5 Months Earlier #2
Laundry and extra blankets had been tumbled on Thomas’s bed, and the cottony warmth dragged Andrew down into sleep.
His muscles uncoiled, his stomachache eased.
He pulled pillows over his head so his world muffled and all that was left was the smell of soft laundry and traces of paint and the warm, earthy taste of Thomas.
Somewhere, through the dregs of unconsciousness, he heard the dorm door open and then close. He wasn’t awake enough to care.
A cool hand touched his cheek.
He pulled from sleep hard, sucking in air like he’d been underwater. It felt like his heart had stopped. Like he’d been lost. Like he’d had a fist on a branch and then—
s n a p
But he was still buried under Thomas’s mussy blankets, sweaty and muddled from waking so abruptly. Someone had flicked on the lights and the glare burned his eyes. He sat up, blinking hard.
Ms. Poppy hovered over him, bangles clinking lightly as she placed a cool palm on his forehead.
“S-sorry.” He sounded slurred. He felt undead, not awake, like he’d slept under a thousand-year enchantment instead of just the afternoon.
The clock on Thomas’s desk read 8:39 p.m. Damn it, he’d missed dining hall and tutor sessions. Sending a teacher to find him meant incoming detentions.
“Darling, you’re a little feverish.” Ms. Poppy made a soft, distressed sound. “We had someone come look in here, but they must not have seen you under all these blankets. I need you to come with me.”
Sleep had left Andrew so foggy he couldn’t find words. He fumbled for a tee shirt, one of Thomas’s maybe. Paint flecked the hem.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled again.
“You’re not in trouble.” But the way she looked at him was infinitely sad.
He followed her downstairs feeling too wrecked to stay upright. Something felt off. The dorm seemed subdued, the usual boisterous games in the rec room dulled, and everyone stared at them as they hurried past.
Outside, the summer night felt sticky and loud, cicadas singing from the forest and tires gravel crunching in the parking lot. Wasn’t it late for visitors? The hedges ended and he saw it then. Cop cars and an ambulance, their blue lights still flashing.
Panic flooded his lungs, vicious and wild.
Ms. Poppy hurried him into the school, murmuring something that was meant to be reassuring, though he couldn’t hear her past the roar in his head.
He was something.
missing
On the stairs up to the faculty floor, they had to step aside as one of the junior counselors walked down with arms around Lana Lang’s shoulders. She had tissues pressed to puffy eyes, her breathing barely controlled. When she saw Andrew, she turned her whole body away and started crying harder.
He hadn’t spoken to her often—she was slightly terrifying—but he knew Dove adored her.
Her presence always turned Thomas snappy and jealous, a juvenile reaction that Dove shut down because she had no patience for his inability to share.
Andrew understood him, though. Thomas was so used to no one liking him, no one caring, that when they did, he was always terrified of the day they’d stop.
Ms. Poppy took Andrew’s hand and squeezed it.
In the principal’s office, they sat him down. Two cops spoke to the principal, and senior teachers came in and out. The room felt too small and stuffy for this many people. Andrew thought he’d be sick; he had no idea what he’d done wrong.
He couldn’t stop thinking about the ambulance outside.
The way he hadn’t seen Thomas.
Agony wrapped fingers around his throat and pressed down hard enough to snap cartilage.
The principal perched in the other leather armchair beside him instead of behind her desk, an intimacy that made the situation even more disconcerting.
“Andrew, I have some difficult news, but first I want to assure you that your father is on his way. We would have him on the phone for you, except he decided to get on a plane immediately.”
Andrew picked at the paint crusted on the hem of his shirt. Thomas’s shirt.
“There has been an accident.”
He wondered what Thomas had been painting since he usually gravitated toward ink and charcoal for his monsters.
“Your sister went into the forest. From what we can determine, she was climbing an old oak and a branch broke. She … well, she struck her head on a rock when she fell.”
He said nothing. He thought if he were in one of Thomas’s drawings, they could scrub charcoal over the top of his worried eyes and sad mouth and blot him right out of the world.
“She … passed away. I am so sorry, Andrew.”
Andrew looked steadily at his fingers twisting his shirt. “No, Thomas wouldn’t let that … Thomas Rye would have s-saved her.”
The principal’s voice sounded higher than usual, and she had to pause and clear her throat. “Lana Lang confirmed that she saw the two of them down by the tree line. They had some sort of argument, and then Dove went into the forest alone.”
The principal went on speaking. Andrew wished she’d stop.
There had to be a finite number of words in the world, and she wasted them going on and on about how students were forbidden from the forest without teacher supervision.
How misplaced loyalty meant Lana hadn’t reported Dove missing until after dinner.
Then police had been called. A search party sent into the forest.
Thomas had been found, oblivious, in the art room.
Andrew had been searched for, but they missed him the first time under all the blankets, and then Ms. Poppy thought to check again and found him asleep.
His twin had been severed from him, and he hadn’t even been awake to feel it.
They asked if he had questions.
He didn’t.
People kept giving condolences.
He peeled paint from his shirt.
He said, “No,” one more time, just softly, but nobody listened. They had already accepted the truth of this story they’d made up, this dark and treacherous fairy tale worse than anything he’d ever written.
Eventually someone said, “He’s in shock,” and they dithered around about what to do with him before deciding to send him back to the dorms.
Dr. Reul escorted him, making comforting comments about how bright and loved Dove was and how he understood Andrew didn’t feel like talking right now, but when he did, there were people who would be there for him.
All Andrew noticed, as they passed the empty parking lot, was how the ambulance had left.
They took her away. They didn’t even ask him if they could.
Only the lights in the kitchenette had been left on, all students in bed and the counselor on duty waiting up with herbal tea and a pitying expression.
Thomas sat at the table staring at a cooling mug before him.
When he looked up, his expression was so raw and terrible that Andrew glanced away.
They’d flayed Thomas alive, it was easy to see.
If they took his shirt off right now, would he have skin left, or just muscle and sinew, throbbing livid and red and bloody as he struggled for each breath?
Andrew felt nothing as he stared at this boy with devastation bleeding from his eyes.
They climbed the stairs to their room in silence and readied themselves for sleep by the light of a single bedside lamp.
Andrew shrugged off the shirt he’d stolen from Thomas and opened his wardrobe door to find his pajamas.
Seeing himself in the slim mirror screwed to the inside of his wardrobe door gave him a jarring sense of vertigo—this angular, pale boy with collarbones made of twigs and hip bones sharp against his pants. It felt like someone else.
Thomas hovered behind him like a ghost. He took a step forward, his mouth trembling. “Andrew, I’m … I’m sorry. I should have been with her. I should never, never have let her go alone—”
“Yes.” Andrew’s voice was barely above a whisper. “You should have been with her.”
Thomas shrank into himself. What had he expected? Forgiveness, absolution?
“It’s all your fault.” Andrew said it in a way that drove a knife into Thomas’s gut and twisted.
He stared at the mirror, at the boy before him who looked like Dove: her honey hair, her warm brown eyes, that stubborn tilt to their mouths when they were upset.
Thomas wiped his eyes and dug fingers through his hair, trying to steady his shuddering breathing. “I’m sorry. I’d do anything to go back in time and—”
“Stop talking.” Andrew didn’t recognize his voice, cool and hard as river stones.
“—stay with her. She wouldn’t have died alone. Shit, she wouldn’t have died. I’d have caught her or carried her to get help and—”
“I said stop talking.”
Thomas choked on a sob. “I’m sorry—”
Andrew hit the mirror.
He hit it again, again, until glass shattered and blood smeared across his reflection. He no longer looked like Dove, now he was a red-smeared thing in fractured pieces. He hit it again.
Thomas was crying out for him to stop, pleading with a voice gone high and cracked and terrified.
He would stop when he’d obliterated every last piece of glass into stardust that he could coat his tongue with and whisper a magic wish to the forest.
Give her back.
Arms wrapped around his waist, trying to pull him away. He wrenched free and smashed his hand into the mirror again. He felt nothing. His fingers looked like broken twigs dyed crimson and dusted with slivers of glass as he kept punching the mirror again and again and—
The dorm door burst open. People were yelling. Light blazed the room and seared his eyes with such brutality that he screamed.
Stronger hands took him by the shoulders and dragged him away.
Voices piled over each other, arguing, questioning. Doors squeaked open across the hall as sleepy faces peered out to see what was happening.
Andrew thrashed against their grip, a strange, unkempt violence spilling out of him as he snarled between clenched teeth. This wasn’t him. He was never like this.
He didn’t know how he ended up on the floor in Thomas’s arms, rocking slowly, slowly. They sat in a sea of mirror shards while Andrew cradled his mangled hand to his chest. Thomas’s cheek pressed to his bare spine, his tears tracking down Andrew’s skin.
“I’m sorry…,” Thomas whispered.
“I said.” Andrew placed each word like a rusted blade against Thomas’s tremulous throat. “Stop. Talking.”
Thomas didn’t speak again. He held Andrew and cried to make up for the fact Andrew hadn’t cried at all.
Everything inside Andrew had been scooped out, and he’d been left a hollow thing, impossible to fill.
Dove would absolutely freak out when she saw what he’d done to his hand. He’d explain it to her over breakfast, how it had been a tough, stressful year, and he’d spaced out for a minute.
He’d thought there was a monster in the mirror and he only meant to kill it.