Devils' Day Party: A High School Bully Romance
Page 24
“Karma?” Mama Cathy asks, sitting in the living room like she was on day … three, was it? I can't quite remember anymore, but the scene of her bent over a small canvas, bubble wrap heaped on the floor next to her, is one I recognize. But not just from today. This is a common occurrence. The moms order art from all over the world for their store in Eureka Springs. “What are you doing home?”
“I'm in desperate need of a mental health day,” I tell her, knowing that at least in this, the moms will understand. I don't have to make up an excuse or pretend I'm sick. God, I'm lucky to have a family that actually gives a shit about me.
Last time I came home during this stupid time loop, I was still bleeding. This time, I paused at a rest stop bathroom and cleaned up. No point in having the moms drive me all the way to the hospital, only to find out that I'm just fine.
“Is everything alright?” Jane asks, coming out of the kitchen, perfectly coiffed and put together as always. She's so damn meticulous that I decided to park Little Bee on the end of the driveway, facing away from the house, so she wouldn't see the damage and start asking about it.
Then again … there's no getting around that. No matter how many repeats I live of today, when I finally get to tomorrow, my car will be damaged. I'll have hit Calix's Aston Martin. It's inevitable.
“Everything's fine,” I say, setting my book bag down near the door and taking a seat in the comfy old recliner across from Mama Cathy. “I'd love some tea, if that's alright?”
Mama Jane smiles at me, one of those rare smiles of hers that feels like a hug. She doesn't smile much, but unlike Calix, it's not because she's trapped inside a mask of her own making. She just doesn't hand them out easily. When she does, they're spectacular.
“Of course I'll make you some tea. Darjeeling?”
“Please,” I say, feeling my heart thunder in my chest. For the last week of repeat days, I've managed to avoid the leaked sex tape of me and Calix. Either I ignore my phone, or I'm in the butterfly cave with Barron, or fucking him in the chapel … Or I'm with Raz, cuddled up at my aunt Deb's cottage.
But I can't avoid it forever.
I have to find a way to stop whoever has it from posting it.
“You know,” Mama Cathy begins, her freckled hands covered in splatters of paint. “I've been wanting to talk to you about something for a while now, but I haven't found the right time.” She looks up at me, an easy smile forming on her pale lips. Cathy's always made up for Jane's rare smiles by having heaps of her own to give out, always free and easy and open.
“Okay …” I hazard, a bit surprised that I'm still able to learn new things, open up new pathways in a timeline that seemed so concrete at first.
Yet, this Devils' Day is anything but.
Raz and Barron, they have feelings for me, feelings that I reciprocate.
I exhale sharply, but keep a smile on my face to match Cathy's.
“I was thinking, we could start carrying some of your work in the store. Prints, as well as originals.”
“My stuff?” I ask, feeling dizzy all of a sudden. I've literally waited years for this. Years. “Really?”
“And don't think this is nepotism or anything,” Cathy says with a laugh as Jane comes out with a tray, setting it on the side table next to my chair. She ruffles my once-again purple hair with her fingers before moving over to sit beside her wife. On the tray, there's a plate of homemade shortbread cookies, the cup of tea I asked for … and 'ants on a log', the celery snack I was talking to Luke and April about.
My throat gets tight as I look back up at the two of them.
“You've grown into a brilliant artist, Karma,” Jane says, her dark curls wrapped up into a bun on the top of her head. She blows on her own tea and then sips it carefully, watching me over the rim of the cup. “That piece in your room, it's brave. There's a lot of heart in it. We talked it over a few days ago, and we truly believe you're worthy of wall space at the gallery—starting with that canvas.”
“The one with the moon?” I reply, feeling my chest get tight as I think about how I destroyed it so needlessly on the first day. Wall space at the shop is in high demand; some artists even pay my mothers to put their originals in prominent spots. Even artists whose work the moms have been selling for years have yet to claim wall space. “Are you serious?”
“You know how seriously I take the shop,” Mama Jane says, setting her cup down. She looks up at me with dark eyes, tinged with worry, before glancing over at Cathy for a brief moment. When she looks back at me, she's smiling again. “Why don't you bring your canvas out to the studio today, and we can all work together? It's been a long time since the three of us spent time creating together.”
“Like a coven of artsy witches, making art on Devils' Day,” Cathy says with another smile. “Are you still planning on going to the party tonight? Or should we do our own thing here? I bet your sisters would love to have you.”
Little does she know, I've had my fill of Devils' Day parties in the last two weeks. Two. Fucking. Weeks. And yet, I don't feel much closer to figuring my way out of this.
“I'll stay in tonight. We can get stuff for biscuits and chocolate gravy, and I'll cook.” That's pretty much the only meal I know how to make from scratch, but I do a good job at it. Besides, it's an Arkansas staple. I've got to represent, especially when I'm the only student at Crescent Prep who was actually born and raised in the state.
“Your sisters will be thrilled,” Cathy says, standing up and taking the small canvas with her. She hangs it up on a nail in the only spare bit of wall in the living room. It's an oil painting of a girl with big, grey eyes. “She reminded me of you,” Cathy explains as she glances back at me, her brows furrowing together. “Only, you seem different now than when I ordered it.”
“Different, how?” I ask, picking up a piece of celery and biting into it.
“Less … afraid,” Cathy says, before turning and heading for the sliding glass door that leads to the backyard.
She has no idea how much her comment means to me.
The small canvas sits in front of me, mocking me with my lack of intent. When I started this, I had no idea where I was going with it. There's the black sky, the silver stars, the crescent moon, and the lone tree. As I study it, basking in the sunshine that fills the room, meaning begins to appear between the carefully painted lines, a feeling that I didn't understand until just now.
“I feel like I'm starting to understand my own intentions here,” I say as Cathy sits down at a potter’s wheel and begins to throw a new bowl. Jane pauses on my right side, studying the piece with a critic's eye. “Before now, I actually thought I had no intent whatsoever. But now I'm getting it.”
“Sometimes we create art; sometimes art defines us. You might not know what it is that you need until you start to put brush to canvas, pen to paper, or hands to clay. The truth is in the medium.” Jane kisses the side of my head and moves away, through a sea of green plants, the fresh fragrance of flowers wafting in with the breeze.
The moms' art studio is really a modified greenhouse, filled with canvases of all sizes, acrylic and oil paints, a pottery station, a woodworking station, and even a desk with a computer and a Cintiq drawing pad, for digital art. If you can dream it up, you can create it in here. One whole wall is reserved for bookcases filled with Mama Cathy's poems, all handwritten in her calligraphic penmanship.
Before picking up my paintbrush, I move over to my phone and start Toxic Thoughts by Faith Marie, closing my eyes as the music drifts softly from the Bluetooth speakers around the room. The moms are big into art, as any medium. Sometimes they play movies, sometimes audiobooks, sometimes they just sit and listen to the drone of cicadas in summer.
As Faith sings about writer's block, I sit down on the paint-spattered stool and take a deep breath, knowing my phone's in airplane mode, that I'm alone, that nobody can bother me in here.
And then I start to paint.
A fever starts inside of me, hot and burning, as th
e hours swirl away into oblivion, the quiet of the afternoon broken up the shrieking giggles of my sisters as they wear their matching Devils' Day masks and play hide-and-seek in the studio while the moms and I work.
“Karma, come paint with us,” Emma blurts, repeating a line she said to me on the first day, almost exactly. “We’re making a mural in the carport. It’s the Horned God.”
“Can I help tomorrow?” I respond automatically, wrapped up in my work, carried away into an artist's euphoria, this brilliant moment when the rest of the world falls away and there's nothing left but you and your art. It happens with any medium: sculpting, writing, painting. It’s known as creative euphoria, and it's a real phenomenon.
“Tomorrow is soooo far away!” Emma drawls dramatically, but I can't stop. My hand won't let me stop, not until the next layer of my creation sits before me. Knowing that I'll likely wake up and that it'll all be wiped away again actually gives me courage. I need not fear mistakes. There is nothing I can do to this canvas that would be wrong, that could ruin it.
“Oh, Karma,” Jane says, her praise as rare as her smiles. Don't get me wrong, she's always encouraged my sisters and me to push harder, further, to be better, but true praise, like I hear in her voice now, is not a common commodity. “This is incredible.”
We stand there together, staring at the freshly painted stars in the sky, each one a different color, the butterflies dancing in the moonlight, the coffee cup smashed to pieces on the ground. There's a little yellow Bug in the distance, the bumper crumpled up and streaked with black paint. Masks hang from the limbs of the tree: a black leather devil's mask, two red ones, an orange and black butterfly mask, a goblin.
“As soon as this dries, I'm tackling another layer,” I say, sweeping my purple hair back from my forehead and smearing my skin with paint. It doesn't occur to me in that moment that the images I've just created will disappear before they get a chance to dry. “For now, dinner's on me.”
I head inside, grabbing my mask from my book bag and slipping it on before Katie and Emma peek into the room to watch me toss an apron over my neck.
“Do you guys want to cook with me?” I ask, and their eyes light up like stars. Sometimes, it's easy to forget how a simple question or an easy smile that doesn't mean much to you, can mean the world to someone else. “You should always be nice, Raz, because you never know when someone's so full of pain they might snap.”
I exhale, forcing a smile to my own face as I dress the girls in their own aprons, their butterfly masks reminding me of Barron as I pull two stools up to the counter to make things easier for them.
“Are we doing Bisquick biscuits?” Emma asks as Katie stands shyly on my other side, always the quieter of the two, her eyes watching me like I'm doing something worth memorizing, planting inside her brain to look at years after this moment has passed.
“No way. We're doing biscuits from scratch. Katie, can you get the flour?” I ask, and her cheeks flush with pleasure before she scurries off.
“Happy Devils' Day,” Cathy says, a furred deer mask on her face, made with real antlers. The moms believe in sustainable hunting, so every deer season, they bring home plenty of venison to feed not only us, but some of the older residents who live in the park. She pops the top on a bottle of champagne and pours three glasses, bringing one to me and kissing me on the forehead. “Don't tell your teachers,” she says, and I laugh, helping Emma and Katie mix up the dough for the biscuits and forming it into perfect little patties.
Once they're in the oven, we start the chocolate gravy, mixing butter, milk, vanilla, cocoa powder, and flour in a saucepan until it's nice and gooey and warm.
“I like cooking with you,” Katie tells me as we drizzle the chocolate over the fresh biscuits, serving the moms plates at the table as they light candles and dim the lights, the air crackling with the smell of burning sage.
“I like cooking with you, too,” I say, feeling my lips turn up into a smile. We serve everyone ice-cold milk with their food and sit around the table, candles flickering on every surface, the sound of my music still drifting from the speakers in the studio. It's just loud enough for us to hear at the dining table, all the windows open to the flood of silver light from the moon. My playlist must've ended and started over again because Toxic Thoughts is playing again.
“This is my favorite Devils' Day Party ever,” Emma declares, chocolate splatters on her mask that I can't even begin to guess how they got there. “We should do this every year.”
“I'll remind you that you said that when you're in high school,” Jane murmurs under her breath, but Emma isn't fazed. She turns her blue-grey glare right on our mom and frowns.
“Karma is in high school, and she's here,” she declares, and a laugh bursts from my throat. A sob is close behind, and I have to clamp a hand over my mouth as the tears slide down my cheeks.
“Oh, Karma,” Cathy says with a bubbly champagne laugh, reaching over to rub my knee. “You're okay, daughter. You're okay.”
We make a circle on the living room floor after dinner, consulting one of Mama Cathy's spell books and reciting a simple mantra for love, health, and happiness, lighting a red candle and sprinkling pink rose petals into a bowl of water from one of the local springs. There are over forty natural springs in the city limits of Devil Springs, and over a hundred in the county.
“Now what?” Emma asks, bouncing in place, her eyes glittering with boundless energy behind her mask.
“Now? It's two in the morning,” Jane says with a yawn, three champagne bottles drained. I was only given one glass because the moms like rules too much, but that's okay. I don't need alcohol or weed or boys tonight.
“Why don't we go work on the mural?” I suggest, and even Katie gasps in excitement. I laugh as my little sisters drag me outside to look at the lines of the image, drawn by the moms, and sloppily colored in with paint by the hands of eight-year olds. The left half of the mural is nearly done, but the right is just waiting for color.
On the ground below my window, I spot the box of spray paint and shame washes over me. Somewhere, someway, the memory of that must be buried in my sisters' brains, just like Barron remembers all the time we've spent together.
“Let's paint,” I say, picking up a bucket and opening the top.
My sisters dig in as the moms sit on my porch and lean against one another.
As the hours pass and the moonlight moves across the sky, the girls fall asleep on the cement, paintbrushes still clutched in their hands, and the moms take them to bed before leaving for their own room.
“If you stay up long enough to see the sunrise, paint it,” Cathy says, kissing my forehead before disappearing into the house behind Jane.
I head inside, grab a band and put my hair into a high pony, before returning to the mural. Even though I'm yawning, my eyes brimming with tired tears, I keep going until a bit of orange-yellow light on the wall draws my attention away from the face of the Horned God and over my shoulder, to where the sun is just beginning to kiss the sky.
Throwing my paintbrush down, I head around to the backyard and grab a ladder, climbing to the roof of the house and perching on the eaves so I have the best possible view of the sunrise.
“It's tomorrow,” I whisper to myself, putting my chin on my knees. This is the latest I've ever stayed up and, beyond all hope, I'm wondering if I've just managed to beat this thing. Frankly, that'd probably be the best thing that ever happened to me. I wouldn't change a thing about yesterday. Not a damn thing.
When I climb down and head inside, I see that it's nearly seven thirty in the morning, and my heart swells.
“Take that, Devils' Day,” I say, wondering if I spent too much of my time worrying about the boys when I could've been here with my fucking family. Maybe that's the lesson I'm supposed to learn? That the toxic love offered up by Barron or Raz or … well, Calix, that I don't need any of that to be happy.
But … even if I don't, I still want to spend more time with them.
Pearl killed herself tonight. Call me.
The text is from Luke, waiting on my phone to fuck with my whole day. I sit down suddenly on the paint-covered stool next to my painting, the excitement in my chest dulling to a painful ache. Pearl isn't your problem, Karma, I tell myself, but yet … I can't help but wonder. Does she die in every timeline, and I've just been missing it? Or is there something I can do to save her? My heartbeat picks up and I close my eyes, clutching my phone to my chest.
The sound of a car rolling down the gravel of the driveway draws my attention, and I glance over to see the shiny black curves of Calix's Aston Martin. I stand up from the stool and make my way over to where he sits inside the blacked-out windows of the idling car. After a moment, I decide to move around the front and get in the passenger's seat, cringing a bit at the rumpled surface of the door.
Calix Knight turns to look at me as I climb in, his devil's mask pushed up into his hair, black makeup bleeding down either of his cheeks, like it's possible he might've been crying. But no, that mussed hair, those blurry eyes … he's just coming down from a long night of partying.
“Pearl killed herself,” he says, almost matter-of-factly. I nod and close the door behind me.
“I know.”
Calix takes off down the gravel road, the circular shape taking us back to the highway. I'm so tired that my eyes keep drifting closed of their own accord, but then I snap to with a gasp, scrabbling to stay awake, desperate to see what tomorrow will finally bring.
“You can sleep if you want,” he says as I glance over at him, his own lids droopy, his dark eyes distant as he gazes out the front window.
“If I fall asleep, I'll wake up and this'll all be a dream,” I tell him, setting my phone into the cup holder between us. Calix's face tightens up, but he doesn't reply. Instead, he drives us almost an hour out of the way, to Beaver Bridge aka the Little Golden Gate Bridge.