Do What It Takes to Survive

When I gave up trying to sleep, I wanted to turn the light back on, but I wasn’t sure if Gerard was asleep. If he was, I didn’t want to wake him. Sleep in our cold prison was so precious; I didn’t want to deprive even him of the rare rest.

Deciding that our truce of not talking to each other had lasted too long, I whispered, “Are you awake?”

“How could I sleep?” he retorted wryly, teeth chattering.

I stood and turned on the light. Then I curled back into my ball. “Good question. It’s too cold for me to sleep for very long too.”

“Is it just me, or is it getting colder and colder all the time?” he asked, sitting up and putting his chin on his knees.

I sighed. “No, it’s not just you. I noticed too.” I was actually enjoying our small conversation, believe it or not. I hadn’t spoken since I had told him to shut up. I had wondered if I would go crazy.

Gerard laughed grimly. “Maybe it just feels like it because we’ve been stuck in here for so long.”

I shrugged, pulling my knees to my chest like he had. We stared at each other from across the small room for a long time. Then he closed his eyes and sighed, sounding far worse than exhausted. He sounded pained.

“What?” I asked. “You can’t bear to look at me?” I was inviting him to insult me. That would have been much better than his almost depressed behavior.

“No, I truly can’t,” he said sorrowfully. His tone was so sad that it didn’t sound like an insult at all.

Something cut deep into my chest, but it wasn’t the words he said, it was the way he said them. I frowned. His pain shouldn’t have bothered me, but it did. I closed my eyes so that I didn’t have to look at his miserable expression.

A few minutes later, Randy came to let us go to the bathroom. When I returned, Gerard wasn’t sitting in his usual spot. He was a little closer to my side of the room.

I ignored it and sat down next to him, right beside my neat stack of four slices of bread. I frowned at the bread for a second, and then shrugged. Gerard’s cautious look evaporated, and he finished his water.

For the next who-knows-how-many hours, I couldn’t help but notice the heat emanating from his body, so close to mine. I could only keep myself form moving closer by reminding myself that it was him.

The next time I returned from the bathroom, I got back before Gerard. When I sat down and saw the six pieces of bread strewn across the floor, something clicked in my mind. Our captors were not shirking on the amount of bread they gave us coincidentally on the same days I made it back from the bathroom before him.

No. They always gave us six slices of bread. And Gerard returned first, ate two pieces, and left the other four for me. I was so surprised that I sat down and stared at the bread.

Why would he do that? Why would he give me twice as much as him? I remembered how much hungrier I had been when I had only eaten three slices of bread. How had he been living on two? More importantly, why had he been living on two?

When he returned and saw my puzzled expression, he sat cross-legged next to me. He must have guessed that I had noticed what he had been doing, because he silently set in front of me a water bottle and my usual four pieced.

I shook my head. Without looking at him, I asked, “Why?”

He didn’t answer for a long time. “It’s not really that bad.”

I took one of my pieces of bread and put it on his stack to make them even. “That’s a lie,” I said quietly, “and you still haven’t answered my question.”

He took a deep breath and said stubbornly, “It is not a lie, and it hurts to see you so surprised. You really think I’m a horrible, selfish person, don’t you?”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You’ve never given me a reason to believe otherwise,” I replied indignantly, baffled. He had never cared what I thought of him before. Why should it hurt him now?

He lifted my chin so that I had to look at him. “Now I am,” he said, firmly placing the bread into my hand. “I’m not eating it, so don’t let it go to waste.”

I pushed his hand away and ate the bread. “Why are you being so nice to me now? We haven’t done anything but argue and feud and resent each other for years.”

“Because now we are imprisoned in a tiny room, freezing more and more by the minute, only being fed bread and water, and are probably going to die,” he replied sorrowfully. More fiercely, he said, “Even if we don’t die, and we somehow get out of this, I don’t want you to hate me anymore. Being about ready to die has made me realize-” He stopped abruptly. Obviously changing what he was about to say, he continued, “I’ve been stupid and childish, and I’m going to prove to you that I’m actually decent.”

This was the longest speech he had ever given to me, and he hadn’t thrown in one cutting word or phrase. I was shocked and very confused, so I didn’t know what to say. I was sure it was the wrong thing to do, but I did it anyway. I turned off the light and tried to go to sleep without even acknowledging that I had heard a word he said.

But how could I sleep with so many things running through my mind? I squeezed a single tear from my eye when I admitted to myself that I had been stupid and childish too. We didn’t even have a real reason to despise each other so greatly, except that we had always done so. Maybe something had happened in middle school to start it, but it must have been something stupid, because I couldn’t remember what it was.

I also had to admit to myself that he had already proved himself decent, if not better than that. He had given me most of his chocolate on that awful truck, and he had gone hungry for days so that I didn’t have to. I couldn’t help but be overly grateful.

I think it was then that I actually stopped hating him. I figured I was going to die anyways. Why waste what was left of my life on something so stupid? I thought that maybe we could become friendly, if not friends. We were trapped here anyways.

I scooted closer to him so that I could be closer to the warmth his body was giving off.