CHAPTER THREE
HELIA
I left my painting on campus, but I kept the concept in my mind.
The darkness, the shadow. The blacks and grays.
Halfway through painting it, I tumbled into bed and passed out.
Even my insomnia couldn’t fight through the mess of today.
Perhaps I should be grateful, but I hated it.
Because that simply meant that I'd get a handful of hours of sleep, at best and then…
the rest of my day would be spent in a literal haze of insomnia fueled brain fog that I wandered about campus in.
And I was already vague and artsy and now I had dropped a class in the middle of semester. I’d be lucky if anyone would take me on, and there was no chance that I was going to call darling daddy like a thousand other girls on campus would do in order to pull a favor.
That wasn’t the way my world worked.
As it turned out, I didn't need to make the call. Because the call found me.
I picked it up on the third buzz, my fingers covered in black paint, at a quarter to midnight. That should have been my first clue. The second was the pause before the voice spoke on the other end.
And the final was that anyone called me at all, outside of my regular Taco Tuesday not-date.
“Hello?”
“Helia?”
I spoke over the voice that started talking at the same time that I did, and sighed.
“Dad. Hi.” all my energy left me in a rush. “I don’t have time for games."
But they’re my favorite thing to play.
Once he would have bantered back with me. Now, I only received silence on the other end.
“You’re going to get some visitors. I want you to let them in.”
I stared at the phone and contemplated telling him where to go. Hanging up. Throwing the thing and moving to a different country.
“Why do you care what I do?” Sure, that petulance is the perfect message I want to send back. I picked up my brush and painted.
My hooded man became an invisible monster painted in detail in the shadow. So dark and deep that even I couldn't see him after a while I wondered what else lurked there, created but unseen.
“Helia.” My father sighed, as though I had burdened him with a great weight simply in the act of being born. “You need to help me with his. It’s very important for business. I need you to let in the people who I send to you, and do everything that they say. Is that clear?”
I added my teddy in its coffin at the base. Also unseen. Screw Master Magnus. He could go fuck a jar of jelly beans and run off on a sugar high. Damn, I was tired. That was the best insult I had right then.
“Helia, are you listening to me?”
“I’m painting.”
“Then stop.”
“Paint’s fresh.”
“Stop.”
“It’s already been smudged once.”
“Stop!”
No.
I’d said it once in the last forty eight hours. I wondered how much more I could say it? But instead, I placed my paint laden fingers on the screen and swiped.
“Good bye, Dad,” I said softly.
And kept painting.
A white figure, a wraith or specter I swore I'd seen in my dreams last night flickered in from the edges. When my phone didn’t ring again, I threw it onto my bed behind me and kept working.
The advantage to living off campus was working my own hours.
Not working to dorm hours or roommates. I worked through past midnight, well into the smallest hours, and my specter grew.
Taking form from the corner of the canvas where I thought he would stay, this apparition consumed the entire middle of the large rectangular space until it was the centerpiece.
And that’s where it stopped. I had no features, only shadows, and so that’s what I painted. And painted, until I was done.
And then, I did something I had never done before.
I named it.