Chapter Twenty-Nine
TWENTY-NINE
The doorknob didn’t work, or maybe it was Andrew who was broken.
He dropped his dorm key for the third time.
Electricity bit at his skin, and he felt hyperaware of everything; his book bag digging into his shoulder, the skin over his ribs stretched so tight it hurt, Thomas hovering at his back.
They hadn’t had a chance to talk yet after Andrew’s trip to the principal’s office since Thomas had been in detention for skipping assignments. But what was there to say?
I’m leaving you alone alone alone—
Andrew couldn’t tell him.
It was already late, dusk crawling across the sky while the forest stretched shadows right up to the school.
Wickwood should have canceled the Halloween dance.
Everyone should be behind locked doors tonight.
Instead, the dorm thrummed with the chaotic laughter and shouts of boys getting ready for the party, ducking in and out of their rooms in tuxedos or ridiculous costumes.
“Just tell me what she said. Are you in trouble?” Thomas snatched the key from Andrew and opened their door.
Andrew stumbled in, book bag slipping from his shoulder and thumping to the floor. He wanted to dig fingernails into his skin and peel, but instead he checked his phone and found three missed calls from his father. He threw it on his cluttered desk.
He couldn’t leave Thomas alone with the monsters, with stories he couldn’t write, with no way to end this because Andrew had never told him the truth of what monsters demanded. They couldn’t be apart; their lungs would be torn out from inside each other and they would suffocate.
Andrew’s voice sounded rusted. “Bryce told the principal he saw me in the forest.”
“What? He couldn’t have. We could get expelled for—”
“I KNOW.” Andrew slammed their door and Thomas leaped out of the way before it caught his fingers.
He looked startled, but said nothing as Andrew stripped off his blazer and fell face-first onto his bed. He needed to think, but his head throbbed and black spots kept nipping the edge of his vision.
Slowly, Thomas crept over and perched on the edge of the mattress.
Andrew stuffed a pillow over his face. “We have to tell someone about the monsters.”
“If we say monsters are attacking the school, we’ll sound insane. No one would believe us, literally no one.” He yanked the pillow off Andrew’s face. “You look really shaken up.”
Andrew rubbed at his eyes, so desperately, achingly tired it was all he could do not to tug Thomas to lie down next to him so they could survive Halloween like this—tangled in each other’s arms like two licorice twists.
“I’m just tired,” he said.
Thomas leaned in suddenly, an arm planted on either side of Andrew, their faces close enough they could eat each other’s words right out of their mouths. He ran a thumb over Andrew’s bottom lip and then traced down to the fluttering pulse in his neck. “Someday do you … want to be kissed?”
Something wicked and wanting surged in Andrew’s chest, but the guilt followed like a swift uppercut. For the way he’d treated Thomas yesterday. For how he’d won their fight and made sure everything would go his way. It wasn’t fair and he didn’t know how to fix it. What to give and what to take.
But as he stared up at Thomas’s face, all he could think of was kissing every one of those freckles. He nodded, his throat tight.
Thomas’s smile was crooked and full of tentative delight. He shoved off the bed and Andrew felt robbed of his touch.
“Let’s get dressed. I’ve still got my dad’s suspenders around here somewhere. My tux hasn’t fit for like two years now.”
Andrew felt too washed-out to get up. He needed to slow down and focus on what he had to do before his dad arrived. Destroy the last of Thomas’s drawings, that had to be the main priority. If the monsters wouldn’t stop, that meant there had to be some art still left.
After that, he needed to—
Kiss Thomas. Somehow, somewhere.
Find Dove and tell her everything. Absolutely everything. If she wanted to stay at Wickwood, she could. He wouldn’t blame her for putting her senior year over him.
Then Andrew had to stop the monsters, whatever it took. He would not leave Thomas alone with them.
Thomas left for the showers and Andrew took his sweet time hauling himself upright and rummaging through his wardrobe for his tux.
He’d rather skip the dance, but they needed to look normal—not guilty, not unhinged, not like boys about to lose everything.
The pounding of feet up and down the hall and the collision of voices said that everyone else was overexcited for tonight.
It took their minds off exams and all the creepy things that had been spilling from the school.
But nothing guaranteed the monsters would stay away from the auditorium. Andrew and Thomas would need to be in the forest early to fight them back and spill enough blood to satisfy the monsters’ appetites. It didn’t matter whose blood, theirs or the monsters’.
Someone just had to suffer.
Andrew unbuttoned his shirt. Then he stopped.
His ribs had hurt so long he’d grown used to the way they pressed sharp against his skin. How he could fit his finger between the grooves. How he was starving and yet felt too full to fit anything in his mouth.
But this was new.
His stomach looked distended, skin stretched like rice paper. He spread a hand over his belly, fingers trembling, and he pushed.
Tentative, careful.
“What the—” he whispered.
His skin didn’t give. It was like pressing fingers to a tree trunk, smooth and unforgiving. Hard lines coiled under the skin and crisscrossed over his stomach, and his shaking fingers followed one line and then another, tracing all the way to his hip.
Vines. Leaves. Roots.
He could see their unmistakable outlines.
This couldn’t be—
No.
Instead of feeling the soft, forgiving skin of his stomach, he felt vines growing through his intestines. They shifted under his touch, still growing as they twisted and tightened around another organ.
Horrible, hysterical panic rose up his throat, and he was going to be sick. He had to get it out. He had to slice his stomach open and get it out, get it out—GET IT OUT GET IT—
Andrew sank to the floor, knees to his chest, hyperventilating as the room spun. He couldn’t show Thomas. Not yet. They had too much to finish tonight.
He couldn’t do this. He gripped his wardrobe door and concentrated on breathing, but he could feel the briars in his lungs, taste the blood in the back of his throat where thorns had pricked his tongue.
The forest had been growing inside him for a long time, he’d just refused to think about it.
The door swung open and Thomas ambled in with wet hair and a towel slung over his shoulders. He looked roguish in suspenders and white shirt with collar popped, his dress trousers cuffed to hide the fact they were too short.
Thomas stopped, still drying his wet hair. “Are you okay?”
Andrew dragged on an undershirt fast. “Yep. You go ahead. I need to find Lana and ask her something.” He knew Thomas wouldn’t offer to come if it was to do with Lana.
Thomas frowned, but he only said, “Meet me in the auditorium?”
First, Andrew needed to search the art classroom.
Then he needed to find a sharp knife.
It only took a press of fingertips to wood and the library door swung open.
Normally the lights stayed on until 8:00 p.m. for independent study, but tonight everyone was up at the main school for the dance.
The library should be locked, but Andrew stepped inside and the darkness greeted him, inky and black and forever.
He felt his way upstairs, cursing his lack of a flashlight. He could barely see his feet, and it made him agonizingly aware of everything else. The utter silence. The fresh dampness of the air, like the forest after rainfall. How the carpet felt like moss.
Inside him, vines stretched.
Upstairs, he put his hand to the wall and felt his way to the end. The art classroom would definitely be locked, but he was desperate enough to try kicking the door in if he had to. Add property damage to his list of sins. It was too late for remorse.
But the door gave at his touch. Something broke and fell from the knob as he pushed, and he frowned. Rope? It wasn’t until the door stuck and wouldn’t open wider and he had to squeeze through the gap that he understood what had been tangled in the lock.
Vivid, green vines.
He hit the light switch.
One bulb lit up in the center of the room and flickered a melancholy dance that barely cut the gloom. He recoiled, his back hitting the wall as the urge to cry out rose up his throat.
The forest was here.
It was impossible, it broke his whole mind, but inside the room grew a wonderland of trees and vines and lush greenery.
Vines crawled over the windows and fungi flourished over the desks.
Tree trunks shot from carpet to ceiling, their branches cramped around light fixtures and cornices.
Delicate violets bloomed along the floor and vicious rosebushes sprouted through Ms. Poppy’s desk.
It couldn’t be real. He reached out and the soft, furred edges of leaves brushed his palm. They leaned toward him as if hungry for his touch.
He had to get the drawings and run like hell.
How the school would explain this away, he had no idea, but they couldn’t pin it on Thomas—even though, for once, this was actually his fault.
He must have lied and hadn’t stopped drawing at all.
That was the only explanation for why the monsters wouldn’t stop.
Except there was never ink on Thomas’s fingers, never pencil lead smudged up his hand, never paint tracking over his mouth because he’d bitten his paintbrush while concentrating.
Andrew crept through the classroom forest. He tried not to touch anything, though every thicket and branch reached for him, brushing his arms, his neck. Maybe it sensed he belonged here since he, too, was growing a forest inside himself.
He ducked under a branch heavy with apples rotting to their cores and found Thomas’s desk. Vines grew through everything: his easel, his seat, his boxes of charcoals and pens. Andrew ripped handfuls of leaves off the easel, green staining his hands. His tux would be wrecked, but he didn’t care.
He only had eyes for this.
No monsters sprawled in wicked ink across the canvas, no things with teeth and claws and blacked-out eyes.
Thomas had drawn in pastels, something he rarely did, the pencil so light on the page that it looked like it was fading away. It was almost finished.
The three of them.
Thomas, Andrew, Dove.
Their faces pressed close together, cheek to cheek, Thomas in the middle with his freckles and frown and sour mouth parted so that roses could grow between his lips.
A crown of feathers slid over one of Dove’s eyes and her face was turned toward the sky with such aching sorrow it bled off the page.
Andrew was the one half unfinished. The hardest for last. His hair curled in soft honey waves, dandelions woven between the strands. But his mouth was missing.
As if Thomas had been waiting to learn the shape of it first.
It hurt to look at them like this, at their grief and rage and joy. But they were all together, weren’t they? In this papered reality, nothing had driven them apart.
Andrew was not himself as he took hold of the paper and tore it down the middle.
He was something else entirely as he ripped Dove’s face in half. Then Thomas’s.
Then his.
He knew doing this meant he’d slid a knife between Thomas’s ribs and twisted. Thomas could hate him, but at least they’d still be alive tomorrow morning. This had to be the last of his work.
No more drawings. No more monsters.
He rummaged around the desk until he found a box cutter, which didn’t seem enough of a weapon against monsters, but it was all he came up with.
He turned to go, stumbling on the ground rutted with tree roots and damp leaves of gold and russet and crimson.
Find the door. Get out of here. His foot slid on a damp patch and he struck out his arm in a desperate attempt to catch himself.
He thought he grabbed at a low branch, muzzy in the dark.
But his fingers tightened over smooth, slick skin.
He was still looking down on the damp patch on the leaves; a pool of rainfall in a room where rain couldn’t reach. Except it looked metallic and thick. Except it looked like blood.
That’s when he made himself stare at the ankle he gripped with shaking fingers. It dangled at his eye level, no shoe, just a bare foot with mud between the toes, porcelain white and so, so cold.
He would always be in this moment, his fingers on dead skin, his neck tilted back so he could look up and up and up while inside him a scream began that would never stop.
A boy hung from the trees, vines noosed around his neck and thrust down his throat. Leaves curled out of his ears, still growing, his clothes torn where rose thorns had caught against flesh, all the better to find blood on which to feed.
touch me again and I’ll kill you—
aren’t you pleased?
this is exactly what
you asked for
Bryce Kane stared down at Andrew while a forest grew from his hollowed-out eyes.