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He picks up his head, his brow furrowed as he looks at my face. “She’s not my girlfriend. I think she’d take issue with you calling her that,” he says.
“She’s clearly into you.”
He shrugs. “Right, but she’s into you too,” he says. “Last night wouldn’t have happened if she wasn’t.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“This isn’t a conversation we need to have with each other,” he says. “This is something you need to talk about with Trine. I can’t speak for her.”
“And you’re okay with it?” I ask him.
He considers that for a second. “I guess it depends on what we’re talking about exactly,” he says. “But I don’t think this is a conversation you want to have with me. Not without her here. This is about her.”
“But what about…”
He holds his hand up. “Think very carefully about what you’re going to say next,” he says. “If you say something I have to tell her, and she gets angry…”
I shrug. “No, I wasn’t going to,” I reply. “I just…I really like her.”
“I know, I really like her too, I…”
He doesn’t trail off. He’s interrupted by a blood-curdling scream from Tom’s room, and we both stare at each other as we run to him, neither one of us sure of what we’re about to see.
It’s worse than I expected.
Tom’s eyes are glassy, the fan above him spinning so fast it looks like the blades are about to come off the hinges.
Woods flips the switch off near the door, and the lights flicker, but nothing else happens. The fan just whirs and spins even quicker, and I hear something mechanical crunch as Tom’s pupils roll back. “Handle that,” Woods says to me, his voice just barely audible over the sound of the fan.
He walks to the bed to tend to Tom, and I look around the room, trying to figure out a way to stop the fan. I grab an old skateboard inched between his shelves and the chest of drawers, jumping on the bed and flinging my arm up so that I can at least slow the fan down.
It’s going so quick I think it might hurt me, but I keep a grip on the skateboard even as the fan spins, even though fighting against the momentum of the fan hurts my shoulder. Luckily, the fan is flimsy, and it doesn’t break the skateboard, slowing down instead.
I’m standing on the bed, still in my shoes, Tom’s legs flanking me below. I look down, ready to celebrate my victory, and that’s when I notice it.
Tom’s looking at me.
And he’s starting to float.
