An Encounter in their high school locker room changed Jimin's view, it leaves him unsettled. He is infected by troubling thoughts and dreams. Who will provide him peace now?
There are also horrific-looking stains on the blue T-shirt, but I don't have an option there but to put it back on. I am pretty sure that I will draw more attention to myself if I walk out of here without a shirt on with gory streaks across my chest and belly. Wiping up the mess on the floor of the bathroom proves to be a lot more difficult.
I use up all the paper towels and the toilet paper just disintegrates into red shards. I realize I will just have to leave the bathroom as-is. I whisper an apology to the cleaning staff. I take some tentative steps around the small space to see if I can walk.
My legs -- especially the left -- send me screaming pain as I shift my weight, but it is no worse than before. I can walk. I'm ready to go.
Before leaving the bathroom, I take a nail from the sink and put it in my pocket." "I make it out to the dance studio without being apprehended. I enter the field house and hobble to my locker.
The numbers of my combination lock swirl in my vision and I can't immediately recall the code required to undo the lock. There are voices from the other side of the locker room and as I fiddle with the lock, I hear locker doors slam and the voices fade away. In the quiet, the combination comes to me.
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Just as I expected, there is a set of clean clothes in the locker. I pull out a fresh-smelling T-shirt and hold it to my face. I smell laundry soap and only the faintest, sterilized remnant of previous exertion.
There are underwear, socks, a pair of gray shorts, and my cleats. The clean, folded clothes feel like a gift from my former self -- an organized and high-functioning version of myself that I seem to have lost, completely. My body is filthy.
I desperately want to get clean. There is nobody around. I strip off my clothes, throw them in a bloody pile in my locker, and slam the door.
I leave my clean clothes in a neat pile on the bench and head for the shower room, hoping that nobody will see me, see my blood-streaked body. The shower room in the field house is huge and empty. I walk to a far corner and turn the knob for hot water.
An entire bank of shower heads along the back wall comes on. It takes maybe a minute for the water to heat up. Steam starts to fill the room.
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I adjust the temperature to the hottest that I can stand before I step into the spray. The crust of sweat and blood covering me begins to liquefy and run off my legs, tracking in a pinkish river to the drain in the center of the room. As the water contacts my wounds, it triggers waves of pain, but then the waves pass, leaving a sense of warm relief that spreads through my body.
I stand in the stream of water and let it melt away my thoughts. The bouncer looks at me, then back at my ID, which in his hand. I'm drunk, and enough THC is swirling through me such that all my senses seem like a remote feed, data from a probe millions of miles away, delayed and offset from my body in space and time.
My... friend... puts his hand on my lower back. The bouncer looks back and forth between the two of us and looks me up and down again before handing my ID back to me.
