“Morning,” he said.
“Morning,” I replied, beginning to unpack my toothbrush and my bag of apples.
We didn’t talk. We didn’t fill the space with noise. He went back to his book, and I climbed into my bed, staring at a small crack in the ceiling that looked like a winding river. The fear was a physical entity now, settling under my ribs, rising to my throat whenever I thought of the mask and the count to ten.
Night fell early. Outside, the first snow began to fall—the kind you can’t see but can hear in the muffled, cotton-wrapped silence of the streets. I lay awake, my eyes wide in the darkness.
“Scared?” a low voice asked from the other bed.
Mark wasn’t asleep. His breathing was too deliberate.
“Yes,” I answered, my voice a mere splinter of sound.
“I was scared, too,” he said. “Three years ago, when I was first in a room like this.”
