Andrew splashed water over his face at lunch and told himself to pull it together. Wait this out. Accusations about his parents would fade because no one had proof Thomas had done anything wrong.
But just to be safe, Andrew used the thin slip of free time during lunch to duck back to their dorm room and burrow around in the dirty laundry until he found that bloodied shirt Thomas had worn on the first day of school. He crouched there, his fingers tracing the brown stains, and told himself this meant nothing. But what if the cops ordered a search of—
Andrew bundled up the shirt and hurried downstairs with it cradled close to his stomach like something wounded, something alive. He burst outside and hurried around the back of the dorms.
It didn’t take long to dig the hole in the damp soil beneath the rosebushes. Muck rimmed his fingernails, stained his palms, but he kept going a little deeper. To be safe. Worms wriggled out of the soft dirt, flexing lurid, pink bodies to tangle with his fingers until he shook them off in disgust. He shoved his hand into the hole for another scoop of dirt—and teeth sank into his palm.
Andrew cried out and tried to jerk his hand free, but it wouldn’t come. For a wild, panicked second he couldn’t thinkpast the pain jolting into his flesh and that claustrophobic feeling of being trapped, needing to get away,get away can’t move can’t move can’t—
The teeth slid out of his skin, smooth as a needle suturing flesh. Andrew snatched his hand from the hole, mud plastered to his palm and beetles crawling over him as if looking for an open wound to burrow into. He wiped them off on his pants, his heartbeat rabbiting in his chest and his breath coming in uneven gasps. He stared at his unblemished skin and then darted a glance into the hole.
Empty. No animal coiled there. Nothing with teeth.
“Calm down,” he hissed to himself, fierce and shamed. He massaged his palm, pain a ghost thing lingering at the edge of his nerves, while his mind folded over those hot seconds of trapped terror as if they didn’t happen. Nothing could have bitten him. There wasn’t even a mark.
He stuffed the shirt into the hole and shoved soft, cloying soil over the top.
Everything would be back to normal soon.
It rained all of the next week.
Thomas left the library when Andrew walked in. He was never in their dorm room. In the afternoons he straight-up vanished. He even managed to leave for the bathroom just as they were being assigned pairs for chemistry lab, and Andrew ended up with someone he didn’t know. He spent the whole time trying to squeeze words through his closed-up throat.
Their week continued like this. Thomas would spend lunchtime in detention for mouthing off at a teacher while Andrew holed up in the library with Dove and listened to her rambling analysis of the book she was annotating for English as if nothing were wrong. At gym, the class divided between swimming and running laps. Andrew ran. Thomas disappeared into the pool.
Homework and extracurriculars devoured the weekend as the intensity of senior year gained momentum. Andrew’s eyes already felt full of paper dust and broken sentences, his assignments slashed in red ink. The gaping hole Thomas left behind was filled with an inordinate amount of study sessions with Dove, not Andrew’s idea of a good time, especially with Dove already sinking into frenzied study fervors and micromanaging his work. He couldn’t even tell her about his fight with Thomas because the words bunched like razors in his mouth.
Maybe Thomas had been right and Andrew was deeply messed up. It had just taken five years for Thomas to notice, and now that he had, he didn’t even want to sleep in the same room.
Every night, Andrew woke alone to silence, Thomas’s empty blankets tangled up and their window open. Dawn would bring wet footprints and leaves tracked across the floor, so it was obvious where he went. He slumped in class with dirt still smudged along his jaw and dark circles under his eyes.
When Andrew noticed Dove looked the same, forest dirt clinging to her shoes as she stifled yawns while they studied—he understood.
Go be with Dove, then.
And Thomas had obeyed.
People only sneaked into the forest at night for one reason.
Andrew kept checking his face in the mirror to make sure nothing showed. To make sure he swallowed his shattered feelings like glass. He rested his palm flat against the mirror and tried to count each of his delicate scars. He didn’t break anything.
He decided, oh so quietly, to avoid them both in return.
Except they didn’t notice his cold shoulder.
He let it stretch a week, then two. He had never been this alone.
On Thursday, Andrew skipped afternoon tutoring on the grounds of having a stomachache—not a lie, since he did feel like he’d swallowed handfuls of cement. No one had spoken to him all day, no one even seemed to see him, so it was with a hollow sense of desperation that he made the call while trudging up the stairs to his dorm room.
He expected to be sent to voicemail or, worse, hear a perky secretary’s voice answer, but for once his father actually picked up.
“Hey, kiddo.” Noise thrummed in the background as if he’d taken the call in a busy office. “Holding up?”
Andrew leaned against the banister, adjusting his heavy armload of textbooks, and breathed in the musky silence. Most students were in after-class extracurriculars, leaving the dorm empty and Andrew the sole specter left to haunt the halls.
“Not really.” Andrew hated how rusty he sounded.
The background noise over the phone grew louder and then dimmed suddenly, as if his father had stepped out of the meeting. He sounded distracted. “It’s not a great time for me right now, kiddo, but how about we pencil in a chat for this evening?”
