Scruby screams when the girl bites off a piece of him. This is his third injury; under the hardness, the soft scarlet flesh peaks through, and blood rushes out to mark their constant victory. Baldy snickers in response, as if he hasn’t suffered the same thing. Scruby still remembered that one time when both side of Baldy was bleeding and he was crying so desperately because he was practically naked. Luckily, the girl hasn’t hurt Baldy in about two weeks, and he has begun to heal, the scabs are slowly disappearing, and new skin is covering up the old wounds as if they never existed. 

Baldy does not talk often, neither does Tieny, yet somehow all of them are just more of afraid of Baldy. Possibly because they’ve all seen him at his worst, and since that moment, they start to have this feeling of sympathy for him, in which he responds with “any goddamn son of b**** who is gonna think I need your help can go to hell!”. Scruby can’t help but feel like it is just Baldy’s way of saying thank you. But Grafton has told him that he is just too naïve because “that dude has no gratitude whatsoever, you are just daydreaming if you think he is ever going to thank us.” There’s no age difference between any of them, however, Baldy has always presented himself as the oldest and possibly the wisest, whereas Tieny, who is the hardest of them all, has never tried to leave to an impression, it is easy to ignore even his existence. 

It had been a week and a half since the girl had taken a bite at any of them before Scruby, which they are thankful for, yet still afraid because they have experienced backlash from these moments of peace. The girl will always hurt them harder; after these times where she seems too occupied with some other business to fidget and get nervous. It doesn't hurt much when she just gets nervous. When Tieny’s sharp edge is forced under their bodies, it doesn’t generate as much pain as being bitten, but when it digs deeper and tries to cut through the flesh attached to the hard shell, the nails begin to screech and make sounds that the girl will never hear. Yet these pains are so shallow compare to the ones they feel when the girl bites on them, their body are literally being ripped apart. Scruby often wonders if the girl hurts as much as they do, when she bites down on her lips and her eyebrows starts to push together to form wrinkles on the middle of her forehead. Scruby wants to ask her if she is hurting too, and why doesn’t she stop biting her nails. The girl never replied, and that question remains as an echo among all of them, when their flesh is ripped out again and again by the not so sharp edge of the girl’s teeth, the never-ending echo flows out of their wound with the blood, yet it is never heard, just like their senseless screams.

After being bitten, Scruby is left alone just like usual. His wounds still has blood seeping through the opening, but the girl does not try to stop it, she merely takes a napkin and presses Scruby not so gently on it, which leaves a red stain that infiltrates even the lowest layer of the paper. He felt drained when she finally lifted up from the paper, and lost his sense of direction. He asks Baldy if he knows where they are, and Baldy whispers the word “a waiting room” as if anybody else could hear them. Scruby understands that something important is about to happen to the girl, yet he cannot help himself but feel detested, “she can’t always take it out on us when she is nervous,” Scruby complains to Baldy as he sense blood coming from deep within him, rushing to the still open wound. Baldy looks at him with uninterpretable expressions, and once again claims his superiority over them by merely stating that Scruby is too young to understand. Scruby still hasn’t figured out how that works, as far as he knows, they were all born in the same time. But Grafton once again reminds him, “yes, but after all, Baldy was the first finger to have been bitten by the girl.”. 

Scruby lies still for as long as the girl was in the waiting room, as the blood has stopped rushing out of his wound. Grafton predicts that a scab will soon form in about two days and that he will have a “vacay” for about one week since the girl will be too scared to touch him again. Scruby doesn’t respond because he feels the girl standing up and walking out of the waiting room, but this time she is forcing her fingers, making it tightly wrapped together, around each other in the shape of a fist, and the arm that holds them is shaking. Scruby has never such strong vibrations as he hugs Baldy and Grafton together with Tieny and Cyclo. It didn’t matter to them that the air was lacking in the fist since they do not need to breath oxygen, but it felt strange for them to be close to each tore like that since the girl often let them keep a certain distance to act well. Grafton was kind and caring enough to not touch the wound on Scruby, but inevitably bumped into the girl one or two times as she was practically shaking throughout her entire body. Scruby could sense it from the flow of the blood under him, it is quick and full of rage, as if the girl’s heartbeat was becoming faster and faster with every step she is taking.

When the fingers could finally relax and shift away from each other, it was done in a slow motion, as if she was grasping something vulnerable in her hand and not just making the shape of a fist. Scruby felt so much better, the blood flow was slowed down and he didn’t have to stick his body to Baldy any more. Just when Scruby thought that everything could be settled, all of a sudden , the girl puts pressure under Scruby’s wound and the blood that just stopped flowing toward the exit once again rushed up and tries to force through the opening between the flesh and nail. Scruby wants to scream as he feels that ripping pain throughout his body once again, and the opening seems to enlarge due to the pressure. He doesn’t understand why she is doing this, as the blood exits once more through the hole in his body, he swears at the top of his lung at the girl because he knows she won’t hear it. Baldy and Grafton are both staring at him now, with the same sympathy and confusion that the others have had when they saw Baldy at his worst. Scruby’s senseless swearing was abruptly stopped when he felt a cold drop of something on his wound, it stings like salt, yet he does not feel any crystalized substance rolling around on his body, instead, it feels like water. That weird fluid keeps falling from nowhere onto Scruby and he tries his best to find its origin or to understand its properties. He looks to Baldy for help. Baldy has restored himself to the same emotionless Baldy, and he answers Scruby with a word he has never heard before. Tears. Scruby understands the word and does not swear at the girl again after that. Her tears mixed with the blood drops from Scruby’s body and for the first time, all of them looked at the girl with eyes of pity. Scruby understood this as even though he was bleeding from the inside, the girl’s bleeding has no exit.