They took her away. They didn’t even ask him if they could.
Only the lights in the kitchenette had been left on, all students in bed and the counselor on duty waiting up with herbal tea and a pitying expression. Thomas sat at the table staring at a cooling mug before him. When he looked up, his expression was so raw and terrible that Andrew glanced away. They’d flayed Thomas alive, it was easy to see. If they took his shirt off right now, would he have skin left, or just muscle and sinew, throbbing livid and red and bloody as he struggled for each breath?
Andrew felt nothing as he stared at this boy with devastation bleeding from his eyes.
They climbed the stairs to their room in silence and readied themselves for sleep by the light of a single bedside lamp. Andrew shrugged off the shirt he’d stolen from Thomas and opened his wardrobe door to find his pajamas. Seeing himself in the slim mirror screwed to the inside of his wardrobe door gave him a jarring sense of vertigo—this angular, pale boy with collarbones made of twigs and hip bones sharp against his pants. It felt like someone else.
Thomas hovered behind him like a ghost. He took a step forward, his mouth trembling. “Andrew, I’m… I’m sorry. I should have been with her. I should never, never have let her go alone—”
“Yes.” Andrew’s voice was barely above a whisper. “You should have been with her.”
Thomas shrank into himself. What had he expected? Forgiveness, absolution?
“It’s all your fault.” Andrew said it in a way that drove a knife into Thomas’s gut and twisted.
He stared at the mirror, at the boy before him who looked like Dove: her honey hair, her warm brown eyes, that stubborn tilt to their mouths when they were upset.
Thomas wiped his eyes and dug fingers through his hair, trying to steady his shuddering breathing. “I’m sorry. I’d do anything to go back in time and—”
“Stop talking.” Andrew didn’t recognize his voice, cool and hard as river stones.
“—stay with her. She wouldn’t have died alone. Shit, she wouldn’t havedied. I’d have caught her or carried her to get help and—”
“I saidstop talking.”
Thomas choked on a sob. “I’m sorry—”
Andrew hit the mirror.
He hit it again,again, until glass shattered and blood smeared across his reflection. He no longer looked like Dove, now he was a red-smeared thing in fractured pieces. He hit it again.
Thomas was crying out for him to stop, pleading with a voice gone high and cracked and terrified.
He would stop when he’d obliterated every last piece of glass into stardust that he could coat his tongue with and whisper a magic wish to the forest.
Give her back.
Arms wrapped around his waist, trying to pull him away. He wrenched free and smashed his hand into the mirror again. He felt nothing. His fingers looked like broken twigs dyedcrimson and dusted with slivers of glass as he kept punching the mirror again and again and—
The dorm door burst open. People were yelling. Light blazed the room and seared his eyes with such brutality that he screamed.
Stronger hands took him by the shoulders and dragged him away.
Voices piled over each other, arguing, questioning. Doors squeaked open across the hall as sleepy faces peered out to see what was happening.
Andrew thrashed against their grip, a strange, unkempt violence spilling out of him as he snarled between clenched teeth. This wasn’t him. He was never like this.
He didn’t know how he ended up on the floor in Thomas’s arms, rocking slowly, slowly. They sat in a sea of mirror shards while Andrew cradled his mangled hand to his chest. Thomas’s cheek pressed to his bare spine, his tears tracking down Andrew’s skin.
“I’m sorry…,” Thomas whispered.
“I said.” Andrew placed each word like a rusted blade against Thomas’s tremulous throat. “Stop. Talking.”
Thomas didn’t speak again. He held Andrew and cried to make up for the fact Andrew hadn’t cried at all.
Everything inside Andrew had been scooped out, and he’d been left a hollow thing, impossible to fill.
Dove would absolutely freak out when she saw what he’d done to his hand. He’d explain it to her over breakfast, how it had been a tough, stressful year, and he’d spaced out for a minute.
