Breathe Me || Completed

9.3

9.3 - Morning After

I wake up with Jean, Summer, and Tabitha trying to sit on me like I'm part of the couch. I groan to let them know I'm awake. They giggle but don't move. "Good morning, Sally," Tabitha says.

I can't help but feel invaded. How dare you storm into my perfect moment, destroy it with your obnoxious teenage jokes? But how could they have known? They couldn't. Samantha is nowhere in sight, but there is a slight buzz on the skin of my right temple. She must have kissed me before she left.

Summer, who is effectively crushing my boobs with her butt, runs her pinky finger over my left nostril. "Does it hurt?" she asks.

"Mm, sort of," I mutter. There's a dull, throbbing pain that seems too big to be coming from a hole made by a sewing needle. A thought that somehow didn't cross my mind before sneaks up on me. I slap my hand over my forehead. "What am I going to tell my parents?"

They giggle some more. "Oh my god you're gonna be in so much trouble," Jean chortles.

"I know! Just tell them you've always had a hole in your nose," suggests Rosie. "And then act offended that they never noticed it until now."

"Just blame it on me," says a voice that makes my heart flop restlessly in my chest. My face flushes at the sound of her from across the room. "Tell them I stabbed you in the face and there was nothing you could do about it."

She crosses the room. She's holding a chocolate chip muffin in one hand and a mug in the other. I want her to wink at me, smile, or something. But she doesn't even look at me. She curls up in an armchair to my right. She looks bored and sullen as ever. I want to tell her that if she was sick last night, maybe she should slow down with the food, but she looks better now. She isn't so gray anymore.

I wish she was here on the couch with me, not these three.

I have so much lost time to make up for. Every moment that she's away from me feels like a moment wasted.

She can probably see the longing on my face. I'm a pretty open book. But she's too good at hiding. She tears the muffin into four quarters and stuffs each of them into her mouth one after another. Her face betrays nothing.

Rosie snickers. "Sam," she says. "Okay, don't get mad, but like, how can you eat like that? It's gross."

You're gross, I want to say. I don't. I pull my phone out from my bag and check the time. It's only eight o'clock. My mom has texted me five times, all different variations on the original text: when are you coming home?

I text back, idk yet. we'll walk tho.

Everyone is much too chipper for eight o'clock. I guess they did all get a lot more sleep than I did. Not that I'm complaining. I spent a few hours watching Samantha sleep after she drifted off on my chest again.

Samantha swallows and takes a long sip of whatever's in the mug. Everyone is silent as she slurps down her steaming beverage like a villain in a movie gulping blood. "Like what?" she says.

Rosie raises an eyebrow. "You know like what. You literally inhale food. I swear, I've never seen you chew." The others giggle in agreement.

I've seen her chew, I want to say. Granted, it's rare, but I've seen it.

Samantha shrugs. "I don't have a gag reflex," she says, which actually makes a lot of sense.

Summer scrunches up her nose. "Ew. So you can just swallow without chewing?"

"I guess." She shrugs again. "Never really thought about it. I can eat weird shit, too. Like concrete. And glass."

She grins evilly at their disgusted exclamations. Samantha finishes the mug of coffee and sets it on the floor, waiting for the others to exhaust themselves of their terror at the fact that she is actually Satan. I'm not surprised that she can eat glass -- I mean, of course she can. Honestly, nothing fits better with her personality than the image of her holding a big bowl of broken light bulbs, tossing pieces of glass into her mouth like potato chips.

I can't really imagine how one would go about eating concrete, but that doesn't surprise me, either.

"That's so gross," Rosie says.

"Everything's gross till you try it," Samantha mutters. Well, that's one theory, I guess.

Jean, who is still sitting on my stomach, says, "Yeah, but why would you? I can't think of a single reason why I would ever try to eat concrete."

"I was really hungry."

Everyone explodes into laughter, everyone but Samantha and I. I try to muster up a chuckle, but it hurts me to think of Samantha scouring the streets with a growling stomach, full of only rotten fruit and cigarette smoke, so hungry that she would sit down on the curb and decide to put a piece of the sidewalk in her mouth. I imagine she would have done it as a sort of joke with herself, thinking, "Okay, here we go," laughing at the absurdity of it as the cement cracked against her molars. My heart feels heavy at the image.

"Anyway," says Tabby. "I think the question we should be asking is, did Sally eat all my ice cream?"

"What?" I mutter, but they're all laughing again.

"I don't know who else could have done it," says Summer, patting my arm. "We were all in the basement."

Tabby grins at me. "I guess Sal came up for a midnight snack and forgot to come back downstairs."

Oh, right. The ice cream. And this couch. And me, lying on it. I guess we did forget to put the carton away before we left the kitchen. I opt to stay silent and exchange the quickest look in history with Samantha, remembering the tang of strawberry in her mouth as our tongues interacted with each other, the sweetness of milk and sugar on her breath. Samantha's eyes are a dangerous storm, but when they meet mine, the waters seem to calm, if only for a fraction of a second.