“What’s wrong with your neck?” Di says.
“What are you looking at?” Connie says.
Of course. He can stay in the room with them with no consequences. He doesn’t need to accompany her upstairs. They can’t hear him. They can’t see him. What is she looking at?
“Nothing,” she says.
Nothing at all.
She goes up to her room and shuts the door. She tosses off the bathrobe and pulls on her dark green hoodie with the too-short sleeves. Panties and her brown cuffed jeans. Socks and her knockoff skater shoes.
She had initiated the lie about the dishes when she first brought Di and Connie to the house almost three years ago. Having seen their comparatively kempt homes, she was embarrassed by her own. At first, she stalled them from coming over entirely. The roof was being redone on her house, she would say. It’ll be too loud to hang out there. And after her roof was redone, well, there were the repairs to fix some of the mistakes the roofers had left. The repairs lasted months. Once the repairs strained the last strand of credibility, and she knew they would have to see her home eventually, she made up the lie about the dishes. It went like this: Ma was a domestic taskmaster. Which, ha. How much more the opposite of true could you get? Dishes, vacuuming, mopping – if Beddy did not do it, it did not get done. She swung this lie successfully, which was rare for her, since she felt her lies never had any purchase. Even when she was given chances to, she never rescinded it.
A knock at her door. She already knows who it is.
She opens the door and Void floats in.
“So you decided to come upstairs anyway, after I embarrassed myself?”
“You keep food up here still?”
With his one existing arm, he feels under the bed.
“There’s peanut M&M’s in the desk.”
He’s over to the desk in an instant, throwing open drawer after drawer before finding it. She had seen him float so slowly, she assumed he was in a weakened state. He grabs the pack and pops the whole thing into his mouth. When he burps, the yellow wrapper sails out as a paper airplane.
“Feel better? Thanks for saving me some.”
“You promised me eggs with turkey.”
“I don’t think I promised. I think I said I would.”
“You don’t have to say the word for it to be a promise.”
Why had she always assumed Void was a he? The body is one tapered androgynous mass, suggesting no hourglass torque in the hips or bulge of breasts, but no discernible muscle, either. With no shadows to claim regions and tell strength from bone, it is a sinuous outline, save for the new injuries. But with that clarity of childhood imagination, she had known it was a man.
“I guess you’re not a fan of the journalistic stylings of Cosmo?” Connie calls up the stairs.
They’re on to her. She locks the door knob.
“They’re going to find you out,” Void says, settling onto her bed. “They’re going to find out what your brain is really like, and someone out there is going to put you in the loony bin.”
He’s right. She slipped up a few times already with her friends. What happens when she gets in public? What happens if the hallucinations don’t end with Void?