No matter where she placed the pictures, it seemed like a child's game she was steadily losing. She placed one photo on the other in a way that made sense to her, though often to her alone. Sometimes they clicked and the photos snuck together as if with static electricity. Mostly they did not. Even when they did, the connections were superficial and obvious, a picture of Eliot linking with the pond or Shane with the campus library. This told her nothing of worth, especially given the creeping fear of the time she wasted in this place. Any attempt to bluff, to place pictures of unrelated things together - Roselyn with Eliot, for example - and the pictures repulsed from one another. She didn't think that this necessarily meant they were disconnected, but simply that she couldn't cheat her way into comprehension. Candyland was never this hard.
If she were trying to straighten her head out and find the solution she apparently already knew, she could think of better ways to organize the information than pretending she was making a photo collage for her best friend forever. In this work, she felt the stress that never visited her in her school days but seemed a formative experience for her classmates, of having all the information before her and knowing she was unable to synthesize what she needed when asked to sit for the test. She understood the frustration less capable students must have felt about school and contemplated if dropping out or skipping class was remotely an option.
Shane had no way of determining how much time had passed since she vacated Girl's dorm. She had tried marking off the minutes and hours by ripping up blades of grass, but they blew away when the breezes came. She tore corners off pieces of paper when she counted to sixty, but they restored when she put them back in a pile. She even tried humming to herself, to count off time in increments of "Here Comes the Sun," but couldn't keep the tempo straight after the third iteration of "Abbey Road."
The sky was useless. Night never came and she knew it never would. While is remained light enough to see with no effort, the heavens held no sun. She found this oddly comforting, as there was never sunlight when she dreamt and it gave more credence to the theory that all of this was little more than a dream. Her dreams were always set indoors, while it was overcast, or that lovely time called gloaming. There was rarely total darkness -- no one ever feels the need to flick on a light switch -- but there was likewise no reason for sunglasses beyond outdated fashion.
With this sunlessness came a general lack of nightmares. While there were horrifying things -- zombies mostly - she knew they would not harm her. She would climb somewhere high or barricade the room and would be calm. She helped others as seemed reasonable, but never felt personally threatened. The zombies were a problem to be survived and solved. When Shane told her mother this, her mother regarded it as pathology. Normal people have nightmares. Normal people don't have such a need for control that they dream of quietly outwitting the undead. She didn't see it as a need for control; it is not as though she marked herself the master of her subconscious, or else her dreams would involve a lot more, young Marlon Brando. She simply knew that she would be fine, a certainty she no longer possessed.
She reached for her diary, comfortably and constantly nestled in her person since Gabe had returned it, and did not find it. When the spider web of instant panic dissolved, she had to admit that this made sense. Why should she keep her diary in this place? What possible good could that do? It could soothe her, even if she couldn't keep what she wrote if… when she went back, she thought. That was purpose enough.
She got up slowly from her pile of photos, Not-V's eyes never leaving the tangle of glossy paper in front of him. She felt she had to sneak away, though she didn't have any rational reason but also didn't feel one was required. She just felt exceedingly bored and would be even less productive if she continued to glaze over. She needed to be refreshed and able to look at this problem with new eyes. A walk would perk her up.
Her rejuvenating walk was far from idle. She had a clear destination in mind though with curiosity as her only guide.
As with time, distance seemed an irrelevancy. The glinting from up the hill seemed only a few dozen yards away, yet she felt she had walked over a mile uphill when finally she arrived at the thinning of the trees and saw what glinted in the directionless light. Tombstones covered this dale, the smooth marble surfaces shining. She had spent more than a few days here as a teenager, though not out of any dedicated morbidity or awareness of mortality. Like every adolescent, she intended to live forever and gave no thought to anything deeper than the bottom of the blades of grass. She came here because it was beautiful and offered a view of the valley below. She heard that it was one of the tallest points in the town and that she could see into three other counties on a clear day. It was a gorgeous place to be. That is why Eliot's parents buried him here.
She walked up to his grave, the earth still fresh and loose. She knelt, not caring for the right shoes or the mess she was making of her purple dress, and began to weep.
"Why are you sad, Shane?" Not-V asked behind her.
"How did you-"
"I am where you need me to be. Why are you crying?" he repeated.
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