7. "lovers of themselves"

He was gone.

It wasn't dark for very long. A minute would be the absolute max, and that's pushing it too, but when the lights flickered back on, he was gone, without a trace. That is, besides a small puddle of blood and a fingerprint on one of the tiles, fading from it's natural scarlet, into the white color the vaccine promised us it would do to us.

Ryan was an innocent man. His blood said so itself. He was probably the most angelic person to enter this room five years ago, and no matter how much time has changed us all since the first time we met, he was the most angelic person still. The guy was a genuine person at heart, and he was sincere in everything he did.

Unlike a lot of people, he wasn't afraid to appear to be vulnerable in a world where they avoided any sort of vulnerability at all costs. If the man bled in black, it would take us all by surprise, but stained in his own innocence enough that he left it behind, we couldn't help but to weep.

I didn't know him extremely well, but I knew him enough to know he was good. If I had the chance to know him better than I already do, then I'd likely be more impressed.

"Disappeared? Impossible," Jewee shook his head in disbelief, studying the area where Ryan once laid, and for I think a first, he was the one out of each of us who could get out a word. We each struggled to find something to say -- something to mutter out from the pain in our crumbling hearts, but we could form nothing.

What he did say, we could hop on with though, for sure. Everything he felt, we felt too -- stranded on the third floor of this place, a body couldn't simply vanish. "He just here-- and-- how? Where did--?"

"I'm calling the cops," Jayvee brought up, but it sounded more like a command to every one else, or a threat that if someone said any different, there would be consequences. Most of us understood that, and we zipped our lips tighter in front of her as she pulled her phone out of her back pocket. Besides, inside each of us knew it was the right thing to do.

Well, everyone except one.

"Do not call the cops," Jared shouted out, more demand in his voice than Jayvee had originally -- which I thought was impossible to pull off until it happened. I thought there was a maximum to being bossy, but when he did it, my ears started to ring uncontrollably. I've prepared myself for the worse when it came to these sort of things, but all that preparation came falling down when he said these words. He meant what he said to the highest degree. No doubt about that.

"Don't call the cops?" Nova butt in, exclaiming at the top of her lungs. "And I'm the one taking all your accusations? This bish doesn't even wanna involve the authorities!"

The air I inhaled took itself back as I processed that. "We can't just not call the cops, Jared. You know that. You're not stupid," I spit out without thinking. We came here hoping for a better life and a better future, and if we covered this up for a millisecond too long, all of our efforts are destroyed. We have the chance to honestly clear our name from the beginning, and to get over that properly. How could someone think otherwise -- especially someone as smart as he is?

"Look-- hey, listen," he defended himself. "Without a body, there isn't a murder, and without a murder each of us are innocent people. You guys do realize that someone standing in this room just shot and killed a man right in front of our eyes, and that means each of us are suspects. I didn't do anything. I don't want to be involved with the police, and most of all I don't wanna be the next victim by adding to this person's wrath. Why would you guys wanna be?"

"Is that really how you look at this? Do you even have a heart at all? My boyfriend is dead, and now his body is gone, and what you're worrying about is staying out of prison. I want that person punished for whatever made them think they had to do this. Do you not?" Jayvee sat harshly into the nearest seat to her. Once she got her anger out, she dawned on the phrase she said accidentally more direct than she intended, 'my boyfriend is dead' and just like that, it was if the life was dragged out of her, too.

"God, I'm so confused," I mumbled under my breath. My head felt like it was going to explode. Somehow everyone was suspicious, but somehow everyone wasn't.

The atmosphere went heavy, pushing us further into the ground as if we weren't above cement, but on quicksand. I felt obligated to speak, just to lift the hopes in the gloomy room, and it felt messed up to do to simply save myself and my pain, when it was a possibility that someone underneath the same ceiling didn't deserve to be uplifted.

"Can we even say for sure it's someone in the room?" I asked to brighten the area up a bit, though secretly, I didn't know where I was taking the conversation. I just wanted to be a happy pill for the moments of grief, but how could I possibly when it was this bad? I could only try. That was the least and the most I can do.

"I mean, we each experienced the same side effect. We wouldn't have known if someone entered the room or not with as bad as I had it. It's a big building. Certainly there's somebody here on another floor or something that came by here, suffering some sort of psychotic break. It's not impossible. We have to have that investigated. We can't close out any possibilities, and the police will help us with that."

Jared looked at me, eyebrows raised, like he was counting down the seconds in a cocky manner until he would stop holding himself back to prove a point, and shortly after, I found out that I was right. This man could be read like an open book.

"Try," he challenged me. "Try opening the doors or the windows. Try it."

Confused, I headed over to the door we entered when we got here this morning, and pulled on the knob. It wouldn't budge. Not even a little bit, and it was the same case with the windows. Jared appeared contented that he expressed what he needed to express -- arms crossed in front of him, as he watched we try and fail to get them to open.

"I told you," he mentioned as he watched me return to the group back in the middle of the room. "When the presentation began and the computer started talking, at around 9 am or so, the windows and the door shut, and it was covered over with this thick cloth which also won't budge to dim the lighting. Most of you probably assumed it was to see the contents of the projector better, and thought nothing of it. I would've thought the same. I only noticed because the light was bothering me at the time and the dimming helped me out."

Nova pulled at the roots of her hair. "No--," she denied. At least she tried to. "I've known each of you for the last five years and you're all good people and that includes you, Jayvee, no matter what chaos we had going on between us. There has to be somewhere someone could get a bullet through from the outside."

"Without damaging the glass on the windows, the wall or the wood on the door? Yeah, right," Jared was consistent with his theory, and he honestly had every bit of proof he needed to prove it. Still, that didn't make it any easier to digest.

"Literally everything about this is impossible. His body disappeared, didn't it? So one more thing being impossible doesn't change that much, hm?"

All of us wanted to have faith in Nova's perspective, and I think that included Jared, despite him going on with his side of the matter. We tried to drill it into our minds as fact rather than let ourselves be skeptical about it, but insides our stomachs did front flips knowing that the fishiness of what happened likely did have to be one of us.

"Either way, we have to call the cops or we're going to be locked in here forever. We need them to get us out of here so I'm going to call them, we are going to report it and we are going to cooperate with the authorities. If we don't speak up and there's evidence somewhere out there that gets scratched up from underneath the surface, guess whose going to have to explain the gap on their resume when they get out of prison? Probably all of us, someway or another. You get me? Let's do it the right way, right now."

I spoke fast, hoping that it would be fast enough that my brain didn't even have to fully understand what it was doing when my finger pushed into the numbers on my phone. Cops have always been petrifying, whether that be when you're getting pulled over for a speeding ticket or a heck of a lot worse, and nobody would gladly want to deal with any of it. We do it because we should, and because they should do things properly to show we should trust them, and I was going to hope that they were going to do their job when we needed them.

"Fine, do it," Jared accepted. "But don't expect that they're going to get the answers we want. It's postponed expectations that let us down, and with how peculiar this situation is, you can't even be sure that they're going to listen to us. We'll probably just be getting our hopes up. We were here when everything happened and we don't know anything. What makes you think that they will?"

"I don't. None of us can be sure of that," I replied. "I just think we should tell them before they find out themselves."

Then again, there was a quiet. Nobody moved either, until Jewee, lifting a trembling finger from the rest it had on his desk. He pointed at the puddle of blood, and as calm as calm can exist in a situation like this, we waited until he figured out how he wanted to say what he had to say. It took several deep breaths, lip biting, back-cracking, scab-picking and the like among our circle until we heard him say what he intended to.

"We can figure out first," he muttered in an undertone, and he was right. He most certainly had a point.

Someone's blood should be black.

If a cold-blooded murder didn't turn your blood black, then what would?