"Tonight it's gonna be the loneliest."
When Victoria gets sick and ends up in a coma, Damiano, Thomas, and Ethan have to find ways to cope and keep themselves together.
The future is unclear for the three boys now that they're being forced to live...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
It's been exactly one hundred and eight hours since Vic's departure. Five days of an anthropomorphic emptiness, as for all of us it has a certain pre-established meaning and character. Pain. Despair. Hollowness. You name it. This feeling is becoming more and more like a false-persona of the girl we miss so much from our lives.
"Ethan?" I hear Thomas' voice echoing through the brutalist rooms of our villa.
I let go of the plate I've been holding. It falls back in the sink among unwashed cutlery and dirty glasses. It's my duty to keep things in order, both when it comes to chores or mental breakdowns.
Venturing through the almost empty rooms, facing the city, feels like a dream come true in the daylight. Los Angeles and its glimmering decadence sparkling through our windows even during a storm, telling us that we made it far from home in all the ways and interpretations that those two words can possibly have. At night, though, when the hills are empty and the lights shine in the distance, we all get the eerie feeling of this place and its many sins — the excesses, a cornucopia of forbidden pleasures, some lustful paradise setting us a trap, waiting for our fall deep down in the casings of decay, and, in the end, our old friends called insecurities and emptiness.
"What's wrong, Thomas?" I ask, concerned only by seeing his confused expression. A short reminder that those feelings are lingering around, even in the middle of the day.
"Her heart," he says, pointing out to the machine measuring Vic's heartbeat. "It made some weird noise."
I go straight to the display next to her bed and look at the graphic depiction of her life. A line. After all the struggle we're going through, in the end, we're just a simple line oscillating in complex angels until it comes a day when our memories metamorphose into an infinite billion of flat digital dots. Sadly, right now, poor Vic isn't far from this. However, our selfishnesses is still present, ready to keep her a bit longer in the dimension of suffering.
"Where's Damiano?" I ask for the only person who's able to share with me the curse of knowing how to read the inscriptions on the monitor without thinking they're some sort of magical symbols like Thomas does.
His answer is strangled by pain, almost guilty, "I told him to take a shower after he came from outside. I thought it's good for him. I'm sorry, Ethan."
"No need to apologize," I try to maintain a calm voice. "Give me the bag with meds."
"Of course," Thomas says, immediately jumping to hand me what I asked for. "What's wrong with her?"
A lot of things, and, at the same time, nothing new. Victoria's heart has been oscillating a lot in the past couple of days. From a median pulse to almost reaching the cursed flatline, this girl has been through all the stages of bradycardia.
My eyes get stuck on the screen displaying the pulse homonymous to her age, while I'm searching through the bag of meds without even looking. Once her rate will hit twenty, the anathematized alarm will deafen us.
