Cellie's POV
I count things when I need to be somewhere else in my head.
I have done it since I was small, since before I had a name for anxiety or a framework for the particular chaos of my childhood. Numbers are reliable in a way that almost nothing else is. They do not change their minds. They do not contradict themselves. One follows two follows three with a consistency that the rest of the world rarely manages, and when everything around me is uncertain or loud or frightening, I go to the numbers and the numbers hold.
I counted the beer bottles in the supply room that morning the same way I had counted the tiles on the bathroom floor as a child during my mother's worst episodes, the same way I had counted the seconds between my stepbrother Gasper's footsteps in the hallway and the closing of my bedroom door, the same way I had counted the days after they told me my father was dead on a south side road in November.
