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Rafe is watching me like he thinks I’ve lost my mind, and I don’t care, because I probably have. I sit on my bed and stand up again. I go brush my teeth for no reason, since I already did that, and while I’m in there, I look in the mirror.

My mouth is wrecked. The split from two weeks ago is mostly healed, and there’s something new on top of it, on my lower lip where she bit me, swollen on one side. My hair is doing something insane on the left where her hands were. I take a picture and send it to her with no caption.

Kylie: What is that?

Me: My face.

Kylie: I know it’s your face, Nash.

Kylie: Why am I receiving it?

I sit on the edge of my bed and watch the dots come up and go away twice. Then a picture comes through. She’s in bed with the lamp off and one light somewhere behind her, her hair everywhere, in a T-shirt with the collar stretched out. Her mouth is as bad as mine. Worse. Her lower lip is swollen, there’s a mark at the corner, and her whole chin is pink where my face was. I look at it for a long time.

Me: We match.

Kylie: We do not match.

Kylie: You look like you got into a fight.

I put the two pictures side by side and send it.

Me: We match.

Me: Send another one.

Kylie: No.

Me: Why?

Kylie: Because I know what you’re doing.

Me: What am I doing?

Kylie: You know EXACTLY what you’re doing!

Kylie: Send me one then.

Me: No.

Kylie: That’s what I thought.

I look at the picture of her again and lie there in the dark for about two hours, not sleeping.

I knock on her door at seven in the morning. It takes a while, and when she opens it, she has one eye open, in the same stretched-collar T-shirt, and she looks up at me like she wants to hurt me.

“It’s seven in the morning, Nash.”

“Get dressed. We’re getting breakfast.”

She blinks. “Are you insane?”

I don’t say anything. I just look at her. She looks back, and then something happens at the corner of her mouth, and she tries to stop it and can’t.

“Give me five minutes,” she says, and shuts the door in my face.

She takes twelve. I stand in the hallway the whole time. When she comes out, she’s in jeans and a sweatshirt with her hair up, and she heads for the stairs, and I steer her toward the elevator instead.

“Since when do you take the elevator?”