Addis couldn’t stop the crooked curve that bent her lips up. Even mired in the depths of a nightmare, her best friend could still read her mind. It took some dexterity to convince her stiff fingers to cooperate as she passed the shard of glass over.

She sank her teeth deep into her bottom lip as Em awkwardly sawed, jiggled, yanked, and pulled at the rope binding her arms to her sides. With each tug, the old rope rubbed and burned her sensitive skin to the point she no longer felt the itchiness, her hunger, or her thirst.

‘Sorry, sorry,’ Emerson cried each time Addis twitched.

Even though she spoke through clenched teeth, she muttered. ‘It’s okay.’

Em’s panting grew louder and more labored as she seesawed the glass back and forth. Suddenly, her movements slowed. ‘Ad? Do you suddenly have four fuzzy arms?’

If Em’s words hadn’t been uttered in a drunken slur, Addis would’ve thought she was kidding. Electric shock zipped along her skin. ‘What’s wrong?’

‘Um, I think I need a second. I’m super dizzy, and I don’t want to accidentally turn your appendages into one.’

‘Here, I’ll work on—’

‘No, can’t,’ Em mumbled. ‘Lips numb. Fingers tingle.’ Emerson’s head dropped to Addis’s shoulder.

‘Em!’

‘I’m ’kay. Just… second.’

In an effort to keep calm, Addis recited the alphabet in English and Spanish, forwards and backwards and then practiced counting to one hundred in Spanish, as well. Just as she reached eighty-seven, Emerson’s head lifted enough to lean against Addis’s temple, and then the determined yanking resumed.

An interminable amount of excruciating tugging later, Addis was seconds away from begging Em to stop, admitting that she could no longer endure the blistering, agonizing burn. Instead, she held her breath, knowing deep in her soul that her best friend felt her pain as surely as if it were her own skin being tortured.

To distract herself – or to add to the torment – she closed her eyes and imagined a juicy cheeseburger piled high with green chile, pickles, and tomatoes and did her best to garner even the tiniest bit of spit for the sake of giving herself any amount of moisture to alleviate her gnawing thirst.

It wasn’t until the warped wooden door scraped against the floor, followed by heavy footsteps plodding across the room that Addis realized she hadn’t been hallucinating moments earlier when she thought she’d heard tires crunching over gravel.

Both girls froze when the door lifted, letting in a gloomy kind of light. Their kidnapper’s eyes flickered over the two of them as, without a word, he produced more of the white pills and one bottle of water which he uncapped.