“Eliza sitting naked on a pink towel. So beautiful I could die.
Concentrating, all focused in on her sketchbook, but aw, god ...her tail.
Her cute little tail moving slowly back and forth, making a fan shape in the dirt.
She's the one. She really is. I know that now.”
Keith's indecision about his sexual interest in Chris and Eliza is the motivating factor for much of the chaos of this story. He has always loved Chris but becomes too jealous of her regularly. When he meets Eliza, he loses his mind. He tells himself that he loves her, but the first chance he gets he returns to Chris. Finally, he decides that Eliza is more attractive and a better person, and its the tail the pushes him over the edge.
“That was all I needed when she smiled at me, all the other stupid, ugly stuff just drifted away.”
Keith is too immature to acknowledge that he's a fickle lover. He will profess his love to both Eliza and Chris ad nauseam, but when asked to act upon that profession he fails almost every time. Although a kind and generous person, he's too young to make important choices of this nature. His indecision ends up hurting both of his lovers.
“It was finally all out of me... I was as pure and empty as the flames moving in front of me.”
Chris is especially disturbed by her mutation. When she finally wanders over to "The Pit," she feels some sort of spiritual kinship with the other outcasts around her. She feels that the fire in front of her symbolizes her emotional journey of overcoming her shame due to the disease. She finds her purity again.
“That night was different... there was something pulling me towards him. Something dark and sexy.”
Chris has sex with Rob early in the comics. Although she likes him well enough, she makes no commitment to him. In fact, she believes that somehow he manipulated her into having sex with him in order to infect her with the bug. When she tells Keith about it later, she explains that she felt positively compelled to be with him by an overwhelming attractive force.
