Who: Dylan Michaels & Hannah Smith
What: Chillin' out, maxin', relaxin' all cool - nope? Nope.
When: Recent, let us go with recent.
Dylan ate most days at the Facility. Ate most meals at the Facility, which was another step in between Before and After, which loomed like that in Dylan's head. Capitals. Before, making whatever was in the little library's cookbook section in the trailer's crapped out little kitchen, when he came in with tupperware and thought a lot all day about getting over to G's room and sitting with her a little, eating beef stew and ratatouille while watching nature programs on TV, oh and yeah, going a little crazy once a month. Waking up with a tattoo or in some bed with a mouth that tasted like the dumpsters behind the high school had smelled on hot days. After, was the place in Vegas he didn't remember. Cool sheets, a taped intravenous line and a whole series of nothing but guard duty and watching kids try to rattle the outer fences for dares on the cameras.
Dylan expected another bad day imminent. He figured there were guys in here like him. Twitchy when the intercom crackled, tense under the skin until the day was done and the clock punched and they were back in bunks. The guys were partly why Dylan stayed: because if the doc called his number, he figured the guys would work it out until he wasn't making choices he didn't remember thinking about, public. G wasn't the issue. G was doing better, she told him so on the phone from the fancy rehab place teaching her how to walk normal. Nah, Dylan worried about people who had watched him grow up or grown up
with him. He worried about Capital bars and he worried about M. Thought about it, until he felt like he'd gone around and around the bare walls inside his head and then he went to the gym and hit stuff until he didn't think about it anymore.
So he was eating. Here in the After. Collected a tray, lined up, and loaded up with everything going, burger, fries, a side of lasagne, chips, and an apple. Mostly, he was starving. Metabolism, he had measured weekly. They pricked him for blood, and measured everything, told him some days, didn't others. Dylan didn't want to know about his physiology: couldn't do nothing about it, didn't know if it was important. Metabolism meant he burned warm even cold outside, and he ate like he was starving. The apple, that was all Leda. Leda who thought fruit kept off expensive doctor bills.
He rolled the apple around on the table, empty. No one else was sat there, the shifts handed off late and the cafeteria here was vast, big enough to hold a bunch of egg-head scientists and dumb guys like Dylan at the same time without them having to talk.