something to latch on to. She responded to her friends first (not much still here. lol. how are you? what’s going on in illinois? have you gone into the city much lately?). Then she responded to her mom (still no outdoor time :/) thinking Kenji and his improv had turned her into a funnier person, though why she couldn’t be funny with her old friends or out loud was a question she didn’t have an answer to.
For her morning routine, Celeste had taken to heading to the gym for a yoga session. At first Celeste had only followed Amira there, feeling much like she had with Kenji the night of the lock-in, a hopeful puppy wanting scraps of affection, not even begging for them, just happy for whatever fell to the ground.
Then, after a couple days, Ms. Duli started a yoga class in the gym, and rather than sit quietly next to Amira every morning, Celeste joined in. People’s joints were hungry for the movement, their muscles aching for work. Celeste was merely hungry for conversation. For somewhere to stand and feel at home. She was starting to get little nods in the halls from other people who attended—Zaira Jacobson, Dov Nudel, even Ms. Duli herself, who missed her daily yoga sessions too much to care she was blurring teacher/student/hostage lines—and she cherished these hints that it was still possible, she could still find friends here.
Kenji had seemed like the answer, at least for a little while. The wider group of the Protectors, too, that first morning. After the sun rose and warmed the inside of the building, as the whole school started dozing off their drunkenness, their exhaustion and their glee, their disbelief, sitting among them all, Celeste had even had that thought: finally. Here was her place.
But then Peejay had disappeared beneath the pashmina, and Amira had started slinking away, supposedly to work out, though she was rarely in the gym, or she and Marisa were in some world that existed only between the two of them, and Kenji had started slipping his earphones in all the time.
Celeste now had a place to sit and sleep, and some people occasionally deigned to look at her, but a home this was not.
On the good days, she exchanged a handful of words with Kenji. She ate with him, and she shared a laugh or two with him, listened to him talk about a podcast episode he’d found funny. A couple of days, though, she didn’t speak at all, just sat and listened and sometimes escaped to whatever quiet corners of the school she could find and made little noises to test whether she’d lost her ability to speak.
Now she kicked away her bedsheets and ruffled around for her workout gear, which her dad insisted on coming by to pick up every afternoon to wash and dry for her mom to return clean and ready to use that evening. She grabbed her hair cream, her lotion and her toothbrush. “Just ’cause you’re locked up doesn’t mean you stop taking care of yourself,” her mom had said, passing the travel-size containers through the window slits.
Then Celeste gave Marisa a little smile and a shy wave before heading to the locker rooms to change and get ready for the day.
* * *
Marisa missed the reefs.
With her planning for the lock-in, the lock-in itself and the week that had passed since she’d closed the doors, a full month had gone by since she’d seen a reef in person.
It’d been a long time since she’d gone a month without snorkeling, even if it was a sad, dying stretch of bleached reef inhabited only by a handful of miserable-looking faded groupers. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d gone more than a few days without so much as seeing the ocean.
She missed that other world, the gurgling hum of life below the waves, the wonders of her own breathing in the water, those strange and beautiful creatures going about their strange and beautiful lives, the vast expanse of blue, of blues, rather, so many rich shades, darker the farther you looked, the deeper you went, each shade hiding its own range of creatures most people were completely unaware of, completely uncaring about their existence. She missed the magic of diving below that blue mirror, like a character in a fairy tale discovering a hidden world. She missed how the ocean still inspired awe and fear in her, its looming powers and dangers becoming more apparent the