I work on my acrylics self-portrait project. I hadn’t taken Jill seriously, but now I’m beginning to wonder if I should apply to the end-of-summer art gallery after all. It’s something to pour myself into, and—I don’t know, the idea of reclaiming the lobby, the very space that hurt me, feels better than I thought it would. I’m grateful to have something to concentrate on, and maybe it’s the raging trash fire that’s currently my life, but I find it easier than ever to sink into the colors, to think about nothing as I let my hand and my brush move across the canvas. I do more work than I have in days, flying from one self-portrait to the next, using each and every one of the canvases I’d prepped.
When I’m finished, I step back to take the portraits in. There I am, on fire, underwater, skin like the swirling universe, flying through the sky, lying in the grass, sitting in the dark while a blur of colors rushes around me, smirking with a crown of flowers on my head . . . It’s not hard to realize that this, these self-portraits, are what I have to submit to Brown for my portfolio. I wasn’t sure if I was going to apply, and I still question why I’ve wanted to go to Brown so badly—but it doesn’t hurt to send an application and see what happens, right? Maybe I don’t need to apply just to prove to myself and others that I can get in. Maybe I can apply just because it offers amazing opportunities. There’re the other schools I’m applying to, too, and I can also look into gap year options. At some point I’ll have to choose what I want to do—but until then, it’s all right to keep my options open.
Either way, I know I’ll need to do several more self-portraits for my applications and for the end-of-summer gallery. The thought of the portfolio used to give me anxiety, stress—but now, I’m just excited.
Focus on myself.
Midway through acrylics class, I’m washing some brushes by the paint-splattered sink when Leah appears next to me. “Hey, Felix,” she says with a smile. I know that smile. It’s the sort of smile you give someone when you have bad news. She leans against the counter and bites her lip, glancing all around to make sure no one’s close enough to overhear. “So, I checked out Marisol’s phone.”
I don’t meet her eye. I already know what she’s going to say. “Let me guess. Nothing, right?”
She lets out a sigh. “I’m sorry. I really thought there’d be something in the text messages, at least—”
“It’s okay, Leah,” I say, turning the faucet off. “Finding out whoever was behind the gallery was a long shot anyway. I really appreciate you trying to help me.”
“Wait,” she says, “wait, hold on. There’re still more people I can check out.”
I shake my head. “I don’t know. I’ve been trying to focus on myself more, and—I kind of feel like it’s time to just move on.”
“Just move on?” she repeats.
I shrug. “Yeah. I’m really grateful for the help. Seriously, thank you. But—I don’t know if it’s worth it anymore.”
She’s shaking her head. “Okay. I mean, it’s your choice.” I start to leave the sink, but Leah opens her mouth, like she has something else to say. When I pause, she has trouble meeting my eye. “I’m just wondering . . . Can we still—I don’t know—talk and hang out and stuff?”
Leah looks so sincere right now that I can’t help but grin. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d really like that.”
I’ve spent all of acrylics class pointedly not looking at either Ezra or Declan, barely speaking to anyone, only working on my paintings—so I’m shocked when Declan marches right up to me a few minutes before the lunch bell.
“Can we talk?”
We end up out in the hall. My hands are covered with streaks of color, and some got onto my shorts also. I don’t know why this embarrasses me. I hide my hands behind my back, staring at the wood-paneled floor. Declan crosses his arms and leans against the wall.
My nerves are on fire. I glance up at Declan a couple of times, but he still doesn’t speak—just stares right at me. Maybe this is his punishment for me, knowing that it’ll drive me insane, just standing there without saying a word.
“I’m sorry,” I say, my voice cracking. I clear my throat and try again. “I’m so, so sorry, Declan.”
He finally blinks. He pushes away from the wall, but keeps his arms crossed. “I’m so fucking pissed at you.”
“I know.”
“You lied to me.”
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“Did you just want me to look stupid?” he asks. “Is that what you wanted?”
“No. Christ.”
“Why did you do it?” he asks. “Not that bullshit with the gallery,” he cuts in, before I can say anything. “Even after you knew I had nothing to do with that. Talking about—all the personal shit we talked about. Letting me tell you that I . . .” He closes his eyes for a split second, lowers his voice. “Letting me tell you that I love you. What was the point of any of that?”
I bite my lip. “I liked talking to you,” I tell him. “I still do. I miss you. I miss hearing your voice. . . .”
“I don’t know if I can believe you. What if you’re still fucking with me now?”
“I’m not.”
He’s frowning, watching me closely. “And Ezra?”
His name puts a shock through me. “Ezra?” I echo.
“He’s in love with you,” he tells me. “I told you that. The person you kissed—was it him?”
I force myself to nod. “Yeah, it was him.”
He takes longer to speak this time. “Do you have feelings for him, too?”
I hesitate. I can’t lie to Declan again. I don’t know how I feel about Ezra for sure, but as much as I’ve missed Declan, I’ve missed Ezra even more. There’s so much I’ve wanted to tell him, and even now, the memory of that kiss rages through me. “It doesn’t matter,” I tell him, “Ezra wants nothing to do with me, so . . .”
Declan takes in a deep breath. “Do you want to get lunch with me?”
I glance up, and he’s watching me again—but there’s a glint of something I’d never really expected to see on his face. Something other than hatred and condescension. There’s warmth. Maybe even some longing.
“Yeah,” I say, nodding. “Yeah, I’d love that.”
I feel self-conscious when the lunch bell rings and everyone ambles outside. Declan and I walk together, out of the building and across the parking lot. I don’t know if it’s in my head, but I feel like we’re getting a lot of double takes—yeah, definitely a double take when James and Marc look at us from their spot against the brick wall—and really, I couldn’t blame anyone for staring. Everyone knows that Declan and I hate each other . . . or that we’re supposed to, anyway. We fight every chance we get. So why’re we now walking side by side as though we’re friends, even if it’s in total and complete awkward silence? It’s only when I catch Ezra’s eye as he stands under the shade of a tree, talking to Leah, that I really fucking wish we’d thought this through.
“Not regretting hanging out with me already, are you?”
I look at Declan. He has an eyebrow raised, glancing away from where Ezra stands.
I shake my head fast. “No. No, no regrets at all.”
White Castle is packed like always, filled with kids from St. Cat’s and Brooklyn hipsters who wear bike helmets and overalls and Crocs. Declan and I stand in line without speaking, and I stop myself from fidgeting as I try to think of a casual conversation that could possibly make this experience at least 10 percent less awkward . . . but nothing comes to me, and Declan just stands and waits patiently with his arms crossed, like he doesn’t feel uncomfortable at all, like he doesn’t give a single shit that he’s standing here beside me—me as me for the first time, and not as Lucky.
We both grab a few cheese sliders and take them out to sit on the curb, eating in silence for a few minutes. Declan’s brown curls blow around in the breeze, and he wipes them out of his eyes as he squints at passing St. Cat’s students who glance at us, raising hands to say hey with smiles.
“The more I
thought about it,” he suddenly says—I whip my head around to him so fast it’s a wonder my neck doesn’t crack—“the more I realized how obvious it was. I mean, the signs were everywhere. You went to St. Cat’s. The things you said about art—they’re the kind of thing you’d say in acrylics, too. Everything you’d told me, about your identities. And you were acting weird as fuck.”
“I wasn’t being that weird.”
“You were weird as fuck, man, always staring at me and suddenly trying to start up conversations out of nowhere. Then there’s the fact that you were so curious about me and Ezra. I was even afraid that you might be Ezra—but I guess a part of me kind of hoped you’d be Ezra, too.”
“You hoped I’d be Ezra?” I don’t really know how I feel about that.
“In a way, yeah,” he says. “Not like I was desperate for it to be him or anything, but I missed Ezra sometimes—missed you, too.”
Warmth spreads over me. I want to ask why he was such a piece of shit to us, then—why not just stay our friend? But I remember what he’d told me. “When we were talking,” I start, “and you said that you broke up with Ez because he was in love with me . . .”
“I felt kind of betrayed. Jealous. It was easier to break up with him and not deal with the inevitable heartbreak. Plus I was dealing with all of that bullshit from my dad, him disowning me—my grandpa and I were trying to figure out the legal stuff of him becoming my guardian, so a lot was going on anyway.”
“I’m really sorry about that,” I tell him, my voice low. “I had no idea that’d happened.”
“I know. I didn’t tell you guys about it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want a pity party.”
“It can be okay to depend on your friends too, sometimes.”
“Thanks for the afternoon special.”
I snort and roll my eyes. “Nice to know that you can still be a dick.”
“I don’t think you get to call me a dick right now,” he says with more bite than I was expecting. He wipes the curls out of his eyes again, blinking in the sunlight.
“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry. I really am. It was just this mess that’d spiraled out of control, and then I started to—you know, have feelings for you—and I just didn’t know what to do, so I kept it going. I should’ve stopped. I should’ve told you the truth.”
He doesn’t say anything for a long time. When he does speak, he leans back on his palms. “The most obvious clue was your voice. I knew you sounded familiar, but I never made the connection. Maybe I didn’t want to. I don’t know.”
“Were you disappointed that it was me?” I ask him. I’m just begging for an insult, for him to hurt me, but I can’t help it. I need to know.
Declan watches me for a moment, not speaking, just eyeing me—and as he looks at me, I remember the conversations we’d had. How he said he wanted to meet me—to have the chance to kiss me. Embarrassment flares, but there’s fear, too. What if I was right? What if he isn’t interested in me?
He finally speaks. “I wasn’t disappointed,” he says. “I was surprised. I just never thought it would be you. It took a second to get used to the idea, and the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The more I . . .” He trails off, and his expression becomes heavier. The longing I’d seen earlier is back. It heats me from the inside out.
He clenches his jaw and swallows, looking away. “I’m going back up to my grandfather’s for the weekend,” he tells me. “In Beacon.”
I’m thrown by the sudden shift in topic. “Okay,” I say.
“Do you want to come with me?” he asks.
“Come with you?” I say. “To Beacon?”
He waits, still watching me with that same expression—except it’s shifted, just a little, back to the expression I’m used to seeing on Declan more. A bit of steel. Protection, armor, I realize, against me hurting him again. I start to hear my dad’s voice in my head. It’s easier, sometimes, to love when you know it’s a love that you can’t have. What if this isn’t healthy—for either of us?
But still, even though I’m not sure about this, I don’t want to risk losing Declan—not again. I nod. “Yeah. Yeah, I’d love to come to Beacon.”
Twenty-Two
I’VE LIVED IN NEW YORK CITY MY WHOLE LIFE, BUT I’VE never—not once—been upstate. I have no idea what to expect.
I meet Declan in Grand Central with a backpack of clothes on Saturday afternoon, under the sea-blue ceiling of golden stars. It’s awkward as fuck. We’ve never really spoken except for on the phone and that one White Castle lunch, so now I can tell we’re both trying to figure out how to make this new face-to-face thing work. We talk about nothing at first. How was it getting to Grand Central? Hopefully it doesn’t rain, there’ve been thunderstorms in the area lately.
We get on the train and sit down with our backpacks on the empty seat in between us. When we leave the underground tunnels, I stare out of the window as the brownstones melt away to green—grass, fields, and then finally the river, sparkling blue under the sunlight. It’s beautiful. I wish Ezra was here to see it with me.
“And you grew up here?” I ask, glancing at Declan over my shoulder.
“Until I was ten,” he says. “That’s when my dad got an apartment in the city.”
His eyes are glazed over, and suddenly, I just want to grab his hand—know what it feels like to touch him. I let my hand slip over his, and he flinches before he tangles his fingers with mine, staring at our hands intertwined. He smiles a little.
“I kept imagining what it’d be like to hold your hand, if I ever got to know who you are. If I ever got to meet you.”
He rubs his thumb over my knuckles. Even though I’d been the one to reach out, having his hand in mine—this closeness—makes me nervous now. “Is it everything you ever wanted?”
He glances up—at my lips first, then my eyes. “Almost.”
I start to lean forward a little without even really thinking about it, remembering how good it felt to kiss Ezra, but Declan shakes his head and lets go of my hand. “Not here. Not everyone’s as open as in the city.”
He goes back to staring out of the window, so I do, too—but the longer we sit there in silence, the more the heat builds in me. I want to touch him. I want to kiss him, the same way I kissed Ezra. The feeling grows in me until it feels like there’s a thunderstorm raging inside me. I can’t think of anything else.
The train follows the river, until finally we’re at the Beacon stop. A light gray cloud moves across the sky, sprinkling us with a drizzle as we hurry to the empty parking lot, and Declan points out an older BMW, the kind that might’ve been popular in the seventies. A man with white hair and hunched shoulders waits in the rain, smoking a cigarette. He has a wide smile for Declan as we get closer. They hug, and I don’t know why, but his face—he’s so familiar. I feel like I’ve met him before.
Declan pulls away, gesturing for a quick introduction—it’s obvious he just wants to get out of the rain and into the car—but the man, his grandfather, looks up at me with a smile, then tilts his head. “Ah!” he says. “You!”
I blink. Declan blinks.
“You,” Declan’s grandpa says again, with even more emphasis. “You’re the lad I met on the train. You remember, yeah? You were with your friend, and I told you about my grandson. This,” he says, turning his hands to Declan, “is my grandson.”
My eyes widen with realization. I’d been with Ezra at the time. I was pissed that this man wouldn’t stop staring, but then out of nowhere he told us about his grandson who’d come out to him and his wife. . . .
Declan’s grandfather seems to remember that I’d been with another boy then, too, but he doesn’t say anything about it—only gives me a sly grin. “You see?” he says. “I told you, you’d like my grandson.”
We slide into the back of the car, the inside smelling like leather and cologne, and Declan’s grandfather—his name is Tully, he lets me know—reaches to Dec
lan and musses his curly hair with a grin, asking how his week’s been, before we’re on our way.
It’s so strange, being out of the city. There aren’t any brownstones, no skyscrapers—just trees and green mountains off in the distance and the never-ending blue sky.
“It’s wild, right?” Declan says to me with a grin, like he knows he practically read my thoughts. “I have to readjust every time I leave the city.”
We pull into a neighborhood where the houses get bigger and bigger, until finally it’s just a mansion every few minutes. Declan’s very pointedly not looking at me. His grandpa makes a left, into a paved drive slightly hidden by brush and trees, taking us up a small slope, until the brush clears and a blue two-story house with a gravel drive appears. I remember what Declan had told me. His grandfather had offered to sell the house, to help pay for Declan’s future, but Declan refused.
The car stops. Declan and I jump out, gravel crunching beneath our sneakers. The three of us head inside. The door’s unlocked. Shoes are neatly stacked by the entrance, next to a coat stand. An antique end table holds a sign declaring the name of this house: The Pig’s Head. I’ve never even been in a house that has a name before.
Tully says he has some reading to do before he winks at Declan with a smile, and it’s a little embarrassing how obvious it is that he just wants to give me and Declan some time to be alone. Declan doesn’t seem to mind. He gives me a tour: a gigantic chef’s kitchen with white marble and stainless steel with an eating nook, the library with a gigantic oak desk and rows of shelves of books, the parlor and the more casual living room with a giant flat-screen TV, the dining room with its place mats and candles, the guest room where I’ll be sleeping, with its own private bathroom and a gigantic claw-foot tub.
Felix Ever After Page 22
