Thomas sounded warm and cottony with sleep. “Of course I would.”
TWENTY-THREE
They sat together on the stairs, working through a package of Oreos between them. Rain had left the garden glossy, hedges beaded with diamond drops and the air thick with that dense, clean smell of a freshly washed world. It was a relief to breathe in something that wasn’t the forest—suffocating, cloying, all-consuming. These stairs led to a side entrance into Wickwood and were only used by staff heading to the parking lot, so the boys felt safe in their aloneness. Unwatched.
They should’ve been in the dining hall for lunch, but this was Thomas’s compromise: They’d avoid everyone if Andrew would eat.
He tried. He wasn’t doing this on purpose. He just never felt hungry anymore, and the flood of anxiety about food tasting of mud, of leaves, of the forest made it impossible to even force it into his mouth. It helped that right now he sat on the top step while Thomas was a few steps down from him. Thomas kept his back to Andrew as he bit into an Oreo, inspected it, and then passed it over his shoulder. No eye contact. No confrontation about this anxious, needy habit Andrew had developed. He couldn’t bite into food until Thomas had first.
Even now, Andrew’s tongue searched for the grooves Thomas’s teeth had left behind.
“They keep saying it,” Thomas said.
Andrew looked up from the notebook cradled in his lap. He had a routine: Bite an Oreo, think, then write a line. He was cold, October crawling into his blazer to leave frosty lingering kisses, but he didn’t mind. “Saying what?”
“That I’m a murderer.” He glowered and then twisted to pass back another Oreo, and Andrew leaned forward to accept. “I know Bryce Kane is spreading shit to rile me up, but it feels like… so many peoplewantto think it. Some guys I’ve never even spoken to were talking about me and they didn’t even stop when I walked past. They smirked. They were like, ‘If he’s not guilty then why’s he so twitchy?’ I just—” He stopped abruptly and let the pause stretch for a long minute before he said bitterly, “Maybe we should let monsters eat them. I donotlook guilty.”
Andrew didn’t point out that they did, both of them. A frenetic energy chewed Thomas through every waking moment—he was stretched and harrowed, attention split a thousand ways, always flinching as if he expected a blow, a scream, a knife through his side. Meanwhile Andrew was faded halfway to invisible.
“And Halloween is tomorrow. The monsters are bad enough now, but they’ll be worse then. I know it.” Thomas bit savagely into the next Oreo. “Why can’t you write a story that says ‘and no more monsters manifested out of my goddamn drawings and we all lived happily ever after’?”
“I tried,” Andrew said. “I wrote ‘and all the monsters died’ last night and theydidn’t. I have to tell some sort of twisted, macabre fairy tale. I have to write… suffering. For them, but also for us. I’m not making up the rules, okay? It is what it is.”
Thomas glowered at the crumbs in his lap and said nothing. From this angle, Andrew had a perfect view of the softest curlsat the nape of his freckled neck, the way his shirt tags stuck out at odd angles, the old smear of turquoise paint on his rumpled collar. Thomas, the beautiful wreck. It took Andrew’s mind off the pulsing headache that never, never left. Or how he felt so full that cramming the Oreos into his mouth left his stomach distended.
How he needed to tell someone that something was wrong with him.
See the school nurse.
Call his father.
Get help.
But he didn’t.
He crumbled Oreos into lavender bushes where Thomas wouldn’t see.
Thomas started to say something, stopped with a sigh, and went back to eating.
Silence pulled over them, companionable if a little morose, and Andrew wrote a few more lines of a new fairy tale. Making up stories in the dark with monsters breathing down his neck was the kind of high-pressured environment he hated, so he jotted down a few ideas in the daylight. His phone lay open beside him, unanswered messages to Dove on his screen.
He should give in, let her win, but if this truly was a war over Thomas, Andrew couldn’t just let go and—
“Hey, can we talk?” Thomas still had his back to Andrew, but his shoulders had tensed.
Andrew’s stomach tightened. “Wearetalking.”
Thomas let his head drop and dug fingers through his hair. Andrew was acutely reminded of how many times Thomas hadstarted to speak only to pack everything back inside himself and deflect.
His next words hit Andrew like a fist to the mouth.
“Do you like me?” Thomas said.
No, they couldn’t do this. They had an unspoken agreement tonever do this. Panic clawed up Andrew’s throat and his heartbeat seemed too fast, too loud. What would it even look like, to cut their feelings out, bloody and aching and raw, and compare them? To find they didn’t match. To be left with guts vivisected and no way to sew themselves back up so they looked the same as before.
Thomas would ruin everything. What if he asked for more from Andrew, asked foreverything?
Or what if he asked for it all to stop?
