by Nicole Thorn
“It’s still dark out,” I said. “What time is it?” I looked over at the clock, and saw that I had only been asleep for three hours. I blinked heavily, and then looked back at my father.
“You have to get up early,” he said. “Unless you want that poor girl to explain to everyone why she’s wearing the same clothes she had been the day before. Do you want her to deal with the reputation sleeping with you would give her?” He spoke in the most reasonable voice, which made me really think about his words.
The other students didn’t like me. I didn’t want anyone treating her badly because of that, so he was right.
“Okay. I’ll get ready,” I said, pushing myself to a sitting position.
“Hold up,” my father said. “Before you do that, can you tell me what all of this is?” He held up the pens that Manny had handed to me. I stared at them for several seconds, frowning.
“Manny gave them to me,” I finally said.
My father nodded. He dropped the pens onto the bed, and pulled the chair from my desk over so that he could sit in front of me. “I saw her arm last night. You had been drawing on her?”
I shrugged. “Kinda.”
“You know how I feel about your drawing, Becket. It only distracts you from everything else, and you’re already so easily distracted.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “She said she didn’t mind.”
“She probably did because she’s a very nice, very polite girl. I’m happy that you’ve got a friend but you need to pay more attention. No one wants someone drawing on them for that long, especially not the kind of things that you draw. Next time, try to be a little more considerate, okay?”
I nodded.
“As for this,” he said, waving to the pens. I looked at them, and worried that he would throw them out. It would hurt Manny’s feelings, and she hadn’t done anything wrong. I watched as my father took the pens, binding them together with a rubber band. Then he set a razorblade down on the bed. “You can either throw the pens out, or you can draw something on yourself with that.” He pointed to the blade.
I stared at the two options. My hands tightened around the edge of the blanket for a few seconds before I came to a decision. I grabbed the razor blade, and then looked at my arm. There were scars all over it, and not a spare space for me to draw something. I had to pull my shirt over my head. There was a spot on the right side of my chest that was free. Underneath it, the skin was wrinkled, distorted by a burn scar.
The edge of the blade felt cold. It was sharp enough to pierce the skin without me even trying. The angle was wrong, so I had to work carefully. The circle wasn’t perfect but it was close. At the bottom of the circle, I drew two eyes that were really just straight lines. Then I carefully carved a curve underneath the eyes. Until I had a smiley face, offering me a grin.
Blood trickled down my chest and stomach but I made no move to stop it. Not while my father was here. He didn’t like me doing that kind of thing in front of him.
I set the blade down, looking up at him. My father’s impassive face stared at my newest scar, and he nodded. “And why did you make this decision?” he asked.
“You’re not supposed to throw gifts away. No matter how small they are,” I told him. My eyes drifted over to the pens. They laid innocuously on the bed, so many bright colors that they made a rainbow on my sheets.
My father nodded. “That was very polite, sound reasoning. I’m proud of you, you know?”
“Thank you,” I said.
“Don’t tell Manny about this, either. It would only make her feel bad, and you don’t want her to feel bad. I know because you’re a good boy, and you understand that upsetting someone as kind as her would be callous and cold.”
I agreed.
“Now, get ready, then take that girl home so that she can change into something new. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He left, and I climbed out of bed. I’d put the pens in my backpack, where they would be safe but I had to shower first. My chest wound leaked all throughout the shower, and there was no way to keep it clean. When I got out, I dabbed at it with a towel, and then stared at the thing in the mirror. It was upside down from that angle but from my viewpoint, it was right.
I focused on it, watching as the bleeding dried up. The edges of the wound grew darker as I made the blood clot around it. The skin wouldn’t heal for a few more days, or maybe longer depending on how deep the wound was but I could keep the evidence of it hidden. I also wrapped the wound because my shirts could rip the clotted blood out when I wasn’t paying attention, and then I’d have blood staining my shirt in the middle of class. When that was finished, I stepped from the bathroom.
My father was downstairs, making breakfast. The smell of bacon filled the entire house. My stomach turned over. I wasn’t hungry anymore but I would eat the food he gave me. Plus, Manny might be starving. I wandered over to her bedroom and knocked on the door.
A groggy sound came from the other side, and I leaned into the room. Manny had sat up. She stared at me with dark circles underneath her eyes, and sleep lines marking her face.
“Good morning,” I said. “Are you hungry?”
She blinked. “Sure. What time is it?” She looked at the clock, blinking again. “Why are you ready to go? I don’t normally get up for another thirty minutes.” She rubbed at her eyes, and it seemed to wake her up fully.
“My father said you might want a change of clothes,” I told her. “I thought we could stop by your house on the way to school. If you’d rather go by yourself, I would understand, though.”
“Huh?” she asked, sitting up. She rubbed at her eyes for a few seconds, and then shook her head. “No, Becket. You can come with me. Why would I rather go by myself?”
I shuffled my feet and stepped into the room so that I could speak with her without my father hearing. “I’d understand if you didn’t want to be seen with me. The other students are already mean to you. It would only get worse if you spent time with me. It won’t hurt my feelings if you want me to leave you alone.”
She blinked again. “Well, I don’t. Want you to leave me alone, that is.”
I smiled, then ducked my head because I knew there was something wrong with my smile. She might change her mind if I scared her away. “We should head downstairs. Dad is making us breakfast.”
“Give me a few minutes?” she asked.
I nodded and stepped out of the room. I wandered down the hallway, then stood at the top of the stairs. My chest stung. It hadn’t when I’d been talking with Manny but I noticed the feeling now. I thought that it would be so easy to let my knees go weak, and then I could fall down the stairs.
Something other than my chest would hurt then. I would be able to focus on pain that wasn’t because of me. It was so tempting that I almost did it. In the end, I refrained because it might scare Manny, to hear me falling down the stairs. I didn’t want to scare her away.
“Becket?” Manny said from behind me.
I turned around to see that she had gotten dressed and was standing down the hall from me. “You ready for breakfast?” I asked.
She nodded, and we went downstairs together.
My father had set the table with an extra plate. There were three glasses of orange juice waiting. In the center of the table, he had put plates of eggs, bacon, and sausage down. He pulled Manny’s chair out for her, and she took her seat with barely a glance at him. I sat across from her.
“Did you sleep well?” Dad asked.
“Yes,” Manny told him. She had lost some of her warmth since coming downstairs. I must have done something that upset her. I stared down at my plate, trying to figure out what it was. Did she not want me in her room? Or maybe she meant for me to wait outside her bedroom, and I had wandered away like an idiot.
“I’m glad,” Dad said. “If your parents are concerned with where you stayed last night, you can have them call me. I’m sure that I could put their worries to rest.” He smiled at her but Manny’s return
ed smile looked wrong somehow.
I frowned over that.
“Becket? Is something wrong with your food?” my father asked.
I shook my head immediately. “No. Just pacing myself.” I took another bite of egg, and swallowed past the lump in my throat. My stomach didn’t want the food but it accepted it. Manny watched me with serious eyes, and then flicked her gaze over to my father.
“If I may ask a question that might be considered rude?” Manny asked.
“Feel free,” my father said. “I don’t mine rude questions. My job kind of depends on them.”
“What kind of magic do you work?”
Dad smiled. “That’s not a rude question at all. I’m a medicine worker. More specifically, I deal in hallucinogens. That’s why I became a therapist, actually. Watching people’s reactions has always been fascinating but I thought that dealing with the after-effects of using drugs was much more compelling work.”
Manny nodded.
“Since you’ve asked about me, can I ask about you? I assume you work metal like both of your parents?”
“No,” Manny said. “I work flesh.”
My father blinked.
Manny smiled. “My great-grandfather married ‘below’ him. Until me, the genes were good enough that my family could forget about the other flesh worker in our lineage.”
“Fascinating,” Dad said. Then he checked his watch. “Well, you kids should probably be going, if you want to get a change of clothes and still arrive at school on time. It was lovely meeting you, Manny. I’m glad that Becket has a friend.” With that, my father rose to his feet and walked out of the kitchen. When he was gone, Manny relaxed, seeming more herself again.
I still didn’t know what I had done to make her uncomfortable.
“Are you ready?” I asked her.
When she nodded, we went to retrieve our things. I put the pens into my backpack as I had planned, and then the two of us left. It was still cold outside, and it was early enough in the morning that the bite wasn’t as pleasant as I usually found it. Most of our walk was silent. We’d occasionally point out something to each other but that was the only communication we had.
We came up to her house, and I shuffled my feet. “Would you like me to wait out here?” I asked.
She frowned for a few seconds before shaking her head. “No. I don’t think my parents are home, and I don’t know if my brother ever came back last night.” She walked up to her front door, and I trailed behind her. Everything about this house felt wrong somehow. It was subtle but it was there. In the way everything looked more expensive than it should have, and how quiet it was.
Manny rang the doorbell and stepped back. Mere seconds later, a guy answered the door. He was shorter than me by a couple of inches and had dark blond hair. His eyes were light brown, and he was heavy. Not enough to be called fat but enough that he probably got teased when he had been in school. He had to be a couple of years older than me as well.
He looked from me to Manny, and back again. “What the hell?” he asked.
Manny looked up at him. “I forgot my key yesterday. I sent you texts, asking when you were going to be home.”
“And when I didn’t get back to you, you took off with some guy?” he said, sneering.
I cocked my head. “I do not like you.”
“I don’t give a shit what you like, buddy,” he said.
Manny took a step forward, and her brother – because who else could he be – did not move. He stood as straight as he could, staring down at her. My eyes narrowed on him. I thought he was trying to play a game with her, the kind that I had never liked. Only, he wasn’t as big as he thought. Manny ducked around him and into the house. He turned around, yelling something scathing after her.
Since he no longer blocked the doorway, I stepped inside as well, closing the door without waiting to be invited in. Manny had already said that I could come in, so it wasn’t rude.
“What the fuck are you doing?” her brother asked, turning on me. He took a step forward, and I blinked at him.
“Standing here,” I said.
“Don’t get mouthy with me,” he warned. “You won’t like the results.”
“If that is a threat, then you are not scaring me,” I told him. “I could kill you without moving from this spot. I won’t because Manny said not to but I could. I’ve done it before.”
He stared at me for several seconds, then shook his head. “You’re a freak, aren’t you?” With that, the man went down the hallway. I wandered into the kitchen, and leaned against the edge of the table. His words had not bothered me. I didn’t understand how someone could be a freak when they were born a certain way. There was no aberration because everyone was born the way they had been meant to be born.
I was not alone for long. Manny’s brother came back shortly thereafter. He stood in the kitchen, staring at me. “I hope you’re happy,” he said. “When I tell my parents about this and Manny gets into trouble, that will be your fault.”
“Why would she get into trouble?”
“She spent the night with a guy. A freakish one at that.”
“She slept in our guest room. My father was home all night,” I said. “If they want to know, then they can ask him.”
Her brother laughed and shook his head. “You think that’s what I’ll tell them. Look, dummy, I got into some shit last night. This will keep them off my back, so thank you for that.”
I cocked my head. Manny had said that he hurt her whenever their parents hurt him. It would seem that he threw her under the bus when it was convenient as well. I looked down at my shoes, thoughtfully. It would upset her if I killed him, and I wouldn’t be able to explain it to my father either.
But I could keep a secret if I had to.
I looked back up at her brother, and felt all his blood flowing through his body. It pulsed through his veins, and in his heart. I concentrated, and he flinched. The glass in his hand nearly fell to the floor but he managed to catch it and set it down on the counter. “What’s happening?” he said.
I concentrated some more, until his face contorted into pain. Then I whispered, “You should lift your shirt up.”
He stared at me for several seconds, and then he did what I said. He hauled his shirt over his head, and stared down at his chest. A bruise had formed, right in the center, and it started to spread. Dark purple at first but slowly getting worse. Turning black.
“I can kill you like this,” I said. “I can fill your brain with so much blood that it bursts. I can create leaks all over your body, so that you bleed internally, without a single wound to show for it. I can freeze your blood in your veins, or speed it up. I can make it hot, or cold. I can kill you like this, and it wouldn’t bother me. I could make your eyes burst from your skull, or have you leaking from every orifice. I can call every ounce of blood from your body, to me. It’ll crawl across the floor to reach me. I can do it all, or none of it... Depending on how the rest of this conversation goes.”
Now her brother stared at me with quiet horror. The bruise kept stretching, until it nearly reached his shoulders. I watched it form, and whispered for it to stop. It came to a halt but his entire chest was one large bruise. He wouldn’t be able to move for the rest of the day without agony.
My eyes went up to meet his. “If you say anything that will get Manny into trouble, I’ll know. And I might ignore that she doesn’t want you dead. I might kill you anyway because it wouldn’t bother me if you didn’t exist anymore. I could have killed you now, and you wouldn’t have been able to stop it. Do you believe that?”
He nodded his head slowly. His mouth hung open.
“Good,” I said. “Do you believe that I’ll come here to kill you if you use me to hurt Manny?”
Again, he nodded.
“I’ll know, too. Any mark that you leave on her, any bruise, and I’ll see it, or sense it. I’ll know that it was you, and I’ll start to think that you’d be better off dead. Do you believe that?”
“Put your shirt back on, before she sees this.” He listened without arguing. His shirt came back on, and he stared at me with quiet horror.
Manny came into the kitchen. She had changed clothes but still wore the sweater I had given her. She had on a dress or skirt underneath it. It was seafoam green. I liked the color on her pale skin. She looked from her brother and back to me. “Everything okay, Lane?” she asked.
Lane nodded. “Yup. Leave, before you’re late for school.” Then he stormed out of the room, heading down the hall. I heard a door slam, and that was it.
Manny turned to me. “He didn’t bother you, did he?”
“No,” I said. “He didn’t bother me at all. Are you ready to go?”
She nodded, and the two of us left. We were halfway down the driveway when a car drove past us. Manny turned to stare at it, with a frown on her face. “I think that was my parents,” she said.
“Is something wrong?” I asked her.
Manny frowned, turning to look at me again. “I thought they had someone in their backseat. Someone they wouldn’t normally have with them. I must’ve been mistaken, or...”
She stared at the bottom of the driveway. I followed her eyes and saw a car pulling up along the curb. It parked, and the person inside sat there without getting out. Manny cocked her head, saying, “Do you mind if I see what’s going on? We might be a little late for school but I’m sure Mrs. Flannigan won’t mind.”
“Sure,” I said. My father would be disappointed if I were late for school but he wouldn’t take it out on me, I didn’t think. He would understand, if I explained the situation to him.
Manny and I walked down the rest of the driveway, to the car. She knocked on the window, and whoever sat behind the wheel jumped. They turned to stare at her. The windows were tinted so dark that I couldn’t see many of their features. Not until they rolled the thing down and leaned out. “What do you want?” the man growled.
He looked normal. His head was shaved, and his face smooth. There were no wrinkles, or indications that he was dangerous. Not if one ignored the eyes. His burned hot and bright.