“Iceberg lettuce. Yum.” She paused as she stroked his forehead with her thumb. “Did you know iceberg lettuce has little to no nutritional value? It’s mostly water. It’s basically a great vehicle for all the other things that go into a delicious salad. Supposedly green leaf lettuce is the most nutritious of all the lettuces. It has all your recommended daily vitamin K. But right now, I think I could eat an entire head of iceberg lettuce just because it’s got all that water in it.”
Back and forth … back and forth … back and forth.
“And the tomatoes,” she went on, still tilting the mirror; still combing back his hair. “Big, juicy, super cold tomatoes. I wouldn’t even bother with the dinky little cherry tomatoes. I want a massive beefsteak tomato. With salt and pepper. If I could eat anything in the world right now, I’d eat a mountain of wedge salad with a side of an absurdly large beefsteak tomato.”
Her stomach growled again, louder this time as if telling her to put up or shut up as far as food was concerned.
“I could totally drink an entire swimming pool of ice water right now,” she said, switching her mind from her hunger to her thirst. “With lemon wedges in it. But I’d probably end up eating the lemon wedges.”
Back and forth … back and forth … back and forth.
“I remember when it was the week of my senior prom, my friends and I decided to crash diet for five days before so we’d be extra skinny in our dresses. We ate nothing but soup and drank lots of lemon water because it supposedly gets rid of water weight.”
She huffed quietly and shook her head. “That was kind of a stupid thing to do. The truth was—and I never told my friends this at the time because I was embarrassed. I was planning to, like.” She paused to stifle a small laugh. “Go all the way with my boyfriend that night. So I was all worried about what I’d look like naked.”
She threw her hands over her face and laughed a bit hysterically, wondering if Nick would be laughing too if he was conscious.
“Sorry,” she managed to say through a fit of cackling. “I don’t know why that’s funny right now.”
But for some reason it was so she continued to cackle uncontrollably for a while.
If nothing else, it distracted her from the lingering thoughts hidden in the back of her brain that she kept trying to suppress.
Nobody’s coming.
More cackling.
Nobody can see the flashes from the mirror.
She clutched her sides, which felt like they were going to split open from the bellowing laughter.
You’re going to die out here.
“Ahhh, anyway,” she went on, wiping the sweat and laughter induced tears from her eyes. “See, I’d been with him for about six months and I liked him a lot. His name was Josh, and he was this cute, quiet type of guy. And we were about to graduate so it sort of felt like the thing to do. I also kind of wanted to get it over with. And he was nice so it seemed like a good opportunity to do it with someone I trusted. Prom night would be memorable and I’d be feeling pretty, and I was sort of over the whole waiting thing,you know?”
She absently placed her palm on Nick’s chest to reassure herself he was still breathing.
“So we did it. His friend Seth had this party and we ended up in Seth’s bedroom. I guess he was doing Josh a favor or something by giving us his room.” She smiled to herself. “And it wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t awesome. But I guess that’s how the first time is, you know?”
She glanced at Nick’s face, feeling strangely embarrassed, even though he probably couldn’t hear her.
“But then he ended up going to Mizzou because apparently they have a good journalism program and that’s what he wanted to study. So we broke up. It ended on good terms, but it still kind of sucked.”
Back and forth…back and forth…back and forth.
“I heard he got married last year,” she added as her gaze skimmed over the canyon again.
The shadows from boulders and bushes were drawn long against the walls and ground. She glanced up at the sky. The sun was now halfway hidden behind the crest.
Once it hit the crest, it had appeared to begin moving at a much faster rate. She chalked it up to an optical illusion. The earth was still rotating at its same speed. She knew that.
Nevertheless, there it was.
Rather, there it was going.
“Going…” she muttered to herself as she watched it slip out of view. “Going … Gone.”
No more flashing the mirror today.
