The Scapegracers

by Hannah Abigail Clarke

  Oh my God.

  The window, the gaping window, the one that was responsible for the tundra inside. It was broad, twice my size or longer. The mothwing curtains gusted around it like shackled ghosts.

  I rounded the chairs and made for the window. I felt my heartbeat in my teeth. I slipped my hands through the gap, grasped the sliding pane, and yanked. It opened wider with a squeal.

  Below the window was a drop, then rows of slanted pewter shingles. I wagered it was the roof over the porch, because I could eye Abel’s car just beyond it. Dying roses twined up the painted lattice directly below me.

  I swung one leg over and straddled the skinny sill. My heart thumped too loud. Blood battered in my ears, between my ribs, and I dangled the outside leg a little lower. The lack of anything below my toes stabbed me in the stomach. This was stupid, this was stupid. Oh my God, I am so fucking stupid. I bowed my torso under the window and pulled my other leg along with me. The ledge was too small to properly sit on. I was on the verge of freefall, and the moonlight struck me like a searchlight.

  I jumped.

  I smacked down on my palms and heels. If it hurt, I was thrumming too hard to feel it. Adrenaline hit like a drug. I crawled down the slant with my heart in my teeth and wished, with a bit of spite, that the shingles felt less like sandpaper.

  The top of the porch proper was significantly farther below me than I thought it’d be. Potentially femur-snappingly far. I envisioned my body cracking on impact, rolling mangled off the incline, and smashing into jam on the driveway below, hair stained sticky red, bones poking through my skin like white batons. I whipped my head around and tried to remember how to swallow. I felt like I’d swallowed a bee.

  There was a tree to my right, a crooked oak with battered limbs all twisted and gnarled, perfect for climbing. I scrambled for it. The shingles felt electric against my naked feet. I crawled like a feral child, belly close to the ground and clawing, and I prayed to something abstract that I wouldn’t accidentally slip off the roof to my death.

  Stop panicking, I reminded myself. I can do this. I’ve dicked around with climbing trees my entire life. Tree-dickery was half my childhood. Just fucking do it.

  I hissed something hideous under my breath, licked my teeth, and launched myself at a branch below me. The moment of falling dragged on, then I struck. The branch was rougher than the shingles, but solid. I clambered for a proper grip and then shimmied lower, balancing myself against the base of the branch.

  The gravel on their driveway was corpse colored, jagged like pulled teeth. It was begging to rip the skin off my feet. It’d taken two and a half songs to drive here. How many miles were in two and a half songs? How far back did the gravel stretch? How many steps would it take to bury the Chantry house behind me?

  My odds tasted foul in my mouth.

  I twisted myself around and braced my back against the trunk. My knees tucked themselves to my chest. What I’d wouldn’t give for some fucking pants! The barely-shorts that Jing had lent me did nothing for the chill. The night had bleached all the color from my legs and left them looking waxy. The blood had dried in thick rivets, and as the moonlight made my skin sallower, it’d made my blood darker. I looked like I’d been wading in ink. I shoved my hands in the blazer pockets and gnawed at my bottom lip. Think, fucking think. Come on, Sideways.

  In the caverns of Caleb’s pocket, my fingertips brushed something metallic. I traced its edges with a nail, wrapped my fist around it, and pulled it out into the open air.

  It was a key. Black around the handle, unremarkable, and as long as the knuckle of my thumb. I’d seen one like it somewhere. It pinged some memory I had, something uncannily vivid and just out of reach. I turned it around in my hand, fiddled with the serrated edge, and realization slapped me across the face. It was the key to a bike lock. I recognized it because I had one just like it.

  The bastard had a bike.

  I pocketed the key and monkeyed down the trunk, limb after limb, and my feet found the grass with a swish. A worm squiggled under my toes. I shuddered, bounced back, and whirled around.

  Bike, bike, bike.

  Aha. Bikes.

  Four glistening bikes leaned against the side of the porch. They looked like horse skeletons under the stars, all chrome bones in strange shapes, and they rested against the roses like they were sleeping. Four bikes for four brothers. It was my own macabre little Christmas. I sprinted over, shoved the key in each lock until I found the one that clicked.

  It was a retro model, a well-loved one at that. Must be expensive.

  A sloppy grin slid across my mouth.

  Mine now, prick.

  I dragged Caleb’s bike to the gravel, climbed on, and flew away.

  I was the only thing alive on the road. The drive was as winding as a board game track, curving and convoluted, and the trees stretched on for eternity in either direction. No wildlife. The town’s deer population had neglected to infect this stretch of woods. Or maybe not—I remembered the antlers that spiked the Chantry halls and amended my theory: the deer in these parts were strictly past tense. There were no night birds, no opossums, and no scurrying raccoons, either. Nothing. There weren’t even half-smashed little carcasses on the sides of the road. The Chantrys had butchered them all.

  I pedaled faster. My hair stormed around my cheeks.

  Gravel turned solid. The trees broke, and the honeyed glare of a streetlamp flooded the path before me. I could’ve cried. Sweet civilization gave me a damned streetlamp, and I was in love with it. The streetlamp wasn’t going to give me a holy water enema, or whatever else was on the Chantry agenda. I took a left, sped down the empty lane.

  The corn loomed high, begging for harvest. It peered over the fences and menaced me as I passed. Cornstalks at night were relentlessly creepy, but they were creepy in a way I was comfortable with. I could handle stalk-roaming monsters. I was higher on the creepy food chain than them, and I’d lived here long enough to make that known.

  Post-Chantry family, I’d have to reevaluate my creepy food chain.

  A street sign marked the upcoming crossroad. Grover Way and Elm Street, both scribed in milky block letters. My pulse pricked. Grover Way led to Main Street. I needed to be on Main Street. I turned and pedaled faster, faster, and the pedals scraped the underside of my feet. My heart thrashed against my rib cage. I gusted past Lincoln Street, Marsh Street, Tiller Street, flying through red lights, swerving into the wrong lane. I had the street to myself. All the cars were neatly lined up on either side of the road like dead things, sitting stiff and stagnant with the windows rolled shut. Buildings were lightless. Dogs didn’t howl.

  I wasn’t, as far as I could tell, being followed. I didn’t look back to check.

  EIGHT

  BETWEEN THE FOURTH AND FIFTH RIBS

  The sign read ROTHSCHILD & PIKE. Long, spindle-serif letters, each etched as boldly as a proclamation on a headstone. It spilled ivy at the seams. The shop occupied the farthest edge of the last block of brownstones on Main Street, the final business in an endless line of prissy emporiums and bourgeois boutiques. The bricks were matte black, dusty as a chalkboard. Overflowing pansy boxes dangled from the rain gutter. Inside was pitch black. From the darkness inside came my Wild Things to the window, the taxidermy monsters that leered through the glass at passersby, flashing their lacquered eyes and teeth. They reared back with their mouths jutted open, eternally screaming at nothing, or arranged in wicker chairs between mismatched tea sets like the illustrations in children’s books. They were a lovely forest-dwelling family, would-be Goldilocks’ victims. Around them, lovingly arrayed on oversized bookshelves, lay palmistry kits, limbless mannequins, yellowed newspapers and silver spoons, flapper pearls and unlabeled perfumes.

  The door was locked—of course it was locked—but there was a key in one of the pansy boxes.

  I hopped off the bike, tossed it haphazardly against the bricks, and made for the planter box. My lungs were still busted from cycling so fast. Fuck tha
t bike. If someone came and stole that stolen bike in the morning, I’d be jubilant. I’d take the robber out to lunch. I loomed over the planter box, wiggled my fingers, and thrust my hands in the thick of the flora. Please still be here, little key. You better goddamn be here. The pansies swallowed my hands to the wrists. They were slick with dewdrops, and they smeared the back of my hands with cold and wet. I combed the soil for something small, something metallic. My nails scraped dirt and the underbelly of leaves, worms, roots, nothing, aching nothing. Then something pricked at my fingers. The relief was as real as a punch to my stomach. It was just the little bite I’d been looking for. I plucked up the key and turned to the door.

  I fumbled with the lock. Lots of shoving the key against flat metal, fiddling with the slit, jamming it this way and that to no avail. Jittery. Botched. Must be what being a teenage cis boy is like. The last drops of battery acid I had left in me were fizzling out. It was strange, how quickly hypervigilance gave way to exhaustion.

  Click.

  I pushed the door in, and it swung shut behind me.

  The smell was overwhelming. The oxygen inside was laced with copper and frankincense, and it oozed into the ruts in my lungs like a salve, filled me with something holy, something pure and delicious and heartbreaking.

  If ball gowns had skeletons, the skeletons would look like our chandeliers. Dozens of them dripped from above, dangling from the ceiling like rip cords from Heaven. They bore thousands of crystal points the size of my pinky fingers. All around, the dark made strange things twist stranger. Bibelots and trinkets stretched on for years in either direction. Book stacks, tarot decks, telescopes, and scratched-up globes mingled with the ancient kitchenware, ornate lamps, effigies of the Virgin Mary. The air was thick with phantoms, with mysteries and revelries. Gilded things. Apparitions. I was not alone. In this space, in the presence of these sacred things, I felt witnessed and genuinely understood. I felt it marrow deep. It made me want to cry, or maybe crash my fists into something over and over again until it was dead.

  Home had a way of popping off my scabs. Feeling safe meant feeling, and right now, everything hurt. The numb vanished, and I suddenly remembered that I had feet, and said feet were nearing the point of no return. My toes hollered. Even in the dark, they took on a gruesome shade of blue, a blue so blue that I couldn’t just chalk its blueness up to the shadows. There was something wrong with me. My body was a mess. I was a walking horrorshow.

  I made my way deeper into the belly of the shop.

  Every step stripped the panic off my bones. I didn’t have it in me to panic anymore. I was turning into a jellyfish. By the time I reached the staircase, I’d be a ghost-shaped bag of glowing guts and periwinkle slime. No girl in there. No bones. I had neither fight nor flight. It was a sickly feeling, not one I appreciated. I was more comfortable with rage. There was something repugnant about the absence of rage in me. I wanted my fury back. I wanted a bath. And chocolate.

  The staircase was discreetly tucked behind a door in the back. There was another staircase, a more customer-friendly, less broken staircase, but that one only led to the second floor of the shop. I needed this here hidden one, which led to our third-floor apartment. I needed to be in my room.

  The door was lavender in the light, but night leeched the color from the paint and made it look like a slab of solid glue. Same lock as the front door. I fumbled again, spat, and swore as I tried to shove the key in its slot. Slip, twist, click. I opened it wide and shut it behind me.

  It was bleaker than Nietzsche on the staircase proper.

  I groped along the wall for the light switch.

  Light splashed down from above and I flinched away from it. It was heavenly fire and brimstone, and it stung in places I didn’t know could sting. My arms flew to shield my face.

  I hadn’t found the switch yet. That light wasn’t my fault.

  “Oh. Oh God. Eloise?”

  I peeked between my forearms.

  Julian stood on the landing with a Louisville Slugger clutched in his fists. His housecoat, cherry silk two sizes too big, hung crooked off his shoulders, as if he’d just barely bothered putting it on. He made a face like a barn owl. “Lamby, you’re bleeding,” he squawked. He splayed a hand over his heart, and before I could think, he’d fluttered down the stairs and tossed his arms around my shoulders.

  Julian smelled like Julian—like soap and books and burnt espresso—and it twisted something in my gut. My throat seized up. Tears threatened to prick. The last cells of power in me gave out, and I went limp against his shoulder. My teeth cut my lip. Breathing was harsher, heavier. I knotted my fists in the silk of his sleeve.

  “Let’s get you upstairs, okay?” He kissed the top of my head. The baseball bat was awkwardly shoved against my side, and I swallowed, tried to muster up enough snark to make some sort of joke about it. Julian with a baseball bat was about as intimidating as a bluebird with a toothpick. If I was a robber, the store would be thoroughly robbed by now. But I couldn’t find the words, so I just nodded instead.

  I had scrubbed the top two layers of skin off my back in the shower. Now my skin was sunburn red. The bramble bush that was my hair had been combed flat against my skull, and I sat with my knees to my chest on Julian’s chair. It was a privilege to sit on Julian’s chair. He was territorial about these things.

  This shard of glass was bigger than the last.

  Boris fished it out with his tweezers. We hadn’t spoken, because he knew me well enough to know when to talk. He dropped the shard in a teacup with the rest, set down his tweezers, and prepped a cotton swab with iodine.

  “Your dad wants to call the cops,” he said at last. He smoothed the cotton over the little gash, taking care to sweep away the blood when it started trickling. It stung like salt.

  I swore something incoherent.

  “He hasn’t yet,” Boris continued. He took my ankle in his hands and pulled my leg closer to his nose. His gaze switchbacked over my skin, and then he let out a little aha and set my leg back down. He reached for his tweezers again. “That’s mostly because he doesn’t know what he would say. If you want him to, then you should tell him. But I’m giving you that option.”

  It was weird, seeing Boris without his glamour on. His hair was the first thing he did every morning—he teased it before he brushed his teeth. Seeing him without his pompadour was weird. His fringe dangled all in his face.

  I swore again and hugged my arms over my stomach.

  “It’s five a.m. If you want to skip school tomorrow, be my guest. You need to sleep. You need to sleep for years. I can make you some tea, if you want. Julian might have already started making tea. Either that, or he’s nervous baking. Don’t worry about staying up until he’s done. I can eat whatever he Frankensteins up. Take one for the team.”

  I licked my gums. Talking was not appealing. If I spoke, I’d probably cry, and I wasn’t one for crying. Bless Boris for letting me just be. I sank farther into the armchair, let it swallow me in its corduroy plushness.

  “Anything you need, name it. I’m going out to pick up Julian’s Truvada in the morning, so if you want anything from the store, I can get it.” He leaned back, examined the wreckage. “You kick a window? I did that once. I was a little older than you. It was not an act of sobriety, let’s say that.” That sounded rhetorical, thank God. “You’re not going to need stitches. If Julian wants you to go to the hospital, it’s just him being him. It wouldn’t hurt to slap on some Band-Aids, though. Snort if you want the Mickey Mouse ones.”

  I snorted.

  He gingerly selected a few from a plastic box, and I tossed my head back, looked away. The wrappers crackled. The sticky was stuck on me. My gaze traced the cracks on the ceiling.

  The fucking curse hadn’t worked. Levi was Chett, wasn’t he? Shouldn’t he have shriveled up and died from even considering abducting me? It’d felt so real when we’d cast it. There was the rage, the rush, the glittering satisfaction. The fucking Ken doll had deformed. The f
our of us had clicked together like chain links and we’d made something, dragged it out of the universe, and forced it to bloom.

  The thought of Levi on Yates, screaming at her, all sneering and snide, made my insides churn. How dare he even look at her. He barely deserved to have eyes. My molars ground in the back of my head. I remembered the sound his boot made when it smacked the fawn’s spine, how it was quick and gruesome as a lightning strike. That boy, the boy who’d kick a dead animal out of spite, was the same boy who’d dragged the terrified Yates out of the basement and out into the cold. And left her there. And arranged dead animals around her.

  And there it was. My anger, vicious and viscous as honey, bubbled up in my bloodstream like a promise. It was scrawny anger, but anger nonetheless. It’d grow. I could feed it and forge it into something that mattered.

  What if they came after me? What if they found me?

  What if I clobbered them to death with Julian’s bat?

  “You’re smirking. That’s good. I was worried there for a second.” Boris clapped his hands. “Voila. Admire my masterpiece. I’m going to fetch some tea.” He gave my ankle a squeeze before he stood up. Boris tossed a hand through his hair and winked at me, smoothed his monogrammed pajamas, and wandered off toward the kitchen.

  I let my gaze slide down to my legs.

  He was right. It was a masterpiece.

  He’d layered circular Band-Aids with thumb-shaped ones so that they resembled tiny hearts, and the hearts made a chain from my kneecaps to the tops of my feet. I was crisscrossed with Mickey Mouse hearts. No more cuts.

  I knew it was a placebo, but knowing didn’t kill the feeling.

  I pulled my knees to my chest and traced the ridges of the Band-Aids with my fingertips. It stung a little, but not unbearably so. The hearts sheathed my newborn anger, nestled it somewhere safe. I gave myself a squeeze.