a pearl

[Maraoone]

A Starbucks in Buffalo becomes the first in the nation to vote for unionization. A truck crashes in Chiapas, killing 55 of the US-bound migrants that were on it. The town of Mayfield, Kentucky is destroyed by a tornado. New Caledonia, for the third time in a row, votes against independence, this time due to a boycott from the indigenous population. Max Verstappen wins his first Formula One championship. Wildfires burn through Kansas, killing two. The island of Mindanao in the Philippines is ravaged by a typhoon, killing hundreds. Spider-Man: No Way Home premieres, and has the highest weekend debut gross of any movie in December. Hong Kong has its first election post-enactment of their national security law; as intended, pro-China legislators sweep all available seats. Leftist candidate Gabriel Boric is elected president of Chile, defeating far-right politician José Antonio Kast.

The class of John Endecott Memorial Academy disappeared from the face of the earth for two entire weeks and, somehow, everything had the audacity to keep happening.

((June Madison: Aftermath START))

She'd asked the nurse what had happened in the news while they'd been on the island and, perhaps against better judgment, the nurse had, instead of replying, lent June her phone, let her scroll to her heart's content. Momentarily, June thought of her phone. She'd taken a selfie with Medea a few minutes before boarding the bus. That picture, along with her phone, was likely destroyed.

The white glow of the screen enveloped her.

After about fifteen minutes or so, she handed the phone back, mouthed a silent thanks; the nurse smiled in reply, and promptly left the confinement room.

The main headline of the moment was she and her classmates, of course. It'd been hard, and distracting, and disconcerting, to pick through all the punditry about what their escape meant, and if SOTF was truly finished for now, and the montage of their yearbook pictures underneath WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE SURVIVORS, and what this would mean for Kirby's presidency and his reelection prospects, and what to do with those of her classmates who had killed, montages of the yearbook pictures of those who had died, IN MEMORIAM, a flash of Iris' face, how their failure to fully extinguish the ATF was a sign of Kirby's weakness as a politician, and so on, and so on, picking through all that to determine what else had happened in the interstice of time between when she'd last been alive to the world and now. She had done her scrolling and now, time felt complete. No gaps.

This was the most activity she had done in a couple of days. She'd slept through most of the boat ride to the military base, and most of the days between then and now. They'd operated on her arm and wrist; according to her doctor, she had transverse fractures on her left ulna and radius, comminuted fractures on the carpal bones of her left wrist, lacerations on her left arm and scalp. So much hurt, faded into an ever present hum in the background of her mind, on the border of existing and not, the mere hint of something worse. In the crook of her arm was hooked a clear plastic tube. Her eyes followed it all the way up to a plastic bag filled a clear liquid slightly more viscous than water.

She had a mild fever as well, consequence perhaps of sleeping in the freezing cold for close to two weeks. She had spent so long on the island wishing desperately for warmth, and now she had too much of it. It exuded from her forehead, her neck, limbs, core, her breath even. She was in a sort of mild hell where she sweltered with a blanket, shivered without. She decided to leave the blanket on for now. Entertained the fantasy of being in some tropical country, as far away from here as possible.

She was laid on a hospital bed now, MSNBC on the TV. They were talking about the military operation that had led to their rescue, how the FBI and Interpol had coordinated to make it possible. Her eyes dilated, and the images on screen simplified to silhouettes and shades, the abstract motion of color upon color. It felt like too much effort to perceive more than that, hurt to focus her eyes. She never wanted to leave this bed again. She never wanted to feel discomfort again. She never wanted to think again.

She never wanted to think again. She hadn't thought in so long. So much had happened while she was gone. So much had happened to her while she was gone. She was at the point of complete exhaustion. She was at the point of complete restlessness. She was going to have to get up at some point. Her skin was sticky with drying sweat, her breath was rank with the stench of stale spit, she was disgusting. The world kept spinning and spinning, people kept dying and being born, cities drowned beneath waves, new movements were born, and yet she was laying still. She had to get up. but it was just,

now that she was alive, now that she had the rest of her life to face up to what she'd done and what had been done to her, what was she supposed to do? Her mind spun around and around in an energetic void, so overwhelmed by all the nothing there was to do, by all the things there were to take care of, whatever they were. Her concerns, as of a few days ago, were finding shelter, hiding from predators, rescuing friends, dealing with dead friends, matters of pure survival, and now, what was there going to be? College applications? Getting enough credits to graduate? She had been so completely removed from society that she found she could not fit back in, a puzzle piece deformed and warped until it could no longer slide into that where it had been taken from.

When she was in a mood, as her therapist had informally put it, she was supposed to ground herself in the physicalities of her current surroundings, in the sensations of what she was doing. If she was getting angry while washing dishes, she was meant to focus on the hiss of the faucet, the soapy slip of the ceramic on her fingers, the blandly lime-pleasant smell of the dishwasher soap, and so on. The intent of this was two-fold: so that she could avoid getting lost in the weeds of her own thoughts, and so that she would not be overwhelmed and debilitated by said thoughts, so that she could get back to doing whatever she needed to do. Set aside the thoughts so she could wash the dishes. Set aside the thoughts so she could write her essay for APUSH. But, she did not want to get up. She had to get up. She never wanted to get up again. She had walked from one end of the island to the other end of the island to its highest peaks to its lowest lows and if fate were just and kind to her she would never have to get up again in her entire life ever. She would stay in bed.

So, what were the physicalities of staying in this bed? She didn't have a phone to distract her right now. She struggled to focus on the TV and, even when she managed it, it was the same news they'd been talking about thirty minutes ago that they'd been talking about an hour ago that they'd recapped six hours ago, looping over and over again in the way that all 24-hour news stations did. It was too hot within her blanket and too cold without. The bed felt nice. It felt really nice. Even though she was starving, she was also sick, and the thought of food made her want to vomit. She wanted to do something. There was nothing to do that she wanted to do. There was a recreation room in this ward she thought she'd heard some of her fellow survivors use. It was just down the hallway. It was too far.

She was restless. There was nothing to do in this bed, with these colorful shapes just playing on the TV, so, she tried to find the cause of her restlessness, the root of it. Her mind circled back, as it always did, to the things that made her mad, the most recent, she supposed, being Matthew's last attempts to murder, even after rescue was assured. Had the talking heads on TV talked about that yet? They didn't typically, the same way the news wouldn't focus on who did what when hiding from a mass shooter, just who survived and who didn't. The common logic was that, given the duress they were under, they were all to be held blameless, which worked well for her, given what she'd done to Iris, Kai, Medea, Jezzie. And yet, she couldn't help but think about how that applied to Matthew too.

There was a fastening of the heart as she contemplated this, dulled as it was, and she welcomed it; it meant she could feel, still. Sometimes it was rage that precipitated her getting up. Sometimes, the thing that got her up in time for her 5 AM alarm was the lingering bitterness of some fight she'd had with her mom seven years ago. So in a way, this fastening of the heart was good, though it felt distant to her. Her anger, spiky thought it normally was, was something palpable and malleable in her hand now, and she squeezed it, and it felt good, if dulled. Under the haze of the fever and the painkillers and the warm blanket she was wrapped in, everything felt dulled. Mom had called her, jubilant, cracks in their voice and tears almost audible, and she'd let them feel enough for the both of them, because she couldn't. She didn't want to. This rage, she was comfortable with, but everything else?

What many failed to understand about Schrödinger's paradox was that, as she understood, it was not just about the state of quantum superposition, the cat simultaneously being dead or alive, but also about how the act of measurement affected the result in and of itself. The act of blasting the quantum particle with photons to observe the particle affected the state of the particle.

The act of observing and quantifying how she felt affected what she felt. Was she angry, or was she sad? If she was angry, was it vague annoyance, or incandescent rage, or seething self-hatred? No way to find out unless you open the box. Don't open the box.

It was Christmas tomorrow. Mom and Dad were supposed to come tomorrow. She was supposed to feel happy about that. It was Medea's birthday tomorrow too. Her parents were to come tomorrow, and it would be a most joyous occasion, filled with laughter and glee and relief. The lights of the Parth household were to be dimmed. As were those of the Emersons, and the Waites, and the Busters, and the Smiths. The fact of that stared at her from a dark corner of the room, in the periphery of her vision, waiting to be regarded fully, waiting to be regarded and for its implications to be felt and for its claws to clutch and pierce her heart. The more she thought about it, the more she could feel it coming on. Don't think about it. Don't think about it.

She touched her broken arm with her working arm, arising flares of pain. The shadow in the corner of the room faded.

She reached inside and tugged at her amygdala.

Matthew was still alive, in the next room over from hers, she thought. If she went into his hospital room and killed him for his crimes, for being a bad person, would the clemency awarded to them all still apply, or would she finally be treated the way she deserved to be treated? In not killing him, she had sought the catharsis of moral standing and found it missing, so maybe the catharsis of vengeance would do instead. Faintly, it occurred to her that pursuing Jezzie had awarded her little catharsis, but that fact felt irrelevant in the face of the anger she cultivated.

Flames stroked the edges of her vision now, overwhelming and choking and extinguishing the dark fact of Medea's birthday in the corner of her hospital room. And then the flames grew, and grew, and then all she could think about was going to Matthew's unconscious figure, and choking the life out of him, and watching his face turn blue, and watching him wake and beg for his life, and watching him suffer all the pain of all those he'd ended.

A shrill series of beeps emitted from the infusion pump.

A nurse knocked on the room, peered in.

"Are you okay?" she asked.

She nodded quickly in reply. There was an extra layer of warmth in her face, beyond the already-present fever.

The nurse nodded back, silent. She went over, tended to the infusion pump for a minute or two, checked the vitals displayed on the screen briefly. The movements were quick, rushed, as if the nurse had seen something she was not meant to see, as if all of the ugliness of June's thoughts had been on full display when the nurse had walked in.

After the minute passed, the nurse wordlessly departed, closing the door, leaving her alone to attend to the other survivors in the ward.

It would never really go away, she realized. The murderous rage the terrorists had grown in her, that she had grown in herself. She had left the island without a single person's death ascribed to her name, and yet, the poison that'd been seeded in her would remain forever.

She pulled her blanket over her face, and hot tears began leaking from her eyes. This was a more acceptable emotion, at least. It was only normal for them to cry, after all.

((June Madison continues elsewhere))