Chapter 36

We stayed at a hotel in Miami because Windflower Springs had been labeled as a Category One disaster area. After witnessing my reunion with my mother, Holly became more fidgety bundle of worms in a salt pile. She paced back and forth in her hotel room, checking her newly replaced cellphone every other second. It was as though she was getting ready to jump out of her skin with every sound.

I knew what she was thinking even though she wouldn't say it.

If the aid workers were able to save my mother after I locked her in our house, perhaps there was hope for Andrew and her parents too.

"Once they start letting people back into Windflower, we can go to your house and look for clues. Maybe they left you a note that we didn't see when we left. Maybe they voice mail because they couldn't reach your cellphone."

"Or maybe they're dead," Holly retorted with a bitter laugh. I saw the edges of her lips tremble as she tried unsuccessfully to form a cynical smile. "I don't even know I'm bothering to look for them. Do you know the rate of reverting back after twenty-four hours of infection, even with medical treatment? It's less than ten percent."

"But there's no reason to stop hoping, not until you are sure."

"Hope only leads to more tears," Holly said and threw up her hands. She had been crossing her arms so tightly around her chest that her fingers were white with blood loss. "Do you know what Jack or Joseph said to me when we were in that bunker under Walmart together? You were sleeping like a baby, but we couldn't sleep with all the gunshots in the store above us."

"Let me guess, his only regret was that he couldn't finish one last game of Candy Crush?" I joked, but Holly didn't laugh. She sniffed at my response.

"He said — we came from the ocean, and now the ocean has come for us."

"Sounds deep. Did he mean that first fish who grew legs and wandered up on a sandy beach for a tan is coming to kill us?" I felt bad for trying to be funny, but I knew that Holly was only talking to me to pass the time until she could determine if her family was dead or alive.

Holly was strangely silent. I expected to punch me in the arm or at least throw the unopened Cup Noodles sitting on the desk at my head for my corny attempt at humor. She stared out the window into the night sky as though the stars in the sky or the taillights of the nearby highway might off some clue where her family was.

"It was his usual geeky babble, but it got me thinking about how we all started out as single-cell organisms floating in a vast ocean, connected by the molecules we pumped in and out of our membranes. One day, one of those cells learned to carry the ocean with it where it went, and it stepped out of the water into the sun. Even now, we're just walking bodies of water nourished by blood vessels, separated from other similar bodies of water by our skin."

"That sounds like something Jack would say."

Holly sniffed at my words. "Thinking about it now, it gives me some peace that maybe water turned on us is a natural evolution of things. We enslaved the water to fuel our cells. Now it wants to control us. Maybe, just maybe, that lends some reason to all this madness, some motive, some purpose other than bad luck. We are giving back to nature what we owe her."

I stared at my hands and wondered if I should tell her what I suspected to be true. This wasn't the end of the Blight Rain. It was only the eye of the hurricane. No, that wasn't the right thing to say, not right now.

I stood up from my seat by the table. I had sat down when she started talking because my high school guidance counselor had told me that people always feel like you're more in tune with a conversation if you sit down. I suppose this came naturally to others, but to my awkward self, it was something I had to make a conscious decision to do.

Yes, sit down, lean forward, make eye contact. Whatever you do, don't tell her the worst is yet to come.

I cross the distance between us in two swift steps. It was a bold move, but if anything good had come out of the last couple of weeks, it was that it had made me bolder.

My hand reached for her elbow. Holly was crossing her arms over her chest again. I tried not to stare at how it made her breast even more prominent. I stroked her caramel-colored strands of hair out of her face with my other hand.

"We'll look for your family together. We won't stop until we find them or find out what happened to them."

"Do you think they're still alive?" Holly demanded as she finally made eye contact. Her eyes were red and bloodshot. Her lips were red too, but not because she had painted them. No, she had been chewing on her lips relentlessly for the past couple of days. I didn't know the answer to her question, and I didn't want to offer her sweet lies. She was too smart to believe them anyway.

Instead, I kissed her gently at first, like a comforting friend — to let her know that even now, we still had each other. Then the kisses turned more urgent as though the thought had simultaneously occurred in both our minds that in a world such as ours, all we had left was the eternal now. The past was gone, and the future might belong to what cruel gods that made a mockery of our lives, but no one could take from us this moment — this kiss — this one embrace.

When we broke apart, I chuckled that she was now wearing my lip gloss. She made a face and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

"Glitter?"

"It was all they had down in the gift shop." I immediately realized that she knew that I had come preparing to kiss her by blurting out that line. I needed to change the subject fast. "My parents haven't looked at me the same since we got back. It's like I'm still me, but at the same time, I'm an alien."

"Says every well-sheltered Asian child who decided to rebel a bit," Holly retorted with a roll of her eyes. At least she forgot about the stupid lip gloss. "Welcome to adulthood, Ailith, where not every kid can score a perfect score on the SATs or grow up to become a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. They're starting to see that you're not the Ailith they thought you were."

"You think they'll get over it? That's I'm still Ailith, but at the same time, not Ailith."

"You are who you were meant to be. You'll find your path, and your parents will have to learn to follow."

"Yeah, maybe I'll start by introducing them to my girlfriend." I smiled at Holly and wiped a last annoying dab of lip gloss from her playfully puckered lips. "If there's one thing I know for sure, it's I want to spend this lifetime with you."

"You better make it worth it," Holly whispered into my ear with a naughty grin. "Because, unlike you, it's the only lifetime I have."

THE END

Author's Note: This is the end of this story. Thanks for reading!

I know it looks like there is one more chapter, but the next chapter is purely for fun, so please don't complain it doesn't make sense if you haven't read Darkly Devoted. The next chapter ties this story to Darkly Devoted (also contains major spoilers for Darkly Devoted).