Chapter Text
All in all, it takes Fatin nearly the entire two weeks to work up the courage to touch her cello.
Leah’s in her bed, messily scrawling her thoughts down in a notebook in a way some would consider writing, but Leah personally considers homework; her therapist’s first assignment has her journaling, and she jots down what she can see, hear, touch, smell, taste - what’s real and what isn’t, what’s real and always has been - and how it sits inside of her, gestates just underneath her skin like some insect ready to burrow or a flower waiting to bloom. And most of it’s Fatin, because they barely leave each other’s sides, because they’re each other’s oxygen masks and flotation devices, because they’re in the crevices and cuts and divots of each other’s worlds.
Leah says, “You look like you want to hold it,” watching her like a mildly interesting television show. (How interesting can it be, really, when all Fatin’s doing is sitting on the edge of the bed, one foot tucked under her opposing thigh, staring.)
Fatin’s mouth tightens, contemplative and wary. “I do,” she says, “but I also don’t.”
“You contain multitudes,” Leah says.
She taps her pen against her current page. Idle and distracted. Fatin glances over, eyes dropping to the lines, the black ink drying between them.
“Can I read it?” Fatin asks.
“Sure,” Leah says. “If you play me something.”
She smiles against her will. “Bitch,” she murmurs, no real heat behind it. It’s what she’d wanted, after all, when she’d opened herself up to bargaining; Leah writes, Fatin plays. Eye for an eye-type shit.
Leah tosses her the notebook, unashamed; Fatin’s heard the darkest thoughts in her head, so she doesn’t mind giving her some of the more mild ones.
Time still doesn’t feel as real as it did on the islands, which doesn’t make sense, because time didn’t exist on the islands at all.
“Strong opening,” Fatin says, sand in her throat. Leah’s eyes are like the waves. The islands sit between them, stretching into the horizon.
In a way, what we went through was so simple. World-narrowing. All we had to do was survive.
People expect a lot of us here. Like talking and listening and smiling. We’re just teenagers. Sometimes I want to say that: I’m not a child but I’m not an adult, either. I don’t know what I classify as anymore; some new species with triple the trauma and far less ability to process it.
Can beauty be revoked? Can it be both in the eye of the beholder, and also something that just unequivocally is? If I used to find something beautiful, what changes about it that makes it not? Does too much time pass? Or is it me, seeing it from a taller place?
The ocean is less beautiful to me now. Same with sunrises and sunsets and waterfalls. Maybe there’s a different word; so much is beautiful before it reminds you it has teeth. It’s like a post-traumatic nostalgia. Another version of that quote: all that blood was once beautiful before you lost too much of it. And then it was red, and grey, and black, and nothing.
Fatin wants to play the cello. I think just to see what it makes her feel when she does: if she hates it as much as she remembers, or if she’s missed it more than she’s hated it. I think she’s scared it’s the second one because then she’ll be doing what her parents expect of her. Expected. But she’s staring at the cello like she’s hungry for it. Like a vampire resisting their taste for human blood or something. Reenacting Twilight in her bedroom.
“You are such a cunt,” Fatin says.
“Love you, too,” Leah says, not at all offended.
I recognize it because it’s how she looks at me, sometimes. A lot of the time. Like she feels all this space inside of her and I’m the only one who can fill it. It’s this innate need. Like how I feel reality slipping when we’re not together for longer periods of time. I start questioning if any of it is real, or if it ever was, until I see her or Rachel calls me or Martha sends me a link to a TikTok. One time Toni texted me mid-panic attack saying ‘don’t die now bitch we need the settlement money LOL’ and, annoyingly enough, it actually worked.
“Toni is such a cunt,” Fatin says, moving past the parts about her. She’s mulling over the perspective.
“She’s funny.” Leah shrugs. “Apparently it works on Dot and Shelby all the time, too. Who am I to question her methods?”
I just want her to do whatever she feels like doing. Because doing anything at all is hard. Even deciding to do something is hard. I’d rather lie with her in bed and listen to her heartbeat while the sun pours through the window. I want to hear the ceiling fan spinning and the laundry machine going and feel inconsequential, like I’m living in a moment that means everything and nothing, with no beginning and no end. When I’m with her it’s in every sense. I always know it’s real.
Fatin says, “I love you,” and hands Leah her notebook back.
“I know,” Leah says. “You think I’d let you read my deepest, most innermost thoughts otherwise?”
“Well, you’re a writer,” Fatin points out. The cello beckons her. Strings aching and out of tune. “Isn’t that kind of the point?”
Leah smiles. “Kind of,” she allows. Reaches out a hand, pokes Fatin’s thigh with her index finger. “Your turn. Play.”
Truth be told, Fatin needs it: the encouragement, the semi-serious bribery, the cushion of Leah’s eager eyes examining the wood as Fatin cleans it and rosins the bow. If she can’t do it for her parents, and she can’t do it for herself - she can do it for Leah. Leah, who’s staring with a look reminiscent of something primal, as though Fatin is sitting before her, inventing fire.
(Fatin plays the cello the same way she has sex: confidently, passionately, and indulgently; losing herself between each string, swaying like a waltz with every note. Music is something that inhabits her, something she wears like a nervous system, and so it doesn’t matter that she hasn’t touched the instrument in three-and-whatever months - the bow glides effortlessly across the strings, even with her eyelids fluttering shut.
And Fatin’s face - eyebrows with the thinnest divot between them as she concentrates, lips parted the barest hint, the way the instrument sits between her thighs–
Oh, Leah’s learning so much about herself.)
“Um, okay,” Leah says when Fatin finishes, kind of like she's on the verge of passing out. “One, that was the hottest thing I've ever seen in my life. And two, I’m realizing I may be attracted to people who are highly skilled and successful in their fields.”
“One, thank you,” Fatin mimics, “and two, you are the biggest fucking dork of all time.” But she can’t hide how her pride shines through, the way it’s prone to whenever Leah pays her a compliment.
(She honestly doesn’t want to talk about it.
You know. The praise kink.)
“Whatever,” Leah says, and crooks her finger, beckoning. “Number one is still an issue for me. Wanna do something about that?”
“I think I'm ascending,” Fatin says with a breathy laugh, setting her cello back in its stand. “I play and you become ravenously horny? Talk about a reward system.”
Leah tilts her head as Fatin approaches, quizzical. “I didn’t know you knew words like ravenously.”
“I want you dead,” Fatin answers cheerfully, popping open the top button of Leah’s shirt.
“Too bad. I’m part of the Unkillable Eleven or whatever the media is calling us.”
“No wonder you failed trig,” she replies, allowing Leah to hike up her dress. “You can’t even count. Aw.”
“Do you want to keep fake-bickering with me or do you want to fuck me?” Leah asks, palming Fatin’s hips. Her smile sits at an angle, but her eyebrow’s raised, challenging.
“Both,” Fatin says. “I want to do both.” And she slips her hand down the front of Leah’s shorts.
“Bitch,” Leah exhales, surprised by the suddenness of the action. Her jaw drops as Fatins skims across the front of her underwear, finding her hot and wet.
“Wow,” Fatin murmurs. “I really got you going, didn’t I? I told you I was good with my fingers.”
“Yeah,” Leah says, “but always under a different context.”
“This isn’t Mrs. Wolfe’s class,” Fatin says. She slides a finger around the band, teasing Leah’s clit. “There’s no context, or subcontext, or what the fuck ever. I’m good, period. Sometimes the curtains are just fucking blue.”
“Jesus,” Leah says, hips jerking; she rests her forehead against Fatin’s shoulder, and her grip digs in. “This is why you aren’t on the Writing Track. Also, do not talk about Mrs. Wolfe when you’re fingering me.”
“Only then, or is she fair game when we strap?”
Leah releases a cross between a moan and a laugh, equally frustrated on either end. “You’re the fucking worst,” she grits out. “I’m serious. Shut up and fuck me.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Fatin says, entirely by accident, and hopes it doesn’t unlock anything in either of them (again).
(Seriously. The things she’d never found hot before, but are somehow illegally sexy and sensual when Leah does them - the list is getting out of control.)
–
It’s the first day of school, which means neither of them have slept at all. Fatin forces herself to eat two of the pancakes Kurt makes and pops a few blueberries because they’re probably good for her or something, and she knows Leah’s parents are technically responsible for her while she’s under their roof.
Leah, on the other hand, looks physically ill at the prospect of eating, and her parents seem hesitant to convince her; it’s all Fatin can do to coax a single strawberry into her and half a glass of orange juice before she feels like she might regret anything more. They’ve remained mostly out of the public eye, aside from a few trips here and there to places they’ve needed to go - hair trimmed, their sun-deadened ends swept away by the hairdresser’s broom (and oh, if only it were all that easy); doctor’s appointments filled with panic-inducing questions, and the occasional fast food drive-thru run to try and fix it all - but nothing that can prepare them for this: a campus full of their peers who won’t hesitate to stare at them, whisper behind their backs, or - god forbid - approach them with a complete lack of empathy and ask directly.
They arrive too early in Fatin’s black Aston Martin (which is, tragically, her least auspicious car), parking as far from the front of the lot as possible. They’d debated the merits of each option, but parking close for a quick escape was revealed as a farce when Leah’d pointed out how long they’d have to spend idling in the lot, trapped behind other students with the same idea.
(“I’m not having a breakdown in the car while everyone stands around watching,” Leah’d said, already rubbing at her forehead with her fingertips. “Park near the street. It’s always hell trying to turn left out of here, anyway.”)
And then they report to the principal’s office, where they’re assured by staff that the conditions set by their parents will be honored, such as being able to leave at any time - as long as they alert the front desk. Their teachers have all been informed, and if they’re given any trouble, they can - again - report it to the front desk.
The principal seems to be sweating a bit, and it makes Fatin wonder just how much legal hell her mom had threatened to rain down upon the school, what contacts she’d boasted about employing to make sure they’d keep their word.
“They don’t even know the half of it,” Fatin says, murmuring into her locker as Leah scrolls through her phone. “If they knew about Mrs. Wolfe, Jeff - they’d be fucking shitting themselves.”
Leah only shrugs. There are only so many demons she can handle at once. “It’ll come out when it comes out,” she says, resigned to the inevitable turning-over of stones in a criminal investigation. “I don’t dislike Mrs. Wolfe. It’s not like she knew what I’d - what he’d do.”
Fatin looks over at her. The correction is anything but miniscule, and they’re both aware of it, but Leah’s body language and tone suggest she doesn’t want this fact acknowledged right now. So Fatin says, “Where’s your locker?” and lets Leah take hold of her distractions.
These buildings are all familiar. Walkways like she’s worn her grooves into them through repetition. Her cello is in the car; her back aches under its invisible weight. Colorful poles holding up the awnings; murals painted across walls. She’s been here for three years, going on four; it’d been an obligation, a necessity, a pathway to perfection and success. Now–
“What are we even doing here?” Leah asks rhetorically, stopping in front of 704, a line of lockers just outside the English Literature wing. She fiddles with the combination. “Like, seriously. What are we fucking doing here?”
“Keeping me company,” a voice says from behind them, and they both jump, Leah’s locker door slamming against her neighbor’s.
“Fuck, Ian,” Fatin says, hand over her heart. She’s been preparing for the comments and questions and sideways glances, but still, being addressed directly is like being shot through with adrenaline - or something worse, heavier, like a bad acid trip. “Jesus.”
“Sorry,” he says, and he seems genuinely apologetic. “I didn’t mean to - I should’ve known better.”
“No, it’s fine,” Leah says, shoving her books into her locker and shutting the door. “We’re just…not ready for this, I think.”
“Yeah,” Ian says, hands tightening around his bag strap, slung over his shoulder. “How could you be? The school sent out an email. Which, like, I get it, but also, now everybody definitely knows.”
“An email?” Leah repeats. Her eyes start tugging on the hilt of that sharp-edged sword, pupils growing as the threats draw near. Information she doesn’t know, but is about her, is a definite red flag.
“Yeah,” Ian says, uncomprehending of the shift. “I mean, they didn’t say your names or anything, but all our parents got a note about non-consensual photography - both on school grounds and off - due to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
“That’s good,” Fatin says, and slinks her fingers through Leah’s, waiting for her first inhale. “Hopefully that keeps everyone from selling our shit to like, TMZ.”
“Yeah,” Leah echoes. Squeezes her hand, signaling I’m here, I’m okay. Leah as the fog and Fatin as the lighthouse; not even oceans, she wants to say. Not even those. “That’s good.”
Over Ian’s shoulder, a girl Fatin doesn’t recognize points at them and whispers to her small circle of friends. Leah’s energy beside her smokes like dry ice, like she’s a breath away from shatter. Yeah, they definitely know, and she’s sure Leah’s already divided the campus into war zones - but Fatin can deflect. Can distract. Keep Leah’s attention on her, keep her brain from wandering while her hands do.
She steps closer to Leah’s side, leaning against her arm. “Let’s see your schedule, Ian,” Fatin says, and digs hers out from her back pocket, prompting Leah to do the same. The crowds seem to grow - crossing line-of-sight as they get to their classrooms, or lingering in the hallways around them and stealing glances. Leah’s strikingly aware of it, shoulders hard-lined and muscles on the brink of flight.
“Hey, we have history together,” Ian says, pointing at Fatin’s schedule. “Finally. Leah took AP Euro last year and fucked us on that front - we used to share it.”
“Well, she’s a genius, so that checks out,” Fatin says, and catches a tug at the corner of Leah’s mouth. “I, however, only truly excel within my area of expertise, so - Ian, I’ll be needing to borrow your notes.”
He grins at her. “Wow, day one and she’s already asking for copy privileges,” he says, and Fatin answers with an echoing smile. Despite everything, she’s good at getting people to like her, whether they want to or not.
“His handwriting is illegible, just so you’re aware,” Leah warns her, successfully off-track. “Seriously. Like he’s slurring all his words, but on paper.”
“Then you can help me,” Fatin says, confused by the fact that she has to explain this at all. “Obviously. Unless you foresee a time in which we won’t be living in each others’ rooms.”
“Wow, you two move fast,” Ian says, and Leah rolls her eyes; between the two of them, they’re treading water, keeping Leah’s head just above it. He might not have all the context, and might not follow Leah’s destructive thought-patterns the same way Fatin does, but he’s still willing to try - and Fatin can work with that. Appreciates it, even; though she can tell that he’s still a little bit in love with her girlfriend.
“We’re gay,” Fatin points out, unbothered. After everything he’s done for them, this isn’t worth jealousy. “I think we’re just living up to the stereotypes.”
“One of the queer love languages is trauma bonding,” Leah says helpfully.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true,” Fatin says, just as the bell rings. The bunker’s alarms had been a different pitch, but there are still comparisons to be made. She settles for clenching Leah’s hand a little tighter, tugging her along as Ian waves them off.
People stare at them a bit more openly as they walk to homeroom, where they sit together in the far back corner of the classroom, avoiding attention to the best of their ability - and it’s only fifteen minutes, but it’s, like, fifteen minutes of watching the Titanic sink. Their teacher takes these weird breaths and pauses as she says their names, sort of like she’s giving it her absolute fucking all at being normal about this (and failing spectacularly). Everyone turns to look at them then, at Leah’s chin resting in her hand and Fatin’s arms crossed over her body and the slope of them, curving automatically towards each other.
When Fatin says present, it sounds like kill me.
The bell rings again. Leah’s forehead is now jammed against her palm, eyelids fluttering. She says: “It’s so loud. Everything’s so loud.”
“Yeah,” Fatin says. She’s not doing much better, but she’s not about to make it public knowledge. “Come on, pretty girl. We have chem.”
–
(Fortunately, the first day of school is meant for going over the syllabi and plans for the year, meaning nobody looks at them after the initial shock of hearing their names during roll call. Mr. Ruiz doesn’t linger or focus on them, and it only takes a sharp ‘Eyes up here, Mr. Burke’ for the class to understand he won’t be letting them stare at Fatin and Leah like a pair of circus freaks.
Leah’s blatantly dissociating. Staring at the wood grain of the table without blinking, eyes unfocused and glazed-over. She’s somewhere else, far away, probably with the ocean in her ears and a fistful of sand, watching the waves erode at her bones.
Fatin lays a hand gently on her thigh, strokes her thumb against the denim of her jeans. Slowly, Leah inhales, nostrils flaring; her hand comes to rest atop Fatin’s, fingers lacing.
“Stay with me,” Fatin murmurs, because she can feel herself slipping. Too many voices and too many bodies crammed in a room, the walls closing in. Doors disappearing; windows covered by iron bars and an unreachable blue sky. She can’t hang on to someone already drifting away; she’ll just be swept along.
Leah doesn’t answer her aloud, but bites the inside of her lip and squeezes Fatin’s hand, once. Clouds lifting from the skyline of her eyes. Reaches over with her right hand, and in the corner of Fatin’s blank notebook page, writes:
Always.)
–
Leah makes it all the way through second period before she snaps, which is a feat in and of itself, because Fatin gives up about twenty minutes in. Her English teacher won’t stop throwing pitying looks her way, and nearly apologizes directly after having to say the word island. She just gets up and leaves. She goes to the front office, and the woman behind the desk seems impressed she’s even made it there at all, typing a small note into her computer before dismissing her.
She texts Leah, who slides into the passenger seat during morning break and rests her head between her knees, breathing deeply like she’s trying not to throw up. It’s not even the least bit dramatic of a reaction.
Fatin starts the car. “Mine or yours?” she asks.
“Yours,” Leah says. “Nobody’s home, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.” She pulls her phone out of her bag. “I’ll let my parents know.”
“We’re stopping by McDonald’s,” Fatin says, turning right out of the lot, the mental map of all the shitty, greasy food she loves eating when she’s hungover still burned into her brain. What a thing to keep alive. “I want fries, and you didn’t eat breakfast. No arguments.”
“I wasn’t arguing,” Leah says, but a smile graces the corners of her mouth. It feels like the first break in a storm, or more aptly, the eye of a hurricane - calm only when directly cratered in the middle of it all. And that’s what she is: the center of Fatin’s entire fucking universe.
“Good,” Fatin says, and rests her arm over the console. “Now hold my hand.”
That, at least, is still a quiet place to land, no matter how far the fall.
–
The rest of the week follows a similar pattern: they make it through a few classes, and then they leave. By Thursday, they actually don’t even show up until around fourth period, because it’s one they’ve never made it to; staggering what classes they attend seems to be the only way they’ll attend them at all. A full day, they’ve realized, simply isn’t within the realm of possibility at the moment.
And people don’t even know they’re dating yet, because they haven’t been around long enough to advertise it. Fatin’s dreading that revelation: they’re already circled like carcasses under a sky of vultures, and offering even more meat might make the entire field seem uninhabitable.
By Friday, they’ve attended every class at least once, and then–
Saturday, Leah turns eighteen.
–
All the girls text their group chat various videos, gifs, and pictures that have something to do with birthdays - Toni’s is some shitty, compressed JPEG of a star with a face that says Don’t let the dementia get you down! and it’s so absurd that Leah spends a solid minute in confused laughter. Martha says she knew it’d probably be offensive, but Toni wouldn’t let her see it before sending it, and Toni answers with an emoji of the devil. Some of the boys text, too, simple ‘happy birthday’ messages without any additional sentimentality.
(For the most part, they’ve readjusted to the real world much better and quicker than the girls have - barring Henry, of course, and Josh, whose family also paid for his spot in the experiment. Bo’s family is allegedly being investigated for child abuse, but that’s all secondhand info they’ve learned through Martha, who thinks keeping in touch is ‘nice.’)
Rachel sends her a voice message. Dot and Shelby FaceTime her, and the four of them spend an hour talking about stupid shit until the rest of the girls pile into the call. Martha’s decided to volunteer as a dog walker for the local shelter, and she’s in a park with a large pitbull mix drooling happily into her lap. Toni’s leaving the gym; Bernice signed her up for boxing lessons, as she’s still barred from the school’s basketball program.
Dot’s decided to go to some sort of trade school after senior year. She’s good with her hands, good at problem solving, good at remembering how things work and what’s most effective in a given situation (and most importantly, Fatin adds, she sucks at leisure). She’s not sure exactly what she’d like to do yet - Toni tells her to audition for Survivor, and Dot tells her to fuck herself - but she likes the idea of repairing things.
“I’m sure your future psychologist will have plenty to say about that,” Fatin says.
“Probably,” Dot agrees. “I meet with her next week, so I’ll let you know. Our case manager has been, like, surprisingly helpful.”
“My therapist is a fucking asshole,” Rachel says, having joined the call mid-conversation. “She doesn’t let me get away with shit. Like she has some sixth sense around things I don’t want to talk about. It’s fucking freaky.”
“You need that,” Leah says. “You’d just sit there all pissed off for an hour otherwise.”
“Shut the fuck up, Leah,” Rachel says.
“Hey,” Fatin chimes in, reproachful. “It’s her birthday.”
“Sorry. Please shut the fuck up, Leah, and happy birthday.”
“Better.”
–
(In reality, Fatin’s mom and brothers get her a Switch, and Fatin gets her a stack of hand-bound leather journals engraved with Leah’s favorite quotes. She’d had them sent to Leah’s house, and Leah’s mom had wrapped them, due to the fact that she didn’t really spend enough time without Leah to pull it off herself. Which is exactly what spurs Leah’s reaction; wide-eyed, slack-jawed, running her fingers across every line and letter indent.
“Fatin,” she breathes out, and abruptly bites her bottom lip into her mouth, a tell-tale sign that she’s trying not to cry; she rests the journals on her desk before turning around and burying herself in Fatin’s arms. “Fuck you. I love you.”
“Getting mixed signals over here,” Fatin says, smiling into her hair. “Happy birthday, baby.”
Her eyes find the journal on top of the pile; a beautiful Italian brown leather that ran around five-hundred dollars, and the quote within it:
You’re the only girl I’ve seen for a long time that actually did look like something blooming.)
–
They don’t go to school at all on Monday, because the FBI agents that occasionally haunt Fatin’s dreams turn up at Leah’s house, ready to take her statement. Leah leads them to the backyard, and they sit at a shade-covered table in lawn chairs, their perfectly-ironed suits contrasting humorously with the kitschy furniture.
“We can skip the awkward introductions,” Leah says, picking at a hole in her frayed jean shorts. She’s wearing a sweatshirt of Fatin’s from some music program she’d attended over the summer a few years previously; she’d mistakenly wound up with an extra large, and it now lives in Leah’s closet. “The part where you tell me why you’re here, I mean.”
“Of course,” Agent Frond says. Her blonde hair is in a tight bun, but the lines of her face are soft. “We won’t take up any more time than we need to. But I’m sure you realize that your account will be the most vital to our investigation.”
“I do,” Leah says. The sky overhead looks like a towering wave if she slants her gaze slightly. The ocean roars in the distance, overtaking the entire bay. She swears the sand is shifting underneath her feet. “Where do you want to start?”
Agent Martins says, “Had you heard of the Dawn of Eve before the supposed retreat?”
“No.”
“Do you know why you were sent on it?”
“I had a bad breakup,” Leah says. They’re staring at her expectantly, and she realizes: she could lie. She might even get away with it. But why would she? To protect who, herself? –No, no; she’s already fed herself to wolves once, and she won’t let them get a taste for it. “I have a question.”
“What is it?”
“Whatever I tell you,” Leah says, “is in confidence, correct?”
Agent Martins tilts her head. “You’re eighteen,” she starts. “Meaning–”
“No,” Leah interrupts. “I’m not talking about my parents. I mean - if there were other crimes committed.”
“On the islands?”
“No.”
“I’m afraid we’re going to need you to explain for a sufficient answer,” Agent Frond says, though she’s good at keeping her tone steady and nonjudgmental.
“Last year, our English teacher, Mrs. Wolfe, assigned us a book by a former pupil who’d become a successful author,” Leah starts. Her retelling is more like a ghost story, like something that happened to somebody else and she’s passing it on for a scare. “He spoke at our school, and she asked my friend Ian to drive him to his hotel, but Ian didn’t have his car, so I did it. His name was Jeffrey Galanis,” she adds. “He was…thirty-seven.”
Their faces remain carefully blank, absorbing the information and taking notes. She continues, “We started talking. He gave me his number. He didn’t ask how old I was, and I didn’t tell him. One night he sent me a drunk text saying he thought about kissing me all the time, and I was, like…infatuated with him, so I lied and told him I was turning eighteen in a few weeks. We met up after that, and we had sex, and we started dating. We were together for awhile until someone sent him my birth certificate. I never found out who.”
Agent Martins latches onto that detail. “Hmm,” she says, clearly searching for the dots and how to connect them. “It wasn’t your friend Ian?”
“No,” Leah says. “And I don’t know who else would’ve known. We kept it a secret. I didn’t even have his name saved in my phone.”
“Interesting,” Agent Frond says. “Of course, Leah, you were a victim in this situation, and unless we can prove its relevance - which is entirely possible - this account won’t necessarily have to come up in court, assuming that’s where we’re heading. Right now, we’re still in the early stages of our investigation.” She sets her pen down across her notepad, diagonal to the lines. Leah resists the urge to reach out and align the two. “What I can tell you is that you were all chosen in pairs, and from the same schools. Gretchen Klein was in academia for many years - psychology, to be precise - and it’s likely she had connections. Mrs. Wolfe, your English teacher, is someone we’d like to look into.”
“Are you saying you think she set me up?” Leah asks incredulously, because the mere idea of her high school English teacher interfering in her life to such an egregious degree seems - frankly - fucking insane. She was nobody. She was nothing. She didn’t do anything to deserve this. “Why would - why would anyone–”
“We don’t have all the facts yet,” Agent Martins interrupts smoothly, wary of all potential paths to implosion. She has work to do. “We’re still collecting them, and figuring out why and how you were chosen is one of our top priorities. An unknown person or persons sending Mr. Galanis your birth certificate, which lead to - can you finish the statement, please?”
“A mental breakdown, basically,” Leah says, flat and hollow. Too much to carry, too many graves to be dug. “He broke up with me because he was afraid somebody knew. Stopped answering my messages, my calls - and I just - lost it. Fucked up my grades, did stupid shit at parties. Got hit by a car when I was fucking around in the middle of the street one night, wound up in the hospital, parents didn’t know what to do. That’s why I was sent on the…supposed retreat.”
“And your parents are unaware of this relationship, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“Alright. Thank you, Leah,” Agent Frond says. “I’m sure that was difficult, but we truly appreciate your cooperation and assistance. Now, if we can start with your time on the first island…”
She looks up at the sky again, and this time, she swears it’s collapsing over them. Tide tugging her out, clothes sticking to her skin. She wakes up in the water, hanging over some piece of airplane debris; the island rises in the distance, and there, on the beach, are seven other girls waiting for her.
She takes a breath.
–
And then it’s over, and she’s fine.
Until around ten to twenty seconds later, when she heaves all over the hallway rug, and the door to her room swings open, followed shortly by her parents’ door at the end of the hall; she must’ve made some kind of commotion, and her palm is pressed flat against the wall, fingertips turning white–
“Oh, honey,” Fatin murmurs, sweeping her hair over her shoulders and expertly tying it back with the spare hair tie she’s taken to wearing around her wrist. “It’s okay, baby. You’re okay.”
She comprehends very few things: Fatin’s hand, rubbing comforting circles on her back with the other curled around her upper arm; the taste of acid on her tongue and her throat encased in fire, metallic and crisp; the sickening stain seeping into the rug, like dark water, haunting her. She recognizes voices, maybe, her mom telling Fatin they’ll take care of it, and then Fatin’s leading her into her room, into her bathroom, arms up, baby, stripping her shirt from her body, unbuttoning her shorts, the spray of the shower hits the tiled floor–
There’s another day sketched across the forefront of her mind; their first day alone in the bunker, sorting through the kitchen closets, Raf with his floppy hair and all-too innocent grin and the breaking; Fatin leading her to their room and shutting the door, hands on her face, ridding her of her clothes and the sound of running water–
“Is this real?” Leah says, but can’t hear any answers. This bathroom is hers, but it’s so easy for her brain to alter her surroundings, what she sees and hears and feels - Fatin’s there, lips moving, but Leah can’t stop her eyes chasing the lines of grout on her tiled walls, the droplets of water running down the glass door.
“Baby,” Fatin says, cutting off her points of chaos by cupping her face in her hands and brushing a thumb across her cheek, “can you hear me?”
Slowly, Leah nods, and Fatin exhales in apparent relief. She feels so far away - body tingling and numb, colors too loud and world too bright - she misses the quiet of the bunker, the dead silence of their rooms, where she and Fatin used to lie in bed and kiss and talk and laugh and nothing else existed.
“Isn’t that fucked up?” she asks aloud, uncomprehending of what’s made it out of her mouth so far. “That I want to go back?”
Fatin understands anyway; of course she does. “No,” she says softly. “It’s not fucked up. I get it.”
“Yeah,” Leah says, and watches Fatin strip off her own clothes, the way they pool around her feet. “I think I’m–”
She must look exactly how she feels, because Fatin lifts the toilet lid and then Leah’s on her knees again, vomiting into it.
Fatin gets her into the shower eventually; shampoos and conditions and rinses her hair, scrubs her skin with her mango-honey body wash, massages the knots in her neck and her shoulders. By the end of it, Leah almost feels real again, something corporeal rather than flickering and translucent.
And then Fatin’s slipping a soft grey shirt over her head, helping her step into her underwear and a pair of comfy shorts, guiding her to the bed - she ends up with her hair brushed and her body pressed firmly into Fatin’s, an ear to her steady heartbeat.
Fatin says, “We can talk about it if you want, or we can go to sleep.”
“It’s early,” Leah mumbles. The sun’s still shining on the other side of her curtains. She imagines peeling them back, flooding the room with light until it blinds her. Until the only thing she can see is the way it reflects against the surface of the ocean.
“It doesn’t matter,” Fatin responds, still using that same gentle tone. Dragging her fingertips up and down the path of Leah’s spine. “Talking about - everything - is exhausting. You can sleep, honey. I’m here, and you’re okay.”
“Okay,” Leah says. Her eyelids are heavy, sinking to the seafloor. The dirt, at least, is finally gone. “It’s real, right?”
“Yeah,” Fatin says. Lips against the crown of Leah’s head. “When you’re with me, it’s always real.”
“Okay,” Leah repeats, trusting her implicitly. Her eyelids are already shutting; Fatin’s heart guides her to sleep with a soothing, consistent drumming, almost like the ocean is still there, crashing against the shoreline.
–
Of course, it’s later that same week when people finally figure out that they’re dating.
Fatin’s not exactly sure how it happens - she hears several different versions and rumors, but what she ultimately pieces together is that someone on the lacrosse team had seen them kissing beside Fatin’s car on his way to morning practice, and promptly lost his shit to every single person he’d come across after.
The newfound interest in their love lives almost makes the rest of it more bearable; she’d rather be stared at for dating Leah, who’s obviously one of the most talented, intelligent, hottest girls at their school (and in existence, if you ask Fatin to expand on it) than for her time spent surviving on a pair of pseudo-deserted islands. In another life, or another time, she’d be flaunting Leah on every social media platform, probably fingering her in the janitor’s closet and the music room and wherever else she could convince her to risk it.
Surprisingly, Leah seems to agree; she wears an arm around Fatin’s shoulders throughout the day like it’s in style, and it’s only when they’re at lunch in the quad with Ian that she finds out the true reason why.
“Congrats to our new prom queens,” Ian says, setting his book bag down on the bench and grinning at them like they’re in on the joke (which they clearly aren’t). He’s the only person who talks to them, really, aside from Colby (a moron, but like, a nice one) and Michael and Tristan, the two boys she’s often accompanied by as the top pianist and violinist, respectively. (They’re also nice, but awkward, and definitely aren’t in on any gossip.)
Leah says, “What are you talking about?” and she spreads her legs slightly, her jean-clad thigh rubbing up against the silky material of Fatin’s skirt, the skin of her thigh. Over her shoulder, Fatin finds about half the quad looking at them, but that isn’t any different than normal; it’s a little more open, maybe, like their peers aren’t as worried about being caught.
“Your newfound popularity,” he says, gesturing around with an apple in his hand. “I figured Fatin was already a shoe-in, and since you’re dating her, you’re the It Couple of the year. They’re probably planning the school paper spread now.”
“I fucking hope not,” Fatin says, leaning her head against Leah’s shoulder grumpily, inwardly preening at the physical affection; they don’t normally make it long enough through the day to display it as casual intimacy, rather than a trauma response.
“I heard Kenny Mackleson wants to know if you’re open to threesomes,” Ian says, framing it as something helpful. Despite herself, Fatin wants to laugh; it’s refreshing to have a bridge to more inconsequential things - where she can embrace sex and confidence - dodge it all like nothing’s ever touched her.
“If Kenny Mackleson wants a threesome, he can go fuck both his hands,” she says, and Leah snorts, arm winding around Fatin’s shoulders again. “That’s all they’re good for, anyway.”
Ian asks, “Know that from experience?”
“He wishes,” Fatin says. Leah doesn’t tense, but she taps her fingers against Fatin’s upper arm once, twice, an idle sort of habit. “Seriously. He’s propositioned me enough times that I know exactly how bad he wants it.”
Her fingers tap again, like a twitch; like they’re desperate to curl around a pen, pull out her journal and write about it; her jaw is sharp, her brow is furrowed, and Fatin realizes–
“Oh, you’re jealous,” she says delightedly, head snapping up as she finally pinpoints the emotion; she’s never seen it on Leah before, not like this. “Oh my god. You’re jealous!”
“Little louder, please,” Leah grumbles, and it’s absolutely the most endearing thing Fatin’s ever heard in her life. “I think the freshman who sit behind C Building didn’t hear you.”
“They’ll have to wait for the school paper,” Ian says, munching on his apple.
“Sorry,” Fatin says (who isn’t sorry in the slightest). She tilts her chin up, leaning into Leah’s side. “That’s cute. Who’s got you all riled up, baby?”
“Not Kenny fucking Mackleson,” Leah says with a particularly vicious eyeroll. “I’m not - okay, maybe I am jealous, but not because you…I don’t care about that. But Jared–”
“Which Jared?”
“Jared T.”
“Fucker.”
“Dick,” Ian agrees.
“Yeah, I know, he’s a pretentious fucking narcissist, but - he asked me if it was true, in our Creative Fiction class, or if you were just trying to get the boys’ attention. And it made me–” Her jaw snaps shut abruptly, clenches. She takes a deep, calming breath through her nose, and says: “People think they know you. But they don’t know anything. They don’t know anything.”
Fatin might swoon. Holy shit, she’s so deeply obsessed with Leah it’s actually unreal; she wants to tear down the sky and roll it out like a red carpet beneath Leah’s feet, let her feel what it’s like to walk across the clouds, weightless and free.
“First of all,” Fatin says, holding up a finger, “Jared T.’s hated me ever since I turned him down but fucked his older brother at some house party last year, and secondly - I’m going to steal your words, baby, but…nobody knows me compared to you, anyway.”
It’s strange how remnants from the islands can be so comforting, so nostalgic. Leah’s lips curl up at the corners, basking in the role-reversal; once upon a time, it’d been Fatin who’d been jealous, and Leah who’d confessed I’m yours, striking the match but containing the fire.
“That’s true,” she says, and leans in, kissing Fatin softly on the lips. Short, sweet, unmistakably poignant; everyone’s watching them because everyone’s always watching them, but this isn’t for them, isn’t part of a show or a statement. Ian’s gaze darts between them thoughtfully, but he keeps his observations to himself. “I’m just…tired of people. Tired of them asking questions.”
There’s a bone-deep weariness underneath her words that Fatin understands the depths of, but, like Leah, isn’t sure how to escape it. Faber and Young, pulling them for interviews; the FBI at their doors; their therapists three times a week. Gretchen Klein, somewhere out there, a ghostly figure holding all of the answers they might never get to hear.
“Yeah,” Fatin says, eyelids shutting, nosing into the crook of Leah’s neck. “Can we go home?”
“Yeah,” Leah answers quietly. They’ve both had enough of the day, and Leah barely has the stomach to make it to her English class since the FBI’s possible revelation of Mrs. Wolfe’s involvement. “Ian, just let me know if we’re doing anything important.”
“Sure thing,” he says, nodding agreeably. “I’m surprised you lasted this long, actually.”
“So am I,” Leah says, taking her arm back from around Fatin and pushing her glasses up her nose. “I wish I could say we were making progress, but honestly - I don’t even know what that looks like, anymore.”
The polished wood of Fatin’s cello comes to mind, its thick strings and fine-haired bow. She’s played it successfully a total of three times, and only one of those had been in her private rehearsals. She still has a bandage covering her index finger.
“Me neither,” she says. Rests her chin in her hand, elbow on the table; her eyes follow a pair of birds hopping around a nearby tree. “Fuck it all.”
They take flight, straight into the cloudless blue sky. Behind them, someone says her name a little louder than intended, and a chorus of shut up, shhh’s follow. She misses Dorothy, very suddenly and severely, with a loneliness so strong it makes her ribs ache.
If there’s a way out, she doesn’t know how to find it.
–
(Therapy is a struggle. Evaluating the sources of her problems - and seeing how sickeningly far back they date, from the first time she equated her talent with her parents’ love to the moment she realized that wasn’t what love actually looked like at all, and subsequently developed an almost inescapable longing for it; a desperate need to be touched, just to prove she was wanted - are things that make her feel vaguely like throwing up when she’s able to wrap her tongue around them. Her therapist has an uncanny ability to frame complex ideas as very simple concepts, but they become so startlingly clear that her instinct is to resist - she hates other people knowing things about her before she knows them herself - it’s like that phrase, the one about leading a horse to water. Sometimes, Fatin just refuses to drink.
Leah, on the other hand, is almost too self-aware for talk therapy to be more than a necessary addition to her primary treatments, which now involve cognitive behavioral therapy for her OCD and a cocktail of drugs for depression and anxiety - the latter of which works well, but gives her horrible insomnia as she adjusts. She stays awake well into the early mornings, eyes bloodshot and fingers twitchy, and it’s how she discovers the dark tunnel Fatin’s found herself in every single night.
Because she tosses and turns all night long, and every time she glances over, Fatin’s eyes are opened wide and staring blankly into the ceiling, or the corner of the room. Fatin, who only whispers it’s okay, baby; go back to sleep, like a watchman keeping guard over the dark.)
–
So, in a shocking twist of events, Leah is the one who convinces Fatin to go to a party.
Leah might’ve had it the worst on the islands, but Fatin’s struggling the most now that they’re back in reality: with her dad out of the picture and her mom no longer pressuring her future, she’s been forced into freedom like it’s rehab.
She isn’t who she was before they found each other on the island. She doesn’t want the boys or the beer or the distractions; she mostly curls up in Leah’s bed with her, preferring to watch hours and hours of random sitcoms or listen contentedly as Leah reads to her. But Ian texts Leah with an invitation to Colby’s one night, and, well–
Now, she knows Fatin hasn’t been sleeping.
Not that anyone who isn’t Leah would be able to tell - her makeup remains as flawless as ever - but her nightmares refuse to give her peace, a horrifying slice of darkness Leah is intimately acquainted with. When she dreams, sometimes it’s Leah, running out into the ocean. Sometimes it’s Leah downing the pills and Fatin being unable to wake her up. Sometimes it’s Leah in the pit, buried under six feet of dirt, crying Fatin’s name. Sometimes it’s Leah in Seth’s arms, knife pressed to her throat.
(Most of it is centered around Leah. Fatin says part of her is still in that jungle, still on that beach, reliving all the ways she’d almost lost Leah for good; Fatin’s therapist says it’s because Leah’s the one person Fatin’s subconscious has deemed necessary for her survival. Like some fucked-up transferrence of trauma; the island, the bunker, it’d all turned routine at some point - turned normal. Being home is the new unknown, and without all the girls - without the certainty of six other people having her back, tracking rations and water and time of day and headcounts - her brain only finds threats around every corner, behind every wall.
Even if she’s right, Fatin says, it doesn’t fucking help me.)
So she prefers not to sleep at all until the sun starts to rise, creeping through Leah’s window and illuminating the room, and there she takes inventory: she recognizes these walls, this desk, the overstuffed bookshelf. Leah’s clothes, strung haphazardly across the floor from the previous evening. And Leah herself, curled into Fatin’s side and safe.
Even trauma specialists aren’t quite equipped to deal with what they’d all gone through. There’s no universal experience to draw from here. Leah sometimes spends entire sessions staring out the window, saying nothing, her voice somewhere far out to sea.
But Fatin can’t go on like this, and that’s exactly the driving force behind Leah saying, “Colby’s having a party. I think we should go.”
Fatin presses the spacebar on Leah’s laptop, pausing whatever episode of The Golden Girls they’d landed on. “Excuse me? Leah Rilke wants to go to a party? Am I in the fucking Twilight Zone?”
“We should watch that next,” Leah decides, easily distracted. “D’you think it’ll fuck us up more?”
“Probaby,” Fatin says. “But we’re risk-takers. We can handle it.”
“Does one of said risk-takers want to come to this party with me, then?”
She eyes Leah suspiciously. “I feel like this is a trap, somehow.”
“Honey, you feel like everything’s a trap,” Leah says. “So do I. It’s the trauma.”
“That’s what I mean,” Fatin says, sitting up in bed. Leah instantly misses the pressure of her body, leaning into hers. “I have this - this reputation. And that’s not me anymore, but I feel like if I show up at a party - it’ll be there, or something, you know? The expectation. The assumption.”
Emphatic and louder than she intends; it almost echoes in Leah’s ears. But she remembers another day, sitting in the quad with Ian and watching Fatin stroll across campus, thinking she knew her, too - thinking reputation and rumor were enough, when they weren’t even close.
“I know,” Leah says softly, recognizing the importance of the explanation. “But that was never really you to begin with, was it?”
Fatin considers this, eyes wandering around the room as if searching for answers. “No,” she says after a moment. “I guess it wasn’t.”
“Let’s go,” Leah says. “I’ll make Ian our designated driver. He’ll just be excited we’re even agreeing to leave the house.”
“Fine, but if anyone hits on me who isn’t you, I want you to kill them.”
“Obviously,” she answers. “It’s my sworn duty or whatever. Plus, I get jealous easily.”
“Also, you’re not supposed to drink on your meds, so we’re getting high as fuck.”
“Great.”
“Okay,” Fatin agrees again. “But - just so you know, jealous monster - people I’ve fucked might be there.”
“That’s not really that different from just, like, being at school, Fatin,” Leah points out. “People you’ve fucked are literally always there.”
“Good point,” she says, and then considers an utterly horrifying thought. “Will people you’ve fucked be there?”
“Maybe that guy I gave a handjob to the night I got hit by a car,” Leah says, far too casual for something so batshit fucking insane - probably one of her worse habits. The first time she’d brought it up, Fatin had realized they’d been at the same party and spent like ten minutes in shock going no, seriously, no, are you serious? until Leah had successfully fucked her off-track. The mention of him now, though, leaves a not-so-pleasant taste on Fatin’s tongue, like a mix of copper and gasoline.
“I know you were like, kind of joking,” Fatin says, gently catching her by the chin, “but I’m not. I’m definitely the jealous type.”
“I know.” Leah rolls her eyes, but she’s charmed by the declaration; she always knows where she stands with Fatin, a clear front and center. “It’s not like you hide it very well.”
Fatin presses a loud kiss against her lips, holding her there until Leah starts laughing against her mouth, and then murmurs, “You’re mine,” cutting off the lighthearted mood rather abruptly in favor of something threatening, sultry. Their eyes find each other, noses brushing; Fatin’s are almost black, irises crumbling in the light. She kisses Leah again, deeper, nipping at her bottom lip after. “You’re perfect.”
“You’re perfect,” Leah echoes breathlessly, arms looping around Fatin’s waist and tugging her onto her lap.
It isn’t true; it isn’t even close. But when they’re alone together, Leah almost believes it.
–
Colby’s house - more like a mansion, really, and somehow bigger than Fatin’s, which says a lot all on its own - is packed to the brim with drunk, high teenagers; dancing in his living room, playing beer pong and other drinking games by the pool, fucking in his upstairs guest bedrooms. It’s a blessing, because it means they’re barely looked at when they arrive; Colby’s thrilled to see them there with Ian, in an obliviously kind way that makes Leah like him just a little bit more. He gives Fatin a couple of pre-rolls he’d gotten from one of the local dispensaries, tells them that unlike the rest of the partygoers, they’re allowed anywhere they’d like to be, as long as they’re comfortable.
If Leah’s learned anything, it’s to keep her first impressions and misguided judgments closer to her chest, because it’s likely they’re not even accurate to begin with.
They find themselves deep in his backyard, in a quiet corner of the garden that’d been gated off, surrounded by hydrangeas and roses and orchids. It’s nice to be somewhere peaceful, where the sky feels expansive again, where beyond those trees she just might find an ocean. Fatin’s lips circle the joint, and she tilts her chin, inhaling deeply.
“God,” Leah says, gawking at her with glazed-over eyes, “you are so fucking beautiful it’s like, actually insane.”
Fatin laughs; head thrown back, freedom on her mouth. She says, “You are so fucking high.”
“Maybe,” Leah says, shrugging. She feels like she could watch Fatin forever, if given the opportunity; like if they’d crash-landed on a deserted island for real, no suspicious circumstances and no accidental deaths, she would’ve spent all her time doing exactly that. “Doesn’t mean you’re not beautiful.”
The garden is dark and calm, shedding moonlight over them. Leah remembers an earlier time in the bunker, the same image, the same poetry: Fatin, ethereal underneath the night, hair long and curling down her back like some river of stars, dark skin imbued with the glow of several spiral galaxies. The universe lives inside of Fatin, Leah thinks, and maybe that’s why being close to her is the only time Leah doesn’t feel lost. The world’s always sitting in the palm of her hand.
Fatin’s staring at her, pupils blown and lips red. She takes another drag, smoke unfurling like some nineteen-forties Hollywood movie star, gossamer-like trails lingering in the air. She murmurs, “I used to find that compliment lazy. But it feels like…like it means something when you say it.”
Leah hums, rolling the grass between her palms. “What do you think it means?”
“That you’re trying to fuck me.”
“I don’t even need to try. You’re easy.”
“Fuck you,” Fatin laughs again, exhales smoke. Observes her, thinking; the paper burns between her fingers. “No. Like…like you mean it. Like it’s something you feel.”
“It is,” Leah says. She doesn’t know how to explain the prose she weaves in her head when they’re together - water-tight baskets made of phrases and flashes and lightning strikes. Fatin, in every sense of the concept, is truly her muse. “That’s kind of my thing.”
Fatin holds the joint up to Leah’s mouth; Leah slips it between her lips and inhales, lungs expanding in her chest. The motion’s entrancing and intimate and Fatin can’t look away.
“I think I’ve been afraid,” Fatin says, and Leah breathes out, mouth in a pretty o shape. “That you’d realize you deserve someone better than me.”
It’s pretty much the stupidest thing Leah’s ever heard in her life. She can’t imagine anyone, anywhere not wanting Fatin; being the object of her affection is all-consuming and addictive, packed with certainty and security and awe, where she looks at Leah like she’s the eighth wonder of the world, like there’s a pointlessness to staring elsewhere because the most incredible sight she could possibly behold is already directly in front of her. Leah’s never felt so sure of love before - not just in the sense of knowing it exists, but constantly feeling the warm weight of it, the tangible proof of how it settles over them like a thin sheet on a summer evening.
“Why would you possibly think that?” is what escapes her, far dryer and more judgemental than she means it to be. She winces and mimes an apology.
“Because I love you, but I’ve - like, I’ve never done this before,” Fatin confesses, eyeline flickering down, away, up. She chases smoke into the air, fingers grasping at nothing. “Like, maybe I’m only good for you when our lives are on the line, stranded on a deserted island. And let’s face it - I wasn’t always good for you even then. Maybe there’s someone better for you here, in reality.”
Leah lets it dangle between them, a chain for a nightlight, waiting for Fatin to grasp and tug, find her way through the dark. But Fatin only stares at the sky, biting her lower lip into her mouth, as if she expects Leah to say Oh, yeah, about that.
“I think you’re stupid,” Leah says bluntly, and laughs at herself after, stealing the remaining joint from Fatin’s grip. So, maybe she is high as shit, but the world feels a little less, a little softer, a little easier to wrap her arms around. “I don’t love you just because of the islands, Fatin. They were just, like…a catalyst for it. Like if we’d had any class together, ever, I would’ve fallen in love with you, I think. I mean, I let you borrow a tampon once and thought about it for a month, so.”
“If we’d been lab partners or some shit,” Fatin says, grin pulling at her lips. “Done a group project together.”
“Would you have made me do all the work?” Leah asks, taking a final drag before she puts the embers out in the dirt beside them, and then remembers that it’s still technically fire season, so she watches the spot closely for a second, just to make sure.
“No,” Fatin says. “Maybe. Just to annoy you for a little bit.”
“See?” Leah says, tearing her eyes away from the ground, satisfied. “Virtually no difference between us getting stuck on an island and us getting stuck in a group project.”
“Fuck off,” Fatin laughs.
“Is that what you’re scared of?” Leah asks. “That I’m perfect for you, but you’re afraid there’s someone better for me?”
“I don’t know.” Fatin sighs, plopping down next to Leah in the grass. “Not exactly. It’s like…I mean, you fucked up my whole world, Leah. I didn’t even think I was built for love until you. And it’s not like I was good at it - before the bunker, I - I just feel like…someone else wouldn’t have hurt you the way I did.”
It sort of makes sense - other than the fact she’s completely wrong about it. Leah scoots closer until their shoulders touch and their knees are brushing.
“Fatin,” she says, “you’re like, the only reason I exist at all.”
A quirk of Fatin’s lips, eyelids fluttering shut. “You’re being dramatic.”
“No, I’m being serious,” Leah says. “I don’t know what I’ve been doing to make you think that I’m, like, okay without you or something, but if you weren’t here - if you hadn’t been there - I would’ve died.”
“Don’t say that.”
“It’s the truth.” Leah releases it quietly, lets it huddle between them. “I told you in the bunker. I told you you were the reason I was alive. That hasn’t changed.”
“But we’re home,” Fatin says, opens her eyes again, stares directly at her. “You’re home with your parents who love you, with your best friend who’d do anything for you, and with, like, a thousand stories you could write novels about.”
“You forgot the most important thing.”
“What?”
“You.”
Fatin blinks, the words slamming into a wall. There’s something else, something she isn’t understanding, and Leah realizes it’s less about her and entirely about Fatin herself.
She’s proven right when Fatin says, “What do I do?”
“Are you–” Leah stops. Rubs two fingers against her forehead, trying to pull her thoughts apart, swirling like cotton candy. “You still think I would’ve been better off if you hadn’t been there, don’t you? You think you don’t deserve this. Love.”
Fuck. Fatin bites her bottom lip into her mouth, breaks their gazes, and that’s how Leah knows she’s found her mark. Fatin answers softly, “I relive it all the time.” She drags her knees up to her chest, rests her chin between them. Leah’s hand hits the ground as she curls in on herself. “You were right from the beginning, and I - did what? Told you you were fucking crazy? Threatened to kill you?”
She can’t let it go. Tears are beginning to shine in her eyes. Leah says, “Proved I was right.”
“Barely,” Fatin mutters bitterly. “I didn’t even get the chance to tell you until it was too late. Until you’d basically taken her down yourself.”
“Do you want me to tell you what would’ve happened if you hadn’t been there?” Leah’s voice raises automatically, passionate. “Because I don’t know what version of events you’ve concocted in your head, but I would’ve killed myself, Fatin. I wouldn’t have trusted a single one of them, and I wouldn’t have told any of them what I thought, and I would’ve driven myself fucking insane by like, day eight. It would’ve been me, alone with my theories, and by the time I broke, none of them would’ve known how to help me.” She takes a breath. Fatin’s gazing at her, stunned. “I knew you. I trusted you. You were the only one who kept me sane for as long as I was, and when I was on the fucking brink, you brought me back. Every time, even if you didn’t know it.”
And Fatin bursts into tears. They immediately overflow, come rolling down her cheeks, and when she opens her mouth, all she can do is manage a choked exhale before shattering entirely. Leah reaches for the pieces, pulls Fatin into her lap, lets her sob into her shoulder. One hand cradling the back of Fatin’s head, the other around her waist.
“Baby,” Leah murmurs, ghosting kisses against the side of her face. “Oh, honey. My girl.”
She keeps whispering terms of endearment, holds her as long as the crying continues. Fatin’s arms around her are tight and desperate, like if she lets go, Leah will disappear, vanish into the darkness like a shadow. Like a specter who was never there at all.
Eventually, Fatin’s sobs start to fade, and her breathing evens out, and the damp spot on Leah’s flannel stops growing. She leans back, catches Fatin’s face in her palms, wipes the wet trail of tears away from her cheeks. Her makeup’s clearly waterproof, because her eyeliner’s still perfect, and nobody has ever looked as beautiful having a breakdown as Fatin, which is probably the point.
“I need you to believe me,” Leah implores gently. “I need you to let this go. You don’t deserve to carry this around anymore, pretty girl.”
“I want to be good for you,” Fatin says, rubbing her nose with the back of her wrist. It’s red and her eyes are puffy, and they’re high at a party in the backyard of Colby’s fucking mansion, and this is so, so on-brand for them.
“You are,” Leah says. “There’s never been anyone better, and there never will be.”
“How can you know that?”
“Because,” she says, and rests their foreheads together, exhaling the truth against Fatin’s lips, “nobody knows how to love me like you do. Even if they tried, they’d all do it wrong.”
Fatin, finally, smiles. Watery and sewing itself back together. And then, she laughs: “What does that even mean?”
Leah laughs, too, because Fatin’s laugh has always been contagious to her. “It’s a vibe,” she says. “Or it’s like - no, hold on, I can do this - it’s like, a paradigm shift, remember? Like love is different because of you. The entire concept of it. When you do it, it’s like…the whole world feels it.”
“God,” Fatin says. Eyes drifting to Leah’s mouth. “I love you so fucking much. I - I wish you knew.”
“I do,” Leah whispers, thinking back to every edge she’d almost thrown herself over, with Fatin’s hand as the only thing that’d stopped her. Fatin’s arms around her, cradling her to her chest. Fingers interlaced. Eyes watching, studying, waiting. Fatin, Leah’s come to realize, has spent quite a lot of time finding her in the dark. “I do. I know. I feel it.”
–
(Ian finds them around two in the morning, lying on their backs in the grass and having a deep discussion around parallel universes and other lives they could’ve led. From what he gathers, Leah is the ocean and Fatin is the sky, or something else gay and poetic he can’t really get a handle on. They’re extremely high, having smoked all three joints Colby’d given them, and when he helps Fatin to her feet, she turns to Leah and says–
I’ve got it. You’re everything and I’m everything. I’d find you anywhere.
Leah tugs her into a kiss so bruisingly sincere he feels his own mouth hurt. He’s had his lips where Fatin’s are now, but he’d never understood what it meant - to be kissed like that by her. Like it’s the only thing keeping her alive.)
–
He probably should’ve seen the conversation coming, because if they were normal - pre-island, pre-Jeff - she would’ve asked him. So? she’d say. Thoughts? Simple and casual, two best friends talking about their soul-wrenching crushes of the week. But Fatin isn’t a crush, and nothing about the situation is simple or casual.
She asks anyway, on a Thursday at the beginning of October; they’ve been finding it easier to make it through the days. Time, unfortunately, really does fix many things. “What d’you think?”
He glances up from the book they’re currently reading in English. “About what?”
“Fatin.” Leah’s tugging on the strap of her bookbag (leather, designer, an impulse purchase made by Fatin at around four in the morning during a particularly bad fit of insomnia) nervously, but he knows it isn’t his answer she’s concerned with. She gets antsy after she hasn’t seen Fatin in awhile, and they’ve gone two full periods now.
Ian confesses, “I feel guilty. For how I thought of her before.”
“Yeah,” Leah says, smiling darkly. “I struggled with a version of that, too.”
“She’s not who I thought she was,” he says. “I mean, I don’t know that we would’ve ever really connected before, but now - it feels weird to be liked by her. I would’ve expected judgment or like, thinly-veiled distaste, but she’s…oddly sincere.”
“It used to be easy to look at her and think she had it all,” Leah says. She’s not picking at her eyebrow, but rather ghosting her fingers over it. “But the pressure she was under…I don’t think I would’ve lasted. I would’ve done way worse than de-stress with sex, you know?”
“Kind of,” Ian says. “Not really.”
Leah looks at him as if debating whether or not the information is fit to reveal. And then she says, “Her parents were pretty hard on her. No matter how much she practiced or how well she performed, it was never enough. Imagine being Fatin - a literal cello prodigy - and your parents do nothing but express their disappointment in you. I think it would’ve killed me.”
“Shit.” He whistles. “Yeah, okay. That’s pretty harsh.”
“I always…thought of myself as so dull, and I wanted more than that, like - to be somebody that other people found interesting enough to flock to. But I see her, and it’s just…not as glamorous as she makes it seem.” She speaks with a tenderness Ian’s never heard from her before. “She’s good at that. Compartmentalizing.”
“I probably couldn’t have handled that pressure, either,” he admits. “Not to make this some kind of after-school special about how we should all be kind to each other because we’re all struggling, even if it’s not obvious, but - I guess now that you mention it, I never really saw Fatin with any friends.”
“Yeah,” Leah says. “It’s not easy to project what she used to and form, like, strong and lasting connections.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Ian says. “Well, I’m lucky to consider her a friend, I think.”
And Leah grins. Wide and reaching towards her eyes, and the way the sun hits her reminds him of light reflecting over the ocean. She says, “You really are. And one day, she’ll do something to prove it.”
“Is that what happened to you?” Ian jokes.
She nods. “The Fatin Jadmani Experience or whatever. But I’m open to workshopping.”
“Good, because that title makes her sound like a circus magic show. Are you sure you’re a writer?”
“Shut up.”
“She gets you,” he says. “I honestly, genuinely, one-hundred percent never thought I’d say something like that about Fatin Jadmani. But it’s like…impossible to ignore how insanely devoted to you she is.”
Her smile sinks, humorless and mild, and Ian knows it’s because the context and history between her and Fatin is enough to fill a thousand encyclopedias, and probably their own version of the DSM. ‘Insanely devoted’ doesn’t even begin to cover it.
“Yeah,” she says, resting her arms across the table. “She does. And she is.”
“You’re not so smooth yourself, though,” Ian says.
“With what?” Leah asks. “My affection?”
“If that’s what we’re calling it,” he replies, and they both laugh quietly, knowing it’s far too careless a word.
“Yeah,” Leah says, and now the light’s climbing to her eyes. It’s a look she only wears for Fatin. “No. I didn’t think I was. We thought about keeping it between us before we came back to school, but…you’ve seen us.” She hums thoughtfully, searching for an explanation on the verge of truth and poetry. “Nobody will ever understand me the way Fatin does. And I know they’ll try - they’re always trying. My parents, my therapist, my doctors; you.” She rolls a blade of grass between her fingers. “Fatin doesn’t have to try. She knows.”
“Because she was there,” Ian says.
“Because she was there,” Leah agrees.
“And because she loves you,” he adds. The presence of love feels important, integral.
Behind them, Fatin says, “The she you’re referring to better be me. I’m not above fighting some skank for Leah’s affection.”
Even the way they talk overlaps; not as if they’re adopting each other’s personalities, but as if words and phrases are souvenirs they carry in their pockets, pulling out occasionally to pass around. Ian finds it secretly endearing while recognizing the honor it is to be close enough to notice. Without him, their in-person circle is essentially a table for two.
Leah rolls her eyes. “Of course we’re talking about you.”
“Good.” Fatin settles beside Leah on the bench and presses a loud kiss to her cheek, satisfied. “In that case, Ian’s right. I do love you.”
“Thanks, babe,” Leah says. “I love you, too.”
“And you, Ian,” Fatin says emphatically, reaching out a hand to rest on his wrist. “We love you. Just differently.”
“I’d fucking hope so,” Ian says. “I’m definitely not cut out for whatever codependent obsession you two have going on.”
Fatin glances to Leah, smirk curling her lips. “Would he have made it?” she asks, and Leah mirrors her expression.
“No way,” she says, finding the apparent concept hilarious. “I mean, the boys they hand-picked didn’t even make it.”
“True story,” Fatin says. “Well, he’s better off, anyway.”
They do this, sometimes; make vague references or inside jokes around the edges of their experience. They still don’t talk about it - not to him, at least - but Fatin seems to have a more compulsive need to bring it up, as if affirming to herself that it happened at all. Leah doesn’t mind, from what he can tell, but she’s far less likely to discuss it unprompted.
“I’ll take your word for it,” Ian says, slowly getting used to the on-but-off-limits island conversations. “I barely survive here.”
“Well,” Leah says, “without the comparison, high school is a different kind of hell.”
Fatin rests her head against Leah’s shoulder; Leah’s playing with a ring on one of Fatin’s fingers. Other students walk by, staring blatantly at the two of them, but they either don’t notice or don’t care. He wonders what it’s like to have lived in a world so horrific that high school becomes just another place, rather than a prison.
He knows they’ve been granted special permissions from the school itself; it’s pretty much impossible for them to fail a class this year, and they tend to come and go as they please. Sometimes they attend each other’s classes and stay hidden in the back, whispering softly and scrawling notes in each other’s notebooks. Teachers don’t call on them unless they raise their hands; Leah sits in the music room during Fatin’s private cello rehearsals and does bits of her homework, though Ian’s not positive she actually turns anything in.
He also knows all these things are necessary. He remembers Leah white-knuckling the desk during English the first week she’d returned, eyes so wide and bloodshot he’d thought she was about to faint, all the signs and stigmas of a haunting - she’d run to the bathroom and thrown up until she’d composed herself enough to text Fatin, who’d immediately ditched her own class to find her. He remembers hearing that Fatin had a panic attack in their pre-calc class, and that she dissociated so hard during one of her first practice sessions with her cello that she tore one of her fingertips open and bled all over the strings.
“I have a showcase in a few weeks,” Fatin’s saying as he tunes back in, and she proceeds to predict the questions in advance. “It was up to me if I wanted to play in it; it has no impact on my grade and I get to pick the piece. I said I would. You think you can make it?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Leah says. “My schedule’s pretty packed these days, and my social life–”
“I totally get it. It’s hard being popular,” Fatin says seriously. “Is there anything I can do to convince you?”
“Well, my girlfriend is the real problem. She’s kind of codependently obsessed with me.”
Ian snorts.
“Likes to keep you all to herself, I bet.” Fatin winks. “Maybe she’ll make an exception. Just this once.”
(They do this a lot, too. Ian found it awkward to be present for, at first; now it’s just part of routine.)
“Hm.” Leah pretends to think. “I’ll ask her. I guess it can’t hurt.” She shrugs a shoulder (the one Fatin ((her girlfriend)) isn’t pressed up against) and drops a kiss to Fatin’s temple.
“She says yes.”
“Great. I’ll be there.”
“As if you’d miss it.”
“Not for any deserted island,” Leah says, and they both laugh, but he swears he sees Fatin squeeze her hand just a little bit tighter.
–
(“Ian, you in?” Fatin says, and it doesn’t actually make him feel like an afterthought. “You can come too, if you want. If the answer’s no, fuck you forever, but also, I totally get it.”
He finds himself grinning. He’s never gonna see exactly what Leah sees in her, but she’s definitely funnier than he’d originally given her credit for.)
–
Therapy does help. It also hurts.
Fatin and her therapist are currently working on the guilt she’s carrying around, which is two-fold: how she outed her father’s indiscretions in a fit of heartbreak, and in turn, destroyed her mother without a thought; and how she dismissed Leah, threatened her, buried her theories until it was almost too late. The former is, at least, straightforward; but unraveling the islands and Leah is like some kind of complex cave system, with cracks that need to be chiseled wider and echoes that never seem to fade. There’s something at the core of it, but she can’t seem to find her way there.
Leah, on the other hand, hits a particularly devastating breakthrough mid-October - the season is fitting for it, streets decorated with carved pumpkins and ghostly silhouettes and tombstones marking graves.
She barrels through her bedroom door on Wednesday evening. Fatin’s already waiting for her, spread out across the bed. Her purse slips from her shoulder, chain clattering against the floor. Eyes too big, like she’s running out of room to store the things she sees.
And then she says, starts fast and unmeasured, “He–” and stops short, trips over the oxygen as it races down her lungs. Slides her fingers across the heel of her thumbs before forming them into fists. “He liked that I was a teenager, and he probably knew I was a minor, because that’s what he was looking for.”
Silence, ringing. Static and white noise. The waves, beating against the shore. The plane, crashing.
“Yeah, Leah,” Fatin whispers. Knees pulled up to her chest, back against the headboard. “He did.”
“Okay,” Leah says. Falls back against the mattress beside her, palms rubbing furiously against her eyes. “I know. Yeah. I know.”
“And you know it wasn’t your fault, right?” Fatin asks, cheek against her knee, head tilted as she watches. There are times Leah needs to be touched or held or kissed - on the rare occasion, fucked brainless - but there are times she needs to sit inside of herself, feel the pressure of her own skin and her pulse, thrumming.
“Yeah,” Leah says. Gravelly and rough; she’s clearly been crying. Tough sessions aren’t unfamiliar territory to them. “I know. I did exactly what he wanted me to do. He knew I was in high school. He came on to me without asking my age. I lied and gave him a perfectly legal way out. I know. I know.”
“The day we were extracted,” Fatin says, extends a hand and trails it through Leah’s hair, loose and spread out across her pillow, “I told you you were the strongest person I knew. That’s still true. It’ll always be true.”
Leah blindly reaches for her hand, squeezing her fingers so tightly it almost hurts. “I love you,” she says. Firm and unwavering, despite the ache in her voice. “You’re the one who taught me what that meant. To love. Not him.”
And, finally: the end of a long, long journey.
–
Gretchen is apprehended the day before Halloween.
They don’t know the specifics of it. Shelby tells them that her father was brought in for questioning, and though Fatin hasn’t heard from him, she assumes her own father was too. Nora is working closely with the FBI, as someone with intimate knowledge of the experiment, in exchange for immunity; Rachel says they’re in family therapy, and she sometimes thinks about lopping off other body parts just to get out of it.
Mrs. Wolfe is mysteriously absent for a few days, but returns, apparently cleared by the FBI. She holds Leah back one day, and already Leah knows she won’t be making it to her afternoon classes.
“Leah,” she says morosely, “I knew her. She asked about my students, anyone who stood out, for an academic study. I didn’t - I had no idea, the truth of it. She did her own research into you, and found out about - Mr. Galanis. I couldn’t…I couldn’t believe he’d done that. And it was my fault. I sent him your birth certificate. I didn’t hear from her much after that, and had no idea–”
“It’s not your fault,” Leah interrupts. God, will the task of relieving other peoples’ burdens never end? They all want to be absolved of the damage they did to her, rather than holding it in both hands, letting it guide them forward. Be better, she wants to say. Don’t let me forgive you. Be better.
“I just wanted you to know,” she says. She’s having trouble meeting Leah’s eyes, but she’s managing. “I’m sorry for my failures. I’m your teacher. I should have protected you.”
“Okay,” Leah says. What else is she supposed to say, really - go fuck yourself? She’d probably get away with it, but it wouldn’t change anything. “If I were you, I think I’d focus on surrounding myself with better company than a pedophile and a psychopath.”
It hits exactly where she wants it to, right between the eyes, right between the ribs, right between the vertebrae. Renders her mute and paralyzed, soaking up the blood of the crimes she hadn’t committed herself, but thoughtlessly opened the doorways to. Leah walks out without another word, and honestly, she feels pretty good about it.
(She’s still a teenager, and sometimes, pettiness really is the best option.)
–
A lot of information starts reaching them at once. Gretchen’s network had been wide-reaching and difficult to trace, meaning it’d likely been primarily funded by extremely wealthy people who are used to getting their hands dirty. Jeanette’s real name was Linh, and she’d been a legal adult who’d signed some kind of waiver that cleared Gretchen of her death. Devon, Gretchen’s son, had inadvertently led to her capture when he logged into his Google Play account for some mobile game data - apparently, hiding from law enforcement was too boring for him on its own.
And, lastly: they’re pretty much famous now. Since her capture, more and more of the details come trickling out, from the location of the islands to their harrowing, depressing backstories; Dot and Shelby, who are now both eighteen and living alone in Dot’s dead father’s house, are immediate magnets for sympathy. Mateo, they learn, does actually start a GoFundMe for them, as it’ll be awhile before they see any money related to the case and the watches Fatin had given them are only worth so much - but it evolves to include Toni, Martha, and Rachel, too, since prosthetics can run expensive.
Fatin has enough money; Leah’s family has always been upper-middle class. They quietly ask not to be included.
Fame has one significant perk, though: their story has made colleges begging for their attendance. They write their personal essays about the islands and their lives leading up to it, what they’ve learned, how they’ve suffered, how they’ve changed - admissions boards are practically foaming at the mouth to admit them. Every local and national news program is vying for an interview, but they don’t want anything they say getting back to Gretchen or her team, afraid of validating any part of her experiment.
Maybe that’s why it happens; why Fatin’s final major breakdown is so fantastically destructive. She doesn’t want the attention. She doesn’t want the sympathy or the pity or the praise. She only wants Leah, but Leah wants to make pro/con lists for each college they’re both accepted to, and–
–
They break up exactly once, for a total of about four hours.
It’s Fatin’s fault; she’ll admit it freely. They’re talking about colleges and she just…sort of snaps, which isn’t that unusual for her trauma and the way it expresses itself, but is the most explosive. A lot comes bearing down on her at once, like a tidal wave or a plane crash or the realization that no one is coming to save them on a deserted island, and she suddenly can’t - can’t be here, can’t continue like this, can’t be the one holding Leah back forever as she heals and Fatin doesn’t, because that’s what it feels like, sometimes, like Leah’s grasping the days in her hands and bending them to her will while Fatin’s trying to remember which direction is down so she can dig herself deeper, and it’s too much, too heavy, too endless–
“Fatin.” Leah’s voice cuts through at exactly the wrong time, her blue eyes wide with worry, and Fatin’s doing it again, dragging Leah into the pit she’s dug, and Leah doesn’t deserve that, not again, and again and again and again–
“No,” Fatin says. There’s a faint ringing in her ears and the sound of the ocean. She slips off the bed, gets to her feet unsteadily. “No. Fuck this. I’m not - I can’t do this.” To you, she means to add, but can’t get it out of her mouth.
“Fatin,” Leah repeats, holding out a hand as if attempting to calm a wild animal, and Fatin hates her, hates how intensely and irrevocably intertwined they are, hates how weak of a word love is, hates herself for feeling anything at all.
“I have to go,” Fatin says, shoving her feet into her sneakers, clutching the doorframe unsteadily. How is she supposed to think with all this white noise, with this deep sea looming overhead? “I can’t do this anymore. We’re - we should be done.”
Leah only blinks, bewildered but simultaneously understanding, and that’s the worst part of all - that Leah knows exactly why she’s doing and saying what she is. It’s always that fucking island, that bunker, that faked plane crash; finding that off-colored dirt, finding Leah with that empty pill bottle, finding out it had all been one giant fucking lie for some psycopath’s personal Hunger Games–
“You’re breaking up with me?” Leah says, looking for clarification, and Fatin can already see that beautiful brain of hers turning its gears, working furiously for answers neither of them actually have, let alone Fatin herself.
“Yeah,” Fatin says, and barely realizes she’s crying despite her blurry vision. “I - I guess. I’m going. I have to go.”
“Okay,” Leah murmurs, watching her grab her bag, listening to her footfalls on the stairs, the front door opening and slamming shut. She reaches for her phone and texts Rana.
–
Fatin ends up in a McDonald’s parking lot; a perfectly rock-bottom place to have one of the worst panic attacks she’s had thus far. Leah, of course, has texted several times, and there’s a missed call from her mother and Dorothy respectively, but she ignores all of them in favor of someone who is actually equipped to handle a situation that she herself clearly isn’t: her therapist.
(This, in itself, is a step. She used to think she was beyond help from anyone.)
She’s been seeing the woman - Diane - for months now, and even if Fatin’s frustrated at herself and lack of progress, she’s able to recognize the good talking to her does. Diane’s number is saved to her favorites, and she touches the screen with a shaking hand.
One, two rings. “Fatin?” Diane’s voice comes through the speaker, and she must immediately hear Fatin’s labored breathing, because she says, “Has something happened?”
“I broke up with Leah,” Fatin manages before having an absolutely fucking magnificent breakdown, sobbing hysterically into the sweatshirt she’s wearing (which is Leah’s, of course).
Diane remains calm. “Okay,” she says. “Take a deep breath for me, and focus on what we’ve practiced. Can you tell me where you are?”
“Parking lot,” Fatin gets out. “In my car.”
“Good. Can you tell me five things you can see?”
“McDonald’s sign,” she says, trying to focus on the world outside of her window. “Gas station across the street. Man with a dog. There’s - um, there’s a kid with a Happy Meal. And the streetlight. Just changed green.”
“Good,” Diane repeats. “How about four things you can touch?”
They continue down the list, with Fatin slowly listing all the influences on her senses, grounding her more firmly in reality. Her tears dry and her breathing regulates. And then Diane says:
“So you broke up with Leah,” in a mild tone that Fatin recognizes as her babygirl, what the fuck voice. “And what prompted that?”
“We were just - just talking about colleges,” Fatin says. The pieces of her mind feel like some Dali painting, like she’s melting into the earth. She presses her fingers into her forehead until it hurts, trying to glue her thoughts back together, find the start and finish lines. “I don’t know. I just - we were talking about our options.”
Diane hums. “And what were the options?”
“You know,” Fatin says. “New York or staying in the Bay.”
“What were the pros and cons?”
“She said I could be closer to my family if we stayed.” Fatin grasps at the edge of the thread, pulls. “She wasn’t even thinking about herself.”
“And that’s a problem?”
“It’s her life,” she says. “She can’t - she can’t sacrifice everything for me. Not when she’s doing so much better.”
“Better than what?”
Fuck. Bingo. Fatin winces. “Better than me.”
“I see,” Dianne says, knowing they’ve found their mark. “So you think you’re holding Leah back from what she truly wants, is that it?”
“She isn’t…scared of life. Not like I am. Not anymore.” Admitting it feels childish and stupid. She uses her sleeve to dry her cheeks, pauses briefly to breathe into the fabric. “She could do anything. She’s so strong. She could go anywhere, be anyone, have anyone–”
“But she wants you,” Diane reminds her. “Unless she’s told you otherwise?”
“No,” Fatin says. Small. “I don’t know if she would.”
“If she’d tell you the truth?”
“Yeah. Because of - because of how badly I need her.”
One thing Fatin likes about Diane is how she doesn’t stamp unhealthy labels onto their brand of codependency, or make Fatin promises about how she can fix her, bring her back to the person she was before any of this ever happened - or at least a close-enough version of it - because Diane knows the worst of Fatin’s trauma was actually pre-island, and that’s why coming home had done the most damage: Fatin, she’d said, the islands were a type of reprieve from the constant pressure of your daily life; you’d only had to worry about surviving, about finding out what had happened to you. And now you’re expected to do so much more than survive. It’s no wonder you’re having a hard time adjusting to that.
So Fatin doesn’t feel shame about admitting her need to Diane. The shame comes from feeling it towards Leah, still, after all this time, to the degree they can’t do normal shit like talk about the future, because then Fatin starts to wonder what it’ll look like and if Leah’ll still be there or if she’ll get sick of Fatin’s fucking meltdowns–
“Well,” Diane says, “do you think she’d lie to you?”
Fatin exhales heavily. “No,” she says. Leah doesn’t lie to her; Fatin’s seen her darkest, cruelest thoughts, and Leah’s never shied away from sharing them. “We don’t lie to each other.”
“Why not?”
“Because we trust each other,” she says. “Because we have to.”
“Because it kept you alive?”
“I guess,” Fatin says. She watches the lights chase their colors once more. “If somebody was lying, it meant - I don’t know. That she was telling them to.”
“By she, you mean Gretchen, correct?”
“Yeah.” Gas prices have gone up again. It doesn’t matter to her, but Leah’s always complaining about it. “Personal secrets…we stopped having those by the time we were in the bunker.”
“So let’s go back,” Diane says, and here’s where Fatin gets her shit absolutely ripped out from underneath her, which is exactly what she needs. “Has Leah given you any indication that your relationship isn’t working for her?”
“No.”
“Has she said anything about college in a way that suggests she’s unhappy with her options?”
“No.” Kind of the opposite, actually.
“Is there a reason she might’ve suddenly begun lying to you about those things, considering all you’ve told me?”
“No,” Fatin answers for the third time, waiting for the cloudlessness of clarity, hovering at the edge of her mind.
“Okay. Why do you think Leah is doing better than you are?”
The question forces Fatin to a standstill. Like she’s a ticking bomb with a glitch on the timer. “Because she - she functions better, or something. Like, she doesn’t freak out as much anymore, and she can go out and have fun and talk to people who aren’t me and still be okay.” She swallows, throat full of stones. “I can’t do that. Not really. Not like I used to.”
“Do you think Leah has something - or someone - who helps her with those things?”
Oh.
Fatin is a fucking idiot.
“I’m a fucking idiot,” Fatin says.
Diane actually laughs. “You’re not an idiot, Fatin,” she says. “It isn’t always easy to see what’s so close to us. And you knew that, so you called me, instead of doing whatever helpful - but self-destructive - behavior you might’ve indulged in previously. I think that makes you very, very smart.”
After they hang up, Fatin goes into McDonald’s, orders large fries and a McFlurry, and eats in her car with her phone connected to Spotify, one of Leah’s playlists on repeat. Licks the salt off of her fingers and thinks of the ocean and doesn’t walk towards it. And then she picks up her phone.
loml
Hey I just want to make sure you’re okay
loml
And that you didn’t crash your car
loml
Sorry if you need space
loml
I guess I’m not like used to that
loml
Did I do something wrong?
-
Fuck. Fatin curses under her breath, rolls her eyes towards the roof of the car and counts to ten. The sun’s setting; she’s probably been here for two hours, trapped in her own fucking head while the people she loves are panicking.
You
leah i’m sorry
You
i’m so fucking sorry
loml
It’s okay
loml
Are you safe?
You
yeah i’m at mcdonalds
You
i called diane
You
she helped
You
i’m so sorry
loml
Honestly as long as you’re okay now I’m okay
loml
Are you coming back? Can we talk?
You
yeah i just need to swing by home
You
you texted my mom right
loml
Yeah, sorry
loml
I wasn’t sure where you’d go or how you were
You
i know
You
it’s okay
You
i'll be there soon. i love you
She sets her phone in one of the cup holders, ignoring the rest of her unread messages that she assumes are from her mother and Dorothy, opting to just call while she drives home.
Dorothy picks up on the second ring, voice echoing out of the car speaker. “Hey, dipshit.”
“Wow,” Fatin says. “What a way to greet your best friend.”
“I heard you broke up with Leah,” Dorothy says conversationally, “which can only mean you’ve lost your fucking mind.”
“That’s a pretty succinct summary,” Fatin says. “Don’t worry, mom. I’m all better now. I called my therapist.”
Dorothy whistles as though impressed. “Look at you,” she says, “being responsible and shit. I’m so proud.”
It’s easier to drive with the distraction of Dorothy’s commentary, rather than listening to the ongoing one inside of her head. “Did you talk to Leah?”
“No. She texted me when you took off.”
Fatin sighs. “God, I’m so fucking stupid.”
“Nah,” Dot replies, mouth suddenly full. She sounds like she’s devouring some kind of fruit, and of course she’s the pinnacle of laid-back as Fatin narrowly avoids self-destruction. “You’re just fucked up like the rest of us. Time to accept your place on the insanity train.”
“Please,” Fatin scoffs. Flicks her turn signal, waiting in the left lane. “I’m the fucking conductor at this point.”
“You know, Fatin,” Dot starts, and she’s about to get therapized again, she can feel it–“it’s not a competition, like, who’s the most traumatized, or who’s the least. We’re all seriously and completely fucked from this.” She pauses. “Shelby and Toni sleep on the phone sometimes. She doesn’t sleep much otherwise.”
“Yeah,” Fatin mutters. “Been there.” Currently there.
“My point is,” Dot says, “you aren’t the only one having these, like…episodes, where you can’t see a way out of your own head. Mateo tried to take me on a date last week, and the couple at the table next to us ordered oysters - dude, the second I smelled them, I threw up all over the floor.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah, man. The staff understood - I think they recognized me, to be honest, which is fucking freaky - but it was like, mortifying.”
Though her instinct is to say I’m sorry, she knows it’s a useless sentiment, and she hates it when people say it to her - like, oh, are you sorry? Sorry for what? That I went through a hell you’ll never come close to comprehending, let alone experiencing yourself?
“People should be thanking us,” Fatin says aloud. “For being the ones who were chosen, instead of them or their kids. It could’ve been anyone. But it was fucking us.”
“Yeah,” Dorothy agrees. “It was us. We have to live with that. But we have each other, you know? You’re not alone, Fatin. You’re just the last of us to have to fight your way out of the dark fucking hole we’re in.”
“Practice makes perfect, is what you’re saying,” Fatin answers, turning onto her street.
“More like, just ask for help when you need it,” Dorothy says patiently. “From any of us. We’re all here for you. But I think you’ve got the best person with you already for all this shit. How many holes did Leah have to climb out of, all on her own? How many times did you help pull her out? She gets it.”
“I know,” Fatin says. She parks in her driveway, idles in her car as she finishes up the conversation. “That was the problem. I didn’t want to–”
“I know,” Dorothy says, and she does. “I know you’re worried about being a burden to her. You’ve always had this hangup about being useful, ever since…I mean, you know. Like you’re trying to take everything off of her shoulders to make up for not believing her originally.”
Fuck. That’s a direct hit, and it stings. She needs to bring this up in her next scheduled session and unpack it further, because she never seems to be able to escape it. “I know. And we’ve talked about it before, but it’s like - it doesn’t stick. When I start to spiral or whatever, I just hear this voice that’s like…she could do better, and she doesn’t deserve this.”
She lets it echo. Dorothy doesn’t speak, still chewing on whatever the hell it is she’s eating, and then says: “I think you should probably talk to Leah about that.”
“Yeah,” Fatin says. Her mother’s face peeks through the curtains, and a wide smile breaks out across her face at the sight of Fatin’s car, relief almost palpable. Her mom is the one who normally calls Leah, so this situational reverse has likely had her on edge. “I will.”
–
“Fatin,” Rana says, her worry written plain across her face, and it’s almost nice to see; it’s proof that she’s cared for in spite of her problems, instead of being resented for them. “Are you okay?”
So Fatin does something she’s never done before: she opens her arms, wraps them straight around her mother, and says, “I love you.”
Rana freezes momentarily, shocked by the display, and then returns the embrace, rocking her slightly. “Oh, sweetheart,” she whispers. “I love you too. So much.”
“I’m okay,” Fatin says, pulling back. “I just–”
“You don’t have to explain if you don’t want to,” Rana says gently, hands still resting on Fatin’s shoulders, thumbs stroking back-and-forth in a comforting motion. “I’m just glad you’re alright.”
“Yeah.” Fatin’s throat sticks to itself, dry and acidic. “I’m - I’m working on it. But I need to go back to Leah’s. I kind of…I did something stupid. So I need to apologize.”
“Of course.” Rana doesn’t pretend to understand their relationship, but she supports it wholeheartedly; it’s clear to pretty much everyone how finely they’re tuned. “Will you be staying over there?”
“Probably,” Fatin says. “But I’ll let you know if we plan to come here instead. I just need to grab a few things.”
“Okay.” Rana offers her a soft smile. “I’m proud of you, Fatin.”
And, fuck - Fatin’s been waiting her entire life to hear those words without any high-class achievement behind them; she purses her lips, pressing them into her teeth hard enough to hurt, trying fruitlessly to stop the tears. She’s done enough crying today, and she’ll probably go crying to Leah, too.
She manages a shaky thanks before she escapes up the stairs to her bedroom, desperate to outrun her own emotion.
–
Fatin opens Leah’s front door quietly; Maryanne and Kurt are in the kitchen, cleaning up after dinner. She winces, hoping they hadn’t prepared a plate for her, but there are more important messes that demand her attention - monsters under beds and lurking in closets - demons with their claws tearing at their backs. She takes off her shoes, sets them beside the door.
When she enters Leah’s room, Leah’s sitting on her bed, in nearly the exact same position Fatin had left her in. She wonders if Leah’s moved at all, or if she’s been in shock, staring at her phone and pulling at her eyebrow and whittling her mind down to the point of a spear, stabbing at herself.
Leah’s head shoots up immediately. “Fatin–”
“I want to go first,” Fatin says, and they both crack a similar uneven smile, remembering the first time they’d ever fought. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t - I don’t want to break up with you, obviously, I just–” She cuts off. Leah’s eyes are a little bloodshot, like she’d forgotten how to blink in the time Fatin had been gone. She inhales, tries again, and says: “It wasn’t rational. We were talking about the future and you were so focused on me, and I felt like…like I was holding you back.”
Leah blinks in confusion. “Holding me back from what?”
“Life, I guess,” Fatin sighs, lowering herself to the edge of the bed, one foot tucked under her thigh. “I don’t know. I get so fucking stuck in my own head, it’s like - like I want to punish myself for being fucked up, or something. I started thinking about how much, like…energy you devote to me, and what if staying in the Bay isn’t what you want, and what if you’re settling for me, and all I’m doing is holding you back, and then - yeah.”
“And then you do things like break up with me because you think it’s for my own good.” Leah draws the conclusion herself; it’s not difficult to. The line stands out against the cork board, point A to point B.
“Yeah,” Fatin says. “I’m sorry. I know - I know you wouldn’t lie to me. I know if you wanted something, you’d just tell me.”
She’s staring down at the lines of her palms, rubbing her fingers together, touching her calluses. She doesn’t feel as hard as her skin pretends to be. Another hand reaches out, takes hers, cradles it.
Leah murmurs, “Baby. Look at me.”
Blue on blue on blue. Leah’s eyes are endless, glaciers cracking in the light. Fatin finds herself momentarily breathless, because she’s never met anyone whose eyes convey as much as Leah’s do, to the point they feel like windows she can crawl through, doors she can open.
Leah continues, “I didn’t want to tell you this, because I was afraid I’d be putting pressure on you, but - when you’re not here, I truly, genuinely start to fucking lose it.” She laughs at herself humorlessly. “I’m - I’m better than I was, but I’m also just better at hiding it from people who aren’t you.”
Fatin frowns. She runs the pad of her thumb against Leah’s knuckles. “I don’t–”
“You’re like - the only thing that turns my brain off,” Leah interrupts, going all in, every card laid out on the table. “I don’t look at you and think about the islands. Or if I do, it’s reassuring, because I know that they were real - that all of it was real. Otherwise, it’s easy for me to, like…lose my grip on it, I guess. I notice people staring at me. I think someone’s listening. I convince myself someone’s lying to me, or I’m still being studied, or - fuck, literally any of that shit.”
She finally drops her gaze, biting the inside of her cheek as if in embarrassment, and Fatin comes to understand several things at once:
“Oh,” she says softly. “You thought if you told me…”
“I didn’t want to be a burden,” Leah says. “I thought you’d feel…obligated. To be with me. And I didn’t want that. I wanted it to - to be your choice.”
And Fatin laughs. She can’t not. They’ve been back for months - all their time spent tangled up in each other’s sheets or hands or red threads - and they’ve both been terrified of scaring the other off, weighing them down like an anchor, chaining them to the things they’re trying desperately to leave behind. She keeps laughing in short, breathy bursts, breaking free from containment. It takes a moment, but Leah laughs, too, grasping her fingers tighter, and then they’re leaning into each other, foreheads touching, eyelids closing automatically.
Fatin says, “We’re so codependent.”
“I know.” She can hear Leah’s grin. “But we have to live somehow, don’t we? And I choose to do it with you.”
“Live?”
“Yeah.”
“From now on,” Fatin says, “we tell each other when things are bad, okay? I know we’re pretty good at that already, but like - you’re not a burden to me.”
“And you’re not a burden to me,” Leah agrees quietly, brushes their noses together, hovers an inch away from Fatin’s lips. “You’re the opposite. You’re, like, the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Bar was low,” Fatin says, ruining the moment, and it’s exactly what they need.
“Shut up.” Leah snorts, shoving her shoulder lightly, and Fatin leans right back in, catching Leah’s mouth with her own. The hand on her shoulder curves around her neck instead, pulling her closer, lips moving more insistently - and then Leah’s on her back, and Fatin’s on top of her, and the sound of the downstairs television is wafting up the stairs, and the smell of the night sky drifts through her open window, and for a few precious moments, all of Fatin’s fears sink low and far away.
Fatin lazily breaks their kiss and murmurs, “You’re beautiful.”
And she is: brown hair spread messily across the pillow behind her, blue eyes like melting sapphires and crinkling at the edges, lips swollen and tilted up at the corners. She looks happy as she rests her hand on Fatin’s cheek, stroking the corner of her mouth; happy like she knows what it’s like to hit rock bottom and crawl her way out; like she’s feeling the sun for the first time after a long, long night.
Leah says, “So does this mean we’re back together?”
“Oh, definitely,” Fatin says. “You’re never getting rid of me now.”
“Good,” Leah says seriously. “I guess I can return the handcuffs I bought.”
That’s a fun idea. Fatin says, “Actually–”
“Oh, my god,” Leah interrupts, as if she’d seen the lightbulb appear over Fatin’s head. “It was a joke. If you want me to tie you up, you can order that on your own Amazon account, because I share mine with my parents.”
The look Fatin shoots her is almost scandalized. “Babe, we are not ordering sex toys on Amazon. We live in the Bay. We need to support small businesses. I’m sure there’s a queer-owned sex shop somewhere nearby–”
“You’re so dumb,” Leah says, blushing but amused. “You do the research, then, sexpert. And the purchasing. I’ll do - whatever you want me to do with all the shit you end up buying.”
“I have a few ideas,” Fatin says, mentally running through various scenarios she’d like to try, and Leah hums, fingers at the hem of Fatin’s shirt.
“I’m sure you do,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I’ve got a few, too, so how about you lock the door and take your jeans off.”
It’s actually embarrassing how immediately turned on she gets whenever Leah gives her orders. She’ll be hiding that one as long as possible, even as she hurries to obey, kicking her jeans onto the floor. “Whatever you want, baby.”
“And be quiet this time,” Leah warns. “My parents aren’t going to buy the horror movie excuse again.”
“Make me,” Fatin says, crawling back between her legs, and finds her eyes dark.
“I’m not going to make you do anything,” Leah says, smirking. She’s curling a strand of Fatin’s hair around her finger, running her foot up the back of Fatin’s thigh teasingly. “But I will stop if you can’t control yourself.”
“That’s not fair.”
“You just want me to gag you, don’t you?”
“Maybe.”
Leah flips them over deftly, her toned upper arms making a brief appearance as Fatin curls her hands around them. “Maybe,” Leah repeats, “you need to learn how to ask for what you want, unless what you want is to be a brat.”
It’s no simple task for Fatin to hold back her moan - there’s a confidence Leah adopts whenever they’re having sex that’s, like, the hottest thing Fatin’s ever seen in her life - and Leah laughs, but it’s deeper, deadlier, because she knows exactly what she’s doing and exactly how much Fatin loves it.
“Maybe I do,” Fatin says, so eager and horny it can’t be anything but brutally apparent.
And then the pressure’s gone, and Leah’s standing at the end of the bed, tugging her shirt over her head and leaving her jeans in a pool on the floor, and Fatin knows she is absolutely fucking in for it.
(And maybe when Leah uses her own underwear to gag Fatin - wet with a heady scent that makes her feel like passing out from the eroticism of it - she comes harder against Leah’s face than she ever has before, and Leah lifts her head, licking every trace of Fatin from her lips in a way that is unmistakably pornographic before saying, “Hm. Maybe we should get handcuffs.”
She slides two fingers into Fatin, fucks her through a second orgasm, and Fatin swears she momentarily blacks out.)
–
They get their acceptance letters faster than most people do, if she had to guess; Berkeley grants Leah some kind of scholarship, and Fatin’s a prodigy, so she gets several outrageous offers to attend a variety of music programs. But she’s finally growing closer to her mother, and her brothers won’t be little kids forever - and Berkeley’s got a pretty interesting music therapy course she’s interested in, an idea both Leah and her therapist love.
They decide to stay. It isn’t even a hard decision.
“I kind of thought I’d do what every teenager does in those like, YA movies,” Fatin says to her mother as they’re going over her acceptance letter. “Where we’d have some screaming match and I’d end it with ‘Juilliard was your dream, mom, not mine!’ or whatever.”
Her mom laughs. “Well, I’m glad we didn’t. I just want you to be happy. But I am happy you’ll be so close.” She runs her finger down the page. “Have you and Leah talked about getting an apartment?”
Leah’s currently passed out on the couch in the living room; she hadn’t slept well the night before, and she doesn’t like taking sleeping pills - they give her nightmares that she can’t seem to wake up from. “Yeah,” Fatin says. “We figured we’d - well, we’d ask you to help, since this is like, your thing.”
“It’s definitely my thing,” her mom says, and the way she smiles now is so much softer than it’s ever been; maybe there’s something empowering for her about being alone, after years of confining not just her family, but herself - maybe she, like Fatin, has also recently learned what love actually looks like. “I’ll do some research. You’ll want somewhere with good security - a front desk and a doorman, if available. Perhaps three bedrooms; an office for Leah, somewhere for you to play.” Using the word play rather than practice is a huge adjustment; play is something she can do for fun. Fatin bites her bottom lip in an attempt to stop herself from tearing up. “Four, I suppose, if you’d like a dedicated guest room–”
“Do they even have four-bedroom apartments?” Leah asks groggily, shuffling into the kitchen. “Rana, you’re spoiling us again.”
“Oh, I can’t help it,” she says, beckoning Leah closer, and Fatin doesn’t miss how she rubs a hand up and down Leah’s back comfortingly - the way mothers do, purely out of habit. The love she has for Leah is real, like Leah’s her daughter, too. “I’m just so excited for the two of you. But to answer your question, yes, four-bedroom apartments exist.”
“I think three is fine,” Fatin says, and laughs at Leah’s wince. “Should we buy or rent? What’s the market like? I’d like high ceilings and exposed beams.”
“Oh my god,” Leah says, the dollar amount flagging red in her head. “We are not buying an apartment.”
“You’re right.” Fatin nods thoughtfully. “We’ll probably have our settlement money by the time we graduate, so we should wait and buy a house.”
“You’ll definitely want four bedrooms then,” Rana advises, and Leah puts her face in her hands, smiling against her will. Well, she knew what she was getting into. “If Fatin sticks with music in any capacity, you’ll need a soundproofed studio. And Leah, you seem like the type to enjoy a home library.”
“I…can’t argue with that,” she exhales, leaning against the counter on her elbows, like even the idea of spending such an exorbitant amount of money is exhausting to her. She knows a losing battle when she sees one, and she’s won enough of them to resist the fight. “I feel like orphan Annie.”
“Embrace it,” Fatin says wisely. “I’ll be your Daddy Warbucks, baby.”
Her mom snorts, far too used to Fatin’s excessive and inappropriate brand of humor; Leah immediately groans loudly, fighting the blush from her face. “Stop saying stuff like that around your mom,” she grumbles, clearly embarrassed. “Rana, you raised a great daughter, but she is far too shameless.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” her mom says. On the back of Fatin’s acceptance letter, she’s been scribbling notes about what kind of properties to look for; something about the act is startling, because in another life, an acceptance letter to Juilliard would’ve been framed and hung in the stairway, proof of her parents’ pride and success. Now, her Berkeley acceptance is just another piece of paper, currently being used as a need, want and don’t want list for Fatin and her girlfriend’s future apartment.
“I needed a flaw,” Fatin says, tucking the observation away somewhere safe and pulling out the egotism instead. “Being perfect is so alienating.”
Leah and her mom exchange a look, but Leah’s mouth turns up at a corner and her mom chuckles after - two people she loves, who deeply love her - and then Leah’s curling an arm around her waist, tugging her closer. She doesn’t really say anything more; just pulls Fatin’s back to her chest, drapes an arm around her shoulder and across her collarbone in a tenderly possessive maneuver. Presses a kiss to her cheek, and says: “I’m sure it is, honey,” and holds her there.
Unfazed, her mother continues on, asking about amenities they’d like in their future apartment, along with any other specifications. No tension despite how open Leah’s being with her affection. It’d be a different story if her father were still there - fists tight around his so-called “values,” which definitely include fucking college students, but definitely exclude his daughter being bisexual - and the lack of judgment is freeing. Something about both the weight and weightlessness of absence, if Leah were attempting to describe the feeling, probably.
So Fatin smiles, turns her head, lays a gentle kiss against the side of Leah’s jaw, just because she can. They’re here and alive and in love, and that's all that’s worth anything, really - not money or status or how many bedrooms are in an apartment or the designer brand of a watch.
Fuck. She’s so fucking corny now. But she’d string together the shittiest poems - with the most inadequate metaphors and juvenile similes - and read them on a stage if it’d make Leah smile, so she can’t find it in herself to care.
–
Leah’s therapy sessions are grueling. The FBI sends out an official advisement for them all to get a lawyer (and unofficially, tells them Gretchen’s likely to take a plea deal, as there’s far too much evidence against her and too many co-conspirators who’ve agreed to be witnesses for the prosecution, should it go to court). Leah spends a long time unraveling that knot with her therapist - wouldn’t Gretchen want to go to court, to utilize their official testimonies for further research? - but Monica points out a few things: that Gretchen must have a hell of a survival instinct, considering the laws she’d broken and the punishments she’d avoided to begin with; and she’d clearly never wanted to go to court, as most of the kids she’d picked had some pretty dark skeletons in their closets, or strewn about their floors, or sleeping in bed with them. Martha and her previous perjury; Leah and her illegal relationship; Toni with her anger issues and property destruction. Things that would’ve helped serve to keep them quiet after.
So when Leah shows up at Fatin’s house on a chilly November evening - after one of said exhausting sessions, where she’s spent the hour falling down a rabbit hole and clawing herself out - it probably shouldn’t be too surprising to see her at the foot of the bed, dark-eyed and steel-jawed and in desperate need of distraction.
“Before I say this,” Leah starts lowly, sliding her bag off of her shoulder, “just know that I won’t make a habit out of it and I’m not using it as a replacement for healthy coping mechanisms.”
“Is there an NDA you want me to sign?” Fatin jokes, unsure of where they’re headed. “Any kind of contract?”
“Shut up,” Leah breathes out, and her jacket hits the floor. “I need you to fuck me until I can’t think anymore.”
Blue screen, black screen, white noise, sirens and explosions. “Mmmhhm,” she hums, a strange jumble of sounds she chokes on.
“I’m serious,” Leah says. Her extremely sexy girlfriend is asking her to be fucked into absolute oblivion, and somehow expects Fatin to have words still in her mouth. “I just - I need you to make me feel good. But also, I don’t know, choke me and call me a slut or something.”
“I’m serious, too,” Fatin exhales. Heart absolutely beating in her pussy. “I’m so serious. I’ve never been more serious about anything in my entire life.”
“Good,” Leah says, pulling her shirt overhead. “I promise I’m okay. Okay enough. I need a break from my brain.”
“I can definitely help with that,” Fatin says, finger tugging on her belt loop. Braless, in her jean shorts; oh, this is unlocking something, this visual - Fatin wants to photograph her, put her on album covers and in museums. “God, you’re stunning.”
“Mmm.” Leah’s arms wrap around her neck, bare chest pressing against Fatin’s, shameless. “Good start.”
Fatin kisses her. Open-mouthed and messy before she bites on her bottom lip, sucks it, swallows the relieved sigh Leah exhales against her; hands splaying against the skin of Leah’s back and pulling her closer. Nipples pebbled against the fabric of Fatin’s shirt, making her moan. And then she’s shoving Leah against the mattress, deft fingers working the button of her shorts and sliding them down her legs, leaving her in a pair of black Calvin Klein boyshorts that make Fatin’s mouth water and absolutely nothing else.
She isn’t shy about it, either, arms above her head and hair splayed against the pillow, lips red and swollen with eyes like a thunderstorm–
“Fuck,” Fatin says, staring breathlessly down at her; Leah drags her teeth along her lip, crooks a knee in anticipation like the gorgeous vixen she is. “You’re so hot. I’m gonna fuck you until the only name you remember is mine.”
That alone gets her halfway there.
–
Fatin can see the moment it hits - that fucked-out bonelessness, the snap of her thoughts breaking apart - somewhere around Leah’s fourth orgasm. Fatin’s hand form-fitted to her neck, pressure against the sides, grinding into her with the strap as she chases her own pleasure; Leah’s eyes, rolling back and fluttering shut, lips parted in a silent moan. Spine arching, fingers fisting the sheets, and then–
Leah comes hard, straining against Fatin’s weight, and it’s not enough. Fatin squeezes her throat one last time and says, “I don’t think so. Turn over.”
“Fuck,” Leah pants, because it’s all she can say. “Fuck - baby, I can’t–”
“You can,” Fatin murmurs, slipping out of her slowly, and Leah’s hips jump. “And if you can’t, I’ll make you.” She grasps Leah’s chin in her hands, makes her look, and murmurs: “Slut.”
There. Leah’s pupils devouring her irises, jaw going slack, clenching around nothing. Skin slick with sweat, thighs drenched. Fatin slides her hands beneath Leah’s body, forces her onto her stomach, weight on her forearms, ass-up, face buried in Fatin’s pillow. Fatin sinks into her again, rakes her nails down Leah’s back, listens to the garbled curses falling from her mouth, and then–
Leah’s fists tightening around the pillow, back arching, and then nothing at all.
–
“Thanks,” Leah murmurs, head lolling back against Fatin’s shoulder in her exorbitantly spacious bathtub. “I needed that.”
“Happy to please,” Fatin says, laying the truth on thick. Why downplay it when it’s something she fought so hard for? Leah’s her one and only, love of her fucking life. “I live to serve you.”
Leah grins. “Clearly.” Playing with Fatin’s fingers above the water. “I love you.”
“I love you,” Fatin says, and peppers the side of Leah’s head with kisses, the shell of her ear, her temple, the top of her head. “You’re the perfect woman. I’m obsessed with you. Never leave me.”
Dramatism with zero exaggeration; it’s basically Fatin’s specialty. Leah laughs, a hoarse and beautiful sound, bells ringing on the hour. She says, “You’ve got an interesting idea of perfection.”
“Maybe,” Fatin murmurs. “Or maybe it’s the rest of the world who’s wrong.”
“Maybe,” Leah agrees. “But I could never leave you, anyway. You’re too good in bed.”
“Is that all?”
“Well, and your money.”
“There it is,” Fatin says, feeling Leah’s laughter vibrate against her chest. “I knew you were a golddigger.”
Leah rolls her head against Fatin’s shoulder, noses the underside of her jaw before dropping a kiss there. “Wash my hair for me.”
“Whatever you want, baby.”
–
(It’s still a ways away, but her mom does start lining up showings for them, just so they can get a sense of what they do and don’t like. Leah loves a tastefully exposed brick wall; Fatin says she desperately needs a fireplace. They’re both maximalists; books and jewelry and plants and perfumes will cover their shelves. Leah can see it: softer colors with vivid accents, a bed with too many pillows, photographs lining the walls.
And she remembers a night in the bunker, Fatin in her arms, the equivalent of holding the entire world - remembers realizing she’d found a future there. Fatin in her room, in her clothes, driving her to school in the mornings, blowing up her phone.
The reality of it is infinitely better.)
–
There’s a sub in Fatin’s history class, and she can’t look at him.
He’s blonde, wears glasses, and he speaks with that same pretentious intonation Faber used on them during their interviews - that pseudo-kindness, that projection of I’m a safe place to keep your stories, and she can’t go back to that room, can’t revisit those same four windowless walls, can’t have him staring at her with a sickeningly fake smile.
Ian’s in her class, and he sits next to her most days, so it’s not strange when he notices something’s up immediately - though it’s been awhile since she’s missed this particular class, early enough in the day that she usually gets by. He leans in and whispers, “Hey. Are you okay?”
“No,” she says, jaw sharp and eyes dark. “He - he looks like - one of the men who held us hostage.” She thinks of burying her face in his shoulder, drown out the visions, but she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself that she can’t run away from.
Ian seems shocked by the information; probably because he didn’t expect the honesty. Leah, she knows, tends to keep her demons vague, rather than giving them a name. “Okay,” he says. “You want me to text Leah? Tell her to meet you somewhere?”
All things considered, he really is a good guy.
“Yes,” she whispers, flinching at the sound of the teacher’s voice. “My car.”
“Got it,” he says, and hurriedly pulls his phone out, hiding it under the table. “Go.”
She stands unsteadily, bag over her shoulder, and tries to make her way to the back door of the room, when–
“Excuse me, miss,” the Faber look-alike calls. Fatin feels nauseous. “Where do you think you’re going?”
Her hand’s on the doorknob. The class is staring between them uncomfortably; she doesn’t know all the other students, but they all know her, and they’re aware of her circumstances. The sub, apparently, isn’t.
“Home,” she says. She’s amazed she gets the word out at all.
He laughs loudly. She winces. She doesn’t know why she can’t just open the door and leave. “I don’t think so,” he says. “I know I’m a substitute, but that doesn’t give you an excuse to ditch class. Take your seat.”
Is it locked? Is that why she can’t get out? He’s locked her in, wants to spend the hour staring at her, see what makes her tick and destroy it - her chest is caving in, the skin is peeling off her face, someone’s knife is pressed against her throat - the plane is crashing, the plane is always crashing–
“You can’t do that,” Ian speaks up. “She’s allowed to leave if she needs to.”
“Is that so?” the sub says, and to her horror, he begins walking towards them. “I haven’t been informed of any such arrangement, so, again: Please take your seat.” It sounds like a threat. His footfalls draw closer.
“No, it’s true,” someone else chimes in - it sounds vaguely like Colby, but she can’t be sure. “She has permission.”
His footfalls don’t stop, but then Ian’s at the door with her, blocking her from the teacher’s approach. He murmurs, “It’s okay. Go.”
The weight lifts; the roots snap. Lungs expanding, tasting oxygen. She could. The opportunity to run is there, and she doesn’t owe explanations to anybody. She’s been in therapy long enough to understand that much: that she’s allowed to take control, and the boundaries that exist to lock her in are all arbitrary. She can open the door. She can get in her car and leave. There’s an exit in the real world, because all spaces are temporary, and she is in charge of which of them she wants to be in at any given time.
So before she leaves, she turns to the teacher - meets his unsettling blue eyes, more like ice than sky - and spits out, “I’m Fatin Jadmani. Google me, you fucking asshole.”
The door slams. It sounds like letting go.
–
“Hey.” Leah pushes off the hood of the car immediately, where she’d been perched, waiting. “I was worried. It took you a minute.”
And Fatin falls directly into her arms, breathes against the crook of her neck; Leah isn’t tied to any one perfume or lotion, but she always smells faintly of fall, something vanilla and woodsy. It’s always some Bath & Bodyworks shit she gets for like five dollars, but it’s comforting and transportive. Fatin can be somewhere else; she thinks of pine trees and crunchy leaves and bitter wind coming over the hills.
She says, “We had a sub in history who didn’t know about me. He looked like Faber.”
Leah tenses at his name. “Yeah, fuck that,” she agrees immediately. “I don’t want to risk it. Let’s get out of here. Mine or yours?”
“Mine,” Fatin decides. “My mom’s working and my brothers both have after-school programs.”
“You want me to drive?”
“Please.”
She tosses Leah her keys without a thought, sliding into the passenger seat, and closes her eyes as Leah fiddles with her Bluetooth settings. A strong cello echoes through the speakers - a recent husband-and-wife cello-violin duo discovered by Leah - and Fatin exhales, feels the memories receding into the corners of her mind, replaced by the wind through the window and Leah’s eyes and the blue, blue sky.
She’s okay.
–
What happens is–
Diane says, “I want to revisit a particular moment from the island,” which usually means Fatin’s about to be bitch-slapped by her own brain once it’s forced to draw conclusions. They’re never moments Fatin particularly wants to think about, either, because they’re the ones that caused her the most trauma - exactly why Diane wants to discuss them.
Fatin says cautiously, “Okay.”
“When Leah overdosed.”
Her jaw clenches; hands balling into fists. The topic they discuss the most, yet never seems to get her anywhere. “What about it?”
“How did you treat Leah after you found her?”
Pause; heavy and unbalanced. It’s not the question she’d expected. “What?”
“You said you all kept watch over her,” Diane says conversationally, tapping her pen against her notebook. “How long was that for?”
“Four days.”
“Okay,” Diane says. “And what did you do for her?”
“We–”
“No.” Her interruption still manages to be kind, despite its authority. “Not the other girls. What did you do for her, Fatin?”
“I–” Stops. Inhales, slow and steady, eyelids shut. Ground beneath her feet; no waves and no water. The plane is nowhere at all. “I - don’t know. She was, like, comatose. Didn’t speak, didn’t sleep. Barely moved. I don’t think she even ate, really. There wasn’t much I could do.”
“Okay,” Diane says, satisfied. “With Leah so unresponsive - were you scared? Frustrated?”
“I was angry,” Fatin says slowly, hot-white shame unfurling in her chest. It’s deeply uncomfortable, and she shifts on the couch. She purses her lips. All the signs are there.
Diane asks, “And what did you do with that anger? Did you know where it came from?”
“Not - not at first,” Fatin says, ribs constricting around her heart. “It just - it hurt, so much, to think about how I’d almost lost her. And how it was my fault. I should’ve known.” Eyes burning at the corners.
“Because of what you’d said to her after she attacked Rachel, correct?”
“Yeah,” she whispers. “That I’d kill her. And I - like, of course I wouldn’t have fucking done that, it was just - I was - I didn’t know, like–”
“Of course,” Diane says. “We’ve been over this. Your reaction was understandable, and Leah’s told you time and time again that it wasn’t due to your confrontation, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“After Leah overdosed,” Diane says, and somewhere there are sirens, firetrucks and police cars racing down the street outside, “did you say anything to her? Over that period of four days, how did you and the other girls handle it?”
I didn’t say shit, she almost spits, because Leah was fucking gone, a victim trapped in her own head who couldn’t see Fatin, let alone talk to her; but then the shame spreads, dips to her stomach and tips of her fingers and races up her neck, and there’s something, something, something–
–
She can’t have another breakdown in one of their bedrooms. She texts Leah to meet her outside, drives them up the hills to one of those lookout points teenagers use to fuck in their cars, parks in a spot that overlooks the city and the water. Hopes it will give her clarity, and distance, and something physical to tether her down.
“I think it was like, four days after you overdosed,” Fatin starts, fingers clenching around the steering wheel. “You hadn’t slept. We’d been keeping watch on you, because we were - like - fucked up about it, obviously, and - we didn’t know why you’d done it or if you’d try to do it again.” She takes a breath. “I mean, they didn’t know why you’d done it. I had…a pretty good idea.”
They’ve been over this so often - this source, Leah leaning against the tree, half a ghost with pills in her hand like an offering - that Leah only tilts her head, lips pursed like she wants to speak but knows better than to interrupt. It’s confusing, and probably infinitely frustrating, hashing over the same points and traumas again and again and again.
Fatin continues, “But today, in therapy - we - we cracked it, finally, like - what I can’t let go of. Do you…remember, four days after that? When Rachel got you to get up, and you found the party supplies?”
“Yeah,” Leah says. Cautious, curious, killing the cat and resurrecting it.
“Before you left camp,” Fatin says slowly, staring out at the Bay, “did…did you hear what I said? About you?”
Leah’s features flutter like wings; a dark realization, and then, a sunrise - understanding. The past few months, all coming together in a perfect celestial alignment.
“Yeah,” she breathes out, strangely relieved. Flying-saucer eyes against a dark blue sky. “Sort of. I heard pieces.”
“I said, like - genuinely horrible shit,” Fatin whispers, but she finds that same lessening in herself, weight lifting. “Like that your head was in the clouds, or you were daydreaming about your geriatric boyfriend - that what mattered was that you were finally quiet.” It’s unconscionable now; the idea of Leah, gone, unable to speak to her. God, the sound of her laugh; without it, there’d be too many cold parts of the world, outweighing all the good. “I said something about you digging your own grave after hoovering all the benzos, and that I was done with you.”
“I remember,” Leah says simply. Not even a little bit angry or sad; not anything other than factual.
“I didn’t mean it,” Fatin says, bottom lip quivering. She practiced this - trying not to cry. Holding the emotion without being overwhelmed by it. She needs to get this out, more than she’s ever needed anything. “I - I was afraid, and angry, and guilty, and I loved you. I thought I’d made you do it. I should’ve known to keep an eye on you, more than anyone, and I didn’t. I was, like, on the fucking brink, thinking of all the things I should’ve done differently - and I didn’t know how to deal with that.”
Leah opens her mouth, instinct to deny greater than her ability to cooperate, and Fatin almost laughs at her predictability. She puts a finger gently against Leah’s lips. “I know you don’t agree,” she says. “I’m not telling you this because I need forgiveness. I’m not a fucking Catholic. But I need you to know that I’m sorry - I’m so fucking sorry, Leah, and I - I didn’t mean it. I didn’t mean any of it.”
Fatin lowers her finger. Vision going dark, going grey at the edges, rain rolling down windows.
“Fatin,” Leah coos, holds her name very softly in her mouth. “Baby. I know, I know.” Reaches over the console, pulls Fatin into her arms as best she can, comforting. Of course Fatin hadn’t meant it; of course Leah’s always known that. But when Fatin thinks of it now, she feels her father’s own callousness - feels the blue-hot anger in her veins, feels the devastation and destruction - but she also feels the terror, the regret, something he’d never felt. You’re not your father, Fatin, Diane had said. You wanted to make it right. You would’ve done anything, and eventually, you did.
Lights of the city glitter below them, reflecting over the water. Leah’s murmuring things she can’t make out softly into her hair. Tears stain the leather of her car until it floods, pouring out of the windows and running into the Bay. Grief, finally letting go.
Fatin says - kiss-stained, tear-stricken, drowning and rising all at once–“I love you. I loved you then. I love you now. I’ll love you for-fucking-ever, I swear.”
“Oh, baby,” Leah says, sighing tragically, beautifully. Fingers weaving through Fatin’s hair, shifting closer, trying to envelop her, give her a soft place to curl up and cry. A string of sentiment and sincerity and her own aching heart comes pouring out of Leah’s mouth, but this time, Fatin can understand the words. “It’s okay now, sweetheart, I promise. It’s all going to be okay. I love you, beautiful. So much. So much.”
The ocean glimmers in the distance, far away, waves sticking to their sandy shores. There’s no plane and no pit and sun-struck skin stretching uncomfortably over their bones, unraveling layer by layer. There’s no bunker and no isolation and no knife pressed against her throat; no cameras and no microphones and no blood-stained clothes.
For the first time in a long time, there’s no island at all.
–
Her apology tour doesn’t end there; like a twelve-step program, only with, like, five million steps because of - actually, this simile doesn’t work at all, so fuck it. Leah can workshop it for her later.
Rachel’s very obviously confused when she answers the phone; she and Fatin rarely call each other alone. “Uh, hey, Fatin. What’s up?”
“I’m sorry,” Fatin says, and begins speaking almost too fast for Rachel to understand. “I met with my therapist today. I don’t know if anyone’s told you - I mean, they probably have, because I genuinely think we’ve forgotten how to keep secrets from each other - but I’ve been having, like, a pretty hard time readjusting. And I keep, like…fucking spiraling.” She takes a breath, gives them both a second to catch up. “We’ve been trying to get to the bottom of it for awhile now. Like, all this guilt I feel. It always revolves around Leah, because she told me about her theories really early on, and I…didn’t believe her. Or support her the way I should’ve. And after she went off on you about Nora, I pulled her away and basically threatened to kill her.”
“Oh,” Rachel says.
“Yeah. And then she…tried to kill herself, or whatever the fuck she thought she was doing, and I can’t forget finding her under that tree with the bottle in her hand, and those four days of just, like, nothing, until I - until I was a fucking asshole about it because of how fucking freaked out I was, and you just walked up to her, told her to come with you, and off you both went. And you helped her.”
Ringing silence. Fatin’s not sure anything she’s said has made any sense at all, or if it sounds like the ramblings of someone who’s clearly lost their mind, but they all have plenty of experience with that, anyway.
Rachel says, “So you’re…mad at me for helping her?”
“No,” Fatin says. “But I resented you, I think. For helping her when I couldn’t. I was a gigantic fucking bitch and suddenly she was spending all her time with you, and she was herself again, laughing at jokes and talking and - you made it look so easy.”
“You were jealous.” It dawns on Rachel suddenly, and yeah, that’s probably how Fatin should’ve phrased it - for simplicity’s sake. “You were jealous of me?”
“Kinda,” Fatin admits. “Jealous in the sense of like…I wanted to do that, too. I wanted to do what you did. I wanted her to be happy that she was alive again.”
Another pause. It’s a lot to process. Rachel says, “I thought you hated me because you felt like I…caused it or something. Because that’s how I felt.” And then comes a heavy, weighted breath, something with a physical presence sinking them both. “You aren’t the only one carrying around all this, like…guilt, for how you treated Leah.”
It’s like a slap in the face; a gunshot to the gut. Fatin frowns. “You think we blamed you?”
“Kinda,” Rachel echoes. “She was my sister, and the shit she did to Leah - to all of us…I can’t believe I didn’t see it, you know? And letting us think she was dead, all because Leah found her out - I - fuck, man. Fuck. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.”
“Rachel, what the fuck are you talking about?” Fatin asks bluntly. “You were probably the last fucking person I ever expected to know. She’s your sister. Who’d want to believe something like that about their own sister?”
“I don’t know,” Rachel whispers into the phone. “You really don’t blame me?”
“No, holy fuck,” Fatin says emphatically. “No. Never. I was just…I hadn’t even admitted to myself how I felt about her yet, and all my feelings were misdirected around that period of time, and you got tangled up in it. It wasn’t fair to you. I’m sorry. And I’m sorry for the way I talked about you that day.”
“It’s okay,” Rachel says, but she sounds far more choked up than she was previously. “Thanks. For saying that.”
“You deserved to hear it,” Fatin says.
“For the record, Fatin,” Rachel says, “you were always the one she came back to. Not me. We were good at distracting each other, but it wasn’t, like…sustainable, you know?”
Fatin shakes her head before remembering Rachel can’t see her. “No?”
“She wasn’t singing Home to me,” Rachel says. “Leah loves us all, but I think home, for her, was always with you.”
–
It doesn’t fix everything; it doesn’t even come close. But it changes her - both in outlook and in action - the loosening of the thread, untangling of the knot. Her life and all its complicated, interconnected patterns, weaving together to form something comprehensible. It’s all about which angle you tilt your head, and what you’re trying to see.
What happens is this:
She walks through Leah’s front door and she understands everything.
How the guilt eases and ebbs and flows. Similar to the anger, the disappointment, the itch for revenge. December passes, and so does January, and then February, and before she knows it, she and Leah spend full days at school without an issue, and she can play cello without her fingers shaking against the strings. People still stare, but not as much; they still talk, but only when new details are released. They hold hands in public and go out to the movies and have joint family dinners. They start seriously looking at apartments, and Leah eventually gets over her aversion to the dollar amount when their lawyers tell her what they’re aiming to settle for.
They all see each other in bits and pieces. Getting them all in one place is difficult - none of them like flying, and Rachel’s the only one brave enough to risk it - so they slip and swerve and overlap each others’ lives where they can. Dot and Shelby road trip out from Texas to look at apartments in Los Angeles, and swing up to see them after; Rachel gets into Stanford with a renewed interest in swimming and diving as a means of physical therapy, and wants to get her own place in the Bay. Fatin thinks it’s funny that after everything, she and Rachel are the two who are arrogant enough to believe they might be able to help other people.
(“It’s not arrogance,” Leah says, rolling her eyes. “Stop being so self-deprecating. You’re both incredibly talented, and you want to find ways to make those talents feel useful or something, right?”
“Maybe,” Fatin says. “But if I call myself selfless, it’s conceited.”
“Oh, so you needed me to do the work for you, is that it?”
“Your words, baby,” she says with a wink. “Not mine.” )
Toni and Martha are - by far - the two with the best grasp on their mental health and codependency. Toni’s taking a year off to decide if she actually wants to go to college, while Martha’s been accepted at UC Davis with a focus on Animal Sciences & Husbandry. Davis is still in California, where it looks like they’ll all be, but California’s a gigantic state and it’s putting distance between them they haven’t had since they met.
(“I’m like, gonna be loaded,” Toni says. “I’m just gonna follow Shelby around. She got into, like, every college in California, so she’s trying to decide between USC and UCLA. Their basketball rivalry is fucking legendary. I can’t wait to go to the games.”
“Because you’re too short to play professionally?” Fatin asks, super tactfully.
“Fuck you.”)
Since Gretchen’s taking a plea deal, they won’t be going to court. But they still have to attend hearings, go to meetings, hammer down the details with their lawyers, and that’ll be much easier to do with them all in one state. New York is Gretchen’s home state, but California’s where she ran the experiment from, meaning she’s being charged and sentenced here.
(It’s a whole clusterfuck, but they still have a few months before they have to fully deal with that - along with the renewed media interest in their case, which never truly fades, just sits on the horizon, floating. Like an island.)
In spite of everything, or maybe because of it, Leah says, pressing a soft kiss to Fatin’s lips - life is good again.
–
Sam isn’t exactly shy, but she doesn’t necessarily want to stand out, either. Orientation day is overwhelming enough; the campus is massive, and with so many students, the icebreakers seem never-ending.
Her roommate is nowhere to be found, and she decides she might as well make an attempt at another friend. Most people are lingering in pairs or groups, and she bypasses them until she finds what she’s looking for: another girl, lingering alone near the wall, staring down at her phone disinterestedly. She doesn’t seem unapproachable, though, just not up for making the first move. Sam decides to give it a shot.
She’s fairly pretty, Sam thinks as she approaches; her hair’s in a stylishly messy bun, and she’s in a white t-shirt covered by a blue-and-grey flannel jacket, straight-legged black jeans kissing the collar of her Docs. And she’s tall - like, probably close to six feet - so it’s kind of surprising she is alone, when Sam’s sure she’s the type of girl who gets hit on everywhere she goes.
“Hey,” Sam says, and the girl looks over at her, seemingly confused by the greeting - and then Sam’s struck by the girl’s insanely blue eyes, hidden behind a pair of gold Aviator frames, which rocket her from pretty to stunning in a matter of seconds. “I, uh - I know this is super lame, but my roommate ditched me and you’re the first person I found who wasn’t, like…surrounded by other people. So I thought we could be alone together? I’m Sam.” She winces internally.
The girl keeps staring, her expression a mixture of taken aback and quizzical. She says, “You don’t know who I am?”
“Uh,” Sam says, now worried the girl was alone for a reason - like maybe she’s super famous or some shit - and she has no clue how to navigate the conversation moving forward. “No? Sorry, I don’t really use social media. Are you an influencer or something?”
The girl smiles at that, loses a bit of her wariness. She tucks her phone into her back pocket. “I’m not,” she says. “I’m Leah.”
“Nice to meet you,” Sam says, now curious without receiving an explanation for Leah’s question. “Should I know you? Like, is it rude of me to not, or–”
Leah laughs. “No, it’s actually a welcome change,” she says. “Don’t worry about it, seriously. What’s your major?”
As they talk, Leah loosens up in a noticeably physical way - like she’s been carrying tension around with her as a shield, rather than a burden. Her shoulders drop; she’s animated with her hands; she’s dry and funny and a little jumpy, but Sam’s enjoying her company, and doesn’t want to push the matter further.
“Are you in the dorms?” Sam asks.
“No,” Leah says. “My girlfriend and I have an apartment close by, though.”
“Oh, cool,” Sam says. She’d clocked it perfectly, but it’s slightly disappointing she’s already in a serious relationship. “How long have you guys been together?”
“Um, like a year and a half?” Leah says, pinching her eyebrows together as she thinks like it’s a difficult question. “We went to the same high school.”
“And now to the same college?” Sam asks, whistles. “That’s lucky. What’s she studying?”
Out of nowhere, another girl appears at her side, thrusting an iced coffee into Leah’s hands - and this girl is hot, no other descriptor for it: she has long bangs that frame her face perfectly, with half her hair pulled into a bun at the back of her head; her eyes are dark and smoky. Beautiful brown skin, and an outfit that doesn’t mind showing it off. She’s also tall, though she’s wearing heels, so Sam puts her at a few inches below Leah.
“Hey,” the new arrival says; Sam doesn’t have to work hard to put the pieces together - it’s probably Leah’s aforementioned girlfriend. She glances between Leah and Sam, the same concern etched on her face that Leah had worn previously. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, all good,” Leah says, offering her a smile. “This is Sam. She doesn’t really use social media.” Sam definitely doesn’t miss the look they exchange, and the way the other girl loses her defensive edge at the news. “Sam, this is Fatin, my girlfriend.”
Leah and Fatin. Their names do sound familiar, but only together, like she’s heard about them as some kind of group. Maybe they’re artists.
“Love of her life, actually, if you judge by my nickname in her phone,” Fatin says, smirking.
Leah sighs. “You wrote that nickname.”
“You kept it,” Fatin says. “Nice to meet you, Sam.”
“Same,” Sam says. She’s actually dying to escape this conversation and somehow Google the both of them. Her theories are starting to get away with her. “I was just asking your girlfriend what your major is.”
“Music,” Fatin says nonchalantly. “I play cello.”
“She’s a prodigy,” Leah says, rolling her eyes. “She turned down Julliard to come here with me.”
“You have got to stop telling people that,” Fatin says.
But it is an impressive piece of information. Sam jokes, “Wow. You must love her.”
Fatin smiles, but it’s wry and lopsided, like a secret Sam isn’t in on. “Oh, you have no idea.”
Something about the weight of the delivery makes Sam shiver, just a tiny bit; a cold, bitter chill brushing just overhead. She almost doesn’t know how to respond - whether to agree, say no, clearly I don’t but I want to, or joke, my longest relationship was six months, so no, I seriously don’t, but Fatin continues on airly, saving her from the decision she doubts she would’ve made correctly.
“But that’s unrelated to turning down Juilliard,” she says, hitting Sam with a wink that feels like a home run. Shit, she needs to get out of here before she asks to be their third.
“Close to home, among other things,” Leah clarifies, leaning towards her, or - no, just rocking between feet, unable to stand still. She’s starting to sweat. “We’re from here.”
“Oh, cool,” she says, barely managing to keep her voice steady. “I’m from Ohio, but I couldn’t wait to get the fuck out, honestly. I could never have stayed close to home.”
“We considered New York, for awhile,” Leah says idly. “I would’ve gone to Columbia or Brown while she did Juilliard. But we…don’t really like airplanes.”
She halts uncomfortably between the two words, and there’s an entire novel hosted in that pause - coupled with the way Fatin’s jaw clenches involuntarily as she sips at her coffee, Sam feels like they’ve accidentally wandered into dangerous territory.
“Yeah, heard,” she says. Jesus, she’s so fucking uncool. “I’d rather road trip. More time for the memories, or something. Plus, I don’t know, there’s always that fear the plane’s gonna crash.”
“Yeah,” Fatin says. Grinning unnaturally. “There’s always that fear.”
In Sam’s peripheral vision, she thinks she sees Leah subtly hooking a finger around Fatin’s and squeezing once before letting go, but the movement’s so quick she can’t be sure she sees it at all.
“Heeeeyyyy, Sam.” An arm she immediately recognizes as her roommate’s slings itself across her shoulder (that charm bracelet is…unmistakable), and she winces involuntarily. By Mariah’s tone alone, there’s no doubting that she knows exactly who they are. “I lost you in the crowd. I like, really need you for something, okay? I’m Mariah, by the way; sorry, not, like, trying to be rude–”
They offer evenly apologetic and sheepish smiles, like they, too, understand the dynamics at play here. “No problem,” Fatin says, waving them away. “Nice to meet you.”
(It won’t register until much later that Fatin never said her name.)
Leah echoes the sentiment, and then Mariah’s dragging her by the wrist to a corner of the hall. “Holy shit,” her roommate hisses. “Do you have any idea who you were just talking to?”
“No,” Sam says, bewildered. “I mean, like, I know their first names. Why, do you?”
“Dumbass,” Mariah says. “That’s Leah Rilke and Fatin Jadmani. They’re two of the girls who were part of that fucked-up experiment on a deserted island. I know you heard about that. It was, like, a huge deal that they decided to come here. You’re so lucky I’m a good actress.”
She had. She cranes her neck around to get another look at them with the context clearing her vision, and they’re exactly where she’d left them, chatting easily with each other - though Fatin, unfortunately, glances over and catches her eye.
“Fuck,” Sam says. Curses again. Turns around, yells straight across the room, “I’m sorry!” before her roommate shoves her out of sight.
–
“Oh, well,” Leah sighs. “It was nice to be anonymous while it lasted.”
Fatin follows her gaze; sees Sam and the roommate that dragged her away whispering furiously to each other across the hall. Well; it’d been a long shot, anyway.
“At least we know she was genuine to begin with,” Fatin says. “Like, maybe there’s hope. Maybe we’ll meet philosophy majors who don’t believe in modern technology.”
“You’re thinking of the Amish.”
“They definitely wouldn’t know who we are.”
“We are at the age where Amish teenagers take their rumspringa,” Leah says, like she’s seriously considering seeking out rural communities in Northern California. Leah, her strange, mad siren of a love song. “Like, I’m just saying. It’s feasible.”
“Weirdly enough, I like my life how it is,” Fatin says, stealing a sip of Leah’s iced coffee. “I’m good.”
“Yeah,” Leah says, grinning. Interlacing their fingers between them, which Fatin then lifts cutely to her lips. “Me, too.”
“I’m sorry!” They both hear called loudly, and watch as the poor girl's roommate shoves her through a throng of people, dragging her away.
They look at each other and laugh, Fatin shaking her head in amusement. “Fuck it, let’s go home,” she says. “We’ve got all our orientation shit already, anyway.”
“Don’t you want to do icebreakers?” Leah asks seriously. “I mean, we’d absolutely crush the ‘what’s one fun fact about yourself?’ round.”
“Oh, yeah, we’d bring down the house,” Fatin answers, slipping her sunglasses over her nose. “I still think we should have shirts made.”
“Fatin, I am not wearing a shirt that says ‘I got trapped on a fake deserted island for an evil science experiment and all I got with this hot as fuck girlfriend.’ Like, for the last time. It’s a resounding no.”
The front door opens; Leah’s boots scuff against the stone stairs. “I bet Toni would go for it.”
“Shelby wouldn’t - actually, I don’t know,” Leah says, interrupting herself. “She’s not the most predictable. She might think it’s adorable, if you print her a version without the ‘fuck’ in it.”
“You come up with a theme for the family reunion, then,” Fatin says. Keys in her hands; their car’s in a further lot. “I’m talking white midwestern family at Disneyland type shit, okay? That’s what I want us to look like when we all meet up for the long weekend.”
“I’m on it,” Leah says. “Give me something to work with, though. What’s the occasion? What’re we celebrating?”
“We’re celebrating - ah, fuck, uh,” Fatin says eloquently, “the fact that we’re, like, alive. And that we came into each other’s lives, even if the circumstances were total shit. Home is a wish your heart makes, or whatever the fucking lyrics are.”
A moment of silence, and then: “We should just go to Disneyland.”
Fatin laughs, leaning into Leah’s shoulder. Her Audi beeps a row away, between someone’s red Mazda and a beat-up Subaru. Leah holds her hand when she settles into the passenger’s seat, and spends the drive home stroking the back of Fatin’s thumb with the pad of her own, humming along to one of her playlists.
The sky is a vivid blue, but when Fatin looks at it, it’s nothing like the ocean at all.