After
You are thirsty, sitting at the smooth black table in the school science lab, and there are two choices before you: one glass of acid. One glass of water.
You think you're going to choose the acid.
Before
You never hated yourself. You liked popcorn and caramel and the color orange. The fact that you didn't like orange juice disappointed you. It looked like liquid sunlight. It looked like you should like it, but for you, it's just a bit too bitter.
After
You've been drinking for days: water, then rum, then bleach. The water did nothing. The rum did less. The bleach made you feel better, then worse.
Your mouth is dry. Dry even when it's wet, cracked and bleeding, giving everything a salty, coppery tint. You look at your two glasses and wonder which will give you more relief.
Before
You liked to swim. You liked to explore. There was this waterfall, this weird back trail. You went walking the day after you learned the name of the girl in the bathroom, and you’d never seen this path before, but the trailhead smelled the way you felt—numb-cold, panic-sharp, dirty. It set its nails to the tender flesh at the hollow of your throat and pulled, so you walked, and you didn’t think about it when you started to bleed.
Once, when you were younger, you filled up a bathtub with orange juice and soaked in it. You thought maybe it would turn your hair orange, or make you like the taste of it, or at least give you a funny story to tell. You woke up the next morning with a yeast infection. You never told anyone.
After
You pick up the acid and pray it does better than bleach. If it makes you less thirsty, you'll be relieved. If you die, you'll be relieved.
At first, you think it tastes like metal, and then you realize that's just your disintegrating mouth. It turns out that when your teeth dissolve, the texture is gritty, then chalky, and then you can't feel it anymore because the nerves in your tongue have gone dead.
Before
There was an underwater cave, and of course you went into it. You liked to explore, didn't you? So in you went, the way you went into school on the first day, the way you went into your orange juice bath, the way you went into that bathroom where your friends had locked that girl inside, alone: you bet it'd be cool. You bet you'd have a story to tell.
After
You can't tell if the burning is acid or thirst anymore. You don't think it matters.
Before
You weren't that young when you took your orange juice bath. It was last year. You snuck miconazole home under a bag of chocolate from the pharmacy.
And then six weeks ago you stuck that girl's head in a toilet and she inhaled water, lots of it. She panicked. You panicked. After she stopped coughing so much, she swore she wouldn’t tell if you just left her alone. You were too terrified to do more than nod, and when she died of pneumonia a month later, you started wearing turtlenecks. They hid the scratches her fingernails left at your collarbone.
After
Your mouth stops burning. Your throat does not.
You wonder if this is what she felt like. You wonder if this is how it feels to drown.
Before
You learned the girl's name from the school announcement the day after she died.
You learned her address and sent a card to her parents.
You learned what a kid dying does to marriages.
You learned what a kid dying does to people.
You took up hiking. It seemed healthier than sitting in your room and looking at the orange safety scissors on your desk.
After
You are still thirsty. You can barely wheeze in a breath, the acid is burning ragged holes in your guts, and you are desperate to drink something.
You get up. The stool shrieks across the tile. This is not the room you should be in.
Before
You never saw what was in the cave. You felt the sharp edges of scales against your skin, the relief of stinging along those ragged fingernail lines at your throat. You tasted whatever it put in your mouth when it pried your jaw open. It was earthy, sharp, the texture of it soft and shredded like overcooked noodles.
When you finally surfaced outside the cave, gasping, the water pounding on your shoulders, all you had left was the bitter aftertaste of orange juice.
After
You are on your knees on sticky, gray-flecked tile. On your knees the way she was. Your breath echoes, frantic hollow wheezing from the ruin of your throat.
You lower your head and the echo of your breath shrinks, flattens, is smothered by the stale water. You inhale. This time, you do not let up. You hold still, as still as you can, and let the water flood your lungs the way it flooded hers. And when your chest gives one final, panicked heave, the thirst winks out, and you are grateful.
