Maybe it’s not safe to be out here alone.

Maybe I should go back and wake someone up.

I don’t.

If anything happens, it will just happen to me.

I push through the doors to the girls’ room and head straight for the sinks where I’m sick. The sound of myself retching makes me retch more. The only way I get myself to stop is by forcing myself to straighten before I’m finished. Bile dribbles down my chin. I twist the faucets without thinking.

Water.

Water. Comes. Out.

Does everyone know this? Did they find out before me? I avoided the taps when I was in here before because I didn’t want to end up disappointed if they didn’t work but they work and no one said a word to me about it. Running water. I stare at the gushing faucet for too long and then I hold my hands under the stream and splash my face, my neck. Dip my wet hands below my shirt. My body trembles in gratitude but I have no idea who to thank. I turn the faucet off and then I turn it on again just to be sure of what I saw, that I didn’t imagine it.

I didn’t imagine it.

The water is real. It moves effortlessly from spout to drain.

I turn it off. I use the toilet. When I come out of the stall, I’m confronted by something else I’ve managed to avoid. My reflection. My skin is tinged green and my brown hair is greasy, strands all clumped together, hanging around my face. There’s a bruise directly below my right eye and I’m not sure how it got there. I trace it with my fingertips. I look better than I did three weeks ago. Funny. The end of the world has done less damage to my face.

I laugh. I lean against the sink and laugh so hard my sides split and I die and it’s good. I press my hands against the mirror. Over my face. The glass feels weird and unreal against my palms. If you break glass into pieces, you can use one of those pieces as a highly effective weapon against another human being. Right through the eye. I saw it. I saw it, I did, I saw it. I stare at my fingernails. They’re ruined, cracked. Rhys and Cary found me sitting in the middle of the road, six streets away from my home, digging my fingernails into the pavement. They thought I was trying to get to my feet, that I wanted to keep going when really I was just waiting to die because I thought I had actually found Lily’s pills and taken them and my brain was inventing this weird dreamscape before it finally shut down for good because how could this be real? How could it be true? The dead don’t just come back to life.

By the time I realized it was real, it was true, it was too late to tell Cary and Rhys I wasn’t like them. That I didn’t want to keep going. They were working so hard to hold on, I knew they wouldn’t understand. So I stayed with them.