Just Hold Hands

Chapter 9

Three in the morning, in the midst of an alien invasion, and Theo was still writing essays. She rubbed her eyes as she tried to finish. Despite her best efforts, however, she quickly fell asleep, drifting off to thoughts of Camus and how much she hated his book.

She slept fitfully. She dreamt not of a nightmarish world, but of a world that felt perfectly ordinary. There were people filling her dream, people she didn't quite know. And because of this she didn't know why, but felt that these people were putting her in immense danger. Should they see her, they would kill her. And so she walked behind each of them, lining the edges of a brightly lit apartment room, several stories up. They all faced the walls of the small square room, typing away nonsense at computers. Dream-Theo walked behind each of them and slowly, precisely, slit their throats. She felt unimaginable guilt, for one, but also a remaining sense of terror, that had she failed, had they not been as dead as she felt guilt that they were, any one of them could still find her, and hurt her.

It was with this that she awakened, filled with guilt for something that she hadn't done and terror of something that may still occur. Her mother was standing over her.

"Shit!" Theo shot up. "I didn't finish my work."

Her mother shook her head, her knotted curls too stiff to move with it. "Your school was destroyed."

"What?"

"Blew up, middle of last night."

"Well," she fell back down onto her pillow, "that solves that problem."

Her mother bit her lip. "No one was in it at the time."

Theo closed her eyes and stared into the dark. "Well that's good."

"I don't think you girls will be able to go back to school this year."

"Fine by me."

Theo wanted her mother to leave her room and let her go back to sleep. She was tired. Caring about things was draining, especially caring about things that she had no impact on, that she wasn't even a consideration in.

"Theo, don't you care?"

"Honestly, no I don't right now. I just want to sleep."

She heard her mother sigh. Good to know that the woman who hadn't gone to work in a week was disappointed that her daughter couldn't go to school. "Okay," she heard her whisper, followed by the gentle closing of the door.

Theo took a sharp breath and opened her eyes. She stared straight up into her stark white ceiling, where minor water damage had caused the paint to chip. She blinked, and a fleck of white paint, dangling from the ceiling, finally fell, drifting onto her face like a snowflake. For a moment Theo entertained the notion that the ceiling may finally collapse on her, burying her in a mountain of concrete and damaged wood, but she dismissed it. If she were to die a sudden tragic death, it would be because of the aliens.

Theo finally found the motivation to roll out of bed—literally roll, she threw herself face first onto the floor to land on her elbows—and clean up her now irrelevant school things. She three her notebooks, sprawled across the base of her blue duvet, into her backpack, followed by the binder on her desk and the unorganized mass of pens and pencils. Her textbooks were never going to fit, so she opened her closet door and tossed in the heavy backpack, before going back for the textbooks. She gathered all six of them, most of them for a history class she hated, and carried them over to her closet. She heard her phone buzz and jerked to a pause before relaxing. She put the textbooks away, closed the door, and grabbed her phone.

It was just Maria, asking if she still wanted to go paint her nails. God she loved Maria, yes she did want to go paint her nails.

When she arrived, Maria had laid out an array of colors across the kitchen counter and was excited to show her.