It's a little quieter at the end of the cafeteria table that sits by the window. There's still noise though. It's like microscopic waves scooping between pebbles. It sifts and swells, and then puddles low again. Eren sits and listens to the noise. He doesn't eat. To him the cafeteria talk seems meaningless, but at the same time discriminate, finely-honed with trajectory and innuendo.

Armin Arlert comes up behind him, so he's talking to Eren before Eren realizes he's not a part of the noise scenery.

"—here? Hey, what's up, Eren?"

"Hm?"

Armin is hunched over his tray as he stands, his shoulders curving in, backpack half-shrugged. There's a drawing of an anime girl on his oversized t-shirt. Her proportions and glistening outfit make Eren turn his head from Armin, and when Armin moves again to accommodate Eren's new sightline, he simply averts his eyes to the cafeteria window.

"I said, 'Hi, Eren. Can I sit here?'"

Daylight from the window laps the far end of the table. It's a warm yellow rectangle during Eren's lunch period. That's why he sits there.

Eren clears his throat. "Why—" His voice is scratchier than he'd like it to be. He clears his throat with intent this time. "Why wouldn't you be able to sit here?"

Armin bobs his tray. Eren isn't looking at his face, but he senses that Armin hasn't attempted eye-contact since he began to talk, and this relieves any reciprocation on Eren's end.

"Well, y'know, 'cause you hate people now, I figured you wouldn't want anyone sitting with you at lunch."

Slowly, Eren puts his eyes on Armin's face. Armin is looking at the toes of his tennis shoes. They're shredded like wet paper.

"I don't hate people," Eren said. "Why would I hate people?"

"Well, I just thought 'cause you're emo now, you hate people and you wanna, y'know–" Armin shrugs; his backpack strap slips, and he scrambles to acclimate before it falls. "Die."

"I don't—" Eren says. "I'm— whatever. You can sit here if you want. I don't care."

Armin sits down next to Eren, and daylight slides over him too, drapes him loosely. He unwraps a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. He chews and Eren listens to him chew without looking, or eating his own lunch. The lack of dialogue doesn't cue Eren into conversation.

"You picked a seriously good spot," Armin says after he finishes his sandwich.

"Hm? Oh—" Eren clears his throat. "Thanks."

"It's nice 'cause you're in the sun. And it's not as loud here, and you're alone so you don't have people throwing spaghetti on you when you're just trying to eat your lunch in peace."

"Spaghetti?" Eren says, turning his head again.

"And," Armin continues. "The monitors don't even look at you, way over here. You can take out your phone."

He settles his backpack on his lap and unzips a translucent flap of its skin, and takes out his phone.

"Do you still play Pokemon Go?"

"I—" Eren has to think to answer. "No, I don't even remember playing that."

"What?" Armin looks Eren in the eyes for the first time. "Yes, you did."

"Okay," Eren said. "I don't remember though."

"Here, let's see if you still have your old account. I bet you do. You don't even need a password to activate it, as long as you've got iCloud linked up."

Eren slabs his chin with his palm. "Maybe later."

Armin plays on his phone. Then he shows Eren memes. He draws Eren into a personal, self-sustained exhibit of special interests. Eren pays some attention. It's easy; he doesn't have to talk or look Armin in the eyes as Armin speaks. He just has to listen.

"You wanna do something with Mikasa this Halloween?" Armin asks, suddenly.

"Mikasa?"

""Have you heard of Halloween Fright Nights?"

"Fright Nights? Oh, like in Universal?"

"Nope," Armin's already shaking his head, "That's Horror Nights. This is South Florida fairgrounds. It's only like, a forty-five minute drive, and tickets are cheaper, and I bet the lines are shorter too."

"It's September," Eren said.

Armin nods. His eyes are round and unfocused. "We have to buy tickets early, Eren, or else they'll be sold out."

"Okay, wait, I'm sorry—" Eren pushes his fingers deep into the hair framing his face, and flicks. His hair fans and falls favorably. "It's been, um? It's been a minute? Since we've talked? I haven't even seen Mikasa Ackerman since freshman year."

"Way more than a minute," Armin says, and he's speaking quickly now. "Halloween used to be our tradition, Eren. We'd always hang out on Halloween. Doesn't it totally make sense to get back together for Halloween? You do know we've only got another year in high school."

Eren sits and listens to the noise of the cafeteria. It's rising now, the sound organic and changing and shapeless like water. It's like the water that ran from the tap into the sink as he stood in front of the vanity mirror, and listened to his mother call him from downstairs, and then he heard his father's good-natured voice.

"Is he asleep? On Halloween?"

Eren turned off the sink faucet. He dried his hands and wrists. He got into bed, swaddled in a soft cocoon of blankets, and blotted the knocks at his door with the hood of his hoodie over his ears. He was small in his hoodie in his blankets.

Eren's bedroom was Zeke's bedroom too, and Zeke knew the pin of the lock surrendered easily enough under coercion. The door opened. Eren's friends came in.

"Aaron," they said. "Aaron."

Before Eren was Eren, he was Aaron. Phonetically, it was the same name.

"Fuck is you doing under there? Jerkin' it?"

"Jit, don't—" Tyler said when Feddie Garcia-Almodovar took Eren's blankets and opened them around him. Eren's legs in his shorts were unveiled to his friends.

"What if he had been jacking off, bro?"

"Man, chill, he wasn't."

Eren sat on the edge of his bed, and rubbed his eyes. The flesh of his legs, to him, seemed to glow around the bones in the dark. His feet brushed the bedroom carpet.

"Aaron," his friends said. "Let's go, Aaron."

"I'm not going," Eren heard himself say.

He still hears it.

It was like something was coming out of him instead of his voice. Some black embryonic fluid. He'd been ingesting poison his entire life; only now there was a bodily rejection.

"I'm not going," Eren said.

Zeke was leaning on the wall. He shifted slightly, and his prescription lenses glinted, scintillating in the dark. "Why don't you want to come, Aaron? It's Halloween and there's a party at Ava's house."

Eren's feet joined with the carpet. He maneuvered around his friends, and didn't look at Zeke leaning on the wall as he passed him. He put his hand on his bedroom door knob.

"Y'all go without me," Eren said.

"Wha'se matter with you tonight?" Feddie said. "You're being a pussy."

"I'm tired."

"What the fuck?" Feddie looked confused. "Why you sound like that? Why you talking like such a pussy?"

"I'm tired of y'all," Eren heard himself say.

Feddie glanced toward Zeke, who shrugged, pushing his glasses up the broad of his nose, an inscrutable smile chewing his face open.

"Okay," Feddie said. "What's that supposed to mean? You're tired of us all?"

Eren nodded. Feddie and Tyler and Cody and Daquan and Zeke were a singular shadow collective, amassed in the dark of Eren's bedroom.

"What about your bi-i-i—"

"Bro, shut up, their parents are like, right outside."

"Yeah, oh my fucking God, Aaron's lil' wh—"

"Bro, be quiet."

"Mikasa's waiting for you on the golf cart outside," Zeke said.

"Okay?" Eren said. This sparked no ignition within him. He scowled at their expectant faces. "She can go if she wants. I didn't even think she gave a fuck about Ava Rivero."

They laughed anyway. Ooh, ooh. Lil' boy. He's already learning—

"Get out," Eren said. "Just get out."

He was opening the door, and then Feddie seized him by the armpits and picked him up, which hurt because Eren's hand was still clawing, twisted now, scrabbling at the door knob. He threw Eren onto the carpet, bracing him so that he landed without force. It was like a game. They watched, like spectators. Feddie hit Eren, and there was no force, only playful softness. Then he grinded against him and when Eren turned his head to glare without comprehension, only discomfort and impatience, he took Eren's jaw in his wide fingers and pressed. Eren's lips splayed like a red pout.

"Say 'I-will-stop-being-a—" and Eren's head was wrenched by the jaw, toward the doorway where Mikasa stood, her silhouette buried into the light of the hallway like an axehead.

"What are you guys doing?" she said to Zeke. "If you're not taking Aaron and Armin and me trick-or-treating, then just drop me off at my house."

"Get off the floor, man," Zeke said to Feddie, uncrossing his arms.

Eren fought to raise his head. She was only seeing a game on the floor, her eyes cutting straight across the room to Zeke.

He remembers her, standing in the doorway.

She had gotten glasses at the start of freshman year. The rims were black and chunky, squat like two square bricks balanced on either side of her nose. Her pillowcase trailed from her hand. A shirt covered her to the tops of her knees.

She startled when Eren began to scream and cry because it was her he was screaming and crying at, but she was the last to exit his room with the tall parade of boys, and so she was the last person he saw as he beat his door into its frame, eyes running and streaming like two punctures in his head.


The red track widens. It's like a vein coming open in an expanse of skin. It contracts, widens, contracts, in time to the thunder of running feet. Mikasa's energy is transmitted into the ground in bursts of heat and dust. Her legs spring her up, jolting, stab back down; air flares like fire in her chest. She runs at her perfect pace, and in her modulation she believes she can run for an eternity.

Eventually, the bleachers and the coach's folding table have wheeled around enough times to make her dizzy, so Mikasa slows. She lets the exhaustion flow over her, beading without soaking through, like water on waxed metal. She trots off the track and takes her water bottle from the folding table. The bleachers shine intricately in the sun, too complex for any of the girls to navigate at the moment. She walks to the patch of shade under their flanks.

The girls canter in the shade, breathing out their words, faces sobbing.

"Aye girl," Ymir pants to Mikasa. "Lemme get a sip."

She's stretching her hamstrings. Her long-muscled thighs are striped with pale athletic tape.

Mikasa sips. "Get some from the fountain."

"C'mon," Ymir says. "That's like a hundred-fucking-miles away, and it is hot out-side."

Mikasa frowns. "You always forget your water bottle during practice."

"Girl, exactly," Ymir says. Her eyes are leisurely slits, as though she's half-asleep. Her forehead is creased. "Coach gone yell if she see me walking down to the fountain again."

"Shouldn't of got Bradley fired, sis," Nadia says, spraying a gasp of water from her own bottle over her head and shoulders.

"You know he was a predator," Ymir says. "He jus' liked the lil' cheer girls more than us lankies."

"Bitch— look who's talking!"

"Quiet," Ymir says.

She turns and clasps Mikasa's shoulders. She's their tallest girl, their hurdler. Her limb movements are disjointed like the short, impatient hops of a frog unable to quite leap yet.

"Seriously, I'm bouta die."

Mikasa sips again, and hands Ymir her water.

Ymir guzzles, and wipes her mouth with the back of her wrist. "Love you, baby."

Nadia shoves Ymir. Ymir stumbles, gulping.

"She run fifteen minutes extra every practice and you're out here stealing her water. Nasty hoe."

"She's good," Ymir says. "Look at her, she ain't even sweating."

"She gon pass out one day on the track. She don't eat or drink, ever."

"She's made of something more than us," Ymir says.

"I'm fine," Mikasa says. She watches the track narrow, then pulse vertiginously with the hard tide of her blood. "I'm always fine." It's like an opened red vein.

"See?"

Coach Em concludes practice. She's a woman, this coach, and Ymir's even more aggressive with her than she was with Coach Bradley.

Mikasa stays behind. She doesn't meld with the tired girls leaving the field. She watches Ymir finish her push-ups. Yellow grass scratches her shins. The sun goes away. The withered September meadows darken and cool.

Two figures stain the glassy horizon. They approach Mikasa as she watches Ymir. They're boys, so she's ambivalent; thinking she knows what they want, thinking she knows what boys are.

"Hi, Mikasa," the first boy says.

Mikasa turns.

She sees Armin. His thin blond bangs have been slashed at the ears; otherwise he has the same childish face from four years ago.

"Hello, Armin," she says.

She looks at the boy Armin is with, and suddenly she wonders whether it was a boy she'd seen approach with Armin. A code communicates itself to her, but it's muddled, elusive, surfacing then submerging. She sees feminine product on his face. Lipstick semaphore. Long hair, combed straight and sheening. He's wearing shades. They're curved like feline eyes with the pupils enlarged to flood the color from the irises.

"Hello," she says.

"Um." He bends his knees slightly, and smiles and waves. "Hi, Mikasa."

Mikasa becomes still. The code of an old interaction set returns to her completely. "Oh, Eren! Hey, I didn't recognize you."

"I almost didn't recognize you," Eren says. He gasps, "You hair!" and steps back as though to admire her.

"You guys," Armin says. "Y'all got each other's cut."

Mikasa itches the buzzed base of her skull. Eren twirls a dark lock around his forefinger and an onyx knuckle ring bulges behind the threads.

"It's been a minute," Eren says.

"Way more than a minute," Armin says.

"How are you?"

"Fine," Mikasa says. "You?"

"I'm— I'm good, thanks."

He turns to Armin.

"So, you wanted to ask her?"

Armin seals his lips together and shakes his head. "Mm-mm."

"Huh?!" Eren's looking at Armin. "Fine, um. I'll ask then."

He turns back to Mikasa and clears his throat. His voice hovers tenuously at a higher octave.

He asks Mikasa. She thinks for a moment, visualizing an October calendar, periodic hollows in the days satisfying her track schedule. Running is all she plans for. It's the only thing she thinks about. But Armin's date works, so she says so.

"Okay," Eren nods, "okay."

He brushes hair behind his ear. Standing in his loose dark clothes with his loose dark hair, he is all restless movement without the moving. Mikasa crosses her arms, uncrosses them, then crosses them again below her chest.

She says, "Who's driving?"

"W-what?" Eren says. He's looking past her shoulder.

"Actually, why don't I drive? I'll pick you guys up. You live in the same places, right?"

"Yeah," Eren says. "Yeah, uh, you do, Armin? Okay, then yes, that sounds good."

"A'ight," Mikasa says.

She puts her hand in front of her. Eren hesitates. He takes it, and she swims her fingers through his like minnows, her long index brushing the soft junction where his inner wrist meets his hand. This is not her track team's traditional dap; she's modified it to include the wrist-touch.

Eren snaps his hand back, curling his fingers. He lifts his hands to his chest.

"Oh—!" Mikasa says, and shakes her head. "I'm sorry, I'm sweating from practice. That was so gross of me."

"It's—" Eren says, then he turns his head to adjust his shades, and coughs into his fist. "You're fine."

Armin's frowning. "We're not gonna group hug?"

Mikasa eyes his shirt. "No, I don't think so."

"But this is awesome, you guys," Armin says. "Isn't it awesome? I've missed y'all so much."

Eren shifts, his eyes disguised, and for a second his expression seems split. There is a dark line twitching between what it should be and what it is. The sun comes back. His expression is correct.

"Aw, missed you too."

Mikasa has not thought much about either of them.

"Me too," she says, and smiles. The track writhes and pulsates behind her, like a gargantuan bloodworm.

"School's torture without you guys."

"For real," Eren says.

They stand quiet.

Ymir sidles up behind them and rests her bent elbow across Mikasa's shoulder. Armin and Eren perceive her grinning teeth with gazelle-like terror. She talks like she's been a member of the conversation the entire time.

"Who're these boys?"

Mikasa thinks for a moment.

"They're my friends."