Epigraph

Perhaps all the dragons of our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us once beautiful and brave.

• Rainer Maria Rilke

There’s something remarkably therapeutic about lying on the floor. Evan would sometimes lay there for hours, watching the fins of his ceiling fan circle around, hearing the world outside his door reverberating through the floorboards. The younger students, no doubt. It annoyed him, for reasons he couldn’t quite articulate. It was the sort of thing he often circled around in his mind, lying here on the floor. Like why certain things bothered him. Why he intellectually knew that what the younger boys were doing was good, in fact: making friends, playing games, brushing up against the letter of the House Rules’ law. That what they were doing was good and that at the same time he listened for a prefect to come out and turn them away, a scolding which would bring him a certain amount of satisfaction.

This was the attitude of a bad person, he told himself. He hated that he only saw in others the most surface-level actions, the noise and the shouts, without any articulation of what their inner world may be like. He had decided that what they experienced during moments like these — during the most simple, everyday moments, in fact, much less the sort of spiritual, heart-opening, or surreally beautiful moments that punctuate adolescence — they barely even registered what was going on or how their actions affected others. They didn’t realize that they were shaking the floorboards or echoing down the hallway. He considered for a moment that he should be more empathetic to them, let them have their fun. And then of course he would judge himself for his lack of empathy, would think how he would reflect back on this particular moment of his life when he was, like, 90 years old. He certainly wouldn’t be happy that he had spent his high school years, years pregnant with possibilities of adventure and romance and mischief, judging others like some crotchety old man. And then of course he would become upset at himself for not joining in the fun either. What he most wanted to avoid, though, was being the bad guy. He knew that at some level, these kids were just trying to cut up and have fun over the weekend, free from the purview of teachers with heavy bags under their eyes, teachers like Dr. Eddington, who last year was the only teacher to use the school’s still-existing corporal punishment rules — rules since struck down by the state school board — to give ten lashes to Ben Larceny for carving a crude pair of boobs in the vinyl surface of his desk, and he (Evan) also knew that if he told them to shove off to another corner of the dorms, that he’d remain in their minds onwards through their adult lives, and that even if they didn’t say anything back to them in that moment, they’d likely spend considerable minutes or hours of their lives thinking of comebacks or mentally tearing him down with whatever monikers or slurs were popular at the time.

And but of course since he inevitably didn’t say anything, he sat their on the floor projecting forward what the rest of his life would be like if he never stood up against things that were merely annoying all the way up to being actively dangerous to himself or to society at large etc., and he imagined how such a lack of backbone would make him grossly unappealing to the opposite sex. It was such backbonelessness that had forced the rift between him and a certain Tracy LaRussa, the girl who nearly a year ago now had agreed to go steady with him until they imploded mere weeks later. Evan felt that Tracy was perhaps the person closest to having a read on him (which is of course a common relation to have with the girl a young man loses his virginity to) and that her subsequent rejection of him at the height of their relational intensity implied two distinct possibilities for him: either she did truly have a read on him and understood something particularly grotesque or repulsive about his psyche, which would imply from the ensuing breakup that he was in fact some deep-down, irrevocably broken person; or that she didn’t really understand him at all, implying a failure on his own part to actually get all of the thoughts deep down in his personhood out of him. The latter was the most likely reality, he reckoned: it must be that everything that goes on between your ears is more-or-less unspeakable in its hugeness, that we all just going around using whatever language that we have at our disposal (which for most people, he felt, was at a level far from conveying even the most superficial cognitive events clearly or truthfully) to try and transplant the whole web of events in our mind into the mind of another, and yet in fact it’s so jumbled and huge and irreducible that even we ourselves have to filter out most of it from our conscious mind in the first place. And so much of human relation is a fucked up game of telephone.

/# Some scene where Marcus goes through a door in the school before the others do, or before the snow collapses on them.

The three of them set out early the next morning. Archie had been keeping track of proximate wind speeds etc. for nearly a week now, and the storm noticeably let up in the mornings. They’d need all the help they could get.

“Radio check, over,” he said into the radio. He had dug a few dozen of these out of the emergency supply closet and arranged a few people still at school to keep them on standby. When he spoke into the radio, he enunciated his words clearly and firmly like a drill sergeant.

“Loud and clear,” a voice replied. A similarly militaristic confirmation, Quinn thought, like the boys were role-playing. It was probably Cal on the other end of the line, the squat second-year whose room was covered in World War II histories. He would commit to the role.

Archie looked over at her and then down at her radio, and similarly over to Evan. She sighed and unclipped it from her belt. “Yo.” Evan’s test phrase was a simple “Hello.” Cal came back: “Rodger dodger.”

The main drive exiting the school was completely covered in snow, no asphalt visible at all. The only thing that distinguished the road was its lack of trees, so the they were essentially following one large clearing all the way into town. It is nearly a ten mile walk there, Archie estimated, though without cell service they hadn’t been able to look up the exact distance. It would take them a few hours of walking, most of the day perhaps if the road was particularly slick.

The three of them mostly walked in silence. Every so often, Archie would check the radio again. None of them could remember ever going into town. Once, maybe (she couldn’t remember if this was a really memory or one of those faint memories that one reconstructs from the constituent parts of many other memories, as with the memories of early childhood), Quinn recalled stopping at the corner market before her parents dropped her off one semester. It must have been some years ago, perhaps the first year of middle school — the memory’s fuzziness and lack of color suggests as much. Nothing much else existed in the aside from this store and the small rural gas station. Once she had seen an older man selling what seemed like rough-cut pottery. He waved at their car with his thick hands, heavy knots built over decades on the wheel. She doesn’t remember exactly what she had needed at the corner store, only that at the time it seemed to her a matter of great importance, and that her parents had listened to hardly a word she said. She doesn’t remember even going into the store really, but she does remember it as one of many small battles she had with her parents, one of many in which she tried ceaselessly to convey some basic necessity like hunger or pain and was otherwise ignored and sidelined, quarantined off at this school from which she was again fleeing at this moment.

All this is to say, there really wasn’t much in town. Quinn couldn’t recall if there was a payphone or anything like that, and even if they managed to track down the store owner or the manager of the gas station, there’s not telling whether their phones worked or whether they would be in any better state than themselves.

The road down the mountain twisted and switched back repeatedly. After a half hour of walking, none of them really knew which direction they were headed, merely that they were following the road until something indicated they should do otherwise. There was no one to salt the roads, so they had slicked over with ice. Evan and Quinn stayed on the road, walking sideways to use the wide side of their feet to gain more traction. Archie had taken to walking through the powder all along the roadside, nearly jumping with each step to clear his legs above the snow. Evan thought he was watching hurdling at half speed. At this rate, they would barely make it to town by dusk.

The road cut a sharp turn and out of the trees opened into a sheet of white. The clearing was half a mile across, a near-perfect circle of even snow with black trees on all sides. The road angled down into the clearing and disappeared under the snow. Across the clearing they saw an opening in the trees but no road visible. Everything apart from that was lost in fog.

The three of them decided to make for the clearing, having no other option but to walk the entire perimeter of the clearing which would only add more time to an already-delayed journey, so they walked straight across on what they hoped was still road somewhere beneath some feet of snow. Slowly the wind picked up and the snow went from fine flakes to large clumps and they couldn’t see shit beyond a few feet in front of them. Evan was beginning to feel the cold wear through him, and several times his legs struggled to make it through the powder. Archie and Quinn were continuing ahead of him, their images slowly dissolving into the snowfall’s static. Evan called for them to wait, but they didn’t stop. The wind cut against his ears and lips. A gust caught him off balance and he tumbled into the snow. He couldn’t see anything, not even the clumps of snow that were hitting his face and stinging his eyes. He could hear nothing over the increasing roar of the blizzard and couldn’t stand against its squall and the white wind and white snow and white ground made him feel as if he were falling even as he lay flat against the earth, helpless. He shut his eyes and tried to breathe and when he opened them the world had stopped: the wind and the snow and all the rest. It had stopped but somehow it still roared in its silence. Though it had ceased to move the white of snow and sky and earth still stung his eyes and through the silence came a voice deep and strong, at once both distant and squarely inside his own mind: “There is no going back.” He heard this and froze, eyes looking intensely as if trying to see through the cloud of unknowing before him. He felt his vocal cords flex and his tongue roll the words in his mouth. He breathed in the voice through his mouth and felt it settle in his stomach. When he breathed out it didn’t leave him, only that heard the world went snap and the roar of the wind and the ice in his boots and the sting on his lips jolted back into existence.

There is no going back. The words floated in his chest, though he could not make out precisely what they meant. As he picked himself up from the ground, he felt the wind subside and the fog clear away. What was before just undifferentiated white now had depth and shadow, and the sky had blue and the trees green and in the distance he saw the pale blue of Quinn’s coat.

/# They get turned around in the clearing and have to find their way back, idk

By now, the sun had begun to set, and it was clear that they would not make it back to the dorm before dark. They had each packed a flashlight, but given the events of the day, none were confident the road they had been following would return them to the school.

They decided to return to the groundskeeping shed only a half-mile up (they hoped) and camp there for the night. As darkness fell, so too did the cold.

Under the shed’s awning was an additional store of firewood, and though the snow had soaked much of it, the logs in the middle of the pile were dry. Archie whittled down some of them for kindling and nursed the small flame until it caught onto the bigger logs.

After a full day in the storm, the soft quiet of the evening was almost unnerving. Snow continued to fall silently, something which at some point in their lives, a point which now felt like a different lifetime, would have been cause for celebration but which now seemed to slowly sap all the energy from their bodies. It was that particular tiredness that they felt in their bones, as if their marrow had been replaced with buckshot. Heavy.

When his eyelids began to droop in sleep, Archie suggested that they take turns watching the fire for the evening. “Every hour, we rotate.” As the progenitor of the idea, he volunteered for the first watch, but Quinn offered to take it instead. She worried that she been a spectator for much of the day while Archie took charge, so she thought it best to pull her own weight, though she didn’t mention all this to the others.

She regretted this decision as soon as the other two had fallen asleep. The warmth of the fire was seductive. It drew her in. Her eyes adjusted to the bright flames against the darkness, and she became unable to see anything beyond the soft glow that formed a small bubble around them. She saw the fire, the tightly wound bodies lying on the grass, and then nothing. Not even the stars above showed themselves to her.

Soon enough, it started to wane as the original logs burned through, so she pulled another log from the stack. By now, the original structure had crumbled, so she simply tossed it on top, embers flying out and dancing skywards. Her eyes were half-closed, sleep beginning to wear on her. For a second it nearly took her completely, her head tilting and eyes slowly glazing over, until she suddenly lurched upright.

She tried to focus her attention on the flames, tried to feel its warmth acutely, to feel how the heat came almost in pulsing waves. She thought of the fire in the common room, of the bookshelves and tapestries and soft couch cushions. How nice it would be to wrap up in her blanket with a book and a warm cup of tea. It was easier to appreciate the snow through a window, she thought, and with a roof overhead.

And she thought of the warm meals her mother made: a roast chicken flecked with rosemary and butter and potatoes in the pan. She thought of the smell of a Christmas tree, remembered the glint of tinsel and the pretty red ornaments. Her family would all hang them together when she went home. They’d pull the boxes up from the basement and put music on the stereo. Frank Sinatra would sing over their living room as they took turns placing ornaments on the tree, ornaments they had made as children with painted handprints and cheesy photos of them with Santa. It had been many years since they had decorated like that together, but it was a warm memory nevertheless.

The fire slowly came back into her focus. She wasn’t sure if she had fallen asleep, which part was memory and which part dream. The fire had once again started to shrink, so she placed a few more logs on the fire.

Evan began to shift and turn from his sleep. He sat up slowly, rubbing his eyes and realizing that it was still the middle of the night. Quinn didn’t know for sure how long they had been sleeping, but she told him it had probably been a few hours.

I thought we were rotating every hour, he said.

Yeah, but I wasn’t all that tired, she lied. Plus you guys were sleeping pretty heavy. Didn’t want to wake you.

Why don’t you take your turn now then? I’m already up, I’ll stay watch for a bit.

I don’t think I can fall asleep yet.

Evan stood up and tried to stretch his back. Shit mattress, he laughed. He turned around and looked away from the fire, trying to let his eyes adjust so he could see the stars. After a few seconds, he tapped Quinn on the shoulder and pointed up.

Above them they saw not only the clear night sky, unmarred by the bright lights of the school or the neighboring town. That alone would have struck them with awe. But tonight, they saw the sky flickering and flashing. They saw streaks of light stretching across the sky, pockets of white flame with long tails flashing into existence. Shooting stars. So many that they seemed to be scratching away the veneer of the night to expose behind it a blazing glory.

Evan sat next to Quinn, and the two silently gazed up at the stars. My grandmother used to tell us, Quinn said, that shooting stars mean someone has just made their way to heaven. She felt the memory in her chest, felt her grandmother’s voice inside her throat. The stars blazed so brightly they seemed to be revealing heaven itself.

After a few minutes the light show subsided, and darkness returned. Neither of them wanted to break the fragile silence between them. Quinn didn’t say anything about her grandmother to Evan. She wanted to hold it in her chest, to have something inside of her for her and her alone. It made her feel safe, having that memory. She felt its warmth spreading through her under the dark sky, and she barely noticed that her eyes had closed or that her body had started to teeter over. She fell onto Evan’s shoulder, sound asleep.

For several hours, Evan sat quietly and watched the fire. Quinn had kept plenty of wood on it, so it managed to last for some time burning freely, but without additional logs it was now little more than a faint red glow beneath its own charred remains. He wanted Quinn to sleep after her long watch, so he didn’t move an inch and never fed the fire.

/# We could probably have something like a dream sequence in here. Later, Evan mentions that he heard Quinn talk in her sleep, may make sense to put something related here.

Archie began to stir, no longer protected from the morning cold, but when he saw Evan’s embarrassed grin as he nodded towards Quinn’s sagging body, he laughed quietly to himself and put on some more fuel, gently blowing at the embers to rekindle the blaze.

The morning sun had crept up slowly on the horizon. Snow was still falling, but almost imperceptibly so. A few flakes dotted the sky as the boys watched the first tendrils of sunlight reach across the sky, piercing the storm clouds in red and gold beams across the violet sky. The forest, silent the whole night through, slowly crept back to life. Birds and squirrels leapt across the tree branches, occasionally knocking loose the accumulated snow and scattering to every direction.

Archie tried to occupy himself, first by tending to the fire and then by scouting out some sort of lookout point from which he could check their path home. He had been certain of himself before, but after the events at the clearing he didn’t know which of his instincts to trust. He walked slightly up the road, taking care to stay in sight of the fire.

Evan felt Quinn nuzzle into his arm as she woke up. As her eyes opened, she saw first the sleeve of Evan’s black coat, and as her eyes followed the sleeve up to Evan’s face, she bolted upright. Her cheeks were already red from the cold, but she turned away as they blossomed to a deep scarlet.

“Shit, sorry about that,” she said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Evan laughed. “You conked out after your long watch.”

“You could have just pushed me off, you know.”

“Yeah, but you seemed comfortable and I didn’t want to wake you. We all need whatever sleep we can get.”

She considered this for a moment, then turned to look up the road. “Where’s the lieutenant going?” she asked.

“Wanted to check something about the route.” Evan tossed another log on the fire, sending embers up into the still-dark morning sky.

/# What comes next: He tells her that she spoke in her sleep, something about her grandmother and how Quinn sang Frank Sinatra in her sleep in this deep, raspy voice. She’s embarrassed, but then Evan offers something about his own family and their traditions, and the two of them feel a sense of connection at least over their longing for whatever the world was like before. Maybe Evan says something about what he heard in the clearing.

Quinn slept terribly that night. It was the sort of wakeful sleep where dreams occupy the entire self and one awakes more exhausted than before.

She dreamt herself atop a diving board. She clutched tightly at the thick railing, which was placed low such that she had to bend over to hold on. She sat up there at the top, hunched over, and over the side of the board she could see down far below. It was a hot day and the sun warmed her skin, but high above the water the wind made her cold, her wet body shivering. She wore an old one-piece suit she wore as a child, though now she had long outgrown it. She stopped for a second to take stock of her body, sections where the nylon stretched or thinned. She didn’t know how she had gotten here, and she was afraid. The rough plastic of the board cuts at her feet like sandpaper. She feels eyes on her, the eyes of the long line of shivering wet bodies lined up behind her, some waiting on the ladder, crawling up beneath her, mermaids come to pull her down from her shipwreck.

Down below (how far? She couldn’t tell) the deep blue of the pool shimmered like a desert haze. The fastest way down is to jump. She remembered as a child how when she first jumped off the side of the pool how her mother would be there to catch her, open-armed, how much encouragement and excitement there was to jump into the pool. From up here there would be no one to catch her, it would even be dangerous to do so. And she remembered that girl who a few years ago slipped from the diving board, how she somehow fell under the rails and back down towards the concrete, how her parents saw their daughter hit the ground with a sound Quinn tried intently not to imagine but which she thought of might be like an insectoid crunch amplified a hundred times over, the crunch of a body tense against the uncaring pull of gravity and physics. Quinn thought for a moment what would happen if someone had tried to catch her, how maybe a leg may have been broken but how ultimately it wouldn’t have ended the way that it did, how that girl’s blood probably mixed in with the pool water in a purple cloud and how parents covered the eyes of their own children and how one of the young boys nearby vomited into the bushes from the sound alone.

Are you all right young lady, a voice asked. Hey. Quinn didn’t look at the voice, and instead looked intently down at the blue square and beige concrete surrounding it. No red. And she thought of the line of people and looked up and around for her parents but didn’t find them. The image came into her mind that she would have to jump, and she imagined what the fall would be like, and she knew that of course no one could jump with her or hold her or catch her at the bottom, that up at the top of the board it was only her. What the wind would feel like against her skin on the way down, the wind and the summer sun keeping her skin warm but her insides a deep cold. She wasn’t afraid of missing the pool but more that somehow the pool would reject her, turn to concrete just as she landed. She remembered how surface tension at high speeds could make the water hard enough to snap her bones just like the girl in the news. And she also remembered that diving boards like this were perfectly safe, that thousands had done it before her and thousands would do it after. The voice returned: Do you need to come down? And she did need to get down, but in her mind it felt a matter of expediency. She walked towards the end of the board and gripped the lip with her toes, felt the board bend and bounce with her weight. On each bounce, she felt the lightness, the air, the butterflies as she floated up briefly, and then felt her guts shift back into place on the way down. It felt as if her knees would give way any second now. Perhaps the board would disappear from under her, and down she would go.

Hey.

She felt impatience growing and eyes looking up from deck chairs and cold wind icing her veins and she leapt. Lightness up, heaviness down. As her body fell back down past the board, she saw everything go: no sunlight, no wind, no chattering or feet slapping wetly against hot concrete or hiss of aerosol sunscreen. It was like getting the sun in your eyes — white everywhere, then all colors bending together into something that was pure vision, pure feeling. And when she opened her eyes again and looked down, she saw the pool suddenly closer to her and braced for impact. She hurdled closer to it, though she still didn’t trust whether she would land on water or concrete, whether she could trust the fall or whether she would make another headline like the girl that fell. She felt the wind in her hair and cool against her skin and she awoke, sweating and shaking, in her bed as the winter winds howled outside her window.

The door frame was chipped and battered. Evan knew for certain it hadn’t been here before. Inside the frame was pure dark, a black that nearly seemed to suck light out of the rest of the hallway. He looked behind him, and several pairs of eyes looked back. Some worried, some closed as if in prayer. Luna’s eyes met his.

At the far end of the hall, the ceiling creaked under the weight of the rooftop snow. He had never seen a brick wall bend until then. Someone from the back of the group began to push and shouted now!. Evan pushed himself against the wall to steady himself. He looked at Luna again. Her gaze hadn’t changed, and she gave him a serious nod. He put his hand into the frame, its contents so dark he half-expected it to be solid stone. But his hand continued through, feeling nothing. Evan edged his body in, inch-by-inch. All he knew was that the other side was solid ground, but he could feel nothing for certain. The crowd behind him shuffled and groaned, and a hand from behind shoved him full-sail through the door.

His eyes stung from the brightness. He saw only white like snow-blindness, but he couldn’t see anything in particular. Textureless white as far as he could see, in all directions. His eyes couldn’t focus without an object to latch onto. His eyes watered and distorted his vision. For a moment, all he saw were colors refracting through his tears.

He turned around, looking for the hand that had pushed him, but all that could be seen was a door, exactly like the one in the hallway. Chipped frame, red door, and a black rectangle where another room should be. For a second he looked down for where he thought a floor should be, but there was only white. No up or down, no near or far. He felt dizzy, like he was on a carnival ride and needed a barf bucket, and he reached out for the door frame to steady himself. His hand missed the frame and fell back through the darkness. Something from the far side grabbed his hand. It felt like a hand, someone with a warm, firm grip. He heard Luna’s voice shout his name, and as he pulled his hand back through the door frame. She had grabbed his hand and came vaulting through the door. She had come running in at full speed and pulled him up as she went. For a moment, they ran beyond the door into clear white until the brightness again made him tear up, and he burrowed his face into the crook of his arm, trying to rub the tears out of his eyes. As he covered his eyes, Luna slowed to a halt. He realized then that there was no sound. No footsteps, no shouts from beyond the doorway.

Evan uncovered his eyes and looked back at the door. They had only run for a few seconds, but it seemed now just a speck of red and black amidst a sea of white. He turned to look at Luna and saw her lips move, trying to say something, but still no sound. He looked back at her and shook his head, mouthing I can’t hear anything.

He noticed that she still held his hand out there in the expanse, and when she knew she couldn’t be heard, she gave his hand a squeeze. He again saw her lips move, but he couldn’t make out the words. In that moment, he felt the ground, or whatever unseeable force was holding them, give way. They began to free-fall, which Evan only knew because he saw the door above them fade away, smaller and smaller, until it was a mere speck in the distance. He looked down, and suddenly, like clouds parting beneath him, he saw the expanse open. In an instant he heard: waves.

Beneath him opened the open ocean, more blue than any he had seen before, the sound so clear that he felt it alone may carry him away. Whatever world they had been in had given way to this, to his body crashing into the surface of the water and the salt stinging his lungs. He couldn’t feel Luna’s hand any more, but as he flailed and kicked to swim back up towards the sunlight, he saw her legs paddling and kicking up towards the surface.

He reached his hand up and kicked hard. The salt stung his eyes, but through his eyelids he could see the light getting brighter. He hadn’t gotten a good breath in before he hit the water; his lungs were practically empty. Before he could clear the surface, an undertow pulled him sideways. The force made him gasp; seawater filled his lungs. For a moment, he saw himself unravelling, limbs flailing for anything at all. The last thing he remembered was a thought: I want to be alive. There was no air for him to call for help.

Then he saw clouds. He felt sand on his back, and he spat water onto his chest. The clouds didn’t seem to take notice of him, and a fear entered his mind: they were going on without him. The world was continuing on while he nearly drowned. He turned over and coughed into the sand. His lungs were clear. He looked across the beach and howled like an animal.

Sand and salt scratched at his vocal cords. He shouted for Luna, and down the beach her green skirt stood out against the white sand. He could scarcely open his eyes from the salt, but as he wiped them clear and looked again, he saw her waving her arms and pointing back out to see. He looked and at first saw only the blue ocean clear as far as his eyes could see, but when he looked back at her he saw her arm pointing up into the sky over the sea. Far off, above the sea and yet beneath the scattered white clouds he saw a black and red box.

The door hung suspended in space high above the water. For a moment he saw only the door, but then one by one he saw bodies. Different bodies all in the same uniforms burst through the door, and faintly through the wind he heard the crash of their bodies against the surf.

By the time he looked back, Luna had gone to the edge of the forest and picked up some of the large downed tree branches that would float like makeshift pool noodles. With three large boughs beneath her arm, she ran straight back into the water. Evan thought for a moment that he should follow in after her, but when he commanded his body to stand it didn’t respond, and by the time he had pushed himself off the ground, he knew he didn’t have the strength to swim against the tide. He collapsed back onto the sand and tilted his head up to watch the door. He tried his best to count the bodies coming through — six so far, seven, eight, maybe more. He tried again to will his body to stand, but it didn’t budge.

This was all he felt he could do for now, to handle this little census, but as he watched Luna’s arms piercing through the waves, he wanted to be there with her. The worst thing was that he didn’t really care so much about saving the others, if he was really honest with himself. He wanted to want to save them, wanted that little compass in his chest to point him back into the water to pull the others up with him. He hated hesitation, hated the strange screen within his mind that separated his mind from raw sensation. He imagined what it might be like to be in Luna’s body right now. He imagined that the ocean must somehow must be more blue to her, the sand exhilaratingly coarse, that the bodies falling from the sky were as important as her own. She could pull them all onto shore with sheer will. Perhaps if he cared enough, he thought, he could show up too.

Some students quickly made their way to shore, especially some of the more athletic crew like Stanton and Havershire, but Luna had to just about pull Lucy Baker onto the shore by her shirt collar. With Lucy safely on the shore, she quickly recruited Stanton to join in pulling people out of the water. As more bodies hit the sand, groups were reunited. Some were hunched over hawking seaweed out of their lungs; others collapsed in the sand and nearly passed out in the tropical sun.

Evan counted eighteen that had come through the door, plus himself and Luna. He scanned the beach and counted out nineteen heads, plus himself for the full twenty. They hadn’t done a full count at the school — all the students were scattered across separate dorms and hadn’t gathered together before the building’s collapse — but this would be their group now.

By now he could stand and walk, and though it felt like his muscles would tear off his bones as he moved, he made it across the beach to Luna, who lay splayed out at the edge of the forest. He flopped down beside her, stretching his arms and legs out at all angles, same as her. He heard her breathing heavy and exhausted, but her eyes remained bright and clear looking out over the waves at the door.

He didn’t break the silence yet. He liked best to see people when they didn’t feel they were being watched. He was like a floating camera, and his subjects were free from self-consciousness. Luna’s face now seemed to have a whole ethics etched into it. It rested naturally in a soft smile, the muscles softly at ease; it had an ethics of care. Her gaze was confident and clear. Her green eyes appeared glowing in the sunlight. When he imagined his own face, turning the camera back towards himself, he noticed how much he clenched his throat and eyes: the ethics in his own face was do not hurt me.

He followed her eyes far out towards the horizon and then brought his gaze back towards the beach, taking stock of the other students again. Some students sat in small groups, others were themselves collapsed on the beach. One of the older boys was vomiting sea water back behind a bush, another wading into the water to clean the sand out of his shoes. Two of the other seniors sat in the sand in an animated discussion.

He looked back at Luna, who met his gaze. The eye contact felt overwhelming to him, and he looked away — something about Luna’s eyes felt as if they were made of different stuff, as if somehow when she looked out into the world she was creating the whole thing from scratch. Evan felt more like he was always watching out for predators. He felt her pull, wanted to know how she saw him, wanted to know what kind of person she was making.

Beneath the wisteria tree there was a boy. His shirt was torn, the top few buttons missing.

Evan recognized him from biology. “Marcus?”

The boy didn’t move save for his eyes, which fixed squarely on Evan. “The red door, then,” he stated. He picked himself up slowly, standing as if his feet could push through the ground beneath him. “I came through the teachers’ lounge. The glass door behind the curtain. Not that any of you saw it, clearly.” Something about the way he spoke made Evan uneasy. It looked like Marcus, but it certainly didn’t act like him, didn’t speak like him. He spit his words out. His movements were too controlled for the quiet kid he had last seen doing Punnett squares.

“Scary as hell, I know. At least at first. But I’ve had some time to learn about this place. There’s a few things I think you need to know.” He looked at each of the students in the crowd with the same gaze, an unflinching movement that felt like being assessed. “But first, let’s get some food in you.”

Marcus showed some of the boys where the fruit trees grew and helped them pick some bananas and coconuts, and he helped them prepare the fish he had caught this morning. Evan found the whole process unnerving. As the sun went down