Ugh! My stomach is killing me!"

"That just means the carnitas are working," Alan said.

Smooshy cradled herself next to him on the maroon festooned bedspread. Alan flipped the page of a 4 year old issue of JAMA, from a twine-bound collection Dr. Hackman referred to as his library. Viral had begun to wonder if Dr. Hackman, formerly Professor Hackman of the University of Maryland, was homeless. It would explain the attachment with which he took to Farooq's double, double-bed room. During dinner he'd overheard that Monica caught him trying to order succulents from Amazon.

"Did anyone else feel, um, I don't know, disquieted when Moni...I mean Agent Treyna slapped Dr. Hackman on his bald spot?" Viral asked the others.

"Oh, hell yeah," Alan said, reclining on the bed.

Next to him Smooshy unfurled just long enough to say, "I thought she was going to play him like the bongos.". Smooshy began to move her hips and sing, "La cucaracha, la cuca --- ooooh…". Furling back on to herself she rubbed on her stomach to quell the agitation.

"Could've warned you: you don't have the obliques for that," Alan said.

"Or the voice," someone said from near the bottom of the closet.

Viral pushed himself up on his bed and peered over Alan's size 11 LaMellos. Dressed in what Viral was beginning to understand as his favorite black, kurta t-shirt, Farooq hung his head over folded hands on the floor.

"Even you sounded like you felt the lukewarm heat of that pathetic burn," Smooshy managed to say through a groan.

"You're right," Farooq said, tilting his head back and resting it against the closet's sliding doors. "I've trained my body to focus it's energy inward when I have to really use the bathroom, and someone is in there being super inconsiderate."

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"Who's in there?" Viral asked.

"Plank," said Farooq.

"I didn't even see him come in."

"He came in behind me and went straight to the loo. He's been in there going on 20 minutes."

"Don't let those carnitas win!" Alan shouted.

"What is with you and the carnitas?" Smooshy asked.

"You're the one who said being vegan made your GI strong as platinum."

"This has nothing to do with my intestines and everything to do with the suspect quality of that so-called shredded meat."

"Don't hate the player --"

"I am literally hating the game, cucktard. That pork was strung out gristle."

"I had the pinto beans," Farooq said, removing his black baseball cap and running his hand across his closely cropped head. "If Monica would have bongo'd my dome I would have snapped and bailed out of here ASAP."

"Why can't you leave again?" Smooshy asked.

"It's a long story," Farooq said.

"Till Plank wipes we got nothing but time," Alan said.

"Spin it, Arabian Nights. Aren't your people known for their epic tales?"

"Aren't your people known for their incest and alcoholism?" Farooq said back.

"The Jews or the Irish?" Smooshy asked.

"Exactly," Farooq said.

Her head still buried in a pillow, Smooshy reached behind her and tapped Alan on the knee. Alan put his hand into his pack beneath the bed and removed a pocket notebook and a pen. He clicked the Pen's end, drew a tick in the notebook, checked the time on the room's clock radio, and completed his note.

"So I'm not the only one weirded out by Agent Treyna slapping an elderly man on the bald spot?" Viral asked.

"She had Avril karate chop a white girl in the neck at the college and none of us said anything," Alan said.

"I thought it was theater," Viral said.

"It was," Smooshy added. "But there was something disconcerting about seeing her do that to an older man. Especially one you'd imagine shed want us to respect."

Farooq snorted. Alan's knod asked him to continue.

"Of course she wants us to respect him. She respects him for chrissake," he said. "Like with everything she does, Monica's sending us a message."

"What's the message?" Viral asked.

"Don't be an old white creep," Smooshy muttered.

"That our web traffic isn't safe," Farooq said.

Alan and Viral looked on toward Farooq; even Smooshy opened an eye and arched her neck to listen.

"Someone's watching us," Farooq said. "And the part that makes me nervous is that Monica doesn't appear to know who it is."

Alan, Viral, and Smooshy turned their eyes from Farooq and looked for matching concern in the faces of each other. Someone, Viral hoped, in the glimmer of an eye or in the relaxed movement of a cheeck, would offer the balm that said things were unfolding as they should.

But the butterfly that unwrapped its wings in Viral's vision was turning out to be an origami trap. There was no center to the maze, Viral feared.

In the silence, they simmered, and waited for Plank to flush.