“I hate this,” Thomas said, his voice cracking. “They’re waiting.”
Andrew tilted his face to the black-painted sky. “So something else is coming.”
“Something worse,” Thomas said.
FIFTEEN
October arrived with cold teeth sharp enough to split bone.
It was early in autumn to be shivering this much, but Andrew never had stamina for the cold. He was too thin these days, he knew, but he couldn’t eat. If he layered up with sweaters and avoided Dove with her sharp perception, he thought he’d get away with it. He figured Thomas wouldn’t notice how much weight he’d lost, not if he was careful to never take his shirt off and show the way the bones seemed ready to cut free of skin.
Thomas was distracted anyway. The first of October had rattled him, and Andrew didn’t want to ask why. They’d stacked themselves into a study nook in the library that afternoon, textbooks and class notes spread across the table. Thomas chewed pencils and drummed on his books and kept accidentally kicking him under the table until Andrew lost patience and stomped on his foot. Thomas settled down with a petulant frown, propped a textbook in front of his face, and started writing.
He needed to focus. Both of them did. They were failing classes, but they didn’tsleep, so how could they survive hours of lectures and assignments? Even without the monsters attacking, they had to check the forest every night and show the trees the sharp edge of the hatchet. Whispers of mocking laughterfiltered through the forest and hot breath licked their necks. But nothing attacked.
Nothing.
Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but Thomas had become a string drawn so tight it took nothing to snap him into a rage or a panic spiral. A classroom door would slam and he’d jump out of his skin. His chest was a broken cage for his emotions, and they spilled out of him like paint.
But Andrew was calm. Maybe it was because he’d grown used to packing his own anxiety into boxes and pasting on wan smiles while on the inside he imploded. Maybe he’d been freaking out for so long it felt normal.
Andrew finished with his revision notes before he noticed Thomas’s pen wasn’t moving from left to right. Andrew sighed and slammed down the textbook Thomas had hidden behind.
“Interesting idea of calculus homework,” Andrew said.
Thomas looked guilty. Inky roses and thorns grew over his workbook page, vicious and cruel and lovely. The thorns curved like hooked scythes, and it looked as if whoever touched that paper would bleed.
“They’re not technically monsters,” Thomas said.
“They’re not helping, either.” Andrew gestured to their mounds of work.
Dove would have had them organized by now. Color-coded schedules. Binders of prioritized assignments. Practice quizzes corrected with her purple gel pens. She never used red because she said it was demoralizing. Andrew tried to explain it wasstilldemoralizing when she wroteNothing You’ve Written Here Even Remotely Makes Sensein the margins.
“Schoolwork seems pointless when it’s, you know, October.” Thomas rested his cheek on a fist and kept drawing. “Halloween month.”
“Halloween is one day. Your country has a weird obsession with it.”
“I just have a bad feeling.”
Andrew slapped his notes over the top of Thomas’s drawing. He received a glare in return, but he didn’t care. “I have a bad feeling about us failing senior year.”
“Who cares.” Thomas started doodling on Andrew’s notes instead. “After this, we should take a gap year. Drive around Australia and surf every beach.”
“You can’t drive,” Andrew said. “Or surf. And if you stand in the sun for five minutes, you scorch like a little tomato.”
“All things I can overcome,” Thomas said in earnest. “I can duct-tape myself to a surfboard and I’ll work on my tan.”
“Isn’t it raining right now?”
“That doesn’t matter. I’ll stand under a big sunlamp.”
“You don’t need a big sunlamp, a short one will do,” Andrew muttered, taking out his laptop.
Thomas gave him a deeply offended look. “That’s enough out of you, or you’re uninvited. I’ll thrive in Australiaalone. Eating Vegemite by thespoonful. I’ll live at your house and go see that big rock you’re famous for.”
Andrew choked. “That’s not how you eat Vegemite. And my dad’s house is in Byron Bay. Uluru is like three thousand kilometers away from there. Have you ever,everlooked at a map of Australia?”
“Stop bringing logic into this…” Thomas trailed off as hefrowned at Andrew’s history notes. He stopped doodling and flipped the page around a few times. “Hey.”
