Chapter Text
The Aftermath
It was like dreaming. Floating close. Just outside her body. In an emergency student assembly, Mikasa sat vague on the bleachers, floating just above herself. AC wailed through the vents, blasting their heat-saturated skin. Their clothes fell cold. She shook. It wasn’t from the AC. Her left eardrum was throbbing.
It was Monday, February 20th, 8:23 AM. The principal’s voice came from very far away: a woman with black pants, short hair; a microphone standing in the center of the gymnasium, miniscule, being stared at by every student present, pinned under scrutiny like a plump seed in a petri dish.
“Each individual has been affected, and each individual has been affected differently. At our school, we have experienced, well-qualified counselors. Please, if you feel the need to speak to someone, about anything at all, don’t hesitate to—”
Mikasa cupped a palm over her ear and heard the ocean. The throb continued as blood wormed through her cochlea. It felt like dreaming. An invisible eye of attention bore down on her. Like a downward flare of hot, exposing light. Chasing her back into the farthest distance of herself.
She was the one inside the petri dish now. She shook. It was from the AC this time.
Grief had infected Lake Valley High School. They were all struck by varying degrees of it. Different versions, even. Some were stunned, simply, by association. Passersby of sudden mortality, passively moving through a rural community of grief and loss. Someone around them was now unexpectedly and inconceivably dead. Someone who, by all accounts, should not be dead. No matter where their age fell, fourteen, nineteen, somewhere in between, death was only a myth, a shelved manifest destiny that none of them needed to reconcile with their delusions of invincibility because people weren’t supposed to die in high school, and they were told it was easy not to. But here it was.
How did it happen?
The mother had found him at the bottom of their pool.
Why did it happen?
Not even the mother could say. For all they knew, he was smart, sociable, athletic. And to the routine platitudes of how are you?: he always responded perfectly, always said he was good, he was doing just fine. He seemed a little tired, but everyone was a little tired. He never expressed such illness. He had had a girlfriend whom he broke up with, when was it?, two months ago, about. A mutual agreement, everybody thought. A pretty girl, with a gush of kinky black curls. Bright-skinned, like he was.
She didn’t come to school today, and she — You don’t reckon she’d . . .? No, no, I don’t think so. She’s just mourning. Give her some time. — still had his hoodie, which she cried into. A pair of his gym shorts, which she slept in.
He was loved.
So, then—
School went on. Students funneled out of the gymnasium, carrying a host of phone numbers they’d never use. The bell rang. They sifted away, distilling, recalibrated to the ordinary. Their footsteps trundled down the invisible iron rails of everydayness. Gossip still circulated. The talking, of course, would never change; speech was precise and machinelike in its homing ability. — she cheated on — did he — i heard that — you’re an ass — why should we care? he chose — stupid — selfish — coward —
everybody wants to die sometimes. did he think he was special?
Life shifted horizontally. Less of an earthquake and more of a soft slide without the drama of natural disasters. It was quieter, had more subtlety. The days were a flexible river, bending around and filling in where he once was, where he once had been, that evacuated role of student, of friend, of boyfriend, of classmate, etc. to continue its track, undiverted, straight into tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Earth adapted that way, didn’t even pause. Barely resisted. That’s how the world adjusted to dead people, too.
His absence was most palpable in English class. Right when Ms. Ral’s tears would stop, they would start flowing again. After sinking into her chair, she let her face flow while the class sat and waited for time and the everyday rails to carry them into sixth period. 3:00 PM came. Swim practice was cancelled and they went home and the sun sank and they ate dinner and washed up and went to bed. Varying degrees of anxiety and grief deterred sleep that night. They all lay in bed thinking about it. It didn’t matter if they knew him or not.
In the gated neighborhood where golf courses sprawled and people in their sixties, their seventies, wheeled around in their electric carts, the Jaeger household rose in its two stories and red brick and red door. Carla and Grisha couldn’t sleep, they couldn’t even eat because their house was lonely in all of its two stories. Nothing except echoes and the immutable silence of bereavement because Eren Jaeger, their son, was gone. It left the mother and the father in agonizing unanswerable perpetual suspense: He was loved.
So, then—
Why?
The Beginning
Sitting in the seat in front of her, Eren had his head down again. Mikasa Ackerman could see the thick elastic band of his underwear bunching out his jeans. They slung loose, below his ‘natural’ waist, as the teachers would say. Visible too: a stripe of his back and the lowest bulging knob of his spine where his shirt had hiked up when his arms lifted to pillow his head. For fifteen minutes now, he had been sitting, face-down.
“Will someone wake Eren up?”
Mikasa reached her pencil forward. She tapped him on the shoulder. The cords in his neck stirred. He lifted his head and twisted his face. Violated sleep pulsed through his eyes. With the end of her pencil, Mikasa pointed to the teacher. He turned around.
He was still slouched over his desk with the stringy muscles of his neck flexing and unflexing, holding his head up. Beneath his hair, those strings continued to tense and relax, even though his head didn’t move at all. It was as if a lot of movement was happening inside of Eren without it happening outside of him. The teacher finished scraping her pen. She pattered over in her chunky sandals and slid the detention slip onto his desk.
“I don’t imagine Coach Hannes will be very happy to hear about your conduct, Eren.” Eren took the slip. He read over it through myopic watery eyes. “You can go see the dean now, too, while you’re at it and get those sagging pants sorted out.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said. It was an automatic response. He came from a Southern family where ‘yes ma’am’ and ‘yes sir’ were drilled into the lexicon.
Another Southern thing: At the time of his eighth birthday, Mikasa first saw the way Eren cowered at the leathered clap of men’s belts. A lot of Southern fathers, she’d been told, whipped their sons with belts. But Eren was the first boy on the maternal side since Dennis, and so it wasn’t the father who ripped the belt from his jeans and popped it between the rippling jerk of his wrists. Sorry, PawPaw, sir. And Mikasa had learned that day that in some families, boys were beaten with belts, and so she felt bad for them.
Eren rose and fished up his backpack and slung it over his shoulder, doing all three motions in one, and walked in a shuffling drowse to the front of the class. Thirty-two pairs of eyes watched him. Another office visit. His shoes flaked with peeling deterioration. Since when? Mikasa thought. He used to obsessively doctor his shoes at even the faintest smear or wrinkle.
Maybe that was the first sign.
At lunch, the regulars took their habitual picnic table. They were a group of five: Mikasa, Armin, Jean, Connie, and Sasha. They ate their lunch outside, under the flaring Florida sun.
It wasn’t pleasant coastal Florida, but the brown midline of peninsula choked by cow pastures and orange groves where heat melted sidewalks and asphalt roads warbled under an illusion of water puddles. Oak trees put shade over them, but the atmosphere was still stifling with congested heat and no breeze to assuage it. While they ate, black birds ruffled over their heads and flapped by.
Freshman year, Eren had been the one to make this picnic table their lunchtime territory. Most people respected each other’s spaces and didn’t intrude. But it was senior year now, and Eren sat with his girlfriend, Noralis. A cheerleader. Short, but not small, with a soft tummy and robust thighs. They had claimed a purple diamond-latticed bench. Side-by-side, they sat. Eren’s arms sprawled the length of the backrest, his face uplifted. The sun fell on his eyebrows, his shut eyelids. His throat curved. Next to him, Noralis sat, stroking his leg—the sharp tips of her fingernails were painted black—talking, not caring whether he listened.
“Hey, Armin,” Mikasa said. Armin was sitting across from her. He ate from a stained Tupperware tub with a spoon. “Do you want to come over this weekend and watch a movie with me?”
“Sure,” Armin said.
“I think I’ll ask Eren, too.”
“Really? When’s the last time you even talked to him?”
“I don’t know. But I’ve been missing him lately. Don’t you miss him?”
“Yeah, I guess?”
“You guess?”
“I’m not sure if we’re really friends anymore.”
“What?” Mikasa stared across the table. “No matter what, we’re still friends. We could go without seeing each other for years. We’re still going to be friends.”
Armin looked back at Mikasa through his glasses. “I don’t know if he feels the same.”
“He does. We’ve been friends since first grade.”
“He has a girlfriend.”
“Yeah, so?”
Armin shrugged. “I don’t have anything against Eren. It just feels distant, that’s all. He’s probably moved on.”
“It sounds like you’ve moved on.”
“I don’t think about it much.”
“You don’t care about him anymore, is that what you’re saying?”
“No?”
“If he disappeared right now—”
“What are you talking about? That’s not what I’m saying.” They fell silent, looking across the table. Armin pushed his glasses up his nose. “I didn’t mean it like that. I was just saying. Things change sometimes. It happens. It’s normal. It’s not a big deal.”
The bell was about to ring. Sasha and Connie devoured Mikasa’s leftovers. Armin asked why Mikasa bought school lunches every day if she wasn’t going to eat them. She said that each day she thought she might. —What about bringing your lunch? —No, thanks. —You’re going to starve yourself.
They threw out their Styrofoam trays. Mikasa’s milk box tumbled down a black plastic abyss and hit the bottom with a blunt sound. Armin and other company split up. Mikasa went to the south side of school. All students began to drift down their respective arteries in a trooping undead slumber. The Lake Valley High circulatory system. They had four and a half minutes to get to class.
Down one of the main sidewalks, Mikasa’s path converged where it almost always did at approx. 1:13 Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays with Eren Jaeger’s. Some days they waved to each other. Some days they didn’t. Some days they actively ignored each other. This was happening more lately.
At some point, a point which couldn’t be identified, in an indistinct overlay of changing phases, Eren began to float like a speck of spotty vision, drifting around after rubbing your eyes. Emerging, not once he’d been seen, but appearing sometime after you remembered you were looking directly at him. He slowly floated up to the mind that way, concentrating the more time and effort you spent trying to remember to see him, taking form moments after your eyes had already fallen on him posted against the background like a life-size cut-out of a cardboard persona. By that time, though, he would begin to submerge again. Sink away. Mikasa had to catch him before he faded.
His messy hair bobbed in the bobbing surf of heads. He was going south too, toward Building 1, integrated in the flow ahead of her. Mikasa kicked up her heels and upped her pace. When she trickled through the gaps, pouring in behind him, she couldn’t stop her eyes from dropping to the seat of his pants. A plastic zip-tie clinched his waist.
Mikasa lifted her fingers, saying, “Why didn’t you just wear a belt?” and clasped Eren by the bicep.
The muscle was warm, sun-bathed when it filled her hand. Eren turned.
“Mikasa.” He sounded surprised. He looked surprised. He smelled like hot, outdoor hair.
“Hi.”
“How you been?”
“I’ve been thinking about you,” Mikasa said. “Reminiscing.”
“Oh, yeah?” Eren’s mouth got ready to smile.
“Yeah,” she said. Mikasa wanted to know if he reminisced too. She looked in his face for it. She couldn’t see anything other than his mouth getting ready to smile, not setting into motion yet. “Anyway, do you want to come over this weekend and watch a movie with me and Armin? I’ll make buffalo dip. We can even talk trash about Jean if you want.”
Eren’s mouth was prepared to smile but not ready to laugh. It wasn’t until that moment, when his eyes suddenly gained more depths, that Mikasa realized those depths had been flattened; that they’d been faded; that they’d been dull and dark. It’d gone by her undetected, and so now she knew that it’d been much too long since they’d last spoken.
“You have good timing,” Eren said.
“Really?”
“Yeah. And I don’t know how you do it.”
“Do what?”
“It’s hard to explain. But you’re good at it.” Then he opened his arms. “I know you don’t like hugs but,” and Yes, she didn’t like hugs, but she put herself inside his arms and they closed around her. He drew her in, comprehensively, into a time reversal, and she reverted, growing out of age, then growing back into it.
Eren Jaeger. Her best friend. The beginning of childhood — and the end of it.
End? she thought. Then she wondered why she thought what she thought. Then she wondered why she wondered about her own thoughts. Then she put an end to the thoughts altogether, and began to perceive nothing other than Eren hugging her.
His hands were wide and warm; he buried her in his chest. His heartbeat throbbed against her cheek.
It wasn’t that Mikasa hated hugs. It was that she never knew what boys wanted. They’d crowd her up into the cups of their bodies, mold her out of shape so she felt like she was pouring out, being unpacked outside herself. But with Eren it was different. She trusted his sincerity, his kindliness. She suspected hugs from boys. She did not suspect Eren.
The hug evolved into an embrace — then it prolonged. This was not distrust. This was not suspicion. Eren’s arms were wrapped around her with too much weight, too much pull, encompassing her too thoroughly. And still Mikasa didn’t question him because Eren was Eren was Eren. Time went on. It was too long. They were going to be late to class. A transformation was occurring. The heartbeat began to march like a line of combat-outfitted soldiers. Mikasa’s eardrum wormed with blood.
“Are you okay?” Mikasa lifted her face.
“Yeah?” Eren said it like a question and bent his neck back to look down at her.
“Are you sure?” she said.
“Yeah, definitely. Are you okay?” He let go.
Mikasa tugged her earlobe. “Yeah,” she said.
“This weekend. If you make the dip, I’ll bring the chips.” Eren smiled. “I’ll text you, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And also . . .” His eyes contained some depth still. “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For being you.”
He palmed the door to Building 1 open and, letting her pass, they went inside together and walked down the hall.
Ms. Ral stood up against her classroom door, propping it open with the little rubber heels of her crocodile-skin shoes. Light shined on the glossy toes. When she saw Eren, she jabbed her index finger and summoned him with a stringent finger-curl. Eren grabbed his backpack straps. He shut his eyes. He opened them. His eyes were dull again.
Mikasa entered the classroom and took her seat and watched Ms. Ral walk to her desk with Eren trailing, slow and sleepy with his dreary eyes, behind her.
The teacher desk rattled. A drawer shut. Eren, unconsciously, tugged at his crotch. When Ms. Ral’s hand lifted, her fingers were knuckled through a pair of blue polka-dot scissors. She leaned in, Eren didn’t move, and she used the scissors to cut the zip-tie squeezing his waist.
“I don’t know why they have to do it like this,” she said, and stuttered, and lost what she was going to say. Eren’s jeans relaxed. From her rattling metal drawer, Ms. Ral took another plastic tie. “Fix it right.”
“Yes ma’am. Thank you.”
The bell rang. Ms. Ral patted Eren’s back when he turned. Her puffy sleeve fell, sheer, off her arm. Then she faced the rows of desks and class began.
Off to the side, Eren applied the zip-tie. Once it was fastened, he slid down into his seat and for about ten minutes, he even devoted some polite attention to Ms. Ral. Then he blinked his sleeping-glass eyes, drew his arms over the desk, and dropped his face upon them.
? ? ?
The wind came up again. It coursed, loud and stirring, through Mikasa’s ears and shucked her consciousness from its shell — her mind dropped into a dream.
The scenery around her was at once familiar and unfamiliar. Beneath her was a white fence which she sat on. She sat on the top rail, feeling like she’d been sitting there for hours, just watching, hearing the wind. She didn’t move. She never wanted to move. Maybe she couldn’t. Maybe she wasn’t allowed.
In front of her, a field of tall grass waved in a gentle, blowing tide. The grass stretched freely, in a slight weep, soft as down feathers. Wind gamboled through the field. Wildflowers nodded their fragrant starry heads.
I have to change it.
Wind whispered past Mikasa’s ears. So soft it could’ve been a thought. Mikasa’s thought, or someone else’s.
The wind, the grass, the flowers, everything moved in a collective rhythm that Mikasa couldn’t wrap her mind around, though she tried, watching it all. At the edge of her vision, she perceived another person—a person she thought she knew—sitting on the white railing fence beside her.
She turned her face and smiled.