Chapter Fifteen
FIFTEEN
October arrived with cold teeth sharp enough to split bone.
It was early in autumn to be shivering this much, but Andrew never had stamina for the cold.
He was too thin these days, he knew, but he couldn’t eat.
If he layered up with sweaters and avoided Dove with her sharp perception, he thought he’d get away with it.
He figured Thomas wouldn’t notice how much weight he’d lost, not if he was careful to never take his shirt off and show the way the bones seemed ready to cut free of skin.
Thomas was distracted anyway. The first of October had rattled him, and Andrew didn’t want to ask why.
They’d stacked themselves into a study nook in the library that afternoon, textbooks and class notes spread across the table.
Thomas chewed pencils and drummed on his books and kept accidentally kicking him under the table until Andrew lost patience and stomped on his foot.
Thomas settled down with a petulant frown, propped a textbook in front of his face, and started writing.
He needed to focus. Both of them did. They were failing classes, but they didn’t sleep, so how could they survive hours of lectures and assignments?
Even without the monsters attacking, they had to check the forest every night and show the trees the sharp edge of the hatchet.
Whispers of mocking laughter filtered through the forest and hot breath licked their necks. But nothing attacked.
Nothing.
Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but Thomas had become a string drawn so tight it took nothing to snap him into a rage or a panic spiral. A classroom door would slam and he’d jump out of his skin. His chest was a broken cage for his emotions, and they spilled out of him like paint.
But Andrew was calm. Maybe it was because he’d grown used to packing his own anxiety into boxes and pasting on wan smiles while on the inside he imploded. Maybe he’d been freaking out for so long it felt normal.
Andrew finished with his revision notes before he noticed Thomas’s pen wasn’t moving from left to right. Andrew sighed and slammed down the textbook Thomas had hidden behind.
“Interesting idea of calculus homework,” Andrew said.
Thomas looked guilty. Inky roses and thorns grew over his workbook page, vicious and cruel and lovely. The thorns curved like hooked scythes, and it looked as if whoever touched that paper would bleed.
“They’re not technically monsters,” Thomas said.
“They’re not helping, either.” Andrew gestured to their mounds of work.
Dove would have had them organized by now.
Color-coded schedules. Binders of prioritized assignments.
Practice quizzes corrected with her purple gel pens.
She never used red because she said it was demoralizing.
Andrew tried to explain it was still demoralizing when she wrote Nothing You’ve Written Here Even Remotely Makes Sense in the margins.
“Schoolwork seems pointless when it’s, you know, October.” Thomas rested his cheek on a fist and kept drawing. “Halloween month.”
“Halloween is one day. Your country has a weird obsession with it.”
“I just have a bad feeling.”
Andrew slapped his notes over the top of Thomas’s drawing. He received a glare in return, but he didn’t care. “I have a bad feeling about us failing senior year.”
“Who cares.” Thomas started doodling on Andrew’s notes instead. “After this, we should take a gap year. Drive around Australia and surf every beach.”
“You can’t drive,” Andrew said. “Or surf. And if you stand in the sun for five minutes, you scorch like a little tomato.”
“All things I can overcome,” Thomas said in earnest. “I can duct-tape myself to a surfboard and I’ll work on my tan.”
“Isn’t it raining right now?”
“That doesn’t matter. I’ll stand under a big sunlamp.”
“You don’t need a big sunlamp, a short one will do,” Andrew muttered, taking out his laptop.
Thomas gave him a deeply offended look. “That’s enough out of you, or you’re uninvited. I’ll thrive in Australia alone. Eating Vegemite by the spoonful. I’ll live at your house and go see that big rock you’re famous for.”
Andrew choked. “That’s not how you eat Vegemite. And my dad’s house is in Byron Bay. Uluru is like three thousand kilometers away from there. Have you ever, ever looked at a map of Australia?”
“Stop bringing logic into this…” Thomas trailed off as he frowned at Andrew’s history notes. He stopped doodling and flipped the page around a few times. “Hey.”
“Hmm?” Andrew started an email with a very solid lie to his dad—or probably his secretary—about why he’d lost his phone and needed a new one. It wouldn’t involve forests. Or breaking rules. And definitely not monsters.
“Did you mean”—Thomas sounded quiet—“to write your notes … in mirror reverse?”
Andrew looked up.
Thomas slid the pages back to him, but his expression had gone carefully blank, a useless precaution against Andrew, who knew him well enough to dissect it.
He didn’t even know how to write in mirror reverse. He hadn’t … he didn’t know—
He scrunched the papers and stuffed them in his satchel.
Silence sat between them: Andrew frozen while his brain spun in dizzying spirals, Thomas chewing his pen and watching Andrew from the corner of his eye.
Then he yawned and peeled from his seat. “I can’t work under these conditions. I need a sandwich. Let’s get sandwiches.”
Relief melted Andrew. Good, they’d ignore this. “It’s an hour till dinner.”
“Well, I’m hungry now. C’mon, the dorm kitchenette always has bread and fruit and stuff. Wait, you guard our study spot and I’ll bring it back. Peanut butter and jelly sound good?”
Andrew hunched over his laptop. “I’m not hungry.”
“Irrelevant.” Thomas stretched, cracking his neck and making a huge effort to act unconcerned. “Let’s eat now and skip the dining hall. Okay?”
It was manipulation. Andrew would’ve skipped dinner anyway, and this meant Thomas would get to oversee him eating—which meant Thomas had, in fact, noticed Andrew avoiding meals.
He should be annoyed, but he only had energy for a small frown, which Thomas returned with a grin so mischievous it was impossible to stay mad at him. He took off, humming to himself.
His absence felt like an electrical surge turned off, as if Andrew didn’t exist without Thomas in the room.
He couldn’t focus on his essay, and his skin felt too tight, his neck prickling like someone watched him from between the shelves.
Plenty of students packed the library this rainy afternoon, but everyone was focused on their own work. No one was looking at him, right?
He twisted suddenly to catch them out.
Yellow eyes blinked behind the stacks.
Then vanished.
Andrew rubbed his face. He knew he was overtired. But still, it had been …
Nothing. Monsters only escaped the dark if Thomas failed to catch and kill them, and there had been nothing in the forest for days.
He forced himself to stare at his laptop screen before he heard familiar footsteps. He brightened, turning to greet Dove—but she swept past with an armful of books and hurried for the upstairs studios.
“Dove?”
She didn’t pause. Maybe she had earbuds in.
Andrew scrabbled after her. He should convince her to study with them. Avoiding her because he and Thomas held too many secrets felt like working with a punctured lung, and he didn’t want to grow used to the pain.
Andrew turned a corner of shelves and stumbled into the librarian. She gave a startled laugh as he grabbed her arms to steady her and stammered an apology.
“That’s all right, darling,” she said. “While you’re here, I have a book you would like.”
“Oh, thanks … um, thanks, Ms. Ye. I’ll come back?”
Not waiting for an answer, Andrew took the stairs two at a time, but when he reached the halls, all the studio doors were shut.
He hesitated, chewing his lip, not wanting to knock and have strangers’ eyes boring into him, pitying or annoyed or mocking.
He hated being looked at, asked questions. He hated figuring out what to say.
Only one door lay ajar at the end of the hall, so he slipped toward it—Ms. Poppy’s art classroom. Dove never took art, but he could snoop on Thomas’s new projects since he’d started drawing again.
Andrew didn’t see anyone inside, so he pushed the door a little wider and crept between rows of art tables before he heard voices. He went still.
Two people sat cross-legged on the carpet ahead, tables pushed back to make room for the mess they’d tumbled all over the floor.
It looked like a rainbow had vomited across their laps.
Shredded and knotted fabrics tangled with a huge box of embroidery thread and sewing supplies.
Two girls bent their heads together as they sorted the fabrics.
Andrew was about to fling himself out of there, but they looked up and caught him.
Lana raised an eyebrow. “If you’re looking for Thomas, he’s not here.” She had her hair in her usual spiky ponytail, blazer discarded and sleeves rolled up to work.
“I wasn’t.” Andrew stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I mean. I was looking … for his art.”
“In the corner. He’s got the window because he’s Ms. Poppy’s favorite. All that dark artist angst.” Lana rolled her eyes. “So glad I switched to drama this year because I can’t stand all his monsters.”
Andrew’s heart tripped over itself before he realized she meant his old drawings. Not his real monsters.
He made a wide arc around Lana and her friend and found Thomas’s workspace.
Tall wooden tables with drawers took the places of desks, the stools tucked in and art supplies piled everywhere.
Begonias stood in mason jars all over Ms. Poppy’s desk, and she’d propped a tiny hand-painted sign on her laptop to say: OUT TO GET TEA! BACK IN 5 MINUTES!
With the walls covered in paintings and the huge windows overlooking the forest, the room felt alive with creativity. No wonder it was the only class Thomas thrived in.