“You okay, man?” James said.
“Shut the door,” Lee said quickly, trying to hide the pill bottle. He knew his voice was too cold, too mean, but James was ruining his sacred space.
James blinked his perfect green eyes. He was confused, but he knew what Lee was like at this point—at least, that was what Lee told himself.
“I didn’t mean to chase you out, dude,” he said. “Your phone is ringing and you just disappeared like you’d been abducted by aliens or something.”
He laughed like it was a joke, but it wasn’t funny—Lee knew people actually got abducted through open doors. He should have laughed—maybe everything would have turned out differently if Lee had just laughed, had tried a little bit harder to pretend one last time.
But instead, Lee’s gaze homed in on the stain on James’s shirt.
It was dark maroon on his yellow shirt, just slightly above his heart. The shape of a bean, or a lagoon, or a teardrop.
“What’s that from?” Lee said.
James didn’t understand at first. Lee had to point to the stain, and even then, James had to tug at his shirt and angle it to the light before he noticed. It all felt like a charade to Lee, because how could he possibly not have noticed such a stark stain? He must have been pretending just to make Lee feel unreasonable.
“Oh,” James said once he held the stained patch of shirt upto the light. “I was just cooking,” he said, shrugging as if it didn’t matter.
But it mattered to Lee. “What is it?” he pressed, clenching his fists.
James shrugged again, but his posture had changed. The way he angled himself was broader now. He was on the crew team, and even though he’d never looked that large to Lee, he suddenly seemed to block out all the light from the doorway.
“I don’t know, man,” he said. “Salsa?”
Lee shook his head quickly. He was lying—people lied all the time and usually Lee could just accept that that was how most people lived, but James wasn’t allowed to lie now. How could he not understand the gravity of the situation? This was not a time to lie.
“It’s not the right color for salsa,” Lee said, glaring at the stain, talking to it rather than James.
The stain didn’t make sense. There were obvious explanations—James had been cooking and probably just got splashed with sauce—but Lee knew that wasn’t the answer. And he needed an answer in that moment, felt that somehow he knew it, that if he only stared hard enough and thought about it enough, the world would peel back its skin and tell him the truth. The need screamed inside him, louder and louder.
“I... Okay,” James said, frowning. “Sorry, I’ll leave you alone. Answer your phone, though.”
Okay, thanks, Lee thought. The words he should have said. He could taste them behind his teeth, opened his mouth to make them real, was so very close to a different life if he’d only said them out loud.
But instead, Lee remembered.
He felt as if he’d been falling and falling and falling through the stairwell and had finally crashed into the tile. His bones burst like porcelain inside of him, and he was a bloody sack of formlessshards, brain oozing from his ears, eyes rolling on the ground, green in this light.Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.
There was a reason that Lee Turner didn’t like stains.
The truth was a passing eclipse of darkness, and for only a moment, Lee could see.
He grabbed James by the arm.
James could have fought back, should have fought back. But he’d always seen Lee as scrawny and small, something unsightly that had crawled out from under the bed. He let Lee turn him, frowning like it was a joke.
“You good?” James said.
It was a kind thing to say, to still worry about Lee at that point, but it was the worst thing he could have said. Because even now, when Lee’s mind felt like a city crumbling to dust, James didn’t see the problem. He thought Lee was weird and eccentric and maybe a bit creepy; he didn’t care that the world was falling apart, that the screams inside Lee’s ribs were only growing louder.
No one listens to me, Lee thought, his hands trembling, his blood full of glass, his ears full of wind.No one sees me.James was still talking, but Lee couldn’t hear him anymore.
He grabbed James and wrenched him toward the railing.
He wanted James to fall into the darkness like his pencils, to meet its teeth and smash through. It was a privilege Lee had wanted for himself at first, but now he needed the dark to swallow James whole.
But James was an athlete, and it wasn’t that easy. James braced his hands against the railing and pushed back.
