Calenture

#1

((Mandy Gross continued from No Bel Canto))

Mandy turned the doorknob again, the other way, and pushed once more, putting a little more force into it this time. Again, the door didn't open, though she thought she felt the slightest bit more give.

"Ashanti?" she called, quietly.

Another twist, another push, more nothing.

"Ashanti, I'm... Ahsanti?"

The pleading, nasal tone was already coming on strong. It didn't exactly take a genius to figure out what had happened. Mandy had lowered her neck into the loop, closed the trap around herself, and now she was well and truly stuck, but she didn't want to think about that. She didn't want it to be true. It could all be a mistake, or she could change Ashanti's mind, or something.

"Ashanti, let me out. Please let me out."

Mandy banged her hand on the door a few times, like she was trying to see if someone was home. No response.

"I'm done in here, so you can open the door now," she tried, as if maybe framing this whole thing like it was a misunderstanding would alter the outcome.

Silence.

Mandy's breathing was getting awfully quick and shallow again, a state of affairs not at all helped by the residual steam hovering in the air. Each inhalation felt dense and suffocating, like she was starting to drown, even if the reason for her lack of oxygen was something else entirely.

"Ashanti, let me out. Let me out. Let me out, Ashanti. Let me out. Please. Let me out."

Mandy punctuated her babbled pleas with banging on the door, an unsteady rhythm that escalated and decreased in volume haphazardly. After a little, she felt like her vision was starting to fade out, and she sat down on the floor and buried her face in her knees and sniffled and sobbed. The fluffy softness of the panda onesie was faint comfort.

It took a minute or more for her to compose herself enough to speak again. When she finally did, she hammered on the door again, still from a sitting position.

"Please let me out, Ashanti. Whatever I did, I'm sorry. Just let me out. If there's anything you want, tell me and I'll do it, only let me out. At least tell me why I'm in here. Ashanti?"

Bang, bang, bang.

It went on more or less like this for the next half hour.

At some point after Mandy got tired of pounding on the door and shouting, when her throat was raw and her knuckles were sore, she sat down and really took stock of her situation and resources.

It took longer to get to this point than it should've, really. If Seo-yun was in this predicament, she would've set to work immediately, rather than crying and pleading and making an idiot of herself begging for mercy from a girl who wouldn't even talk. Mandy wasn't even totally sure Ashanti was still there. She'd gotten down on her belly and looked at the gap under the door and was pretty sure she'd seen feet moving around, but it was really hard to say and it looked like something had been pushed up against the door too, so it was only a small sliver she could see anything through. But yelling some more hadn't accomplished anything, so it was either Ashanti out there, or nobody, or someone who thought this whole thing was very funny but not enough to help or even interact with her.

Anyways, what Mandy had was the bag and the contents of the cabinets and then the bathroom itself.

The bag was easy enough to inventory. It was a navy blue backpack with a big part of the side all burned up and crumbly. Inside was a first aid kit which was mostly pretty full except the stuff she'd used on her burns, a map that was partially burned and partially melted, a loaf of bread, a partially-charred box of crackers, two packs of seaweed snacks, a bag of dried squid, and a little bottle of rum. There were also some extra clothes, but those were the sundress which was pretty burned, the dog hat which was almost entirely burned, some t-shirt that had had some kind of logo on it but had been more or less incinerated, and the underwear Mandy had worn before she repurposed the swimsuit, but which was also not spared fire damage. Oh, and a little packet of something she at first thought was another mysterious first aid thing, that could've fallen out of the kit or whatever, but actually it was a condom. That, of course, was totally unscathed.

She also had the clothes she'd worn into the room, but they were pretty badly burned, and a scorched team towel, but that was unnecessary.

The stuff in the bathroom was slightly more promising. There were a bunch of towels, in white and eggshell and pastel mint green, and they were thick and fluffy. There was a cup with toothbrushes in it, and a tube of toothpaste. In the cabinets was a fresh toothbrush, still sealed in its little plastic and cardboard container, so Mandy opened it up and brushed her teeth. The toothpaste was cinnamon, which was the actual worst, but she hadn't brushed her teeth in a long time so she made do.

There was a nail file, and a whole bunch of toilet paper under the sink, and a couple of pill bottles but they were empty. There were hand towels, and shampoo and conditioner, and body wash stashed away in a corner of a cabinet, and a loofah, and a squeegee for wiping down the glass shower door. There was a little thing of bubble bath, too.

None of this was particularly useful when it came to formulating a daring escape.

The room itself was pretty big for a bathroom. It was roughly twelve feet on the long end by maybe eight on the shorter one, part of which was taken up by the tub with the steam shower. There was a big mirror, and in front of that a big counter with a built in sink and cabinets under it. There was a fuzzy blue rug on the floor, to dry your feet on, and the floor was otherwise tile, off-white, the grout very neat. There were three light switches, which Mandy hadn't messed with before, but experimentation revealed that one controlled the primary lighting of the room, and one controlled a smaller set of lights that specifically illuminated the mirror, and the last triggered a fan in the ceiling to help dissipate the steam. And of course, there was a toilet.

All things considered, there were far worse places to be trapped. Mandy had running water, and a toilet, and toothpaste, which probably almost nobody else here had. So that was a bright side, right? The was only one way in, and that was blocked off, but you couldn't ask for everything.

"Ashanti?" she whispered to the door.

Once she was really, truly sure that Ashanti definitely wasn't going to let her out, Mandy pulled all the towels and washcloths and stuff out of the cabinets and spread them on the floor on top of the fluffy rug and then turned out the lights, burrowed into the pile, and slept. What else could she do? If someone was going to come in and kill her, that was going to happen anyways. She did consider maybe sleeping in the tub instead, but it was still damp after her shower, so she took the floor.

It was better sleep than she'd had up to this point, actually. The tile floor was hard, but she had so many towels that it didn't dig into her back too badly. She was stiff, but she could squeeze at where her arms or legs were knotted up. It wasn't like there was anything else to do.

She had strange dreams, but they were hard to keep track of, and even though she told herself in her half-awake state that she'd remember them, by the time full lucidity came they were gone.

When the announcements played, Mandy was taken aback, both by the sudden disruption of the silence and by the revelation that she hadn't been in the bathroom for the million billion years it felt like. Based on the set before she and Ashanti had their one-sided conversation, it had been maybe eight to ten hours of captivity, most of which Mandy had passed sleeping.

This was nicer to think about than Danger Zones. If this place became one, Mandy was thoroughly out of luck, but Ritzy kind of implied that wouldn't be happening for a while, which was something.

The other good news was that Seo-yun was still alive. Shoshanna had perished after all, and there were no other kills attributed to Mandy's friend since, but that didn't matter that much because her name wasn't among the dead either, so there was still a chance.

It was all worthwhile stuff to mull as Mandy tucked into a breakfast comprised of bread, and then when that got boring after two slices, bread with crackers in the middle. Cracker sandwiches was only a little better than plain bread, and might have actually been a loss compared to plain crackers, but it broke up the monotony. Mandy ate one of the seaweed snacks for dessert, and it was the most flavor she'd had in a while, and that made her sniffle again. She was saving the other for later. She was saving the dried squid, too, but for different reasons; it sounded indescribably icky and she hadn't quite decided whether or not starving would be a worse fate.

"Ashanti?" Mandy called, giving the door a little knock, just in case. "Did you want to talk about the announcement?"

But of course there was no reply.

The scissors went snip snip snip as Mandy perched on the counter, leaning in really close to the mirror, trying to make the best out of her horrifying home barber attempt.

At first she'd planned to just trim the singed part of her hair off, but that was asymmetrical and choppy in a way that wasn't really her style, and so she'd tried to do something more proper. The reflection in the mirror, however, had confused her a little, and before she knew it she'd gone really short in a couple places after turning the scissors the wrong way, and then the spring of her hair sprang and she looked like a mushroom. So after that, it was time to go for the pixie cut, but Mandy had never in her life had a pixie cut and didn't know where to start, and before long she messed that up too, and now her only hope was to try to get it to look like she'd shaved her head on purpose instead of having a bad run-in with a weedwacker.

It wasn't going very well.

Girls with curly hair, like Mandy had, often wished they had straight hair, because it was so much easier to deal with. Mandy's mom assured her that girls with straight hair wished they had curly hair, valuing its natural bounce. Right now, Mandy wished she had hair period. There were spots where the tiny first aid kit scissors had clipped it so close you could see bare skin, and parts where it hadn't been so precise and she still had a half inch or so of length. She'd hoped to even everything out to the latter, but more and more the former looked like her only choice. And who could even guess what the back of her head looked like? She just had to snip snip snip and hope.

At least she'd had a rare moment of foresight and slipped out of the onesie, hanging it on the doorknob several feet away so it wouldn't end up full of hair. The swimsuit was cover enough, and besides, surely there were more interesting things going on for people to watch.

Once she hit a place where her situation seemed as least-bad as it could get, Mandy gathered up all the loose hair she could and tossed it in the trash can under the sink. She tried not to think too hard about it. Some of that hair had been on her head when she was still in middle school, she thought, and now it was in the trash in a bathroom in a huge boat in the middle of the ocean.

Instead of thinking about her twelfth birthday party, Mandy took another shower.

With the steam billowing through the room and the only light present that which shone directly on the mirror, and with her patchy head, Mandy looked almost like an evil witch as she pulled faces. She kept having to wipe the mirror clean again and again, because the steam kept fogging it, but that was something to do at least. She stuck out her tongue and tried to lick her nose. She'd never been able to do that, and she still couldn't, and her tongue was getting kind of sore after repeat attempts, but it was something.

It felt like it had been longer than anything else in her entire life since the last announcement. She'd messed with her hair, and rebandaged her burns, and showered, and tried to sleep more, and tried to inflate the condom like a balloon before giving up because all the slippery stuff was getting all over her lips and it was disgusting, and eaten another piece of bread and more crackers. She'd brushed her teeth again, too, twice.

There was no way to track the passage of time. The light under the door was more or less constant at this point, and Mandy couldn't remember if the room on the other side would have natural light or if it'd all be artificial anyways. She still made token pleas for release now and then, but she'd given up expecting a response.

She'd considered just drinking as much water as she could, but drinking out of the sink was a pain, and by the time she finally thought to dump the toothbrushes out of the cup and clean it out and use that, the whole endeavor had lost its appeal because she'd realized she'd just spend half her time sitting on the toilet. No thanks. So it was faces in the mirror, and then maybe afterwards she'd try to sleep yet again or something.

Mandy leaned against the door with as much weight as she could, and it didn't give, but she could make out some things she hadn't before.

It was actually pretty embarrassing how long it had taken her to really sit down and examine the door itself, but there had been other things to do, like making faces and showering and brushing her teeth repeatedly. But now that she was paying attention, Mandy could tell that the door was mostly being kept shut by two things.

The first was something leaned against it. It wasn't that tall, but it blocked her view at the bottom some, so she thought it was maybe a dresser. But while Mandy wasn't a weightlifter or anything, she was pretty sure if it was just a dresser she could push it out of the way. The second, more vexing element, however, was that there seemed to be something securing the handle of the door. She couldn't really see well, but if she put her whole weight against the door and leaned close she could see that a cord wrapped around and around.

Ashanti still hadn't acknowledged her in any way. There was a chance the girl was sitting outside on a chair, staring at the door with the revolver in her hand, all ready to blow Mandy away the moment she finally escaped. That seemed unlikely, however. Ashanti might be crazy, but she was still one of Mandy's classmates. Mandy had been bored to literal tears multiple times while waiting in the bathroom, and she had no choice but to do so. And still she kept herself stimulated as best she could. She'd even paced circles a few times. Ashanti was not constrained the same way, so for her to just wait around and watch would require an incredible amount of willpower.

So, then, it was just a matter of making sure she wasn't paying attention at right this second.

Mandy considered yelling, just to see, but nothing had come of her yelling literally any of the times she tried it, so that seemed like all it would do is maybe get Ashanti to glance over. That would be counterproductive.

Instead, Mandy went back to where the tiny first aid kit scissors still lay on the counter, a few miniscule scraps of hair still stuck to them. She scooped the scissors up, rinsed the hair off, and went back to the door, and leaned on it, and poked the blades through the gap she could barely create with all her strength. She felt them scrape against the door and the frame, and her breath sped up, but then she wiggled them and felt it: contact. She opened the blades, wiggled them around some more, then closed them on the binding, whatever it was.

It did not cleanly snip apart. In fact, it didn't seem to snip at all; Mandy squeezed the scissors hard and the tactile feedback was strange, a heavy resistance. She let out a little frustrated whine, and then her eyes went wide and she clapped her hand to her mouth and pulled the scissor blades the half inch back inside necessary to keep them hidden.

Had she been noticed? Was Ashanti about to open the door and shoot her?

"Ashanti?" Mandy called.

No response, of course.

How long would she have to wait to be safe? How long had she been here in general? Mandy decided to count to ten thousand in her head, which would be close to an hour, assuming she counted at about two numbers a second.

At one hundred, she decided to actually only count to six thousand. An hour was a long time. She could fudge it, assume a leisurely pace of one number per second. Ashanti wouldn't watch the door for a whole hour anyways.

At two hundred, she decided that, actually, Ashanti wouldn't even watch the door for half an hour. How about one thousand? That was a long time, right? All of this felt like a long time.

At three hundred, Mandy told herself, alright, halfway there. Ten minutes was more than enough. She was so ready to get out. She didn't even know what she'd do, just take a big deep breath of something besides steam-tinged moistness.

Four hundred and fifty was close enough to five that Mandy called it there and pushed the door again. Out snaked the scissors, and this time she pinched them at the bindings and kind of sawed, back and forth.

It really didn't feel like she was making any progress. There was a faint, nearly imperceptible scraping sound, and that made Mandy nervous, but the thought of counting again made her kind of want to die, actually, so she took the risk. But it was slow, and she couldn't tell if it was working, and she was getting frustrated, her grip tightening, trying to force the blades of the little scissors to meet in the middle, winning her freedom.

What felt like at least as long as counting a hundred passed, and Mandy lost patience and squeezed the scissors as hard as she could.

There was a snap.

Then the two halves of the cheap little scissors dropped from Mandy's fingers to clatter on the floor.

She let out a strangled sob, and let her head smack into the door with a solid thump.

For dinner, Mandy was having a toothpaste sandwich. It wasn't ideal, but she was out of crackers and still not desperate enough for the squid, and the cinnamon was nicer with something to dilute it besides. For breakfast, her mom used to make her these miniature squares of cinnamon toast, that came frozen with four pieces all connected in a bigger square, that you heated up in the toaster oven and then broke apart. This was just like that, except the cinnamon flavor was not as nice and the whole thing was rather gritty.

There were warnings on the tube of toothpaste saying not to do what Mandy was doing, to keep it out of reach of kids six and under, to call poison control if you ate a whole lot. So she was using just a little, spread into a thin layer all over the bread, which was kind of mushed into another slice of bread.

Would it be that bad to die from eating toothpaste? Nobody had ever done that before on SOTF, right? If it came down to it, she could just squeeze the tube into her mouth, except it was honestly sort of hard to swallow even the amount that was spread around the bread, and it made her mouth all foamy and her gums burn, and it was a little travel-sized tube, which might not be enough toothpaste to die?

Come to think of it, Mandy had heard a lot of stories of people eating a bunch of pills and then dying, and precisely zero of people dying from toothpaste overdose. And pills were hard to get hold of—she knew where the aspirin was at her house, but anything more serious her parents kept stashed somewhere—while everyone had toothpaste. So you probably couldn't actually die of toothpaste, right?

The gritty, foamy texture was really actually not that good at all, but bread was a limited resource now and she couldn't afford to waste it, right? She could beg Ashanti to slide more slices under the door, maybe, but it wasn't like any amount of begging had paid off yet.

She made herself swallow, made herself swallow again, and then started eyeing the rum.

The announcement almost made Mandy scream. She'd forgotten that it was coming entirely. It seemed like years ago that she was waiting so desperately for it.

Now she was in the bath, having a bubble bath, because she'd forgotten there was bubble bath the first time around in the tub but then had remembered the second. It was an unbelievable mess, because Mandy had poured all of the bubble bath in, and also she'd drank the entire bottle of rum as fast as she could because it turned out to be pretty gross, so she figured she was probably drunk. There was foam everywhere, and the swimsuit and panda onesie were over on the counter, where they'd be safe from the foam and water spilling over the rim of the tub now and then when Mandy moved. The steam shower was on full blast, and the fan was switched off, because Mandy had this vague idea that maybe if she poured enough steam out of the quarter-inch gap under the door Ashanti would get annoyed and have to come in to stop her, but that had not yet happened, and the steam mostly seemed to float up to the ceiling and then condense and drip back down on her.

Most of the announcement kind of went by without Mandy really registering it. The important bit was at the start, and that was that Seo-yun had killed Alaska, who was kind of a big deal in her own weird way but also had gotten sort of fat and hung out with Laura all the time and was accordingly a skank. It was mostly just good to know that Seo-yun was still out there accomplishing things, that she hadn't been mowed down as soon as Mandy wasn't there to help her, which shouldn't have been a surprise but somehow Mandy had gotten it into her head that she was indispensable to Seo-yun's success. That was six now, wasn't it? No, wait, seven, because of Shoshanna.

That was good, right?

Still, the last twelve hours had felt like half of Mandy's life. She might very well be in this bathroom for literally the rest of her life. Someone could shoot her through the door, or it'd become a Danger Zone and she wouldn't be able to leave.

She wondered, briefly, if she should just duck under the water and breath in deep and hope it was relatively quick and painless. Except, in her fantasy that would mean Seo-yun would hear what happened on the next announcement and come avenge her, but in real life Ritzy would just call her stupid for drowning in a bathtub and nobody would ever know it was Ashanti's fault.

This felt stupendously unfair.

Aside from that, the only other thing that mattered was that Mandy only had two teammates left. She didn't feel any particular attachment to them, since she didn't know who they were, and she sort of resented having to keep the stupid bandanna tied on, especially as it'd gotten soggy even after she moved it to her head, but it was something. Two was better than none.

So she sat in the bath, turning all of this around, and then a flash of inspiration struck, and Mandy jumped up and out of the tub, trailing suds behind her, as she made her way to the mirror and wrote with her finger: "Ashanti killed me."

It was only after another few minutes of sitting in the tub that Mandy realized the only way anyone would see her message would be if they came into the room, which they wouldn't be able to do if it became a Danger Zone, and if it didn't do that then she would hopefully not be dead. Also, they'd have to get the steam going to reveal the writing.

Her fingers and toes were getting all wrinkly. Her stomach was kind of sore, and she wasn't sure if it was the rum or if she was going to die from eating toothpaste after all.

Mandy hadn't said anything in a long time, and she wasn't expecting anything different now, but still she splashed water all over and banged her hand on the side of the tub, the slaps resonating dully.

"Ashanti?"

Nothing, of course.

Mandy's toes looked really far away as she lay on her back in the middle of the floor, chewing on dried squid, which was actually sort of tasty. A pile of soggy towels lay in front of the toilet. The fan whirred above, even though the mirror was long since cleared. She'd even squeegeed everything she could.

She spread her legs, like she was going to do the splits, but she wasn't that flexible, and the bulky, bunchy panda onesie kind of made the effect even less impressive. Mandy was thinking she might sleep again soon, even though her periodic naps had left her not tired at all. But maybe if she turned out the lights?

What else was there to do? Nothing. There was nothing. She'd given up. All that was left was to wait for the next announcement.

"Oh, hello."

The world froze. Mandy stared through her toes, into nowhere, all her being suddenly focused on the words she'd surely imagined. Because, after all, this seemed the sort of place where one would hear voices and conjure up departed friends, right?

"Remember me?"

There was more, but none of it registered. Mandy jumped to her feet, scrambled to tug on her Uggs, and got as much of a running start at the door as she could, hoping all the while she wasn't truly going insane but also sort of beyond the point where she had it in her to much care.

((Mandy Gross continued in Ashanti & I))