by L.H. Cosway
I walk home.
A few teenage boys and girls shout some obscenities at me. You tend to garner negative attention when you’re wearing something as bizarre as I am. I stop in front of them, twirling in a massive circle and bowing down while raising my middle finger in a silent “fuck you.” I continue on my way. Opening my front door, I hear talking coming from the living room and immediately recognise Shane’s voice.
What’s he doing here?
I walk into the room to find him sitting across from Pete on the couch. He has his violin and Pete’s got the laptop I managed to scrape together the money to buy him last Christmas open, some sort of application running on the screen that looks like a virtual recording studio.
“Hey,” I say, glancing between the two of them, my voice more air than sound. “What’s going on?”
Pete raises an eyebrow. “Shane’s giving me music lessons, remember?”
“Oh, right,” I mutter, and then look to Shane.
His expression is indecipherable. A long moment of silence passes between us, a dozen questions hanging in the air. Finally I clear my throat and ask him softly, “Would you like to stay for dinner?”
Some sort of tension leaves his body as a breath escapes him. “Yeah, I’d love to.”
“Uh, Jade you’re getting that white crap all over the door,” Pete interrupts.
I glance to the side to find I’ve got my hand pressed against the wooden frame, white makeup smeared all over it. I drop my hand and take another step into the room.
“How’s everything going? Have you seen Damo around at all?” I ask my brother.
Pete lets out a snort as he types furiously on his laptop. “He’s shitting himself over Alec. He came to me after school, telling me to let my brother know he doesn’t want any trouble.”
I sigh in relief. “That’s good. Is school okay?”
“It’s all right. A few of the teachers practically tore me a new one over all my absences, but I can handle it.”
I smile. I want to reach over and ruffle his hair, but I can’t because I’m still in my costume. The wings are so big they hardly fit inside our tiny living room. I quickly duck out and go upstairs to change, using a makeup wipe to get the face paint off. I throw on some comfy yoga pants and a baggy jumper before going back downstairs to the kitchen. I find a note on the counter from Alec telling me that he fed and walked Specky this morning, but that he’s got a date with Avery tonight, so he won’t be home until late.
I look over the ingredients in the fridge and decide I’ve got everything I need to throw together a chicken curry with rice. About twenty minutes later, as I’m standing by the cooker stirring the sauce, the door opens and somebody comes inside.
Two arms wrap around my waist, and a chin rests on my shoulder. “Smells good,” Shane says, voice low. “You okay, Bluebird?”
I nod, not saying anything. He holds me there for a few seconds longer and then goes to sit down. The food is just about ready, so I start dishing it onto plates. Pete comes in and grabs his, bringing it into the living room to eat, leaving me and Shane alone. April is out with her friends, so there aren’t going to be any interruptions. I’m still in turmoil over whether or not I should tell him that I’m the girl he wrote all those songs for. Will he be freaked out, or think it’s romantic?
We eat quietly, and I thank him for starting those music lessons with Pete. He shrugs it off, telling me he enjoyed spending time with my brother. He says that Pete taught him almost as much as he taught Pete. Shane was pretty much in the dark about all the new technological stuff that’s out there.
When we’re finished eating, we wash up together, and I ask him if he wants to hang out in my room for a while. I don’t have sex in mind. I plan on telling him the truth. All about the strange coincidence I suddenly became aware of this morning.
In my room, I turn some relaxing music on low and then sit down on the bed. Shane slips off his shoes and does the same.
“Why did you freak out and rush off earlier?” he asks after a long while.
I turn to him, hugging a pillow to my chest as he lounges back against the headboard. “It was the story you told me, about the missing girl and her sister.”
He leans forward, curious. “That freaked you out? Why?”
I bite on my lip, clasping my hands together to keep them from shaking, and meet his gaze. “Because the missing girl was my twin. I’m the sister, the one you saw on the news.”
Shane’s eyes flicker back and forth between mine numerous times, a dozen emotions crossing his features. He moves closer to me then, taking my shaking hands into his still ones. “Wow,” he breathes.
“Yeah,” I say. “First you have that painting of me, long before you ever knew who I was, and now it seems you’ve actually written an album for me. It’s downright spooky.”
Not to mention it makes my heart to do a backflip and then try to turn itself inside out.
Shane seems to be more focused on my history than anything else. The need to know my story is practically humming from him. “What happened to her?” he whispers. “I mean, did you ever find out?”
I stare at my wallpaper, at my golden sparrows, my mind wandering to a dark place. “Yeah, we found out. I knew all along who it was, but the police never released the information to the press until after her body was found. They were afraid it would compromise the investigation.” I stop for a second, then tell him, “I was there when she was taken.”
Shane inhales sharply and stares at me empathetically. “You don’t have to talk about this if you don’t want to.”
I let out a small breath. “Well, it seems I’m in a storytelling mood, so you might as well sit back and listen. I never talk about her. And I mean never. I pay tribute to her in so many ways every day — she’s constantly present in my world, but I find it hard to actually speak about her. Her name was Sparrow. We weren’t identical, but we had the same colouring and looked a lot alike.”
“Sparrow? Is that why you got those tattoos?” he asks, eyes going to my arm.
I nod. “And my wallpaper. I’m always drawing those damn birds, too. I can’t get them out of my head sometimes. They’re a symbol of her. She was an artist just like my mother, the good twin. I was the moody one, always trying to change my appearance so that people would see us as two different people rather than one. That’s why I had the purple hair and the makeup. Sparrow never deviated from her natural blonde roots. She was so pretty. It brought her attention from people and was probably why her abductor took an interest. They always go for the pretty, innocent types, right?”
Shane just stares at me silently, empathy streaming from his every pore.
“Anyway, we were walking home from school one day, and it started to rain. We were getting soaked and began running, holding our bags over our heads to keep from getting wet. Then a car pulled up by the side of the road. It was our geography teacher, Mr Francis. He offered us both a ride home, but I’d always had a bad feeling about him, so I said no. Sparrow, being as trusting as she was, wanted to accept the offer, but I told her not to and began dragging her away. We got into a fight because she didn’t want to walk the rest of the way home in the rain. We shouted at each other. In the end I gave up and let her get in the car. I should never have let her get in the car.”
“Fuck,” Shane swears under his breath. “You couldn’t have known.”
I take a deep breath and continue, “I walked the rest of the way home, expecting Sparrow to be there already, but she wasn’t. I didn’t get too worried at first because she’d often have dinner at her friend’s house down the street, so I thought that was where she’d gone. Mum was out doing groceries, and she had Pete and April with her. The evening progressed and everybody started to arrive home, but still there was no sign of Sparrow.
“Mum and I sat up half the night calling her friends, calling everyone we knew and asking if they’d seen her. We didn’t get a wink of sleep, and finally in the morning we called the police
. It took about a day before they began searching for her properly. I told them she’d gotten into Mr Francis’ car, so they went to his house to ask him questions. He told them he’d given her a lift because it was raining but that he’d left her off at her street and driven home to his wife and kids. His wife gave him an alibi, but she must have been lying. The police could find no evidence, no CCTV footage of him taking her, no proof at all. So it was the word of some Goth teenager over that of an upstanding citizen, a local schoolteacher who’d never had any trouble with the law.
“About a week passed, and still there was no sign of her, no leads. I was so angry I felt like going to his house and threatening him until he confessed. Instead I went to school early one morning and thrashed his classroom, scrawling the word ‘paedophile’ across the blackboard. I got a week’s suspension, but Mum was too busy worrying about Sparrow to be mad at me. She believed me about Mr Francis, and I think she might have even been a tiny bit proud of what I’d done. Two months passed by. I rallied all the students together to boycott his classes, and in the end he resigned, stating he couldn’t work under such conditions, said he was being demonised. What a joke.
“It was almost three months exactly that she’d been missing when a couple walking their dog near the mountains found a suspicious-looking patch of freshly dug-up earth in an under-populated area. They called the police. The police came, and that was the day they found Sparrow buried three feet below the ground. I knew she was dead all along. I could feel it, like a part of me had been ripped out of my chest. Two days later, Mr Francis shot himself in the head. A week after that, the results came back from the tests they’d run on Sparrow’s remains. She’d been raped and then strangled to death. Mr Francis’ DNA was all over her. I wanted to die, thinking of the suffering she must have gone through, all because I couldn’t stop her from getting in that car.”
I pause for breath, wiping at the tears leaking down my face. Shane wraps his arms around me, pulling me into him.
“Jesus,” he whispers.
“I was so full of guilt. The only thing that could numb it was alcohol, and that’s where my drinking started.”
“You were so fucking young. No one should have to go through what you did,” Shane says, his mouth on my hair, his nose breathing me in.
I stare at my wallpaper for a long time, then draw away from him, going to my wardrobe and pulling out the sketch pad sitting at the bottom of it. Bringing it back over to the bed, I sit down beside him again, placing it on his lap. He hesitates a moment, then opens it up.
“Sparrow wanted to be an illustrator when she grew up. She was always drawing these little sketches, creating characters,” I tell him as he flicks through the pages.
“She was talented,” says Shane as he stops on a page, his mouth falling open.
“That was her favourite character,” I explain. “The one she drew the most. She called her Evangeline Spectrum — don’t ask where she came up with the name. She thought it sounded cool, like a futuristic angel.” I get up and go back to the wardrobe, pulling out a big canvas, the only large-scale picture Sparrow had ever had the chance to complete. I set it on the edge of the mattress for Shane to look at. It shows Evangeline Spectrum, her blue wings spread out wide as she sits on the moon, staring down at a world full of people.
“But this is you,” he whispers, his eyes taking it all in.
I shake my head. “It’s not me. I re-created Evangeline as a living statue. I’d been playing around with the idea for a long time, and after a while I gathered everything I needed for the costume. Somehow dressing up as one of her characters made me feel closer to Sparrow. That’s how I cope with missing her. I put her in my life in little ways, like tattooing birds on my arm or drawing a sparrow randomly on a wall in a house full of artists. It feels better than crying into my pillow or drinking myself half to death.”
Shane picks up the canvas, his gaze eating it up. “You’re amazing.”
I let out a surprised laugh. “That’s a nice way of putting it. Most people call me crazy.”
He sets the picture down and looks at me dead-on. “Those people don’t know what they’re talking about.”
A second later he’s pulling me back into his arms and stroking my hair. We stay like that for a while, and then I start talking again.
“Before Sparrow died, I didn’t believe in anything. I was a complete and total nihilist, thinking the world had no meaning. It just was. I had never lost anyone, so it was easy for me to believe that when people died, that was it. They were gone. Dust on the wind. There was no good place they were headed. Then my twin was dead, and I found myself believing in everything if only it would mean that this wasn’t the end. It was completely hypocritical, but I was desperate for the light at the end of the tunnel to be true. I needed to hold onto the hope that I’d get to see her again, that she’d get to live on somewhere wonderful after the horror she endured. So now I let myself see the impossible in the mundane. I let myself believe that things can happen that defy explanation. That I can fly with my fake wings or that I can be standing listening to music on the street, and suddenly I’m in a grand ballroom full of dancers. It’s the only way I know how to survive without her, the only way I can convince myself we’ll meet again.”
Shane looks at me for a long time. His hand on my hair pauses as he dips down to kiss me on the temple. “We all have to believe in something to keep going, Bluebird,” he murmurs, and then drags me down to a lying position. Somewhere along the way he pulled the blanket over us, and the music I put on earlier isn’t playing anymore. It’s so quiet. His thumb brushes the edge of my forehead, pushing my hair away from my face.
“Us being here together right now could be a sign, you know,” he says then.
“What do you mean?”
“You want proof of the impossible, and you have it right in front of you. I saw you crying on the news eleven years ago and wrote an album of songs for you like I was possessed by music. Then years later I find myself staying in a room where a picture of you is hanging. A couple of months after that, I’m walking down the street one night, and the woman from my painting is standing in front of me in the exact same pose from the painting. If there’s magic in the world, then we’ve both experienced it for ourselves.”
For what seems like the millionth time today, tears fill my eyes. Something stabs at my heart, and I love him for every word he just spoke, even if none of it is true, even if it’s all just coincidence. I look between his beautiful eyes, barely breathing, and then finally I whisper, “Thank you.”
Nothing more needs to be said. He made my entire world right just now, and I’m clutching onto his words.
I’ll never let them go.
It was just an ordinary night.
He didn’t think anything extraordinary would happen.
Until it did.
Turning a corner onto the bustling night time street, he saw her all in blue.
The woman from his painting was a living, breathing thing…and she was so completely still.
Twenty-Three
I wake up early the next morning wrapped around Shane. We’re both in my bed, fully clothed from the night before. My face feels stingy from tears, but there’s a lightness in my chest, like getting everything out lifted a weight I didn’t even know was there.
My body is half on top of his and I lie still, admiring how handsome his face looks when he’s sleeping, how his dark lashes create shadows over his cheekbones. He stirs a little then and wakes up, blinking his eyes a few times. When he realises where he is and who’s on top of him, I feel his body spring to life. His cock hardens against my inner thigh.
Suddenly he flips us over so that I’m flat on my back on the mattress and he’s hovering above me. He does it so instinctively that it sets my nerve endings alight, like it’s so natural for him to want to fuck me.
“How did you sleep, Bluebird?” he asks huskily as he runs his knuckles down one side of my face.
�
�Good,” I answer, quiet. “And you?”
“Good, too. I always sleep well when you’re with me.” He moves his hips a little then, rubbing his erection against the centre of my thighs. A quick breath escapes me. Then he seems to think of something and pauses, squeezing his eyes shut.
“Crap, what time is it?”
I glance to the clock on my nightstand. “Eight-thirty. Why?”
“I have a radio interview at lunch, and they want me to play live on the air. I need to go home and practice, but I really don’t want to leave.”
There’s a sort of agony in his eyes. I understand that he wants to get busy, judging from his current state of arousal, but…and then I get it. He thinks that if he goes now he won’t be able to see me again for another three days.
“You can come over tonight,” I offer hesitantly. “Or I could come to yours?”
He narrows his gaze. “But what about the rules?”
“Fuck the rules,” I tell him brashly and he laughs, bending down and sucking on my lower lip. Damn, I really wish he didn’t have to go now, either.
Pulling back, he stares at me, his gaze roaming from one part of my face to the next, his eyes glittering. His thumb brushes back and forth over my collarbone, and I keep on staring back at him, unable to break the connection.
“I feel like I’m falling,” he whispers, bringing his mouth to my lips for a soft, barely there kiss.
All my words get stuck in my throat as he draws away from me and slides off the bed. I watch as he straightens out the clothes he slept in and pulls on his shoes. Why did he say that? More to the point, what does he mean? I refuse to allow myself to draw fanciful conclusions, but it seems fairly obvious what he was trying to tell me. It feels like a lifetime has gone by when I find my voice at last.
“I’ll call you later. Good luck with today,” I tell him softly.