In Stone (4 page)

Everything falls silent between Leah and me. She ditches the cheery yellows and oranges she’s been painting with and starts smearing her canvas with big black streaks. She makes a hissing sound through her bucked front teeth. This is a Leah-ism that tells me something’s up. I watch her through squinted eyes until she gives me a sideways glance.

“What’s going on?”

“Are you still on a social media sabbatical?” she asks after an extra-large slurp of her slushy.

You can go one of two ways when you and your ex-boyfriend share the same social networking site. You can stalk him relentlessly and torture yourself with every movement he makes. Or you can swear off the site until you’ve moved on. I’m not into S&M, so I did the latter.

“Yeah, why?”

She chews on her straw likes it’s a licorice lace. “There’s something I’ve got to tell you about Mark.”

“What?” I prompt when she hisses a second time.

“I’m really sorry.”

“Leah…”

“Word is that Mark is officially cavorting with The Boob,” she replies in one quick burst. A resounding no rings in my ears. For the first time since the almost-corpse incident, I feel the same stab of hurt that had been plaguing me in the park.

The Boob, aka Monica Sparks. We call her The Boob because she has massive jugs. Like, you can see them coming around a corner before you can see her. If she didn’t wear tops that exposed all but her nipples you’d think she had a couple of melons shoved up her shirt. It figures that Mark would replace me with her. 

“But who cares, right? Screw him,”  Leah says. “You were way too good for him anyway.”

“Ironically, if I’d screwed him two weeks ago we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation.” I try to keep the wobble out of my voice. I’m unsuccessful.

“You did not just say that.” Leah shoves my arm. My paintbrush takes a sharp diagonal swerve across the canvas, leaving a thick, impromptu line of red paint in its wake. I imagine this is the shape of the new split in my heart. “The guy is vile. He did you a favor,” she replies with a matter of fact head bob.

I’m almost certain that I would have had sex with Mark, eventually. But he’d dropped the notion out of the blue. I just needed some time to get used to the idea of taking my clothes off in front of him. If he’d waited a couple more weeks I’d have been right there. Probably.

“Beau?”

I’m in a trance. My paintbrush has found a pot of cobalt blue, and I’m pulling it across the canvas so hard that it’s leaving indentations. My brush snaps.

“Easy tiger.” 

“Relationship issues, gargoyle issues…I’m seriously considering joining an Indie rock band,” I conclude, but something I just said makes my face stiffen. My eyes expand as I replay the sentence back in my head.

“What?” Leah laughs. “Did you just say you were having gargoyle issues?”

“What? No. What? I mean, yes…” I splutter. “We all are. As a community.  People stealing our expensive stone statues. Sucks.” Nice save. Not. But it doesn’t matter, because Leah is no longer listening. Something over my shoulder has her undivided attention. Her eyes are wide open, and her jaw is touching the floor. This is generally how Leah looks when she sees obscure trinkets in thrift stores -- or shoes. She gets slack-jaw when she sees killer shoes. I turn to see what she and a number of other girls in the class are staring at.

A new boy.

“Fresh meat.” Leah grins.

New boy stands at the head of the class apologizing for being late. Jan bats away  his apology like she’s batting away a gnat. In art room A2, we’re never late; we’re always exactly where we’re supposed to be at exactly the right time. A Jan philosophy, not one of mine. She wraps her arm around New Boy, and they start chatting quietly amongst themselves. He nods as I suspect she fills him in on art room etiquette; wash your own equipment, don’t start a paint fight, call me Jan not Mrs. on account of my ‘everyone’s equal’ policy, that sort of thing. The light from the projector and the picture of the gargoyle shines on New Boy’s face, covering it  in motley splotches.

“He’s wearing pants,” Leah whispers in my ear. This is somewhat of a phenomenon. We’re in high school; no boy wears pants. Jeans, yes. Pants are practically obsolete unless you’re at a funeral.

“And a jacket.”

“You know I can see him, right?”

“Just saying.” 

New boy smiles a smile that soaks the room in sunlight as Jan smooshes him against her side, wrapping up their talk with her signature glad-you’re-joining-us squeeze. We’ve all had one. Jan claps her hands, and the curious, circulating whispers stop.

“Guys, I want to introduce you to Gray, with an A not an E.” She reaches her arm up and slaps her hand down on Gray’s six-foot-high shoulder. “Gray meet the guys; guys meet Gray.”

He half-waves.

“Just find yourself a seat and get your art on,” she enthuses with an Elvis inspired jut of her hips.

“Score!” Leah squeaks into my ear. I know I should agree with her. He has twinkly blue eyes and a smile that requires sunglasses. His perfectly right-angled face should be in the movies or on billboards in Time Square, not wasted in the tiny town of Plumbridge. So why can’t I agree? Something about him makes me shift in my seat. Gray with an A looks at me. A wave of acknowledgment adjusts his features, and he starts walking over.

“Erm...do you know this guy?” Leah mumbles.

“Definitely not.” 

“Hi there.” He has an accent.

“Hi?”

“Gray, with an A, but then I guess you already know that.” New guy smiles and offers me his hand. I take it and shake it. His grip is tight, tight enough to rearrange my fingers into a pile. And he’s not in any rush to let go of me. Maybe it’s a European thing.

“Nice painting.” He flicks his eyes toward my canvas. I look skeptically at the three lines of blue paint, and the one obviously out of place red lightning bolt that’s smeared across my canvas. There’s every chance he’s mistaken the mess of lines for modern art.

“Er…thanks?” He sounds sincere, but I can’t push past suspicious. My shoulders rise and my back stiffens.

“She’s going through a minimalist phase, right Beau?” Leah prompts as the seconds of silence amble on by.

“Yeah.” I have to force -- really force a smile. A hot flush comes from nowhere and makes my skin damp. Before I can check myself I’m jumping up off my stool. Gray hops back like I just took a bite out of him. “I have to...I...” I don’t offer anything more, because I don’t have anything more to offer. I need some air or some cold water. In a fluster I grab my bag and scoot out of the classroom.

“You know what would make you feel better?” Leah announces as I dab my face dry with a paper towel. Morning classes are still in session and the girls bathroom is deserted.  Leah came to find me after I’d bolted. She doesn’t ask what prompted my hasty retreat. I’m grateful because I don’t have an answer. She sits on the sinks, kicking her legs back and forth and twisting a paper towel into a rosebud. 

“A lobotomy?”

“There’s that, or as a cleaner, more legal alternative, you could change your mind and come camping this weekend.”

“Cleaner? No. Legal? With your friends from the ‘Rock and Rave’…really?” Leah shrugs indifferently, because she knows I’m right. But she doesn’t want to rag on her hardcore drinking buddies. Which is fair enough. But still, it’ll take me hours to convince mom just to let me go. And then it’ll be an entire weekend of fending off advances from tattooed guys with names like Killer and Skull. Not to mention all the holding back of Leah’s rainbow hair while she simultaneously weeps and throws ups Jello-shots.

“You suck,” she jokes, jumping down off the sink. I wonder how the five-inch heels of her shoes don’t snap when they connect with the floor.

“You’ll get over it.”

DARK IS DESCENDING BY
the time school lets out. Streaks of deep indigo color the sky. A double dose of Math class has stolen all my energy, so the walk home is less of a walk and more of a snail-paced shuffle. My breath is visible in the early evening air. I pull my coat tighter and watch the paint-splashed toes of my Docs as I plod over pavements. I decide to take a shortcut via the Switch, a skinny alley that cuts through a bulk of houses.

As a general rule, nobody walks the Switch on account of the overgrown nettle bushes, a pungent aroma of foot infection, and a collective fear of encountering something feral. However, the Switch shaves at least ten minutes off my journey, and lately I don’t trust the dark. I blame my encounter with the almost-corpse, two nights ago. Before then the dark was just a natural progression; something to be slept in, a different color in the sky. Now, shadows make me jump, and the dark carries a silence that makes me think of funerals. It breathes life into creatures that had always been safely contained behind a TV screen. I make my way down the Switch, striding over vicious flora and trying to ignore the occasional nip that sinks straight through my jeans.

“Hey, Beau!” A voice from behind startles me. When I turn, Gray is jogging in my direction, thwarting thorn bushes with his bare hands. “I was looking for you.”

The hairs on the back of my neck bristle. My hand is in my pocket, and my fingers are wrapped around a slender cylinder of pepper spray as he reaches me.

“Well you found me. What’s up?”

“There’s something I need to ask you,” he says sheepishly. He hammers his toe against the ground, grinding it nervously into the dirt and crushing several stems of dandelion into gold dust. He giggles; it’s a soft, sweet sound that suffocates my hostility. He reminds me of Mark moments before he’d asked me out on our first date. Maybe this guy could be the one to liberate me from my social network sabbatical. Maybe my slightly-too-heavy eyeliner and my reputation as the mortician’s daughter hasn’t freaked him out.  

“Really?” Surprise raises my pitch. “What’s that?” The pepper spray is abandoned in my pocket.

“Where’s the knife?” he replies, snatching my throat and slamming my back up against the concrete wall. It’s so forceful, so hard, that my spine ripples. Red flashes across my vision. The muscles in my neck go slack, and my head flops forward. He stabs his thumb up under my chin, forcing me to look him in the eye. His eyes are like the moon; cold, giant circles of icy-silver. But a change in his eye color is nothing in comparison to the change happening on either side of his head. I don’t understand it. It makes me wonder, briefly, if what I’m seeing is a side effect of the migraine pills Leah slipped me at lunch. Gray is growing horns. Giant grey horns that slide out of the side of his skull and then curl like springs around his ears. They’re animal.

Regardless of what I’m seeing and why, Gray is killing me. I’m dying. My heart starts ferociously hammering out beats in a desperate attempt to pump the depleting supply of oxygen around my body. I kick out, try to land one of my Docs in that squishy, sensitive spot on his shin. But he steps up, shoving his chest into mine and catching my legs in between his. His teeth clamp together tight. I try tearing at his constricting fingers, clawing, pinching, nipping. But it’s all useless. He’s got me.

“Where is the knife?” He snarls and gives me a sharp shake. I flop about like a marionette on the end of his arm. My larynx is crumbling under his hands. Even if I wanted to answer him I couldn’t.

“Answer me,” he demands. Terror gives way to an inappropriate wave of frustration. I think ‘dick’ so loud that I worry he might hear it. I know which knife he’s talking about, but surely he must realize that I can’t answer him until he loosens his grip on my voice box. There’s no room for silky-soft air to slip out, let alone big, bulky words. He forces his thumb up further into my throat, challenging my skin not to pop under the pressure.

“She can’t very well answer you while you’re squeezing her windpipe now can she?” A new voice chirps in. A British accent, so plummy it belongs in a pie. At least this guy has half a brain.

“You found me then?” Gray replies. His words are coated in a dull fizz.

“Let her go.”

“I can’t do that,” Gray says, his teeth still locked. Horns still hanging out of the sides of his head. He keeps his eyes fixed on me. “Does she have it? She does, doesn’t she?” A psychotic-inspired jerk is pulling up the side of his top lip. “You know, we could share it. You and I would be unstoppable.”

“Is that what you said to Nicholas right before you killed him with it?”

“Typical Jack, completely missing the point. He’s dead. Dead. Such  a phenomenon cannot be ignored. Imagine what we could do with this kind of power. Don’t tell me you’ve never wondered what it would be like to sit at the top of the food chain. This is a gift.”

“Immortality is our gift.”

“Was, brother…”

“Dismissing another’s death as if it were nothing, talk of food chains and power. Look at yourself. I don’t know this person you have become…we are not brothers. You’re a stranger to me.”

I have no idea what they’re harping on about, and to be honest I don’t care. Against my will my fingers stop scratching at Gray’s. My shoulders slump. My lungs, I’m pretty certain, have shriveled to the size of raisins. I’ve deflated like a balloon blown up a decade ago.

Stay awake! Beau you have to stay awake.