Andrew dragged on an undershirt fast. “Yep. You go ahead. I need to find Lana and ask her something.” He knew Thomas wouldn’t offer to come if it was to do with Lana.
Thomas frowned, but he only said, “Meet me in the auditorium?”
First, Andrew needed to search the art classroom.
Then he needed to find a sharp knife.
It only took a press of fingertips to wood and the library door swung open. Normally the lights stayed on until 8:00 p.m. for independent study, but tonight everyone was up at the main school for the dance. The library should be locked, but Andrew stepped inside and the darkness greeted him, inky and black and forever.
He felt his way upstairs, cursing his lack of a flashlight. He could barely see his feet, and it made him agonizingly aware of everything else. The utter silence. The fresh dampness of the air, like the forest after rainfall. How the carpet felt like moss.
Inside him, vines stretched.
Upstairs, he put his hand to the wall and felt his way to the end. The art classroom would definitely be locked, but he was desperate enough to try kicking the door in if he had to. Add property damage to his list of sins. It was too late for remorse.
But the door gave at his touch. Something broke and fell from the knob as he pushed, and he frowned. Rope? It wasn’t until the door stuck and wouldn’t open wider and he had to squeeze through the gap that he understood what had been tangled in the lock.
Vivid, green vines.
He hit the light switch.
One bulb lit up in the center of the room and flickered a melancholy dance that barely cut the gloom. He recoiled, his back hitting the wall as the urge to cry out rose up his throat.
The forest was here.
It was impossible, it brokehis whole mind, but inside the room grew a wonderland of trees and vines and lush greenery.Vines crawled over the windows and fungi flourished over the desks. Tree trunks shot from carpet to ceiling, their branches cramped around light fixtures and cornices. Delicate violets bloomed along the floor and vicious rosebushes sprouted through Ms. Poppy’s desk.
It couldn’t be real. He reached out and the soft, furred edges of leaves brushed his palm. They leaned toward him as if hungry for his touch.
He had to get the drawings and run like hell. How the school would explain this away, he had no idea, but they couldn’t pin it on Thomas—even though, for once, this was actually his fault. He must have lied and hadn’t stopped drawing at all. That was the only explanation for why the monsters wouldn’t stop.
Except there was never ink on Thomas’s fingers, never pencil lead smudged up his hand, never paint tracking over his mouth because he’d bitten his paintbrush while concentrating.
Andrew crept through the classroom forest. He tried not to touch anything, though every thicket and branch reached for him, brushing his arms, his neck. Maybe it sensed he belonged here since he, too, was growing a forest inside himself.
He ducked under a branch heavy with apples rotting to their cores and found Thomas’s desk. Vines grew through everything: his easel, his seat, his boxes of charcoals and pens. Andrew ripped handfuls of leaves off the easel, green staining his hands. His tux would be wrecked, but he didn’t care.
He only had eyes for this.
No monsters sprawled in wicked ink across the canvas, no things with teeth and claws and blacked-out eyes.
Thomas had drawn in pastels, something he rarely did, thepencil so light on the page that it looked like it was fading away. It was almost finished.
The three of them.
Thomas, Andrew, Dove.
Their faces pressed close together, cheek to cheek, Thomas in the middle with his freckles and frown and sour mouth parted so that roses could grow between his lips. A crown of feathers slid over one of Dove’s eyes and her face was turned toward the sky with such aching sorrow it bled off the page. Andrew was the one half unfinished. The hardest for last. His hair curled in soft honey waves, dandelions woven between the strands. But his mouth was missing.
As if Thomas had been waiting to learn the shape of it first.
It hurt to look at them like this, at their grief and rage and joy. But they were all together, weren’t they? In this papered reality, nothing had driven them apart.
Andrew was not himself as he took hold of the paper and tore it down the middle.
He was something else entirely as he ripped Dove’s face in half. Then Thomas’s.
Then his.
