She was keeping it anyway.

Across the water an oak held out a tire swing, bald rubber on frayed rope, the kind of thing that pulled kids out here in July to shriek and cannonball with their stupid alive bodies. Same ledge. Same drop. Different math.

The math was the clean part. Mass times acceleration, and she knew her mass because she had stood on the bathroom scale in the dark eleven days ago and read it twice to be sure. A hundred and four pounds. She had not told anyone that either. It was the kind of number that made people's faces do something, and she had gotten very good at not making people's faces do things.

A hundred and four pounds of a girl. Dark hair, heavy, hanging past her shoulders in a way it had not been cut into on purpose. Collarbones that had started showing through T-shirts in August and were showing through a jacket now. Cuticles bitten past the quick on both hands, the left thumb still tacky where it had opened again in second period yesterday. Blue eyes, which people used to mention, and had stopped mentioning. Boots she had bought in August with her own money that no longer fit, because her feet had gone up a half size in September and she had not told anyone that either, and so the leather worked at her heel every morning and would keep working at it until one of them gave.

Forty-seven feet down to the water. One point seven seconds to fall it.

She had checked that number too, which meant she had typed her own body into a calculator and pressed equals.

Her bladder was full. She had been holding it since four, since she gave up on sleep and pulled on yesterday's jeans and walked out here in the dark on a route her feet knew from a summer when she was twelve and thought swimming in abandoned quarries was rebellious instead of just sad. The wind came off the water carrying limestone and rust and something rotting in the scrub brush, animal probably, or just October doing what October did to everything soft.

She should have been scared.

That was how it went, wasn't it. The edge, the height, the body's old argument against falling. Scrambling back on your hands. Weeping into the gravel. Grateful. The sad girl finds her reason, cue the music, roll credits on an after-school special nobody asked for.

But the water didn't care about her reasons and neither did she. It was easy. Easy the way swallowing vomit is easy, that hot rush of bile up the throat and the burn and the gulp, and then you smile at whoever is watching. I'm fine. And you feel almost proud of yourself for putting down the revolt of your own gut.

The water waited. Indifferent as a bill collector.

Jump or don't. I have all day. I have forever. What's one more body.

The rat scraped, tooth on bone, that particular note she could have hummed. And then something else arrived, sudden and violent and out of a place she had no name for.

Hunger.

Not for the water. Not for the math. For something. She wanted to climb down there and put her tongue on the stone. She wanted to open the sky with her fingernails. She wanted to take the world by the throat and shake it until it gave her a reason, any reason, a bad one, a stupid one, anything with a shape.

She didn't jump.

She turned around.

*

[Cedar Falls, Iowa. October 9th. 7:47 AM.]

Fifteen minutes through the suburbs. Stage-set houses. Lawns mowed into submission. The collective agreement of six hundred families laid out in quarter-acre plots that nothing was wrong anywhere.

Mr. Yoshida was watering his hydrangeas. Blue ones, dying under his attention, petals going brown at the edges like letters nobody wanted to keep. He waved. She waved. Transaction complete. Good morning, good morning, everything's fine, nobody's standing on any edges, nobody's running numbers on the weight of a falling body.

The gnawing came back somewhere around the Hendersons' mailbox.

Her backpack cut into her shoulders. Eighteen pounds, and she knew that the way she knew the hundred and four, because there had been a night in September when sleep didn't come and weighing things had seemed like a reasonable use of the hours. Biology. History. The English anthology with pages torn out for notes she passed to Tia during class. A tampon she had been carrying for six weeks without needing. All of it pressing down on her collarbones like the world reminding her: you're still here, you're still carrying things, people still expect you to show up and put them down somewhere.

The factory smell hit two blocks out. Jennings Manufacturing, something to do with plastic casings, and nobody in town had ever cared what. Burnt polymer and bacon grease off the diner next door. The smell of every morning for three years. The smell of the trap she had been walking into since freshman year, and before that, and probably since birth, since whatever morning somebody decided she was the kind of girl who grows up to carry eighteen pounds of textbooks into a building with windows that don't open because a kid went out of one in '94.

Past the gates, which stood open the way they always stood open, gray metal with the paint coming off in scales, chain-link bent in the corner where people climbed through after hours. Beyond them the building did what it always did, which was sit there being brick and being seventies and being ugly in the particular way of institutions that gave up on beauty before they were finished being built.

Inside, the air changed.

Warm. Used. Six hundred bodies breathing and sweating and wanting and being afraid, all of it pushed around through vents nobody had cleaned since Clinton. She could taste it on the back of her tongue. Hormones and anxiety and floor wax laid over the top of everything like a lie told by someone with a mop.

Locker 247. The dial stuck between twelve and fifteen. It always stuck. She had learned the jerk-and-twist in September, refined it by the first week of October, and now her hands did it without asking her opinion. Muscle memory. The body learning the shape of the trap. Inside: gym socks three weeks forgotten, loose anthology pages, and the smell of her own neglect, the proof that she could not keep even the smallest territory of her life in order. She took the biology text. Slammed the door. The bang was satisfying in a way she didn't want to look at.

Down the hall the noise was building. Doors. Sneakers on linoleum. Voices stacked on voices, did you see her, did you hear what he said, I literally can't. Everyone performing Normal, and the performances were good, and she had no idea whether that meant they were faking it too or whether she was the only one in the building doing an impression.

The thing in her chest woke up.

A hand landed on her arm.

"You look like shit."

Tia. The smell hit before the face did, which was the way it always went: vanilla vape smoke and unwashed hair, three days at least, the coconut of her shampoo faded down into something more honest underneath. Musk and skin and the funk of a girl who had stopped performing hygiene for anybody but herself. Eyeliner smudged out at the corners. A pimple forming on her chin, red and furious. She was real. That was the whole thing about Tia.

"Thanks." Cairo's voice came out flat.

"I mean it. You sleep at all?"

"Define sleep."

"I'm defining it as lying horizontal with your eyes shut for more than forty-five minutes. Not staring at your ceiling doing a whole thing about whether you're a real person."

"Then no."

Tia snorted. That sharp ugly sound, breaking glass in an empty room. Nobody else laughed like that. Nobody else made ugliness sound so much like honesty.

Her thumb was working the ring on her index finger, the cheap silver one from the gas station in Iowa City. Turning it. Cairo caught the way Tia's eyes kept going to her face and coming off again, checking something, worried about something she was not going to say out loud in a hallway.

"Come on." The joke went out of her voice. "Baxter's gonna be insufferable if we're late. And I need you upright another six hours before I can deal with whatever this is."

"Whatever this is."

"Yeah. Whatever you're not telling me." Tia's eyes held hers a beat past comfortable. "I'm not asking. I'm just. You know."

"I know."

The gnawing stopped.

Not for a reason. Nothing had changed and nothing had been fixed and the quarry was still five miles east with its forty-seven feet of patience. The gnawing just stopped, the way it always did when Tia was close enough to smell.

They walked.

*

[Cedar Falls High School. Room 114. October 9th. 10:47 AM.]

The bell screamed and the room emptied, thirty bodies exhaling out the door with their phones already lit before they cleared the frame. The fluorescents buzzed at a frequency that felt like something being drilled into the soft part of the skull. One tube flickered. It had been flickering since September. It would flicker until the building came down.

A boy hovered at the edge of Baxter's desk with a late paper. She took it without looking up. "Thanks, Tyler." The word landed like change dropped in a tip jar, mechanical, emptied of whatever she had been pouring into the Dickinson three minutes ago. He left with the paper still half-extended, then lowered it, then left for real.

Cairo didn't move.

She was still sitting there when the last sneaker squeaked into the hallway. Still sitting when the noise faded into the not-quite-silence a classroom gets when it's been abandoned, the echo of bodies that were just here, the warmth thirty metabolisms leave behind.

"Cairo." Not sharp. Not soft. Present, the way a river is present when you're standing at the edge of it. "Stay a minute."

From the doorway Tia groaned. "I'm literally going to die if I don't eat." She was leaning on the frame, thumb already scrolling, half her attention somewhere else or doing a good impression of it. The ring was still turning. "One minute."

"Fine. But if I pass out from starvation it's on you." She went. Her footsteps got eaten by the churn.

Cairo stood. Her legs felt wrong, too long, badly attached, like somebody had put her together out of spare parts this morning and hadn't checked the manual. She walked to the front of the room. Fifteen feet, maybe. It took longer than fifteen feet.

The rat stirred.

Up close, Baxter was a different woman. Not the one who had been reading ten minutes ago, who had gotten ten feet tall and burned with something Cairo couldn't look straight at. This was the other one. The one who existed when the performance stopped.

Forty-three years old. Cairo knew that because she had looked it up one night on the school website like a person with a problem she didn't want to give a name to. BA from Iowa. MA from somewhere in Massachusetts. Fifteen years in this room. Up close the tiredness was visible. Lines at the corners of her eyes like river deltas, and they didn't read as wrinkles. They read as erosion, something wearing her down grain by grain across years. Her lipstick had gone at the center where she'd been biting her lower lip during the reading. Cairo had noticed. Cairo had been noticing without meaning to for about six weeks.

A coffee stain near the collar, permanent, the kind you stop trying. The oatmeal cardigan pilling at the elbows with a small hole starting near the left cuff. Her hands flat on the desk, the nails bitten down to the quick, cuticles torn. She smelled like coffee and dry-erase markers and, underneath it, something human and tired that reminded Cairo of her own smell on the third day of not showering.

She's like me. She's just older. She's what I look like in twenty-five years, if I make it that far.

Cairo's throat tightened.

"You haven't turned anything in," Baxter said. A fact. Not an accusation. The way you'd mention rain.

"I've been busy."

She left it there and made it wide. Busy. It was a door with the hinges already oiled. All Baxter had to do was walk through it. Busy with what. Busy how. Are you all right. Anything.

"Busy," Baxter said.

"Yeah."

Nothing came. Baxter had this way of waiting that Cairo had watched her use on other people, and hated, and wanted turned on her. She left silence where anyone else would have put noise. The silence pressed down until you wanted to crack yourself open just to make it stop.

Cairo looked at the floor. Worn linoleum, gray, a pattern that might have been cheerful in 1974. Somebody had carved FUCK THIS into the leg of the nearest desk. The letters were uneven. Desperate. She wondered whether that kid had ever stood at a quarry. She wondered whether they had turned around too.

"Your last piece was good," Baxter said. "The one about the house."

Her stomach dropped. The house piece. She had written it at two in the morning half asleep, not meaning to turn it in, not meaning for anyone to read it at all. Her grandmother's house after the estate sale. The empty rooms. Dust and old perfume and something rotting in the walls that nobody could find.

"It was fine."

"It wasn't fine. It was good. Really good." Baxter's voice dropped. "You have something."

Something. The word hung there, alive and dangerous, a live wire sparking in a room full of gas.

And that was the second time. Cairo had opened the door and Baxter had walked past it and into the work, and now here was a compliment about a house piece where a question should be. She tried again anyway, because the thing in her chest was not a creature that learned.

"I wrote it at two in the morning." She said it carefully, laying it down like a coin on a counter. Not I write at two in the morning because I can't sleep, which was the true sentence and too heavy to lift. Just the coin. Just enough that someone paying attention would ask what she was doing awake.

Baxter leaned forward, and the coffee smell got stronger, and the tiredness underneath it.

"That's when the real stuff comes." She said it like a fact she was glad about. "I want to see more of it. Not the five-paragraph essays you think I want. The real thing. What you're actually writing at three in the morning when you can't sleep."

So she had heard it. She had heard it and she had turned it into an assignment.

"You're not the only one," Baxter said. Softer now, almost under her breath. "I know what that's like. Feeling like the only person awake in a room full of sleepwalkers."

Cairo's chest hurt.

She does know. That's not a teacher sentence. Nobody puts that in a lesson plan.

The gnawing had changed direction. It wasn't gnawing to get out anymore. It was gnawing toward something, toward this woman with her bitten nails and her coffee stain and her fifteen years of showing up to the same fluorescent room, and Cairo understood with a lurch that she had a bag on her shoulder with a purple notebook at the bottom of it, and that she could take it out. Could put it on the desk. Could say here, this is all of it, please tell me it means something.

Her hand actually moved. Two inches toward the strap.

"Just don't disappear," Baxter said.

Cairo stopped.

Don't disappear. It went in somewhere deep, somewhere she didn't let people put things, somewhere the quarry water was still sitting and being patient and being indifferent.

"Don't disappear," Baxter said again, "and keep submitting your work."

And there it was. The second half of the sentence, arriving a beat late, turning the first half into what it had always been. An instruction about output.

Cairo did not hear it that way. She heard the first three words with her whole body and the last five not at all, the way you hear your own name in a crowded room and nothing else in the sentence it came in.

She wanted to say something. Wanted to crack open and put all of it on the desk, the edge and the rat and the mornings when getting out of bed was climbing a mountain made of wet sand and the way words were the only thing that made any of it bearable. But her throat had closed, and her hands were shaking in her pockets, and Baxter was looking at her like she could see the whole of it anyway and had decided not to ask.

"Cairo." Tia, from the hallway. Distant. Impatient. "Seriously. Can we go."

The moment broke. Baxter stepped back and the professional face came down over the other one, smooth, practiced, the face she kept for students who didn't write about their grandmothers' houses at two in the morning.

"Go," she said. "But I mean it."

Cairo nodded. Turned. Walked. The hallway swallowed her whole, noise and bodies and floor cleaner and teenage desperation and whatever was going bad in somebody's locker. Tia was already ten feet out, complaining about the cafeteria line, about how every part of this building had been designed by someone who wanted to maximize suffering.

Cairo's hands were still shaking. Not from fear. From something worse. Somebody had just told her not to disappear, and she could not work out whether that was a rope thrown down to her or a chain to keep her here, and she was not sure the difference mattered to a person who had been drowning quietly for eleven years.

The gnawing went soft. Almost gentle.

Behind her the classroom door clicked shut.

*

[Cedar Falls High School. Library. October 9th. 12:14 PM.]

Tia had rehearsal. Cairo had the library.

Not studying. The textbooks were stacked on the table, biology and history and the anthology with three more pages torn out of it this morning, but they were a set. A costume. The costume of a girl doing homework at lunch because she had nowhere else to be and nothing else to be, and studying was the only performance that didn't require a second person in the room.

She pulled the notebook out of the bottom of the bag. Purple. A unicorn on the cover, a gift from Tia when they were twelve, and the irony of it had long since composted down into something she'd have fought a person over. The pages had gone soft at the corners. Half of them were full of handwriting that changed depending on what it was carrying. Notes to herself: cramped, angular, the letters barely finished. Lists: neat, vertical, under control. And then the other thing. The writing she did when the writing was the point, when the words were reaching for something she couldn't get her mouth around.

A blank page. The cap off the pen.

The water held its breath. Everything held its breath, the scrub oak with its one bald tire swaying like a pendulum nobody had wound, the limestone shelf still warm with yesterday's sun, warm the way a body stays warm after the heart has stopped, residual and diminishing and indifferent to whoever stands at its edge. She could smell rust and crushed sage and the mineral patience of stone that had been waiting since the Devonian to meet her bare feet. The math was clean. Forty-seven feet. Terminal velocity in one point seven seconds. The water was the color of an eye that had stopped seeing, not green, not blue, but the place those colors go to die. And she stood there. And the standing was the loudest thing she had ever done.

The pen stopped.

Cairo looked at what had come out. The sentences were long. Longer than she thought, longer than she talked, as though the pen had a way into some other version of her head that ran at a different speed. The thinking was fragments. Jagged. Quarry. October. Cold. Jump or don't. But the writing gathered the fragments up and laid them in a line, and the line became a paragraph, and the paragraph became a thing she could stand outside of and look at.

There it is. On the page. The thing I can't say to Tia, can't say to my parents, can't say to a counselor I've never been to see. On the page it has edges. On the page it's almost beautiful. On the page the girl at the edge isn't me. She's somebody I wrote. Somebody I can put down.

She closed the notebook and capped the pen. The library smelled like old carpet and printer toner and the held-breath quiet of a room full of teenagers performing productivity. A boy three tables over was asleep on his arms. Mrs. Okoro was at the desk, not noticing, on purpose.

The rat had gone quiet. The way it went quiet when she wrote. Not gone, never gone, but busy. As if the writing had handed it something to chew that wasn't bone.

She put the notebook back in the bag and went out into the corridor to find where the afternoon was.

*

The second floor was almost empty. Lunch winding down, the last stragglers drifting back with the glazed contentment of people who had eaten too much bad food and were about to sit through algebra in a stupor.

She turned the corner by the water fountain and stopped.

Baxter was coming the other way. Twenty feet, maybe less. Folders against her chest with one arm and a vending machine coffee in the other hand, the paper cup with the plastic lid that never stayed on. Still in the same cardigan, sleeves pushed to the elbows, the thread pulling loose at the left cuff. Her shoes made a specific sound on the linoleum. Not a click, the heels were too low for that, but a firm deliberate tap-tap-tap, the walk of a woman who moved like she had somewhere to be even when she didn't.

Cairo stepped aside. Hallway geometry. Somebody's coming, you move, you put your shoulder toward the lockers and make yourself smaller.

Baxter glanced up. The nod was brief. Professional. The acknowledgment you'd give any student you'd spoken to earlier in the day. I see you, you exist, we've met. Her eyes didn't stay. Her pace didn't change. She went by and the smell went with her, burnt coffee and something softer underneath it, cedar or sandalwood, the ghost of a perfume put on at six in the morning that had been coming off all day.

Cairo stood there.

The hallway emptied. A locker banged somewhere around the corner. From the faculty office, Baxter's voice, muffled now, talking to somebody. Not to Cairo. To another teacher.

Then a laugh. Short and low.

The kind of laugh that happens between adults who share a context you don't have access to. Faculty meetings, grading rubrics, the thousand small jokes of a professional world Cairo had never been inside of and couldn't read the edges of.

She doesn't laugh like that in class. In class she's precise. That laugh is loose. That's the shape her voice makes when she isn't teaching.

Cairo put her back against the lockers. The metal was cold through her shirt. Her heart was doing something stupid, not racing, not the adrenaline of the ledge, just a low insistent thud she could feel in her wrists.

Don't disappear. Still lodged. She pressed her sternum with two fingers, the way you press a bruise to check it's still there.

She probably says that to every kid whose writing isn't garbage. She probably said it to somebody last year, and the year before, and it's a tool, the same way the nod was a tool and the smile this morning was a tool. Teachers have tools. That's the job. You find the ones out on the edge and you say the thing that keeps them from going over and then you go back to the lounge and drink your bad coffee and laugh with people your own age about things that have nothing to do with the girl you just told not to disappear.

She probably does.

But the way she said it. The way her voice went down. The way she held my eyes one beat past professional, and I didn't know what to do with the extra beat, because I've never.

The thought hit a wall.

I've never been looked at like that. Not by an adult. Not by anybody who wasn't Tia, and Tia looks at me the way you look at somebody you love without wanting anything from them. This was different. This had weight. And I don't know enough to know what the weight means, because I've never been in this room before. The room where an older person pays attention to you and you can't tell if it's kindness or something else, because the vocabulary for something else is a language nobody taught me.

She pushed off the lockers and went to find her fifth period.

The smell of burnt coffee stayed with her for three hours after that. Faint, and belonging to a woman who had nodded at her like she was anyone, and had told her not to disappear like she was the only one.

*

Tia got out of rehearsal at four and came across the lot doing an impression of somebody who had been made to say the same line eleven times.

"Helena is a doormat," she announced, getting in. "Helena is a doormat and Shakespeare knew it and did nothing." She found her vape in the door pocket, held it up as evidence of something, and put it in her jacket. "Drive. My house. My mom's at her sister's, we can eat garbage."

Cairo drove. The car took two tries to start, the way it had since August.

Third Street had gone yellow at the edges, the elms giving up in the order they gave up every year. She knew this road better than she knew most people. Every heave in the concrete, the missing square outside the vacant lot where somebody had put JAKE LUVS MARIE into wet cement a decade ago, and neither Jake nor Marie lived here now but the love was still in the infrastructure.

Tia was talking about Helena. Cairo was somewhere else.

Tell her.

It would take one sentence. Baxter kept me after and said something weird. Not even a confession. A piece of gossip, the kind of thing you hand a friend in a car because handing things to Tia was what the car was for. Tia would say something filthy about it. Tia would say she's forty and she owns one cardigan and Cairo would laugh, and whatever the thing was would come apart in the laughing, and by Friday it would be a joke they had instead of a thing she had.

Which was the problem.

If I say it out loud it gets smaller. And I don't want it smaller.

The thought went through her clean, the way a splinter goes in, and she did not look at it.

"Are you listening to me."

"You're a doormat."

"Helena is a doormat." Tia hit her in the arm. "God. Pay attention. This is my art."

Cairo turned onto Tia's street. The blue siding, the basketball hoop with no net, the steps where they had sat through four summers with their legs hanging down.

She pulled into the driveway and cut the engine and sat for a second with her hands still on the wheel, and the thing she wasn't saying sat in the car with them, warm and private and entirely hers.

*

[Cedar Falls. Tia's bedroom. October 9th. 4:53 PM.]

The pillow hit Cairo in the face.

She looked up from the laptop, cursor still blinking on the blank page, mocking her. The screen had gone dim from inactivity. Thirty minutes of staring at nothing while the white of the document burned her eyes.

"What."

"Get over here." Not a request.

Tia was sprawled across the bed, king-sized, absurd in a teenager's room, but her parents bought guilt in bulk and had been buying it in larger quantities since her dad moved out. The sheets were white and not clean. There was a coffee ring on the pillowcase from two weeks ago and a magazine half-buried under the comforter, the kind with sex tips Tia read out loud in a fake breathy voice to make Cairo laugh.

Cairo shut the laptop. Her thighs were red where it had been burning her. She crossed the room. The carpet was thick and expensive, the kind that muffled everything, footsteps and voices and the sound a girl makes coming apart slowly. Tia's house was a tomb wrapped in money. The central air hummed somewhere inside the walls, a white noise that made the quiet louder.

She dropped onto the bed. Tia pulled her in without asking and they fit the way they always fit, legs tangled, Tia's chin on her shoulder, the smell of her hair filling up Cairo's lungs. Coconut and vape smoke and three-day human.

The rat put its head down.

Not silenced. Not fed. It just settled its weight against her ribs and stopped, the way a dog stops circling and lies down, and Cairo noticed it the way you notice a noise ending, half a second late and without understanding what the noise had been.

"You're not gonna write anything tonight," Tia said.

"I know."

"Then why are you torturing yourself."

Cairo didn't answer. The ceiling had a crack in it, hairline, branching out of the corner like a river system. Like the lines around Baxter's eyes. The thought arrived uninvited and she crushed it before it could put anything down.

"You've got a four-four," Tia said. "Baxter loves you. You could hand in a grocery list and she'd give you an A."

"It's not about the grade."

"Then what's it about."

Quiet. Cairo could feel Tia's heartbeat against her back. Steady. Real. Eighty beats a minute maybe, the rhythm of a body still bothering to try.

"I want to write something that isn't bullshit," Cairo said. "Something that doesn't feel like I'm performing for someone."

"So write it."

"I can't."

"Why not."

"Because." She let the breath go. The words were stuck somewhere between her chest and her throat, like the rat had sat down on top of them. "Because what if it's bad. What if it's just nothing."

Tia shifted, propped herself up on an elbow. Her face came into view. Smudged eyeliner, the pimple on her chin already picked at and gone raw. She was looking at Cairo the way she did sometimes, like the performance was a screen door.

"You know what your problem is."

"Enlighten me."

"You think everything has to matter. Like, cosmically. It doesn't. You can just write some dumb shit about being sad and it doesn't have to change the world."

Cairo looked at her. Really looked. The scar through her eyebrow from the skateboard thing freshman year, still pale, still slightly raised. The too-big teeth she wouldn't get braces for. The chipped black polish she'd been wearing since September.

She wanted to tell her about the quarry. About the edge and the water and the morning she nearly let the math win. The words sat behind her teeth like stones, heavy, specific, waiting. The rat lifted its head and pressed down on them.

"I went to the quarry yesterday," Cairo said.

This morning. You went this morning, you stood there at seven with your toes over the edge, and you're moving it back a day because a day back is a story and this morning is a thing that is still going on.

The sentence cost her everything she had anyway.

Tia went still. Not the arranged stillness of somebody getting ready to react. The real kind. The stillness of somebody taking impact.

"The quarry," she said. Flat.

"I didn't jump."

"Obviously, because you're lying on my bed being dramatic about a Word document."

But her hand had found Cairo's. Gripped it. Her knuckles had gone white.

"Why didn't you tell me." Quiet now. The jokes stripped out.

"Because telling you makes it real."

"It was already real, Cairo. It was real while you were standing there and I was what. Sending you memes."

Cairo shut her eyes. The guilt was a physical thing, thick and bitter, coating the back of her throat.

"I turned around," she said.

Tia was quiet a long time. Her thumb went in slow circles on Cairo's palm, deliberate, the unconscious rhythm of somebody working through a thing too big to say.

"Okay." Her voice had gone rough. "Okay. We're not. I'm not gonna make this into a thing. I'm not gonna cry at you or lecture you or whatever." A shaky breath. "But you're here. And tomorrow you're going to school and you're going to write that piece for Baxter and you're going to keep being alive, because I need you alive, asshole. I need you here."

I need you here.

It landed differently than don't disappear. Simpler. Less beautiful. Not a thing you could put in a notebook and turn over later looking for extra meanings, because it didn't have any. It was one sentence that meant one thing.

"I'm hungry," Tia said. "You want pizza."

The pivot was so fast that Cairo laughed. The sound surprised her. She hadn't laughed in days, maybe weeks, and it came out rough, like something rusty being made to work.

"Sure."

"Cool. Also I think I left my vape in your car."

"You definitely did."

"Can you grab it tomorrow."

"Yeah."

They settled back into the tangle. Outside the sky was going gray, clouds rolling in from the west, and through the cracked window came the smell of rain about to happen. Wet earth and ozone and the faint sweetness of leaves going over.

The pizza came forty minutes later in a greasy box with the cardboard already soaked through. The smell hit first, cheap mozzarella and pepperoni with that processed sheen, something chemical in the sauce that made Cairo's mouth water in spite of itself.

Tia had half a slice in her mouth before Cairo got the box open. She ate like she was starving. No pause, no performance. Grease running down her chin, cheese stretching out of her mouth in a long obscene string. She was thin, Instagram thin, three thousand followers and half of them men in their thirties with family photos for profile pictures, and she ate like there was a hole in her that had never once been filled.

Same. Different kind of hole.

Cairo took a slice and bit down. The grease went off in her mouth, hot and salty and disgusting and perfect. They sat on the floor with their backs against the bed and the box between them like an offering. The carpet was soft under her thighs.

Somewhere in the house a clock was ticking. Outside, the rain started, soft and then hard, coming at the window in sheets.

"I think I'm getting my period," Tia said, mouth full.

"Congratulations."

"Fuck off." She licked grease off her fingers one at a time, taking her time about it. "I feel like shit."

"At least you're not pregnant."

Tia snorted. "That'd require having sex."

"Minor detail."

She took another slice. Enormous bite. Chewed, swallowed. A string of cheese had stuck to her chin and she either didn't notice or had decided not to care.

"When I do," she said, "it's not gonna be some thirty-second thing in the back of somebody's Civic. I want someone who knows what the hell they're doing. Someone who's heard of foreplay."

"Good luck with that."

"Right?" She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and left a smear of sauce. "I'm not letting some guy just jackhammer away while I lie there wondering if this is it. That's not fun. That's just suffering for somebody else's dick."

Cairo looked at her. Sauce on her face. Grease on her fingers. Dead serious.

"Who told you that."

"The internet. Reddit." Tia shrugged. "Mostly common sense. Like, why would I want to do something that hurts. If it hurts they're doing it wrong."

She took another bite and the moment went by. Cairo's stomach cramped. She'd eaten too fast and the grease was sitting heavy in her, but it was a good kind of wrong, the discomfort of being full, of having something in her body that wasn't the rat.

"I need water," she said.

"Me too. Too lazy."

"Same."

They stayed there. Thirsty, greasy, full, the rain hammering the window, the house quiet around them except for the hum in the walls.

Tia burped. Loud. Unapologetic.

Cairo laughed until her ribs hurt.

It wasn't much. Two girls on a floor eating bad pizza, talking about sex they hadn't had and periods they didn't want. But it was real, and it was more real than anything she had felt in weeks, and the rat lay against her ribs with its eyes shut and did not move.

At nine her mother texted asking if she was staying over. Cairo looked at the screen for a while.

Then she wrote yeah, and put the phone face-down on the carpet, and reached for the last slice before Tia could get it.