Kellan swallows hard.
“Hunger. Cold. Your lacerated hands. The need to piss and sleep. All those things vanish. You turn off a switch, rid yourself of the burden of bodily pangs. The only thing left working is your rational mind trying to calculate a way out,” I say.
From the kitchen comes a shout and a cackle. Kellan puts his hand over mine, as if to say Mute that boozy interruption. Go on. His hand is warm, but not yuck-warm.
I keep my hand still.
“A lot of people would have curled into a ball and waited to die,” he says.
“It was pure survival instinct. I had no choice.”
“It was a choice,” he says. “You chose not to die.”
“I guess. But here’s the thing: sometimes, I think I got stuck in that mode. I can’t turn the switch back on. I can’t stop calculating and start feeling again.”
“Maybe you’re still trying to survive,” he says. His eyes dance as he moves my hair off my shoulder. It would be natural to slip my hands around his neck, breathe in his boy smell.
“I should check on Mom,” I mumble, staggering away and into the kitchen.
Mom and Erik are three-quarters into a new bottle of cabernet. Erik perches on a counter stool, knees pointed, bopping his head to the Sirius grunge station and smiling at Mom, who’s decided this is the right moment to belatedly carve our Halloween pumpkin, which smells rotten. She’s got the top off, and is digging the guts out with bare hands, sleeves up to her elbows. They both look snockered. Someone has lit votive candles and set them on the counter and the breakfast table. The timer dings, and Mom rushes to pull some kind of Indian rice pudding off the stove. I block her way. “You wash your hands and let me get that,” I say, slipping on potholders and lifting the pan. The aroma of cardamom and raisins grows, nearly eclipsing the pumpkin funk. My stomach growls. Mom and Erik take forks to the pudding and hash out whether or not some professor’s article was worthy of having been published in the Lancet, and how they are sooo bad to be gossiping about it, never mind having double dessert, shame on them, giggle-giggle.
Kellan and I stand back, gawking. “Should Erik ride his bike home?” I whisper, flustered. If there’s anything more paralyzing than seeing a parent drunk, it’s seeing your parent’s friend drunk and scarfing down rice pudding.
“I’ll offer to drive him home.” Kellan tilts his head until our temples nearly touch. “But I think he might stay.”
“Should I throw a sheet and some pillows on the couch?” I ask.
“They’ll sleep together, dummy,” he says.
“Oh no. They’re research partners. It’s not like that,” I say. But I can’t tell you what it is like, either.
“Oh really? I guess you weren’t picking up the signals I was picking up. There’s major history there.”
I nearly yell “Ha!” Instead, I deflect. “It’s … complicated. They’re kind of codependent. Like, Erik completes my mother when it comes to things like social skills. She doesn’t have the greatest EQ. After the woods, she dragged me out of Shiverton, supposedly to get away from the nosy reporters and bad memories. So where does she take me? To the Berkshires. Home to the largest state forest in Massachusetts. This at a time when I’m avoiding trees in any number.”
“I maintain anything in large numbers is scary. Take kittens. One kitten is cute. Five hundred kittens in one place? Terrifying. The principle applies to anything. Birds. Ladybugs. Babies.”
“It’s not a joke,” I say, trying to scowl, though I want to laugh. Because an argument right now would make it easier to keep things on the right plane, with this guy who not only hooked up with Liv, but is involved with an aggressively preppy puck—
“I know. You were traumatized. And half the time you feel like you’re being punked, because of the wildly inappropriate things people do and say in front of you. Like trying to make you feel better by sending you to a vacation home surrounded by woods,” Kellan says.
“Or worrying I might get PTSD from seeing Ana Alvarez’s dead body, because it’s not like I might already have it from, say, getting abducted.”
“Or saying they’re acting like they haven’t seen food in days, when you went two days eating, what?” he says.
“Basically nothing.” I smile a bit. “You caught that.”
“And I’m sorry for saying it.” He leans against the wall, thumbs hooked in his pocket, his signature slouch. “It must be hard to feel like the world is periodically surreal. Like you’re being punked all the time, or on Candid Camera. Don’t you feel like looking into the camera sometimes and saying, ‘Seriously?’”
My jaw drops. How does he know?
“But I’ve figured something out about you. You think it’s kind of funny when people make those gaffes,” he says.