Now, concerned parents brought fruits and veggies, too, sliced to the appropriate dimensions. The school board had begged them not to, at first, sensing Marisa might cave if people started starving. The school board member that suggested this lost his job afterward, and the parents were allowed to keep feeding their children, but that meant the board was at eight members instead of nine, and many decisions now lacked a tiebreaking vote, slowing everything down.
Marisa put her hands flat on the floor. She’d never been so flexible before, and she had Amira to thank for teaching her the art of pushing her body’s limits. Marisa had thought a body was a solid thing, but it really was amazing how easily its edges and boundaries could be rearranged. When her cramp was gone, she popped open her Tupperware filled with sliced bananas and checked her messages.
These weren’t on her phone, but in a repurposed tissue box they’d tied up to the wall. Mr. Gigs came by several times a day to deliver news, ask questions on behalf of the board, show drafts of the demands being met. A lot of this took place via phone and email, too, but Mr. Gigs had stuck to the lock-in routine, happy to step away from the other adults, to be useful in some slight way, to be the bridge between the students and the adults (he’d started thinking all the students were on Marisa’s side). He’d left a few notes over the course of the night: Habitat for Humanity trip changed to Rescue the Reefs. Accommodations in eco-hostel. Boats to use eco-diesel. Mineral sunscreen only on reef rescue dives. Okay?
Marisa patted her pockets for a pen, frowning when she felt nothing against her thighs. No sooner had she frowned than a pen appeared before her eyes. Amira.
Marisa felt a deep swell of gratitude for her, though it came with a feeling of uselessness, too. What could she possibly give Amira in return? What good was she, chained to a door, always needing? What could have this fiasco looked like without Amira?
It would’ve had a great more deal of suffering, to be sure. That’s what Marisa had planned on, it’s what she’d told her cronies: prepare to suffer for this. They might not have found anyone sympathetic to their cause to help empty their buckets if they got full, they might not have found privacy to change into fresh clothes. They might have to make do with the supply of canned food they’d packed into their bags, if no one offered to run to the window slats for them.
And, to their credit, the cronies had all prepared to suffer. They were only following Marisa’s lead.
But with Amira there, it had felt so...easy. Like Marisa could do this for months to come. However long it took.
“Thanks,” she said quietly, relishing how common it was for their fingers to brush now. She scribbled some notes on the back of Mr. Gigs’s paper—carpool to airport, percentage of proceeds to local environmental group, check that eco-hostel’s practices actually align with conservationist efforts—then placed it on top of the tissue box for Mr. Gigs to pick up later. “How’d you sleep?” she asked Amira.
It caused a rush within her to realize how many days in a row she’d asked this, the casual domesticity of it. It was what her parents asked each other every morning. Marisa had never been in a relationship, so she didn’t know all of its benchmarks. This, premature though the thought might have been, felt like one.
Amira yawned, laughing through it, since her body had responded to Marisa’s question for her. She did a halfhearted full-body stretch, not awake enough yet to recognize what her body needed. Not that she listened anymore.
She sat up, scanning the foyer, counting the seconds that had passed since she’d looked at Marisa. If you wait ten more, she thought, Marisa will smile at you. If you wait thirty, she’ll ask you to knead the knots out of her shoulders. If you wait forty-five, the conflicting facets of your life will easily fold into each other, and your mother will accept you.
The wind howled, and the rain drizzle turned to downpour. Amira used to love running in the rain. (It felt dramatic to phrase it that way, but it’d already felt like another life to be out there, in the rain.) She’d loved the blanket of sound it put between her and the rest of the world,