Page 8 of Stop and Seek
Rachie
im sorry. im not mad at you. i know its been hard
but you need to srsly start trying again
pls
you cant let jagger ruin your whole life
Theo couldn’t find the energy to get up for work.
Every time he threw his legs over the side of the bed, they… hung there. Limp. Dead weight. Like they knew better than him.
The idea of people—of smiling faces and Mrs. Rosario’s sweet, soft caring—made his stomach knot.
No.
He grabbed his phone from the nightstand. The screen glow felt accusatory—it couldn’t have known he’d been staring at the ceiling for two hours already.
7:44a.m.
If he didn’t get up now—right fucking now—he’d be late.
But he couldn’t figure out how to start. His brain was buffering. Body offline. Executive function curled up in a ditch somewhere, sobbing faintly.
Grimacing, he tapped on Mrs. Rosario’s contact and cleared his throat as it rang.
“Yeah, just a bug,” he muttered when she picked up, tacking on a cough that sounded pathetic. “I should be fine Monday, ma’am.”
She said something about soup and rest and not pushing himself. Her voice was maternal and concerned, and he hated that it made his throat ache.
He hung up feeling like a liar, even though technically hewasn’t.
He hadn’t slept. Not with the apartment turning into a microwave around 3:00 a.m. when his sad, wheezing AC gave its final rattle. The single fan he owned sounded like it was being fucking tortured.
Swimming through wet cement would’ve been easier than dragging his body out of bed. He shuffled to the bathroom, flinching as the cold tile hit the soles of his feet.
The shower helped. A little. Even if his body wash was nearing empty. And the water pressure barely qualified as a rinse. But it scrubbed some of the film from his eyes, and when he stepped out, he felt… adjacent to human.
It wasn’t even noon yet.
Maybe he could still make it in.
When he got outside, Theo eyed the car like it might bite him. Hell, it could. He didn’t know. The sun bounced off the hood, too bright, too loud, slicing into his skull.
He slid into the seat anyway, turned the key.
The car responded with a noise that sounded like it was actively trying to die. A half-splutter, half-cough, followed by a puff of black smoke rising from under the hood.
Theo shut it off in a panic.
Nope.
Absolutelythe fucknot.
If this car wanted to self-immolate, it could do it on its own time.
He wasn’t about to make the six o’clock news as the guy who accidentally blew up The Eaves apartment complex.
