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I pressed my free hand to my heart, my mouth hanging open. “Oh...”
He dropped my hand and made a face like Kota, imitating his voice. “Don’t be so rough on Sang. Why are you always in the bathroom with Sang? Do you think she’d want this pink shit? Fucking ape hamster shit fuck, Sang, Sang, Sang.” He stopped and then smiled, picked up my hand and kissed my knuckles. “I’m not complaining, but that guy bugs me more about making sure you’ve got enough clothes and things than anyone else. I tell him I’ve got it covered. I’m not going to let you walk around naked.”
I turned my head to hide the blush heating up my face. “Nathan said he talks to Kota about me but Kota wants to talk about other stuff.”
“Not as far as I know,” he said. He scratched his chin absently. I suddenly noticed he hadn’t shaved and there was a shadow of stubble across his jaw. I liked how it made him look.
“But we do need to get him in on the plan,” he said, not seeming to notice me admiring his face. “Mr. Blackbourne keeps putting it off. Honestly, I think he’s waiting on Nathan and Silas to come around on the idea more. Maybe he’s worried Nathan could talk Kota out of it.”
“But we need Kota in on it to convince Nathan,” I said. “Maybe I can do something this week, spend more time with Kota. If I can get him to where he seems like he might be comfortable with it, Mr. Blackbourne can finally tell him about the plan. We can all get on the same page.”
“That might be a good thing.” He tugged my hand to get us walking again. “I can’t wait to be able to talk to them all about it openly. All this secret keeping is driving me batshit.”
“Can you let the others know, though? It might be hard for me to pull them all aside right now without Kota noticing now that we’re all here.”
Gabriel lifted an eyebrow, reached up and touched the pink earring. “No trouble, Trouble.”
We found the latrine and it wasn’t too far from our campsite. The gray stone building had two sides, with girl and boy sections, thick dark wood support beams, and overhangs on all sides. There were water fountains out front, with spots to plug in hoses, too.
Gabriel and I stood on the concrete porch just outside the girls’ side. The door was propped open with a rock. We glanced inside, our heads close. It was dark. The tile looked dingy, covered with sand in spots. The stalls had rusty patches flaking from the old green paint. There were initials and words scratched into the walls, some faded, some inappropriate for children.
And all I could think was that there must be a hundred creepy, crawly things in there.
“Gabriel?” I asked in a quiet voice, a finger pinching my lower lip. “Will you go in there?”
“I don’t want to go in there,” he said. “You go in there.”
“There might be a spider,” I said. “You should go see.”
“I don’t want to see a spider.”
I stepped closer, but still held his hand, taking him with me.
We leaned in the doorway. There were several stalls on one side, sinks on the other. Beyond it was an even darker area, like a back room. I didn’t know what it was for. I kind of didn’t want to know. The area was shadowed, smelling strongly of old soap, rusty water, and dampness.
I glanced up. Gabriel’s eyes followed mine. The beams of the building were exposed and the windows were wide open above the stalls. There were screens in the windows, but they had holes in them. I couldn’t see the corners of the ceiling because of how dim the building was, but I imagined hundreds of spiders above us, waiting to fall in our hair the moment we stepped inside.
“What the hell?” Gabriel asked. “Why not just plant a toilet in the ground outside?”
“There’s spiders in there,” I said. “Go get rid of them.”
“I’m not going in for a spider,” he said. “I don’t like spiders.”
“I have to pee,” I said. Now that we were here, I wanted to get that part over with so I wouldn’t have to go for the rest of the day. I couldn’t imagine going in at night. I’d have to make sure not to drink too much. What was I going to do for the rest of the week?
“I have to pee, too,” Gabriel said. “I’m a second away from using a tree. At least out here in the sunlight I can see if anything is crawling on me.”
“I can’t pee on a tree. I don’t have a...the...plumbing.”
“Ha,” Gabriel said with a chuckle. “You almost said penis. That’s so cute.”
“Who are we going to get to go in and kill the spiders?”
We stared at each other for a minute. We needed someone who would actually kill spiders and wouldn’t laugh at us. At the same moment, we both turned our heads back toward the campsite and shouted. “Silas!”
Silas materialized a few moments later, coming up the hill to the latrine. “What?” he asked as he marched toward us. He’d removed his jacket, wearing just a blue baseball shirt. The shirt made him look bulkier around the shoulders. He towered over me as he got close.
“Will you go in and kill the spiders?” I asked.
He peered into the girls’ bathroom, squinting into the dark. “You saw spiders?”
“No,” I said. “Can you go see if there are any?”
He laughed, and the white of his teeth contrasted against his olive skin. His voice was rich with amusement. “You made me run down here to see if there were spiders?”
I blushed. Maybe he was laughing, but he hadn’t said no. “Please?”
Silas glanced at Gabriel. “You wouldn’t go in?”
“I’m not going in that shit,” he said. “They’ve got those big ones around here. The ones with the furry knees.”
My mouth fell open. “Furry knees?”
“Don’t tell her that,” Silas said. “She won’t be able to sleep tonight.” Silas nudged us out of the way, stepping into the bathroom. He tilted his head around and then slapped the wall.
The bare bulbs overhead flickered to life, but there was little improvement.
Silas sighed. He marched to the first stall, opened the door, and disappeared into it for a second before he came back out, announcing, “There’s no spiders in here.”
“Did you look under the toilet?” I asked.
He grunted and shuffled back into the stall, stepping out a second later. “Aggele,” Silas said. “Will you get in here, please? There’s no bugs. It’s clean. It’s not bad. It’s just a little dark because you’re out in the brighter light outside.”
I wasn’t sure if he was right or if he was just trying to make me happy. I edged forward. Once inside, I wrapped my arms around my stomach, trying to become as sm
all as possible so I wouldn’t risk touching a wall or a sink. I gazed at the painted brick walls, and the concrete floor with an ominous drain on the floor. Why was this so creepy? Maybe I wasn’t a camping sort of person.
“Good luck, Trouble,” Gabriel said from the door. “I’m going to go find a tree to make friends with.” He dashed off towards the trees where I couldn’t see him.
“Argh,” I said, making a fist and shaking it, although I didn’t really blame him at all. I wasn’t so sure a tree wouldn’t be better. “So much for having a camping buddy.”
Silas chuckled and then leaned against the stall wall, folding his arms over his chest. He seemed taller than ever—definitely older than sixteen. “Gabriel thought you’d be the one to squash the spiders. Usually, we make him do it.”
“He doesn’t like spiders.”
“We’re probably why he doesn’t. We get him to take care of all the spiders; he complains every time.” He took a step back, took hold of the stall door, and held it open for me. “Go ahead.”
I peeked in at the toilet. It looked clean, but my skin crawled thinking about touching it. “Silas?”
“Yes, Aggele Mou?”
My next thought was that if he went back to camp, some ax murderer would come in and get me while I was in the bathroom. Or a bear. Or spiders. “Will... will you stay? I mean not in here but in this bathroom?”
He smiled and rolled his eyes. “I’ll be your temporary camping buddy.” He bent down, planting a kiss on my forehead. “Just whistle or something if you see a bug.”
“I can’t whistle,” I said. I snapped my fingers. “I forgot the whistle they gave me.”
“You need to take the emergency things out of your kit. This is where you use your whistle.”
I entered the stall, locking the door behind me. I stared down the toilet. Now that I was here, I had another problem.
“See a bug?” Silas asked after a few minutes.
“Can you run the water?”
“Huh?”
“I can’t go when I think you’re listening.”
“I’m not listening.”
“Please?”
He let out a small, amused groan and then one of the sinks started up. Then a second one. It was enough noise that I felt I could pee without him hearing. I might have let Gabriel in the bathroom with me, but none of them had been around when I was using the toilet, and it was too strange to do so with him so close.
