Chapter Five
FIVE
Instead of waiting up until the witching hour to sneak out and stargaze, Andrew fell asleep.
He’d found Thomas in the dorms after dinner and they’d fallen into their usual first-day routine of haphazardly unpacking until Andrew had nodded off on his still unmade bed.
He dreamed brambles wrapped around his throat, a briar rose resting on his tongue.
Dove kept knocking on his door, begging him to come to the forest with her, but he couldn’t squeeze words out past the thorns. She went without him.
His best talent had always been letting people down. Even in sleep, apparently.
When he woke, it was dark and he felt feverish. Pinpricks of pain rippled through his right hand, and he gave a sleep-fogged moan before looking down.
Blood streaked his knuckles, every scar flayed open again. When he made a fist, skin peeled apart to show stark white bone against raw tendons.
Andrew shot upright with a cry. A light burst on and he whipped around, an arm flung up to defend himself from the glare—or an attack. But it was just Thomas clicking on his desk lamp, one boot on and worry furrowing his brows.
“Are you okay?” he said.
Andrew glanced back down at his hand.
No blood. Only a lattice of thin, white scars.
Thomas dropped onto the mattress beside Andrew, and they both stared at his hand for a minute. Then Thomas traced from the tips of Andrew’s fingers down to his wrist.
A shiver shot down Andrew’s spine. He had to breathe out hard to hide it.
“It healed well,” Thomas said. “The scars almost look like lace. Do you still want to sneak out? We don’t have to.”
Andrew pulled away and reached for his sweater. “You owe me like seven hundred answers.”
“It’ll feel wrong to go without Dove.” Thomas said it so softly, Andrew paused with his sweater half tangled over his head.
When he turned back, Thomas still sat on Andrew’s bed, his head bowed, fingers picking at old, dried paint on his jeans. Out of school uniform, he always looked lawless, as if the loss of rigid lines turned him into a passionate painting spilled all over a page.
Well, this meant Thomas and Dove hadn’t fixed their argument, but if they were in a fight, they weren’t kissing. He hated himself for the selfish relief. “I still want to.”
They climbed out the window, feet wedged in the cracks between bricks, hands gripping window frames and trellises to lower themselves down.
Thomas first, then Andrew, dropping into a crouch on the dewy grass.
The night was cool for September, but then Andrew was always cold.
Everything felt more alive out here. An energy thrummed between the rosebushes and up through the ivy-covered walls.
There was a stickiness to the shadows, the night so dark that staring into it made Andrew feel unsteady.
A shadow moved with the softest scrape of scales against gravel before slithering out of sight around the dorms. Hair prickled at the back of Andrew’s neck, but he scrubbed his eyes and shook himself.
He wasn’t properly awake, was all. Nothing breathed out here but them.
They took off, the velvet dark cloaking them.
Both had notebooks in hand, and Andrew had shoved a packet down his sweater at the last minute.
Plastic crinkled as he walked, and Thomas mimed at him to hush several times before giving up and hiding his laugh.
They crept through the deserted gardens to the sheds and used a firewood stack to climb onto a low roof.
Thomas’s sweater rode up, his bare stomach scraping against tiles.
A hiss escaped him before he rolled out of the way.
Andrew vaulted up behind him.
“Stop doing that so easily,” Thomas muttered.
“Start growing.” Andrew pulled a packet of Tim Tams from under his shirt. “Surprise.”
“Oh, yes, yes, you freaking godsent saint.”
Andrew bit back a laugh as Thomas snatched the Tim Tams and then scurried like a goblin over the roof.
They’d discovered this spot back in freshman year, when Thomas realized no windows from any of the dorms or the school manor overlooked the neat little garden sheds.
It was rebellion, but safe. Even Dove allowed it instead of doling out her usual lectures about Thomas’s rule breaking.
The way she clung to rules and Thomas mocked them fueled most of their wars, but Andrew suspected they fought because they liked it. Or because Dove needed the relief of an excuse to be less than perfect for a second. Or because Thomas only knew how to bite people for attention.
Andrew settled on his back next to Thomas. The slope was gentle, the tiles cushioned by decades of moss and papered with old leaves.
“I bought original because you have low standards anyway,” he said.
“True.” Thomas tore into the packet. Tim Tams were nothing more than malted biscuits with a creamy filling, dipped in chocolate and then blessed by an Australian brand name, but for some reason Thomas worshipped them.
“They’re not even that good,” Andrew said.
“Be disrespectful somewhere else. If I eat enough, I will turn Australian. I will be a bloke.”
Andrew jabbed Thomas in the ribs. “I’ll take them back.”
“You can’t if I lick them all. Actually wait, I’ll give you one and you give me your notebook.”
“One, wow.” But Andrew passed over his notebook.
This was their tradition, a chance to cram in updates about everything they’d missed over the summer.
Without Dove, it did feel strange, but so what if Andrew had Thomas to himself for once?
It was an excuse to lie beside each other, skin brushing skin, knee pressed against leg. Only the stars could judge.
Thomas sat up and nestled Andrew’s notebook on his lap, handing over his own sketchbook. “Give us some light.”
Andrew obliged, propping his phone on his knees so a soft glow bathed their swapped books.
An extraordinary amount of intimacy lay in exchanging art. Not for critique and not for class. Just to look. To feel. To understand each other.
Andrew paged through slowly, chewing his lip as he looked at Thomas’s drawings from the summer. Everything here had been cut from the cruelest fairy tale.
Towers wrapped in thorns, with monsters hung by the throat at the gates.
Thistle fairies with their wings cut off, teeth sunk into their prey’s flesh.
A princess with fingers grafting into tree bark.
The final portrait made Andrew linger. A boy with arrow-tipped ears, his face a constellation of freckles, and eyes cut out for roses to claw through the sockets. His mouth had been scribbled out in dark pen.
Andrew loved it. He loved them all. He could tell many had been based on his stories, which meant he had been on Thomas’s mind all summer.
Thomas flipped pages in Andrew’s notebook, getting crumbs and smears of chocolate everywhere as he made small noises of appreciation. “You should write a whole book someday. Your stories are too short and I always want more.”
“They’re meant to be paper cuts.” Andrew turned to the last sketchbook page. “This one is inspired by my story, right?”
A boy, done in charcoal, leaned over the lip of a wishing well with fingers outstretched to the silver water. Behind him, a monster with elegant human hands and a hacked-off wolf’s head for a face devoured the boy’s parents.
Thomas snatched the sketchbook from Andrew’s hand.
Andrew stifled his yelp and had to grab for his phone before it skittered off the roof. He shot a confused look at Thomas.
Thomas ripped the page out and scrunched it up. “I hate this one. It’s … the shadows are wrong.”
Andrew’s phone flashed a low-battery warning. He turned it off. Truth felt safer in the dark. “Tell me what happened with your parents.”
Thomas sighed and stuffed the last Tim Tam in his mouth. “Or we could look for shooting stars and I could annoy you?” He handed back Andrew’s notebook.
“You already do. No extra effort needed.”
Thomas wrinkled his nose.
The lightness slipped from Andrew’s voice. “Are you even okay?”
They never did this—never confronted each other or asked what was wrong to be mapped out in words that made sense.
Andrew was the worst about it, the one who clammed up or outright lied so people would stop trying to pry apart his bones and see why he was riddled with peculiar agonies.
He couldn’t explain himself, which meant he couldn’t ask Dove why she fell into manic study spirals, or Thomas why he had a wine-colored scar on his shoulder blade.
So Andrew tucked his problems away—his panic attacks, his suffocating shyness, the way he disappeared into daydreams.
Thomas flung an arm over his eyes. “I’m fine. What about you? You looked haunted after dinner.”
No way was Andrew confessing about the … whatever that thing had been that licked his neck. It hadn’t been anything. A waking dream. Lurid, and not his.
“Nothing,” Andrew said. “Why did you lie to the detective?”
Thomas went still.
Even whispering, their voices seemed too loud in the night. When Thomas peeled his arm off his face, something harrowed lived behind his eyes. Fear didn’t suit him. He was meant to be invincible.
“Because it looks bad.” Thomas’s voice came low. “I-I can’t explain it. I don’t want you to worry, all right? I knew the house was—things were messed up before I left. I left anyway.”
“Did your parents hurt you?” Andrew hated the pitch to his words. He thought of the drawing Thomas had ripped up.
“What? No. I told you before, they get a bit high and drunk sometimes and they get caught up in their art. All families are dysfunctional. Stop telling yourself stories where I’m some damsel in distress.”
“Thomas—”
He pushed himself up on his elbow and dug fingers into Andrew’s shirt. “Stop asking.”
Andrew went quiet.
Thomas pulled him down so they lay side by side again. Billions of glittering stars layered the world above them, blotting out the dark.
“Tell me a secret,” Thomas said, “and I’ll tell you one.”
I’m glad Dove didn’t come with us tonight. Andrew swallowed, his skin suddenly hot. “I’m scared of everything except the dark.”
Thomas huffed the tiniest laugh. “I knew that. You write the darkest things, and it never keeps you up.”
“Tell me yours.”
“I think someday you’ll hate me.” Thomas’s voice stretched with a loneliness Andrew had never heard before. “You’ll cut me open and find a garden of rot where my heart should be.”
Andrew let the silence sharpen between them, waited until Thomas’s breath caught in quiet anguish from being made to wait.
“When I cut you open,” Andrew finally said, “all I’ll find is that we match.”
Below them something scraped softly over the stony path. The world smelled of sweet cloying decay, rotten leaves, and earth.
“Did you hear that?” Andrew scooted himself toward the edge, but Thomas caught his arm.
Shadows stole his face but for the sharp line of his mouth. “It’s probably a fox or something. We should leave anyway.”
They climbed down in silence together, their fingers cold and lungs aching. It was strange, Andrew thought, how when something moved in the dark, everyone’s first instinct was to go inside and hide under the covers.
As if monsters couldn’t open doors and crawl into bed with you.