Page 73 of Nine-Tenths

I puke in every trashcan between the bar and home.

That night, I clutch my stomach and hate my self-destructive bullshit, and miss Dav so hard it feels like someone has heated a metal cage and wrapped it around my lungs.

Sometimes, on the days when my grief is at its worst, I get these… these flashes of images that sear into my head. Of… of Dad.

Dad as a corpse.

Dad as arottingcorpse, in a box, in the ground. I can't stop picturing his flesh gray and sagging off the bones of his skull. His brains and his tongue, liquefying—everything that made my father aperson, I person Ilovedand who loved me back—putrefying, gone forever, and unable to come back.

And now I can't turn off the thoughts ofDavlike that.

Dead. Corpse-still, unblinking and pale. Laying in a ditch, or at the bottom of the ocean, or buried in cement, whatever it is they do when dragons disappear someone.

Day six, I have a panic attack in the morning, a call with Dr. Chen from under my sheets in the afternoon, and I spend the night looking at old photos, desperately missing all the people who are supposed to be beside me and aren't. I only have a few pictures of Dav. The two Hadi took, three stupid selfies, and oneI snuck of him on the back deck of the café, when he'd turned his face up to the sunset after a long day.

I hyperventilate instead of sleep, so when I get back to the café on day seven—finally open again, Min-Soo on the counter shadowed by some new kid named Rajish, me in the back putting the new roaster through its paces and hating every second of it because it's a machine, it's nothim—I look like ass-on-a-cracker when I get papped.

Yeah, you heard me.

Fuckingpapped.

As in, some of those princess-killing, celebrity-chasing, danger-creating photogs have caught wind of something, and decided to take five-hundred horrible, unflattering photos of me trying to shoulder my way through the crowd of trend-chasers outside the café when I try to leave the café at noon. I scramble back into Beanevolence, bombarded by lots of noise I can't separate out as individual phrases in my sleep-deprived state, but know aren’t polite.

Not a single one of those pictures is anything I'd want my mother to see.

So of course, some chucklefuck tracks down her home address, and shows up on her front doorstep at just after noon, brandishing his camera and asking for a comment. Mum has the good sense to slam the door in his face and draw every curtain.

By the end of the day, my misery has been reduced to a string of pithy hashtags. #Alvalin, #FairyTailEnded, and a few more not fit for print. I’m holed up in the café kitchen, pacing in tight circles while Stu gives me the play-by-play of Gem on the lawn with a shovel, playing whack-a-mole with expensive telephoto lenses.

Hadi and I sneak out the back way, to where Min-soo has her car parked at the bottom of the ravine, and I spend the night on Hadi's sofa. I don't get any sleep.

I just lay there and call Dav. Call again. And again.

The voicemail is full by dawn.

"Just tell me you're okay," I say, in the last message I can leave. "That's all I want. Please."

It isn't until the next morning, stuck in Hadi's apartment with nothing better to do, that I learn why the paps even give a shit about me. It's not the trendy coffee—and thank fuck it hasn't gotten out that it was dragon-roasted, despite all the Influencers complaining about the change in recipe. It's the fact that almost no one in the Royal-Watching community has seen Dav, (who turns out to be the fucking Marquess of Niagara,what the fuck) in literal decades. And then he pops up working in some random coffee shop and just as suddenly vanishes again, which is the icing on their invasive cake.

It's on the goddamnednews.

I turn on the TV to pass the time, and the first thing I see is that photo of Dav and me walking on the sidewalk in the sun.

It's… gross.

They have no right taking those pictures where we’re happy, and distorting it into something cruel and selfish. That smile is mine. It was forme.

And it's dumb, but you know what upsets me the most? The news tells me his age. I hadenjoyedour game of guess-and-deflect. I wanted to learn from Dav himself, because he trusted me with the information, because he wanted to celebrate with me. And some newsreader just blurts it out.

Like it isn't a treasure.

Like it isn’t something I was trying toearn.

"Our top celebrity story tonight is still the brief appearance of the two-hundred and sixty-seven year old Alva George Tudor, Marquess of Niagara. The Marquess vanished from public life in 1921—"

Born in 1758.

Two hundred and sixty-seven.