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"I THOUGHT THAT YOU DIED," Atlas deadpans, looking down at Meredith with mild interest as she suddenly sits up, her eyes wild, her hair sticking out from her ponytail in wild tufts. After eating her seventh slice of meat-lovers pizza, she'd had fallen to the floor, facedown, snoring loudly. She hasn't moved in the past twenty minutes.
The four of us are sitting in Silas's basement the day after I almost died, some shitty old horror movie playing on the TV, three boxes of Villa pizza (despite whatever Atlas tells you, getting it from anywhere else would be blasphemy) resting on the coffee table in front of us.
"I would never die before getting an eighth slice of pizza," Meredith responds, her voice dead-serious, reaching towards a box. Her face falls as she only finds crusts. "Oh, fuck you guys. Who ate all of it? And who left all of their crusts? Your bloodline is weak."
"Um, you," I remind her, handing her the unopened box of cheese. "Here."
"Oh, right." Meredith takes the box and grabs a slice of pizza from it. "Cheese isn't the ideal pizza state, but all pizza is good pizza. Thank you for supporting me and my endeavors."
I grab a slice for myself, then flop back onto the couch. "I'm the backbone of this family. Where would you guys be without me?"
Atlas, who hates me, offers, "Probably better off."
"Atlas, shut up," Silas, who's nice, defends me.
"Dead," I finish for Atlas, because he seemed to have forgotten the last (and most important) word of his sentence.
"Anyways," Meredith leans her elbows onto the couch so that she can look at me, her eyes alight with a particularly morbid curiosity about the story of how I got to looking like a hotter version of Frankenstein. "Cain, you said that you'd tell us what happened when we got refreshments. And, well, I'm onto my eighth slice of pizza and fourth Capri Sun. I'm waiting. So is all of America. Do you know how unpatriotic it would be to leave us hanging any longer? This is practically treason."
After what had happened in the woods, I'd woken up around eleven at night in the backseat of Atlas's car with no memories of the past twenty-four hours. He'd explained what had happened from his perspective; I told him about my weird-ass dream. We'd talked it over and decided was the best plan of action was lying about what happened and saying we'd been out taking a hike and I'd tripped and hit my head on a rock.
The scar I'd gotten in my dream had still burned on my cheek; it'd left blood dripping down my shirt. It was very, very real and, as Atlas put it, made me "look like hell." The only rational explanation we could come up for it was that, since he'd been dragging me through the woods, he must have accidentally cut me on a rock without realizing he'd done it, and I'd felt the pain in my sleep so I'd dreamed up something about it.
