CHAPTER NINE #3
“‘Through the fire–’” Elliott sang the lyrics and danced around the Common Room.
It was the one illegal song they knew from when James had stolen a radio from Professor Winston on Elliott’s birthday once.
Chaka Khan’s Through the Fire was released in 1984 and they wouldn’t have known it otherwise and, now, Elliott was singing on top of his lungs of how he’d gladly risk it all, right down to the wire, even through the fire.
It was the song he’d sing on his last day on earth.
Eventually, James gave in and sang with him. His ears incarnadine.
By the end of the night, their limbs were tangled in a heap on the couch, their skin feverishly hot and enmeshed together.
The mass body heat of the Common Room had risen to an almost humid, summery temperature.
With his cowboy collar crumpled, Elliott sat beside James, watching Heather count her earnings in the corner and stash it in her heavy armor.
Heather’s friends walked around with black trash bags for stray cans, marinara-streaked paper plates, and used napkins.
It was Mrs. Fletcher’s fortieth year at AEscwulf College, and she was paid to clean, however, it was Heather T?n’s rule that it was not the groundskeeper’s wife’s duty to tidy the Common Room after ragers, it was the students’ duty.
Abruptly, Elliott smiled. “Do you remember your freshman year when you couldn’t stand getting the flu and you used to eat raw ginger whenever you left the dormitory?
” Elliott laughed. AEscwulf College was at a higher elevation and thereby a rimier temperature, and James refused to contract the flu.
For James, contracting the flu meant he had to sit out for a political speech.
Even when his voice was hoarse and difficult with a severe cough, he loved competing against rival universities in formal debates.
Finch was the only one who understood him.
James chuckled back, amused. “You only know about my freshman year because you couldn’t stand to be apart from me. You’d sneak through the window at night to commandeer my bed.”
They were inseparable. Quite literally attached that year.
Elliott cut holes in the French-linen bedsheets of Winterthur Residence Hall and took turns balancing James on his shoulders, or steadying himself on James’s shoulders, and they nearly pissed themselves laughing at everyone they scared through the rowdy halls.
Elliott and James were already eerily tall, but stacked on top of one another, it was a frightening height that made Roslyn scream and hurl a stapler at them.
Her aim was perfect. Elliott still had the scar underneath the hollow of his throat.
Suddenly, James ushered Elliott into one of the storage closets. “Elliott, you’re bleeding.”
The bucket and mop lurched in front of Elliott. The orange and black Hallowe’en streamers blurred in his vision. The hammers and equipment boxes became shadowed, distorted, bestial figures that leered at him. Mocked him. The floor swam up to his vision as he nearly plummeted forward.
You killed him. You gave them your keys.
Murderer.
Murderer.
Murderer.
He will never spend Hallowe’en with his children again. His students still leave paleo-botany periodical newsletters on his grave.
James unknotted his country cowboy bandana and wrapped it around Elliott’s right hand to stanch the blood. “Did you slice your hand on a beer glass?”
Probably. He couldn’t remember how he’d gotten nicked. Elliott swayed, resisting the urge to grasp for charcoal or graphite and sketch the nightmares behind his eyelids. He always carried it with him. The grief.
Mr. Newton will never dress up as Isaac Newton or Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr for his students again. All because of you.
Elliott couldn’t fall asleep, and all the dark liquor was rushing back up to him vertiginously, rendering him exhausted and depleted. He wanted nothing more than to pass out on the Common Room couch, but the night terrors would ambush him in front of everyone. He’d scream out Arthur Newton’s name.
Elliott’s hands felt as though they were incinerating.
He felt invisible keys etch into his skin.
Sometimes, when he was half-drunk or half-asleep, he’d accidentally grab the nearest set of keys or anything sharply similar, and clench his hand.
He’d physically try to hold onto the keys, even if it cut open his hand, to keep it out of Knox Pearson’s grasp. To keep Mr. Newton alive and safe.
James loosened Elliott’s country bandana and he twined the fabric around his other hand to suppress the leaking blood there. “You took the storage closet keys by accident. Let me take you to the infirmary. Stay here.”
“No, I’m fine.”
“Elliott, you’ve soaked through your sleeve. The key was rusted.”
Before James could stop him, Elliott shot back one last rum and coke to keep awake.
The party rampaged through the late hours, a riot of dancing and heavy thrusting, and Elliott shook his head clear.
He apologized to the passed out centaurs he tumbled over.
Elliott beelined right for the ice packs in the communal fridge.
He stitched himself up and rinsed himself clean of blood, rummaging the cabinets for new bandages.
Without warning, the room fell deathly silent behind him as a girl with a burned temple entered the Common Room. Her pallid-white cheekbones were damp with perspiration, her sodden-black hair clung to her pale skin like seaweed, as though she’d survived a turbulent sea storm.
Her head was strapped with gauze, but everyone caught the stench of the cauterized flesh beneath. Five more victims filed in behind her, their foreheads wrapped in an adhesive compress, and Elliott regretted his cheery participation of the eve of Samhain.
While they partied and had fun, these students were publicly tortured.
An invasive cold crept in his lungs.
The ice-bound entrance was left open to air out the miasma of burnt flesh. The last boy staggered inside, and someone assisted him around the arms. Heather handed him a shot of vodka, no charge.
Huey Powell cut the stereo to signal the end of the party.