“You’re allowed to say thank you.” Patricia laughed.
He ran over and hugged her so tight, he nearly squeezed the life out of her, and he felt her bare shoulders against his chest and her face against his neck. She made a slight protesting “squick” noise and Laurence slackened a tiny bit but kept hugging her.
“Thank you thank you thank you.” Laurence’s eyes felt splashy. His senses filled with clementines and softness and warmth. He blessed the day his parents decided he should be outdoorsy.
The others had come back, and Sougata was life-preservering Priya with tears rushing down his face. “I thought I’d lost you forever, I couldn’t have lived with myself, I never want to let go of you,” he said.
“There were colors outside the visual spectrum,” Priya managed to say. “But I could still see them. I can’t stop seeing them now.”
“Vodka and loud music,” Patricia called out from Laurence’s death grip. “Stat. It’s an essential part of her recovery process.”
They rushed Priya to Benders Bar & Grill. There was some talk of going to the ER instead, but Patricia nixed it, and nobody wanted to argue with the person who’d saved all their asses.
“But how did you do it?” Anya kept asking. “What did you do?”
“I used my sonic screwdriver.”
“No, really. What did you do?”
“I reversed the polarity of the neutron flow.”
“Stop giving Doctor Who answers! Tell me the truth!”
“It was sort of a wibbly wobbly,” Patricia said, fully teasing Anya now.
Booze really was medicinal, after a near-death experience. Holding a drink in both hands and letting it corrode the topmost layer of his mouth and throat, Laurence felt a spiritual relationship with Bushmills.
Priya, too, seemed to be pretty much back to normal as soon as she had a couple swigs of vodka and heard the sound system blasting “Cum On Feel The Noize.” She started dancing on her stool and making jokes about heavy-metal hair and body shots. Laurence made sure the liquor kept coming, so Priya would get her recommended dosage. Whatever she’d experienced during her time outside of our universe, she seemed to be rinsing it out of her mind, and maybe if they were lucky, the whole evening would feel like a weird blur to her when she woke with a hangover. As a strategy for scrambling someone’s short-term memories, it didn’t seem bad.
Everybody kept toasting Patricia and buying her drinks and laughing at her dumb jokes, as if they were ultraconscious that she’d pulled their fat out of the fire. When Patricia went to the ladies’, Sougata leaned over and said to Laurence, “Seriously, where did you find her? She is amazing. She’s like the weirdest genius I’ve ever met, and that’s actually saying something.” Tanaa and Anya both chimed in. But at the same time, Laurence noticed that none of his friends would quite look at Patricia, and they kept talking past her rather than to her. These people hated superstition, but they were treating his friend like a bad-luck charm.
Patricia watched Priya like a freaking hawk and touched her hand every now and then, as if her touch had healing properties. Which it probably did. Patricia paid no attention to the rest of them, even Laurence. Patricia might be an antisocial weirdo who wandered at three in the morning talking to rats, but she had unlimited gentleness for people when they needed it. Patricia’s black hair was swept back, and her face had a beaconlike quality to it that went along with the intentness of her gaze.
Laurence had a moment of counting up how many of his secrets Patricia knew, and feeling good about it. He felt a weird sense of pride that he had found someone he trusted so much. Like he’d chosen well, even if it was mostly by accident.
He walked her home, fighting the urge to embrace her randomly. She was laughing and shaking her head. “God, it was iffy for a few moments there,” she said. “Your friend got pretty lost. Plus it’s a miracle she didn’t get squashed by the weird gravitational effects of the space she was in.”
“I wonder how many other things in our world are just the shadows of things in other places,” Laurence said, forming the thought as he spoke. “I mean, we always suspected that gravity was so weak in our world because most of it was in another dimension. But what else? Light? Time? Some of our emotions? I mean, the longer I live, the more I feel like the stuff I see and feel is like a tracing of the outline of the real stuff that’s beyond our perceptions.”
“Like Plato’s cave,” Patricia said.
“Like Plato’s cave,” Laurence agreed.