Twenty-nine #2
There was one person I couldn’t seem to get away from. Someone—definitely my dad—sent Casper up to my room every day with two big childproof cups of blood, one for me and one for himself. Casper treated it like a tea party. At least hunger didn’t add to that hollow pain inside me.
Casper couldn’t read hints for shit, so he overstayed his welcome every day to practice his art.
I came to expect him and to not mind so much.
He was the one person who didn’t have any reason to be disappointed in me.
While he was with me, I put my homework aside and furiously drew what I remembered from my dreams.
Mostly, they were drawings of Mason.
They were all drawings of Mason.
Sketches of his calloused hands, his full lips.
The heart-shaped birthmark on his thigh.
Mason floating in a sky where all of the clouds were sheep.
Mason’s corded back and the veins in his forearms. A wolf in a field of lupine.
A werewolf in a chicken coop, too large to comfortably fit inside, delicately holding a chick in its massive clawed hand.
There were pages and pages of paint swatches as I tried to perfectly match the raw-sienna shade of his skin and the different colors of his eyes.
Putting Mason onto paper, sketching and erasing and sketching and erasing his angles and curves, I was stunned all over again by the way he was sculpted, the way light seemed to find its perfect touchpoints on his face even in a drawing.
His eyes were frustrating; I didn’t have the tools to recreate them.
Nothing in the human world could do the job; or I was just utterly, embarrassingly gone for him.
Shaping his lines with my own hands, it became painfully clear that he had always been too good for me.
A pearl inside an oyster, he hadn’t been mine to take.
The stars, or gods, or whoever the hell had stuck us together, must have been cruelly curious, or bored, or a few drinks in when they did the job.
I drew my nightmares too. These were foggier, harder to re-envision. I was drawing a feeling more than anything. Clocks, bells, feathers, talons, the sun, the moon, engulfing shadows.
“You should hang these,” Casper said on a Friday night, standing on his toes to peer at the stack of finished pieces on my chest of drawers. “I hang all of mine.”
“There’s no space on the wall,” I said.
“Sure there is!” said Casper. He pointed to a high sliver of wall between a pitiful watercolor of a windflower and a page from my mom’s book on pollinating birds. “Right here. And there. And there. And there . . .”
He didn’t recommend I use my other walls. He couldn’t possibly understand why I hadn’t, but he saw me clearly somehow.
So I dug out my thumbtacks and lifted him up so he could pin my drawings of Mason to the wall.
They overlapped with my mom’s doodles and notes, filling something I hadn’t known was missing: time.
Mason and my mother—sunshine people who I hadn’t managed to keep for long but who had, at the same time, been with me all my life.
My wall was an art piece. I left the nightmares in my sketchbook.
***
The weather slowly warmed. We got more sun and marginally less rain. I waited for the day I would wake up feeling better.
That day didn’t come, but I did reach a point, at the beginning of March, when I could resume the tundra documentary without feeling sick.
Arctic wolves mated for life. The way they courted, always nudging each other, nosing and nipping and feeding each other, reminded me so much of Mason, I smiled at the screen.
Casper rubbed my shoulder. “It’s okay. My papa cries at these movies too.”
The next day at school, I let myself look at Mason a little longer than was wise. I was thinking about the wolves. For the first time in weeks, he met my gaze. Something wasn’t right. Light had returned to his eyes, but it was strange. Angry. Feral.
That look kept me up that night. I tried to draw it, to make some sense of it. I lay in bed sketching and erasing, still halfway under the covers, hoping I might find some answer or at least draw myself to sleep.
It was after midnight when my stomach dropped, startling me so badly I sat up and dislodged my blanket. I knew this feeling by now, dread and secondhand pain.
I was on my feet in an instant, stumbling as I tried to run while sliding into sneakers. I rushed down to the basement, frantic, and banged on Annalisa’s door.
There was no response.
“Please open up,” I begged, pounding my fist. “I know I’ve been shit lately, but you can yell at me later, okay? I think Mason’s in danger.”
Every time I had felt this before, Cedric had been involved.
Still nothing. I yanked her door open and found an empty room.
I heaved a dry, panicked sob. She was probably out with Lara.
I didn’t bother knocking at Cedric’s room. I tested the doorknob—locked as always—then rammed my shoulder against the door and crashed inside. He was gone.
“Fuck,” I said, muffled beneath my hand. “Fuck!”
I hurried to Cedric’s desk and snatched the meanest-looking knife, a long narrow dagger.
Silver wouldn’t do him any real damage, but a knife hurt no matter what.
I stashed it in my hoodie pocket and was about to turn away when I noticed something on his desk that didn’t fit in.
Next to an envelope with a stamp was a piece of paper that had once been folded in three.
It was a letter. I recognized the unsightly handwriting immediately and didn’t linger to read the rest. At the bottom of the page was Mason’s phone number.
A door opened down the hall. Casper’s aunt, Alice DeLuca, poked her head out to ask about the noise, face drawn in concern. I ran past her without pausing to answer.
Another painful jolt nearly knocked me off-balance. It was different from my birthday, the feeling farther away. There was no tug telling me where to go. I couldn’t pinpoint Mason’s location by sensation alone. I went to my car anyway.
I threw myself inside and shoved the key into the ignition. Without thinking, I dialed Cella, gripping my phone in a shaking hand.
It rang, and rang, and my panic climbed.
She answered.
“Kieran?” she said, voice heavy with worry despite sounding half asleep. “Is something wrong?”
“Cella, it’s Mason, I don’t—he’s hurt and I don’t know where, and Cedric has something to do with it, and—”
“Kieran, breathe.”
“That doesn’t work on me! Cella, I don’t know what to do.”
“Breathe,” she said sternly.
I tried. I sucked in, but my breath stuttered and went out like a weak flame.
“Close your mouth. Breathe through your nose. It doesn’t have to be deep, just slow.”
I followed her directions. I took a light, long breath and imagined it traveling through me. It trembled less on the exhale.
“Good,” said Cella. She asked, “Now, what are you going to do?”
The car revved to life. I shifted into drive.
“I’m going to find them and bring Mason back,” I said. “Whatever it takes.”
Next, she said, “How can I help?”