CHAPTER SEVEN
“ELLIOTT, YOUR HANDS ARE BLEEDING.”
Elliott’s head shot upward. The receptionist snapped her gum at the art department main desk.
She was a full-figured woman with fierce green eyes and fiery hair.
For Samhain weekend, she was dressed as Ygritte from A Game of Thrones.
Roslyn kept herself warm beneath layers of primitive fur with a stern bow of weirwood strapped to her back and sharp arrows fletched with grey goose feathers set in her sewn quiver.
Her blue-gray eye contacts made her gaze even fiercer than usual.
Every freshman feared Roslyn, but by the end of the year, they realized she remembered birthdays, parents, home pets.
She always had a listening ear. She always baked goods on the holidays.
She lent students unauthorized fiction. She carried tissues for grieving students and, on occasion, she was an infirmary nurse as she handed Elliott a bandage.
“Did you hear about the seven students that were caught?”
Seven? Elliott balked, he’d heard four bellows of pain earlier, but seven was nearly twice as many.
“Don’t lean on my counter, I need to make it look like I’m working.” Her nails clacked against the keyboards. Plastic Jack-o’-lanterns danced on the counter in front of her. “But did you hear about it?”
Elliott nodded his head. “I heard it this morning.”
Octobers felt warm with Roslyn and Elliott melted from the cold beside her.
He helped himself to her homemade pumpkin tarts that sugared the air.
Freshly brewed apple cider in festive cups invited him to sit for a spell with her.
However, anxiety overwhelmed him. Elliott took a paper cup, turning it over restlessly in his hands.
“I need something else besides a bandage.”
Roslyn checked over her shoulder for the watchful gaze of any passing professors, before returning her glance to the nervous twitch of his fingers. The gnaw of his lip beneath his chipped teeth.
“What do you need…a Xanax?” Her eyes skimmed over the rabbiting foot of Elliott as he shifted from right to left, then left to right, then right to left, then left to right. She opened a metal cabinet. “You need a Xanax. Today has been a nightmare already.”
“No Xanax, thanks. Do you have transfer paperwork–”
Her emerald-coated nails were pincers as she rattled through medication. “Benzodiazepines are your best bet, honey. Benzos are the miracle drug for anxiety. Don’t you dare touch barbiturates.”
In Banebury, it was relatively new to speak openly about seeing shrinks or taking prescription drugs for mental assistance, a town entirely reticent to the concept of modern therapeutics at all.
They lived in the southernmost point of Connecticut, where the snowy homes didn’t squeeze together like friendly teeth on the mountain range.
Their mansions were isolated, their families didn’t discuss ‘abnormalities,’ and they preferred their antiquated society structured that way.
Baneburians made it seem as if you needed to be institutionalized, if you went to therapy.
Elliott had no notion of whether therapy was beneficial or not. He rocked back and forth, unable to express himself as he felt his hands carbonize his flesh.
“Please. I can’t.” His words were fragmentary. He couldn’t endure another year of art. His voice splintered. A cry for help that watered his young eyes. “Survive. I can’t.”
I can’t stop seeing a dead man. I can’t stop drawing him over and over until I sicken myself and vomit. Until I callus and bleed. Art is killing me.
“I know. Every year, I beg the professors to end the punishments. They never listen.”
The professors were deep in deliberation of the hibernal by this time of year, their hands clasped behind their backs.
Behind Roslyn stood a mammoth glass window that gave view to the browned landscape where the Saexhelm Library was buried under autumnal foliage and warm lights blanketed over the bookshops in the early rain.
The sky was slate gray throughout the campus.
Near the mountains, the bitter, dry wind rippled over the river end, nipping every scarf and sweater, upending the stitched threads.
The fallen acorns were littered across the campus where the woodland squirrels gathered under the shedding oaks.
Elliott had to head to lecture, but all he could think of was that because of him, his biology teacher’s chest was cleaved open by metal.
His teacher’s contorted expression of pain was all he could endlessly paint.
Elliott bruised his hands with how tightly he gripped the brush.
At night, he clung to a pair of keys, until his hands bled.
He destroyed a man’s entire life.
“Elliott, you’re bleeding all over my books,” Roslyn said softly, her eyes were kind as she handed him a tissue. “There’s a psychiatrist in Deer Ridge–”
“I need…transfer out…the art department.” Elliott couldn’t endure another year of art, his hands wouldn’t survive it. However, he couldn’t stop himself.
He painted obsessively, erratically, irrepressibly, for several hours straight, before the frenzied haze stopped, leaving him gasping, gulping, by the end.
Art is pain, dear Elliott, one of his professors told him when Elliott had confided in him.
Elliott had to get out before he destroyed himself.
Roslyn wasn’t even fazed, she never judged the students.
“Got it. You need professorial signatures from the art department for release, then. Can you manage that?” That would be simple enough, however, her tone deepened as she grimaced in pity on his behalf.
“As well as the sanctioned approval from the philosophy department. I take it you want to enter into the philosophy department?”
Elliott blinked. “What makes you think that?”
“The young man you walk around with. Ah…the one with the ah…” Roslyn gestured to her hair. “The one with the white head of hair like he was caught in a snowstorm. He wears the philosophy undergraduate badge.”
Elliott was flushed that Roslyn noticed him with James.
However, a new registration would be nearly impossible that late in the term, the philosophy department was notorious for their rigid deadline.
The philosophy lecture halls were secluded in caves near the mountain.
The science department might take him, but he needed near-perfect examination results.
Elliott felt as though he was plummeting to the earth, flightless, his wings clipped.
“Yeah, the philosophy department. Thank you.”
He gathered the necessary paperwork, smudging the edges with a patina of blood by accident, and he left for his morning lecture.
Maybe if he had forged the signature for the science department right then and there and if he begged Roslyn to never mention it to anyone, none of what happened that Samhain weekend would’ve ever happened. He would’ve been preoccupied with textbooks and midterm preparations.
It wouldn’t have been the beginning of the end of everything he knew.
The end of everyone he loved.
Allegory of Prudence by Titian
(c. 1550-1565)