To my skin, to me.
Air sputters from my lungs, and his fingers graze around to my throat, my lips, wiping away the lake water. Something unspoolsinside me, my thoughts stripped away… a feeling that almost hurts. Wishing he would come closer.
Wanting his eyes to never look away.
And for a single half second, I see a pain in his eyes—as if waves were stirring in the deepest part of his chest, an ache at the top of his solar plexus—just like I feel in mine.
His mouth parts a little, like he’s going to speak, words hanging on his tongue.
But the uncertain weight in my chest is too much, the questions too many.What about the secrets we both keep? What about Cricket?Has he loved her in this way? Deep and dizzying. Has he touched her and made maps of her golden skin? Is she watching us now?
I swallow down the knot in my throat, and I turn away, slipping from beneath his fingers.
It hurts. Looking away from him, severing the feeling of his hand on me.
But I dip my head beneath the surface, feeling the cold against my skull, my too-warm skin…
And I swim back to shore.
We build a fire. A small one, up in the trees overlooking the lake, out of sight. We don’t want to be spotted, but we also can’t eat our dinner raw—a glistening fish that Noah speared at the far side of the lake where the water was deep and dark.
He places the fish on a pronged elm stick in the middle of the fire to cook, while Cricket and I sit side by side, warming ourselves beside the flames, our hair still dripping with lake water. She lookspale, worse than an hour ago, and I can see the pain hiding beneath her sallow skin when she blinks, when she presses a palm to her ear. And I’m starting to wonder how much farther she can travel.
“You should take another pill,” I tell her.
But she shakes her head, bending closer to the fire, shivering. She doesn’t want to admit what’s happening to her body, that something is wrong. She reaches for the knife at her waist, touching the blade to her thumb to test its sharpness. I watch her, unsure what she’s doing, but then she brings the blade to the side of her head, and using her other hand as a guide, she begins scraping the blade along the shaved side of her scalp. The hair has started to grow long, and she wants to shear it close again. But her fingers tremble as the blade slides close to her ear, and she almost drops it.
I stand up, fearing she’s going to cut herself, and touch her shaking hands. “I’ll do it.”
She makes a muttering sound, like she’s going to protest, but she must know she’s too weak to wield the blade, and maybe she doesn’t have the strength to argue, so she lets me take the knife, her hands sinking helplessly to her lap. It’s strange seeing her like this, every exhale a tremor in her lungs, all her toughness gone, as if she is only a shell now, all her insides scraped out.
Carefully I begin gliding the blade across her scalp, watching the dark hairs come away, flitting through the air like pollen in spring.
“They might have lost our tracks in that dust storm,” Cricket says softly, her eyes focused on the fire, sparks leaping out into the sand. I wonder if she’s thinking about turning back, the pain in her skull enough to make her second-guess her decision to come with us. “We haven’t seen any sign of them.”
“It probably slowed them down,” Noah answers, sliding more scraps of wood onto the campfire, hands unfazed by the heat. “But if they have a good tracker, a dust storm won’t be enough to lose us.”
Cricket falls quiet, and Noah’s eyes watch me for a time, the slow movement of my hands across Cricket’s scalp, the firelight sparking along the blade. A smile ghosts across his lips, there and then gone.
When I’ve cleaned away the last of the stray hairs, one side of her scalp cut clean, she lets out a sigh. “Shave the rest.”
I lift the knife away, staring down at her. “Are you sure?”
She nods. “It’s all knotted anyway—it’ll be easier without it.”
My eyes cut over to Noah, his mouth flat, tensed—I’m unsure if I should do it, if it’s really what she wants, or if it’s just the exhaustion talking. But Noah exhales, looking up at me, and nods gently.
It feels like a letting go, like a sacrifice to once-worshipped star gods. I slide the blade across the uncut side of her skull, peeling away the long, beautiful black layers of her hair. I watch them drift to the ground, feeling like I want to cry. Like some part of me knows that this has meaning greater than this moment. A tenderness in it, a ritual, that my hands have found themselves anointing.
She breathes, her posture relaxes, and Noah sits on the far side of the fire, elbows resting against his bent knees, watching us—a quiet, mournful glint in his eyes. And at last, with the fire snapping and sparking, I scrape away the last of her hair against the nape of her neck, the strands smelling like campfire smoke, until there is only a pile at my feet.
“It’s done,” I say, and she runs both her palms over her shorn head, pale and a little red from the blade.
“Good,” she answers, bending to gather up the long strandsfrom the sand around her feet. On shaking legs, she pushes herself up, and makes her way down to the shore, bare feet dragging across the sand. Noah and I watch her, her silhouette wading in up to her shins and then stopping to peer across the lake, before she lets the long lengths of her hair fall from her fingertips. Some catch in the wind, lifting up to the sky, carried toward the trees; the rest scatter across the calm water. An offering. A surrender, maybe. And it feels like goodbye—to the old us. Who we were before we all found one another.
And I get the sense, Cricket won’t ever turn back. She won’t abandon us or hand me over to those men. She’ll stay until the end.
Until there’s nothing left of her.
