Chapter Six
SIX
On Wednesday, they took Thomas from class.
He packed up his books and left in silence, only pressing his fingertips to the top of Andrew’s desk as he passed. No backward glance. Through the open classroom door, Andrew saw the corner of Detective Bell’s cream trench coat before she strode out of view.
He sat motionless through the rest of the lesson and tried to make each breath more shallow than the last. He would disappear if he could. Just until Thomas came back.
As soon as class ended and everyone filed out, the whispers began.
“Not surprised…”
“He’s always so rude.”
“… has that violent streak—”
“Bet he killed his parents.”
No one should even know this had something to do with his parents.
Either a student had overheard something or Dove had been extra vindictive since their fight and spread the rumor.
It left Andrew wading through classes with a feeling of pins being twisted into his skin, one by one, until he could barely speak through the taste of metal in his mouth.
His lower lip bled. He had to stop chewing it.
Thomas didn’t return for lunch or when the final period ended. Why did the police even need to keep him this long?
Because it looks bad, he’d said on that first night back at Wickwood.
What could you possibly have done, Thomas?
If Andrew started down a trail of what-ifs and maybes, he’d spiral. He had to stop thinking.
He skipped tutoring and went hunting for Dove. He knew where she’d be.
The Wickwood library had been known to eat students whole.
It had its own building beside the school manor, smaller but still built of stone and ivy, and it had been packed with shelves and cozy study nooks.
The upper floor had begrudgingly relinquished studios to art students and extracurricular clubs, so the whole building always smelled of books and paint, and sometimes Shakespeare monologues could be heard through the walls.
Since Dove lived to study, and Thomas breathed art, and Andrew craved stories, they all had pledged their hearts to this library.
Andrew wandered between the narrow shelves and ran fingers along the spines of his favorite sections.
Leather-bound first editions lined overhead cabinets, and every reference book imaginable could be requested because Wickwood was designed for minds that burned to know everything.
It was a school for brilliance, for fixating on the stars until you grew tall enough to reach them.
Andrew found Dove and her best friend, Extra Credit Assignments, holed up in a study nook by the window. It had a clear view to the parking lot—perfect, he’d see when Thomas returned.
Andrew slung his satchel onto her table. “That is way too much homework for our first week back.”
“It shouldn’t even be called homework, should it?” Dove had a pencil behind one ear and another jammed through her ponytail. “We live here. It should be homeschoolwork. I’m starting my essay analyzing stereotypical gender roles in fairy tales. You could write this better than me.”
Andrew thumbed through his notes from today’s classes, but he was too agitated to focus. He took out his notebook. “I don’t show people my stories, you know that. They wouldn’t get it.”
They’d had this argument before, but Dove eyeballed him anyway. “Our teachers handle Thomas’s art, and he’s a drama queen of the macabre. You could get extra credit if you wrote for class. Or—hear me out—you could write something nice.”
To write something nice, he’d need something nice to say. But his ribs were a cage for monsters and they cut their teeth on his bones.
“Have you heard anything about Thomas yet?” Andrew fiddled with the edge of his notebook and glanced at the window. “Should we worry?”
Dove reorganized her already perfectly stacked homework piles, and then straightened her tin of highlighters. “Not yet. Give it till dinner.”
“Then you’ll ask about him?” He hated how thin he sounded. Pathetic.
But Dove said, “Yes, I’ll do the asking,” firm and without judgment.
What were twins, if not one to shout and one to whisper?
She started to ask about his math homework—it was one of his worst classes, and Professor Clemens was a glorified bully—but the library doors burst open and a group of teens clattered in.
They were all midconversation and immediately began hushing each other and cracking up because of it.
Andrew put his elbow on the table and covertly cupped a hand over one ear to block out some of their noise.
Dove suddenly got to her feet. “I have to go.” She crushed handfuls of papers down among her textbooks while Andrew’s confusion turned to shock. Dove did not mess up her orderly perfection.
“Who are we avoiding?” He swiveled to look at the incoming group.
Lana Lang strode around the shelves. Her purple combat boots came first, her stabby expression followed, and she had a sack of flags over her shoulder, the edges peeking out to show stripes of various color combinations.
The motley crew behind her looked liberated from theatre class—different ages, some still in costume or glittering from drama class residue, and a few with haircuts that barely met Wickwood’s restrictive dress code.
They all whispered or linked arms as they headed upstairs.
Only Lana paused. She put one hand on her hip, an eyebrow raised as she surveyed his shoved-aside homework. “Studying alone?”
“No, I’m with…” He looked back, but Dove had cleared out like a puff of smoke.
Was she fighting with Lana, too?
Lana watched the last of her crew disappear upstairs, then readjusted her sack of flags. “Want to come?” Her usual brusque tone had a tentative edge.
“Are you running an art club?” Andrew said.
Lana squinted at him, and he had a flash of panic that he’d said something foolish. He hated talking to people.
“Ms. Poppy runs the GSA club, but we come in early to hang out.”
Andrew wanted to turn himself inside out. “It’s not my … thing.” Did Lana look annoyed? She probably thought him a bigot now instead of someone who was an absolute mess about his sexuality and didn’t want to talk about it with anyone ever.
“Suit yourself.” Lana put her boot on the empty chair beside him and adjusted her laces. “Just know anyone’s welcome. Queer, straight, questioning.” She let that hang in the air. “I just thought it might be better than being alone.”
But people did homework alone all the time … unless she thought he was too unstable to be by himself.
Andrew massaged his scarred hand under the table. “Dove ever go with you?”
Lana snorted, but her smile was fond. “A few times. She fixed all the Pride flags we’d hung crooked. Offered to iron them, too.”
He stole a quick glance at the window just as a car pulled in.
From this far away, he could barely make out faces, but a boy with tousled auburn curls climbed from the back seat and slammed the door hard enough for the shock wave to be felt inside the library.
One of the professors walked around the car with keys still in hand, motioning Thomas toward the manor.
But he took off in a flat-out run to the dorms. The professor didn’t try to catch him.
“I have to go,” Andrew mumbled, aware that avoiding Lana to chase Thomas had become a habit.
Aware that she noticed.
He gathered his homework and flung himself from the library.
Lana was wrong to invite him, anyway. He didn’t fit with those kids because he didn’t fit with anyone except Thomas and Dove, and he didn’t know if he was gay enough when there was only one boy he wanted.
A small, reserved part of him knew he must be asexual, and that being gay enough wasn’t a thing.
But he looked at other boys and felt nothing, so maybe the only reason he didn’t want Thomas to kiss Dove was so their trio wouldn’t change—not because he wanted to kiss Thomas.
Or maybe he … did?
But it was better this way; Thomas was in love with Dove, and he was not one to think kissing was enough, anyway. Andrew wouldn’t survive a gentle, pitying rejection. He just wouldn’t.
Andrew went to the dorms, but their room was empty. He dumped his satchel on his bed and checked the bathrooms, then the lounge. Nothing. A quick survey of the garden and athletic fields showed no sign of Thomas.
Afternoon tipped toward dusk. He had one last place to look.
Past the endless green sea of tamed grass, the forest rose up in a sharp, dark line. It had always marked the edge of campus, but it used to be easy for a stray ball to be kicked through or kids to sneak past the tree line. Now there was the fence.
As if that would stop Thomas. The forest was immense and unmappable and monstrous—and it had always belonged to him. He never got caught sneaking in there.
Crossing the stretch of open field without being seen from one of the school’s many windows would be a trick, so Andrew sprinted. Don’t see me, please let no one see me.
The fence looked like a beast up close. Eight feet tall? Maybe ten. Chain links made for easy climbing, but the wires had been left sharp at the top. Andrew hauled himself over and waited for some sort of alarm to go off. It was instant expulsion to those who crossed the fence after all.
It didn’t used to be like this, but maybe one too many kids had sneaked out to hook up or drink after dark, and the principal had had enough.
Andrew scraped his arm climbing over. He hissed as he dropped to the soft leaves on the other side.
His shoes hit the muddy forest trail and he tried to talk himself through his swelling panic. Whatever the cops had wanted Thomas for didn’t matter. They’d given him back. He couldn’t be in real trouble.
Because it looks bad—
Pines sighed as Andrew slipped between them. Already dark places lived in the woods, the promise of night thickening against the trees. He left the worn hiking path and followed a thin track crowded with shrubs and mottled blue flowers. Moss underfoot. Ferns rippling against his ankles.
Then the underbrush thinned and his destination sprawled before him—a white oak big enough to hold up half the sky.
It was ancient and lovely, with branches that curled like hands reaching out to welcome him.
They called it the Wildwood tree and had been climbing it since they were kids.
They used to whisper their fears into the bark so it could swallow their words whole.
Thomas would be here.
Andrew stopped at the base of the oak and tilted his head up. “Thomas?”
At first, nothing moved. An emptiness stretched around Andrew, and his heartbeat felt too loud in his ears as his feet sank into the soft, leafy earth.
He was acutely aware of how alone he was, how if he cried out, no one from the school would hear.
Why was he thinking that? Nothing would happen.
This was their place, where they were best together and comfortable in themselves.
A slow chill slipped down his neck like cold molasses, and he shook himself to dislodge the unease. It shouldn’t be so still, the ground this soft. He put fingertips to his temple, to the aching pulse of a headache fluttering to life.
Someone breathed out hard behind him. He made himself turn slowly, but there was nothing there. The wind, it was just the wind.
He refused to freak out over nothing again.
But when he shifted closer to the tree to see if Thomas had climbed up, the ground seemed to suck at Andrew’s shoes.
It shouldn’t be so damp out here—it hadn’t rained.
When he looked down, the earth was as sodden as a bog.
Dying afternoon light shimmered over the wet leaves, and for a second they looked almost … crimson.
Andrew knelt, careful, and touched the corner of a rotting leaf.
His fingers came away tipped with blood.
Something shifted in the Wildwood tree and Andrew surged to his feet, his heart flinging itself frantically against his ribs.
But only Thomas dropped from its branches, his expression strained and his mouth at an angle that looked almost angry.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said.