"Chino? Chino, man, you alive?"

I look up from my plate of scrambled eggs and toast to meet his questioning gaze. His eyebrows are drawn high in curiosity and a bemused little grin is tugging at the corner of his mouth, exposing the pale white point of a single tooth. My mind goes blank for a moment, my thoughts still wandering somewhere five miles behind; then his words sink in and I answer with a smile, and a small, rolling nod of my head.

"Yeah, I'm cool," I reassure him, just catching the glimmer of skepticism in his smile before I lower my eyes again. I haven't touched the slowly cooling food piled onto my plate. I wasn't that hungry when Stef called me from my bunk to breakfast, and ten minutes spent contemplating the lumpy masses of cooked egg hasn't improved my appetite. I hear him shift across from me, restless, ready to fill the silence that's stretched fine between us like a nylon string pulled tight enough to snap.

"You ever wake up at, like, 4:00 in the morning, and it's too early to get up and you can't fall back asleep, and you just lay there in bed thinking of the weirdest shit?"

"Sure," he answers, easily, without much thought. Chino's being a freak again. Just agree with him and maybe he'll write a song about it instead of launching into one of his bizarre impromptu dissertations that always ends with us contemplating the meaning of our own petty existence.

No such luck.

"Things look at a lot different at 4:00 in the morning. It's like your mind is too tired to remember the way things are supposed to be, so it just starts inventing all these wild ideas... That happens to me a lot. Sometimes, even in the middle of the day. Things just...change.

"Take this fork, for example." I hold the utensil aloft for him to see, carefully poised between thumb and forefinger. "It's just a fork. You eat with it. No big deal." I spin the fork between my fingers, readjusting my grip on it so that my fingers are all wrapped around its handle, with sharply glinting tines pointed down. I glance up again and lock his gaze in mine, making sure I have his full attention. "Who would have thought--"

Smack.

Gasp.

Crunch.

Thud.

"--it could do that?"