Alizarin Crimson

by Erica Millard

  “Like what?” Liam said. “I want to help.”

  His sincere blue-gray eyes were the color of the sky around the golden clouds of the sunrise. I shook my head.

  “I think this is something I’m going to have to deal with on my own.”

  Liam nodded. “Just know, I’m always here if you need me.” He took a half-step closer, and there was nowhere for me to go.

  “I’m not sure why,” I said. “I did just yell at you over something you have no control over.” I longed to reach out and touch him, to have his arms around me. To kiss his lips. Maybe I could. Maybe it would be okay.

  “I don’t blame you. It was a jackass thing to say.”

  I laughed. “How about we just pretend this conversation never happened?” There was a lot of pretending things didn’t happen going on around here.

  “I think I can do that.” He put his hands on either side of my hips on the pool table and leaned closer, his lips barely inches from mine.

  17

  They were made with a will, with feeling, with passion, with love.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  I waited for the kiss, waited for the red to ignite. Longed for it. But I remembered what Andy said. No, I couldn’t do this.

  “Aya!”

  Liam stepped back as Kendra practically flew into the room. Her fiery gaze swung from me to Liam and back again.

  “Hey, Kendra.” I felt light headed and the room was spinning. “We were just playing pool.”

  “Uh, huh. Can I talk to you for a minute?” Kendra asked. “Alone.”

  “Sure.” I handed Liam my cue. “I’ll be right back.”

  We ducked into an empty supply cupboard, and Kendra rounded on me.

  “What are you doing?” she whisper–yelled. “Did I just see what I thought I saw?”

  I bit my lip and couldn’t help but squirm.

  She grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “I thought you were trying to avoid another ‘send a boy to the E.R episode.’”

  “I am.” I folded my arms and tried to think of anything I could say in my defense, but she was right.

  “Not very hard.” She sighed. “I don’t think you realize how serious this is. Don’t you remember the council? Liam is not an Aolian. He can’t know about you. It would jeopardize everyone, especially since he’s been here now.”

  I went cold. Aolians who are unable or unwilling can face incarceration and rehabilitation.

  “You’re right. That was really stupid of me.”

  “I came down to tell you I can’t go to the museum with you tomorrow.”

  “What? Why not?”

  “My Grammy is going to be in the city,” she said. “I’m supposed to meet her for a day of shopping.”

  “Oh.”

  “So you either need to cancel or get yourself under control,” she said. “I’d really hate to see you hurt Liam or yourself.”

  “That is the last thing in the world I want to do,” I said. “But I have to go to the museum, tomorrow. I have to.”

  “Why?”

  “I think . . . .” I paused. “I just need to see paintings from Van Gogh.”

  “You are risking a lot to just see paintings.”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but he’s the only one who knows what it’s like to have the color inside him.”

  “Maybe you should talk to Leslie,” Kendra said. “She could help you. The first little while of being a Talent is hard, and I think you need some help.”

  Kendra didn’t know the half of it. She didn’t know that I’d almost killed myself with red. She didn’t know how easy it was to lose control. How easy it would be to hurt, even kill someone with the red that was in their body. The last thing I wanted to do was talk to Leslie.

  “I’ll be careful tomorrow. I promise,” I said. “I’ve been working with Danny already. I can talk to him.”

  “Danny?” Kendra said. “That could work. And this goes beyond being careful tomorrow.”

  “I will stay at least a foot away from him at all times, cross my heart.”

  “I’d make it two.” Kendra opened the door and stepped out into the hall. “Which is really too bad, ’cause he is seriously hot.”

  “Thanks for reminding me.”

  Liam was shooting pool when I came back into the room. Jana and Preston had disappeared, and the rest of the mansion was quiet.

  “What did Kendra have to say?” Liam asked.

  “Just that she can’t go with us tomorrow. She has a date with her grandma. It's just you and me.”

  “Sounds good.” Liam put away the pool stuff and didn’t even bother to hide the smile on his face. “Your room was up on the third floor, right?”

  I led him to the staircase. “It’s in the old servants’ quarters. It’s funny. They gave me one of those super plush rooms, but I asked to be moved. I like visiting museums, not living in them.”

  “This place gives me the creeps when it’s dark,” he said as we slipped past the dim wall sconces on the second floor.

  “It’s not so bad during the day, but you’re right. I don’t usually go poking around here at night.”

  “I wouldn’t either.”

  I opened the door that led to the third floor. The stairs were completely dark, as was the hall upstairs.

  “I’m not sure where the light switch is.” I took a few steps forward, ran square into the stairs, stubbed ten toes, fell down, and caught myself with my hands before my face slammed into the wood. “Ouch! I just found the stairs.”

  “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  He put his hands on my hips as I still lay on the stairs and helped me to a standing position. I was both relieved and disappointed he let go right away.

  “How did you manage to find them without tripping?” I asked.

  “Easy. I let you go first.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I did think you knew where you were going, though, or I would have sacrificed my shins.”

  “Next time it’s your turn.”

  By the time we made it to the top, we were both laughing harder than we should have, seeing how the rest of the house was already asleep.

  The huge window at the end of the hall gave us enough light to see the outline of the walls, and I went to it. The half-moon lit the garden with its pale light.

  “Strange how night steals all color from the world,” I said. The silver leaves outside shuddered in the breeze.

  “The color is still there,” Liam said. “We just can’t see it.”

  “I wish it did remove all color for just a few hours.” I sighed. “During the day it can fill the world, but at night I wish it could be just black, white, and all the grays in between.”

  Liam didn’t say anything, and I fiddled with the curtain to the side of the window, trying to hold onto this colorless world.

  “Let’s find you somewhere to sleep,” I said finally. I turned on the light in my room. “Now if you forget which door is mine, just look at the white board. Mine says Aya.”

  “Also handy if I forget your name.”

  “Yeah, Matt, I mean, John, I mean . . . What was your name again?”

  “Haha, funny,” he said sarcastically.

  “Now if you get the sudden urge to draw a mustache on someone’s face in the middle of the night with a Sharpie, then I’ll be in there.” I pointed to the door next to mine.

  “Got it.”

  “And this,” I flipped on the light in the room across the hall, “can be yours.” The room was pretty much like mine with the craftsman style furniture and the slanted ceiling, but the walls were gray instead of pale green. He threw his sweatshirt onto the bed. “The bathroom is down the hall, and there is plenty of shampoo and stuff if you want to take a shower in the morning.” Great, now I was imagining Liam in the shower. This would be so much easier if the red weren’t compounding my crazy teenage hormones.

  “Thanks. I guess I’ll see you in the morning,” Liam said.

  I
walked to the door but turned around at the threshold. “Hey, thanks for coming,” I said. “It means a lot to me.”

  “I’m glad,” he said.

  I pulled the door shut.

  “Goodnight, Aya,” Liam said through the wood.

  “Goodnight.”

  I didn’t go to bed. Instead, I pulled on my workout pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt and shoved some headphones into my pocket. Using the light on my phone—why didn’t I think of it when I was trying to find the stairs with Liam?—I opened my door as silently as I could. I stopped by Liam’s room, but his light was off and I didn’t hear any sound from inside. Still, I tiptoed until I was outside and on my way to the gym.

  The gym was an octagonal building with walls made entirely of glass a ways out into the forest and not visible from the Mansion. I think they were going for the whole ‘commune with nature’ thing when they built it. It was obviously created way after the mansion, probably specifically for Talents. It had to be impossible to keep heated in the winter.

  Before I stepped into the gym, the forest was visible on the other side, but the glass distorted the image making it look like the trees moved and twisted. Once inside, I flipped on the lights, and my view of the outside disappeared. I didn’t like the idea of anyone outside being able to see me when I couldn’t see them, but I figured since all the lights in the mansion were out, everyone was likely asleep.

  I snagged a pair of kickboxing gloves from the equipment box, put in my headphones, and jogged to the punching bag, the music pounding in my ears. It’d been too long. I hit the bag experimentally with a jab. Oh, man it felt good. I hit the bag again and again, faster and faster. I let my anger bubble up inside me, allowed it to take over, to turn my vision red. But it wasn’t enough. I threw the gloves off and hit the bag with my bare fists. With every hit, I screamed the things I’d lost control over.

  “Hurting others. Getting attacked. Almost killing myself. Hurting Andy. Wanting to paint. Never knowing my dad,” and everything else I could think of. My knuckles began to bleed, but I never felt the pain.

  “Hating red. Loving color. Losing control. Becoming someone else. Who am I now? Loving this power. Hating this power. Who am I now? Being a freak. Hurting others.” My anger built, but then I noticed every hit left a mark on the bag, and not just the imprint with my blood. Pure red pigment leached out of my body. My anger and punches forced the red out of my skin. Again and again I hit the bag, with each punch the red left me. I pushed at it. Found it and forced it out, like it was poison, even though I knew it was power. Maybe power was poison.

  I don’t know how long it took, but at last the red dimmed. I knew it was only a matter of time before it would find me, trespass in my body even though it didn’t belong, as if it owned me. But for now, I was just me, with only a small amount of red forcing me to have feelings I didn’t want or understand. For now, I was free.

  I returned to my room.

  I had my hand on the doorknob when a voice startled me, and I jumped back.

  18

  I really can’t tell if I shall ever again do paintings that are calmly and quietly worked out, because I have the feeling they will always be incoherent.

  —Vincent van Gogh

  “This is a terrible idea.” Liam’s voice was in between yelling and whispering. There was a pause and I realized he must have been talking to someone on the phone. “But dad . . . no, of course not. No, that won’t be necessary.” Another pause.

  Liam swore. His door banged and it sounded like he had punched its solid oak surface. “What am I doing?” he mumbled.

  Uhhh . . . what? I guess I wasn’t the only one who liked to hit things on occasion. I thought about calling out to him but decided against it. What did his dad want?

  I glanced at my phone: one thirty. I locked the door behind me and stripped off my clothes. The cool sheets enveloped my skin as I sank into bed. The Talent-induced unconsciousness did not consume me like it had so often of late, but my exercise brought me the sleep of a mortal tired at the end of a long day.

  I woke feeling clean, even with the dried sweat from last night clinging to my skin. The red was almost gone, and for the first time in a long time I was calm, serene.

  I peeked into the hall, and Liam’s door was still shut.

  After my shower, I was almost me again. Old me. Not psychotic me. I had taken my clothes into the bathroom with me so I wouldn’t meet Liam on the way to my room in nothing but a towel. Even though I’d managed to drain much of the red from my body, red lines still flitted across my skin. I opened the bathroom door and the water across the hall was on. Liam must be taking a shower. I glanced into his open door. The bed was made and nothing else hinted he had slept there last night.

  “The boy sure is tidy,” I said.

  Liam’s shower shut off. I hurried into my room and left the door open just a crack. The last thing I needed was to see Liam in just a towel.

  I didn’t know how long he would take, so I sat at my desk with one of my Van Gogh books. In so many of his early paintings, the color was dull compared to his later works. So many browns and grays, muddy greens against black backgrounds. Was this how Van Gogh painted before the color took over? Or was this his way of keeping the color at bay?

  “Good morning,” Liam said. I turned around as he swung open my door. His dark hair glistened and even though he wore the same clothes from yesterday, he smelled good, like outside.

  “Hey,” I flipped my book shut. “You hungry?”

  “Sure.” His eyes lingered for a brief moment on my freshly scabbed knuckles, but he didn’t say anything.

  “If you don’t want to be an artist,” I said as we headed to the kitchen, “what do you want to do?”

  “Do I have to decide right now?” he asked.

  “Nope.”

  “Good, ’cause I have no idea.”

  After breakfast, we headed to Liam’s car. The sky was saturated cyan, and even the greens of the trees and yellows of the lilies seemed overblown. Maybe the red had distorted my vision more than I’d realized.

  “Hey,” Liam said as the engine revved to life. “You never did give me a tour of the house.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I said tossing my messenger bag on the floor at my feet. Most of the guys I knew had old soda bottles and lost homework littering the floor, but not Liam. The carpet had even been vacuumed recently. “I didn’t. We’ll have to next time you come up.”

  “Is there going to be a next time?” he asked. “Aren’t you coming back to school soon?”

  Now that he mentioned it, I imagined myself living here, but still going to art school. Could the two worlds connect?

  “I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to do,” I said.

  “But you’ll be coming back to school right?” His truck was a manual and each time he shifted, it shuddered and jerked.

  “Yes,” I said. “Are you sure this thing will get us all the way to New York?”

  Liam looked insulted. “Of course, she will. This baby’s been running for forty years, and she’s not about to give up now.” Someone ran a light in front of us, and Liam slammed the middle of the steering wheel. Instead of the usual duck sound, the notes to ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’ played. I couldn’t help but laugh as the red-light runner turned to see where such cheerful music came from.

  “No offense,” I hit the horn again, “but this car doesn’t really match the whole, ‘enough money to buy your way into the most expensive art school in the country’ motif.”

  “Well my dad hates it, but he lets me drive it since I paid for it myself.”

  “It’s pretty awesome,” I said. “Did it come with that horn, or did you put it in?”

  “That horn is one of the reasons I bought it.” Liam grinned. “It’s supposed to play five songs, but the car must really like baseball, because that’s the song it plays the most.”

  “Maybe it used to live by a baseball field and now misses it.”

  “Yeah, we
should take it to a game some time.”

  “I’m not sure how many seats we’d need to buy for it to fit, though,” I said. “We’d need to rent a box.”

  Liam laughed and I was happier than I’d been in days. With most of the red gone, my happiness was able to push aside the other emotions. The scenery flew by, and I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had so much fun with a guy. Before I knew it, we were in the city.

  “It’s impossible to find a parking space,” Liam said, “so we can park at my place and walk or take the Tube to the MoMA.”

  “The Tube? Please tell me you rich people don’t have some transportation device that shoots you through a tube like those drive-through things at the bank.”

  Liam laughed. “I meant the train. The Tube is what we call it in London. Most of the time I use the American words, but on occasion my childhood sneaks up on me.” He pulled into an underground parking lot under a stunning all glass high-rise building and waved at the security guard in the booth before settling into his personal slot.

  “This is where you live?” I asked. “Your forty-year-old jeep really doesn’t match this place. You’d laugh at my house in Montana.”

  “I’d probably prefer your house.” He grabbed my messenger bag and slung it over his shoulder. His phone chimed, and he glanced at it. “Hmm.”

  “Is something wrong?” I said.

  “Yes, well, no. Well, it’s just my sister. She’s been begging to meet you.”

  “What? I didn’t know you had a sister. Of course, I have to meet her.”

  “But what about the museum . . . ?”

  “The museum will still be there after I meet her.” I eyed my bag, but decided if he wanted to carry it, I’d let him.

  We headed to the elevators and Liam hit the button to the fifty-second floor, but he had to put in some security code before the elevator would move.

  Apparently Liam lived on the entire floor, because the doors didn’t open into a hall—they opened right into his living room.

  The outer walls were entirely made of glass, with a stunning view of the New York skyline. The room could have been in a magazine article with sleek furniture so perfectly arranged it seemed like it was set up on a grid. The space was open, with the kitchen and the living area joined together. I could fit my whole house in just these two rooms.