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i.
The first time Shauna let Jeff fuck her without a condom after they got back, she maneuvered them so that her face was buried in a pillow, where he couldn’t see her bite her lip so hard it bled or hear how wet her uneven gasps sounded.
This is fine. You’re fine, she repeated to herself. This was just one more thing Jeff never needed to know she struggled with, one more thing to get the fuck over.
Come on, Shipman. The odds of getting pregnant are miniscule. And you have options and help if it does happen. You want his name, you’re going to have to get used to this eventually.
Still, it was impossible for her to get into it. Her hands had been steady on the knife (well, except for Nat, but that was because she hadn’t been meant to do it. It was just another sign. Stop thinking about it ), but they were shaking now.
Jeff was starting to leak now, his loud pants almost loud enough to cover hers. The growing wetness inside caused a new round of unease. Her internal chant of it’s not blood it’s not blood itsnotblood only did so much to calm her down, when the reality wasn’t much better for her.
The last of her meager arousal had faded away, and she was somewhere outside of herself again. Inexplicably, she heard a whisper of wind, and Lottie’s voice as if from a distance, asking what do you hear? What do you feel?
Well, she felt Jeff’s hands, fumbling even now in his best attempts at getting her off. Before, it was so easy to come with him, something about the taboo of it all. Now, it was, well…earnest.
It was fine, he was close, and then it would be over, and she would have proved to herself she could do this. It wasn’t the first time a girl had faked it with a man, or even with Jeff specifically. Jackie faked it every time.
This, of all things, was what finally made Shauna regain a grip on herself, because she could never stop getting herself twisted up where Jackie was involved. But maybe this was right, that Shauna be as dissatisfied with Jackie’s boyfriend as she had been. Jackie couldn’t, so she would have to experience the pleasure, and the mediocrity, for her. Yes, she wanted Jeff’s name to regain some anonymity, but also, one of them was always supposed to carry it. She could do this small thing for her.
Determined anew, resolutely ignoring the actual feeling of Jeff’s skin on hers, Shauna forced her grunts and gasps to twist into moans, feeling the phantom of Jackie’s air in her lungs, pushing the sound out of her vocal chords, so that the sound belonged to both of them.
“Oh, oh, oh,” panted the girl under Jeff, and it didn’t matter, for a second, who or when she was. She was alive, and would live for both of them, pink and green and just pushing the edges.
Finally, it was over, and she gave Jeff the enthusiastic reassurances she knew he needed to hear but pleaded at tiredness to get him to shut up. She curled up under his arm, turned away from him, and imagined Jackie in the space where he was, lying in bed with her as they had at sleepovers as little kids, or in the early days after the crash.
Eventually, though, Jeff slid into a true sleep, and his deep snores were impossible to imagine as Jackie’s. Reality came creeping back in, and Shauna became uncomfortably aware of the come still dripping down her thigh, starting to dry. Slowly, careful not to wake her lover, she got out of bed and slipped into the bathroom.
She quickly and methodically washed away the wetness on her legs, sticking her fingers up to clear as much out of her as she could as well, but she knew it wouldn’t actually change anything. Still, she wanted it out of her, the past and the present, wanted all of it except Jackie gone, even as she knew that this life, the potential of future life, was the least she owed Jackie. She just didn’t know if there was space inside her for all of it anymore, him and her and who she used to be and who Jackie would have been, too, and who Shauna could be, and what they could create.
She just needed more space, and some clarity. And Jeff was sound asleep. She hadn’t purposely cut herself in this way since she was 13, but her hands remembered the movements. Jackie had been the one to notice, then, but she wouldn’t now. The only one who could see was Jeff, and he probably wouldn't notice one more line amongst the others, wouldn’t know how to say anything if he did.
Shauna’s hands never shook around the blade. Steady hands, steady mind. A moment of pain, but less severe than she remembered it being. The moment of clarity like a breath of fresh air. Blood on her thighs, wetness dripping down, but she was in control. This was her role, this was what she was good at. Bloodletting to let the sickness out, to leave space in her for the good.
A moment more, and she got up. Cleaned the razor. Cleaned her leg, bandaged it. Washed her hands. Glanced in the mirror for the first time since coming into the bathroom, quickly looked away. She was in control. She was fine. Jeff didn’t even stir when she slipped back into bed.
ii.
When Taissa moved into her freshman dorm, she did the three and a half hour drive from New Jersey to Howard with her parents, squeezed next to Van in the backseat except when they were taking turns driving, the two of them determined to make the most of their last time together for a while. While Taissa had made the decision to take her spot at Howard as soon as possible after they got back, Van had made no efforts to reach out to any colleges interested in her before the crash, spending most of her time working or at Taissa’s house.
Despite the weight of all the things left unsaid, about the wilderness, about the difficulties of parting for a significant time since then, the road trip had been exciting, fun, and blissfully normal, like something they would have done if everything had gone as planned.
Now, going back for her senior year, Van was gone, even if she was still just across town (would she never leave and move on —no, Taissa was not thinking about her), and with most of her stuff stored in DC, it made no sense for Taissa to expect her parents to embark on a long road trip when they were both swamped at work, no matter if they said they would be more than happy to go.
No, she had to get over this fear sometime, and this was a tame trial run, all things considered. The flight was less than an hour and a half, hardly enough time for anything to go wrong, or for her to fall asleep. And it was hardly comparable, because this was a commercial, routine flight, and that had been Lottie’s dad’s private plane.
Taissa’s parents had won the argument over driving her to the airport, but lost the argument to come inside with her. She was 23 years old, she could navigate an airport herself, just like a normal 23 year old.
By the time she was in her seat on the plane, she was extremely wired up, and also so bored from all the waiting she almost forgot to be afraid. She popped a piece of gum in her mouth for something to focus on, and after realizing she was fiddling with the rope bracelet around her wrist, harshly enough the skin underneath was red, she pulled out a book to at least attempt to read. She ended up reading the same page about Harry Potter’s name coming out of the Goblet of Fire at least ten times, yet had no idea what happened in the scene.
She was relieved when takeoff actually began, because at least then she had something to think about, namely keeping her breathing steady and not looking out the window or thinking about how high they had gotten. Her stomach wouldn’t stop lurching, and her jaw was starting to ache from how hard she was chewing on the gum. But eventually they leveled off, and she was able to unsteadily begin to breathe again, forcefully forcing her clenched hands open.
You are being ridiculous. Millions of people fly on planes every day, and nothing bad happens. You are more likely to die in a car crash. Rationality wasn’t helping, try as Taissa might. That was fine. Where logic wouldn’t succeed, determination and spite would. Also, the inability to get off the plane at this point (ha, maybe she should try skydiving, make this feel easy in comparison), so she might as well have some dignity about the experience.
Somewhere on the plane, a baby started to cry. A couple nearby was arguing. A man a few rows ahead was harassing a flight attendant, whose professional expression was on the verge of turning murderous. A white woman across the aisle and a few seats back was loudly espousing vile political rhetoric to a friend, while shooting suspicious glares Taissa’s way during the breaks in her rant.
Taissa turned back to her book and smoothed out her expression. Polite smile on her lips, hiding the gritted teeth. People were always good for one thing–-they were eager to provide fuel for a temper, and anger and annoyance were easy emotions to lean into. She never relaxed fully, but she managed to drown out the screaming (and the fire and the blood and the blank eyes and the never-ending feeling of falling —) with the sounds of irritable life around her.
The 1.5 hours stretched and stretched, her control over her mannerisms stretching thin as she forced herself to be normal, be normal, at least look normal, just a little longer , but finally, finally the landing sequence started. She barely had time to start panicking and rapidly swallow back her vomit before they were touching ground. Somehow, somehow, Taissa resisted the urge to bolt off the plane, feeling sweat slowly drip, drip, drip down her neck as the flight crow finished doing whatever they needed to do. She even resisted the urge to push aside the other passengers on the plane on her way off, instead calmly, calmly waiting her turn to get off, like a girl who hadn’t eaten her friends while living in the woods for a year and a half.
When Taissa finally, finally stepped outside of the airport, her whole body was buzzing with adrenaline, like she had just finished playing a game (or was in the middle of the hunt— no ), and she wanted nothing more than to run 5 miles. She was terrified and exhilarated and breathlessly alive as she hadn’t been in so long, and for a moment she understood everything and herself, honed around the single point of her heaving chest, acute fear, and widening grin.
She could do this. She had done it, alone, and she would do it again. She would take 10 flights, 100, 1000, to regain this feeling, to master this fear. Nothing had made sense, and now it did. This is real. I am so afraid, and so awake, and this is real.
iii.
It wasn’t even an issue at first. Not even an it’s-an-issue-but-she’s-handling-it, like so many things were and continued to be. They were alive and they were home, what more could Van ask for? So many of the others weren’t, she nearly hadn’t been so many times. Plus, the scar was so much better than it had been. Most importantly, she already knew Tai loved her and didn’t mind.
There were so many parts of her life she didn’t easily fit back into, already. She could never again be the relaxed, chill friend watching your back, because all of the relaxed parts of her now had no give. She had lost the capacity to see her protection as a game or have any mercy in it. Those she protected were few and she was an iron wall behind them, impenetrable and unbreakable.
It was only as the others started to break off that she started to realize the faults in her build. That she may be a wall, but that the others were load-bearing support. First Lottie disappeared, into herself and then into Switzerland. Shauna faded into an unrecognizable version of herself, stubbornly resuming life-as-normal, but playing the roles of both herself and Jackie. Nat and Travis were in their own world, doing their best to make sure their brains wouldn’t be capable of remembering what had happened in ten years. Misty…well there was no reason to deal with her once they were back. Only Taissa stayed, and only she made sense.
They were open, now, where before they were too afraid. Their old fears were insignificant in the face of everything. When Van was with Taissa, she fit into her old life and her new life. This was as natural and right as it had always been, and required no explanation for the ways she was different now. With Tai, she could go back to the way things had been before without hiding who she was now.
But Tai had never been satisfied with things staying as they were. She wanted more, and her ambition was always something Van had loved. She couldn’t understand the desire to uproot her life again so soon, but she supported Tai anyway. But little by little, Tai did what the others had: built up a wall, brick by brick, between herself and Van, between herself and the girl in the woods. She polished her explanations about what happened, turned in essays about “growing from the trials of that experience,” started talking about the lessons she took away from it all.
There were no lessons. There was Here and There, and the same rules didn’t apply. Sure, they dragged things back with them, the trauma, the protectiveness, the paranoia. A very noticeable scar on the face, a new fear of fire, a rope bracelet. Lessons in how to survive, maybe. Not lessons in how to succeed in college coursework or a high-paced work environment.
It was bullshit, plain and simple. If Taissa wanted to package her story prettily for the masses, Van would not serve as a pretty prop for the tale. So it ended, and Van suddenly found herself adrift again. A wall protecting nothing within.
All of them, so insistent on moving forward, continuing on like it hadn’t happened, hadn’t ripped their identities to shreds and made them rewrite their fundamental selves and beliefs. Like it hadn’t forced them all to learn the answer to what would you do if…?
That’s when it started, though she didn’t realize at first. It wasn’t like she had been vain to begin with or cared about checking how her outfit looked that often. So she hadn’t looked in the mirror in a while, but did it matter. It wasn’t that she avoided looking at reflective surfaces, she was just focused on where she was going when she passed them. She’d rather pace than stand in one place in the bathroom while brushing her teeth, anyway. When she ducked her eyes in public restrooms, it wasn’t to avoid the mirror, it was to avoid accidental eye contact and risk inviting a conversion.
She only realized how big of an issue it was when her mom gasped, out loud, when she came downstairs after cutting her own hair. She hadn’t gone to a salon since returning, not trusting a stranger that close to her with a blade, so Taissa had done it. Without Taissa, she decided she could do it alone, but she hadn’t wanted to see it as she did it. She figured a straight cut couldn’t be that hard, anyways.
Truthfully, she didn’t want to face herself, who she had become. She had lost the shelter of familiarity when she broke things off with Taissa, the last connection between Van-Before, and Van-During. She had no idea what Van-After even looked like, though, and where before the scar was just a part of her, now it was just another mark of how estranged she was from everything. The scar made no sense in Wisayok. It belonged to the wilderness and its people, all of whom were gone from her now.
Her mom insisted Van had to let either her or a professional fix it. A blind, animal panic entered Van’s mind at the idea. All it would take was a slight movement, purposeful or accidental, and she could be dead or scarred anew. But if her mom, who spent half her life passed out, was concerned, she knew she had to fix it.
The first few steps were easy: wash her hair, brush it out. Open the drawer, get out the scissors, rinse them off. Now look up.
Not much, just enough she could see the ends of her hair. A flash of red, then blue. She dropped her eyes, and the scissors clattered into the sink. Goddamn idiot. You can survive a horror movie, and can’t even look in the mirror over a year after being rescued.
She forced herself to try again. Knuckles white on the sink, dragging her eyes up bit by bit. First the heaving of a chest, the twitch of a tensing shoulder, a curve of pale neck. Then her lips, and the scar on the cheek. She forced herself to not look down, to stare until her vision blurred. It was nothing, nothing at all. It was already over.
A Herculean effort, and blue eyes met blue. Look no further up, no need to see the scar above. In the mirror, a girl who still couldn’t seem to put back on all the weight she lost in the woods. Frankenstein scars still pink, eyes shot from starting so hard, hair a choppy mess, like someone took a knife and started hacking.
For a moment, she saw herself as she never actually did, half of her face a bloody gap, eye blood red like a demon's, looking more like a monster than a girl. She saw herself with devotion in her eyes and no shame in her heart, adapting because that was the only thing to do.
She blinked, and she was just a goalie again. Scarless and round-cheeked. Who she was before, when life was better. When everything wasn’t such a mess, when the only lie she had to tell was about her sexuality. When the world itself didn’t seem so awful.
She lifted the scissors. She’d always kept her hair long, but after the mess she made earlier, it was easier to start fresh, so she made the first cut at chin-length. Once she had committed, there was no turning back. As she cut, red ropes of hair fall to the floor until she was surrounded by them. Better to let it all go. Better to not think about it.
She never broke eye contact. If she looked at the eyes and the hair and ignored all the rest, it was almost normal. They had been great once, she had been great, but she would settle for normal.
She would look herself in the eye and she would learn how not to flinch. This was what she knew how to do: ask the question, what would you do if…? And then do what had to be done.
iv.
The first time she and Travis imploded after they got back, Nat fucked off for a weekend in the city. A weekend stretched into a week, into a month, a year, and she never wanted to leave.
Things were easier in the city.
No one knew her there. No mother, no teammates, no former school friends. The rescued New Jersey soccer team just wasn’t that important to the other people in the city, sorry, especially when actual celebrities were walking down the same blocks. She got lost in the throngs of people, savoring the anonymity, the sense of absolute insignificance.
The sounds of the city were completely distinct from those of the woods, too. Cars honking, people shouting, sirens wailing, electricity humming; they made it impossible to forget where she was or to think she was back in that isolation. There was constant manmade activity where before there was stillness and the quiet of nature (especially that of winter—in summer, there had been wind through leaves, birds chirping, animals calling to each other; in winter, there was only the crunch of snow and ice beneath her feet, the harsh hiss of wind amongst barren branches).
At home, there was green everywhere—parks and lawns and woods adding brightness and color to the former industrial town. Here, she could avoid seeing more green than a single tree every few feet with barely any effort, could keep her feet on solid, concrete ground with no give (the city promised not to yield to her as the wilderness had, thank God—but she wasn’t thinking about that). There were hardly even true seasons in the city—it got hotter, and colder, then warm again, but that was it. Sure, there were a few leaves in Autumn, and some snow in Winter, but none of it stuck, not like in the woods or in Wisayok. It was, in that way, timeless, consistent, and completely distinct from the wilderness.
She didn’t have to worry about messy history with the people she hooked up with in the city. No messy issues like eating his younger brother together, or having fought for control over their accidental, unwanted cult with her. None of the understanding that came with that history, either, but that was ok. That wasn’t the point of this.
And, as Nat quickly learned, the city had easy access, all the time. It was easy to get into bars, even with her shitty fake from Before. It was easy to get a new one, once that one finally got taken. It was easy to find people willing to buy a pretty girl a drink or two. Easy to get access to drugs she would never have considered in Wisayok, or had never heard of.
In the city, it was to lose herself in it all. It was easy to forget.
The first time she overdosed, it might have been on purpose. It might have also been a mistake. She wasn’t really certain–that had been the point. Plausible deniability. Who was she to throw away the sacrifice that had ensured she would live? Who was she to break her promise? So she could never have done something with intent. So it had to be something passive, something that could be an accident.
On the other hand, Nat was, if anything, a survivor. Always clinging to life when she really should have died, always letting someone else die in her place, their blood on her in the aftermath. Every experience in her life had told her that when it came down to it, she would end up fighting her death every step of the way. So it also had to be something that drained her of the fight, that she could lull herself into.
So she got so high there was no longer any intention behind her actions, except maybe more, and she did it all the time, convincing herself and those around her it was normal . And she never took note of her limits. Just a stupid, fucked up party girl.
Of course, at some point she got unlucky (or lucky–who was to say?) and finally took too much. But she was fortunate (unfortunate?) enough to be around people who were coherent enough and kind enough to notice and get her care. So Natalie Scatorccio survived impossible odds, again.
She even got to go on another nature retreat because of it! Who could ever be so lucky as her.
The rehab clinic was supposed to help. Remove the bad influences, the environment, and most importantly, the source, by getting all the poor druggies away from the big, bad city.
At first it wasn’t so bad. The pain and sickness as she detoxed was so incredibly overwhelming she could think of nothing else, and the pounding in her ears loud enough to drown out everything else.
Eventually, she recovered enough physically to register her surroundings on a consistent basis. It was a truly lovely rehab clinic, funded by the kind and concerned people of Wisayok (the last time they would ever fund it—traumatic experiences only got you so much pity and charity). Open, airy halls filled with kind staff. Windows overlooking beautiful mountains and forests. Plenty of outings in nature, therapy based around mindfulness and reconnecting with the inner self and outer world.
It was, of course, nothing like Before. The interior was nothing like the cabin, and even the forest outside looked nothing like their wilderness. This was the northeast Appalachians; even the soil type was different. Most of Nat knew this. She had always been practical, after all.
The staff was much more interested in talking to her about the other part of her. The part that made her spend as much time as she was allowed in her room, that avoided looking out the windows. The part that constantly jumped and longed for something to take the edge off, so she could relax for just one moment. The part that made her lash out at the fellow patients, seeing them all as a threat.
She refused to call it fear. It wasn’t fear, it was anger at the stupidity and unfairness of the world. And it was caution, because caution was needed in a place like this, as experience had told her, even if those around her didn’t realize it. A place isolated in nature, filled with dozens of people with an emptiness inside them, who had already gone to desperate lengths to fill it artificially? Who now had a new kind of hunger in them, kept from what they yearned for by nothing more than some staff and some distance? All that truly held them back was a lack of imagination, encouraged by an acceptance of societal expectations. Nat knew how thin a barrier that was.
So she stayed on edge, and she avoided looking outside, or interacting with the others. She watched those around her for how they, as mostly normal people, dealt with the situation and eventually got out. She remembered, sort of, how Nat-of-Before might have reacted, what she might have said. She started by parroting lines, and realizing that wouldn’t work, started to fake a narrative of a slower recovery and path to self-discovery. She could be what they wanted her to be if that’s what it took.
Eventually, they let her out, fully recovered. Travis picked her up, to her surprise. When she had been moved to the clinic, she had thought her mother had arranged for the stay, but that had been the scraps of childish naivete. Of course it had been him.
She had no intentions of staying sober when she got out, but he was so tentatively proud, so awkwardly supportive, she decided to give it an honest try, for a bit. It lasted until Javi’s birthday.
Maybe the next time she was in a rehab clinic, she would mean the words she said. Maybe the next time, she wouldn’t find a way to survive it. But Nat was a liar and a survivor—she highly doubted it.
v.
When they were rescued, when they boarded that plane and flew off and didn’t go up in a fiery blaze like Laura Lee, Lottie felt her connection to the Wilderness—disappear.
She had thought it was gone before, when It chose Natalie instead of her. But she must have been wrong, as she was wrong about so many things, because that was quiet, and this was a void.
It wasn’t even anything so dramatic as a snap or an unwinding, nothing she could have likened to a physical phenomena. It was just there one moment and gone the next. Trying to remember how it had gone, how it felt when it had been there, where it had gone missing from, was as elusive as trying to remember how it felt to be a baby. Her time as the chosen leader had been like being in the womb: total protection, total connection. Then she had been its newborn, still cradled close and nurtured. But to ask her now, as a woman near 20 in the real world, to explain or accurately recall those times was impossible.
So it all felt a little unreal, and she doubted if It had ever been there at all. Wouldn’t she have known, wouldn’t It have told her, or at least Natalie, that rescue had been coming? Wouldn’t It have prepared her better for leaving Its embrace?
If she had made it all up, then all she had told them to do, all she had said as Its voice—. She didn’t know, she didn’t know, shedidntknow. Better not to speak then, better not to share what she had known as truth once, in case she was wrong. (Or in case this wasn’t the rescue they thought, if this was all wrong, and the Wilderness was silent for another reason, some part of her whispered).
Lottie had a lot of experience at being quiet. Silence was a well honed habit of the Matthews family, especially in her childhood. Speaking up had never gotten her anywhere good, until she joined the team. And even then she was quiet, until the crash made her forget all of her hard-learned lessons on how to survive.
So the silence worked for her, even as her friends distanced themselves from her, seemingly relieved for the proof it was all just because Lottie was crazy. She stayed silent through doctors appointments and family meals and attempted interviews, stayed silent even as she was locked away, as far from It in the cold stone walls as she could get. They gagged her when they started the electroconvulsive therapy, probably to save her tongue, but it felt unnecessary. The only sounds she would make with or without a gag were those she couldn't help, and losing a tongue would make avoiding those easier.
Depending on how you looked at it, the ruination or the solution to the silence came with the clarity of the pain. It shocked her system every time, enough to almost put her back into the worst moments of adrenaline from the Wilderness, enough to force her into a half-awake state. She didn’t doubt herself then. The half of her sent tumbling back to the Wilderness was perhaps not confident that she was always right, but devastatingly sure of where to look for answers. And the half of her shoved cruelly to awareness in the present knew that she was a case study, locked away until repaired, and knew that she should want to get free of it.
This clarity started to last longer and longer, as her body began to associate the pain and adrenaline with needles and constraints and electricity rather than falling and fire and hunts. (So in a way, the treatment worked, a part of her thought with a fair share of irony.) The clarity lasted long enough to start to notice her surroundings again, including her roommate.
Later, she would think this was where her new beginning and purpose began. Much later, she would think this was where she doomed them again. But it was never in Lottie’s nature to ignore someone she could help.
It started with touch. A touch on the wrist, the shoulder, the chest, just to help ground her. It seemed to make it worse rather than better sometimes, at first. But like a shy dog, she slowly warmed up to her. She stopped fighting Lottie off and sometimes even seemed to lean into it. If it didn’t help her, it didn’t seem to make things worse either.
But touch was only a temporary relief, clearly. Lottie had been docile all the way through, but her roommate thrashed and snarled and fought, so she was often sedated before treatment, and as a result could never breach the surface of her own mind.
Lottie knew she needed to help her out, because it was the right thing to do and because she knew she could. She could help pull her out of herself, to take that first clawing breath of air, so that the doctors would finally offer her true help, and then the other girl would be able to follow the rest of the way herself. She just needed to get her that far.
The first time she tried, she couldn’t get the words all the way out. She hadn’t spoken in so long that they came out jumbled, creaky and quiet. Luckily, her roommate barely even seemed to notice that they were an attempt at speech, lost as she was in the depths.
But she got better, remembered how it felt to speak and feel the words vibrate all the way through her with the strength of their truth and sincerity. The words smoothed back out, and with it her thoughts. It didn’t matter if anything was real, except for herself, the person she touched, and the chance for healing that connection offered. Her thoughts, her touch, her words—they could heal. They could lead people to the light, help them to see what was best for them. Helping people like that, guiding them--that couldn’t be wrong. And she knew it was true because her roommate calmed, even smiled, when she heard Lottie's words.
“They can make you better. The same way that they helped me.”
+1
As Misty stared into the fire at Lottie’s purple paradise of healing, she was of course aware that the situation was extremely fucked. Lottie was out of her mind again, there had been multiple murders in the last few weeks, and they were actively pretending to go along with the plan to commit at least one more.
But…Natalie was here and they were friends for real this time. And the others had come to her for help, looked to her for answers. And Walter…he had no reason to get involved, but he was here helping, and he seemed to understand her like no one else really did.
So it might seem like they were back there, but it was different this time. This time, she had friends and they had help. It would be different. And, once they got through this crazy fake hunt and got Lottie the help she needed, it might even be good. So Misty was nervous, but she wasn’t truly scared, not knowing she wasn’t alone anymore. And she wouldn’t be again.