Stain

by Francette Phal

  Rachel sighs. “Yes, she always does exactly what we ask of her. I’m just worried, that’s all. I understand you’re a senior now, and you need to study hard, but I don’t want you overstressed, you’ll get wrinkles.” God forbid that. “Well, anyway. Eat up, we’re leaving in twenty minutes. Seconds, Sarah?”

  I eat what I can of the large meal set in front of me, even though I’m not much of a breakfast person, but knowing food intake is being monitored, I take a few more bites to put Rachel at ease. The remainder of breakfast thankfully passes by uneventfully. We pile into the gray sandstone Acura MDX fifteen minutes later and pull out of the two-car garage. Tim is driving, and Rachel takes the passenger seat while Sarah and I hop in the back. She’s still too consumed with her book to say anything to me. But I don’t mind because I’m not in the mood for conversation. The drive to church is a relatively silent one except for the Christian contemporary music chirping softly from the subwoofers. We live on the border of the second largest city in Massachusetts, except there’s no quaint New England charm about the grittiness of Trenton. It’s known more for its crime rate than any of the other notable things that have happened in its long history. Our house however is located miles away from where crimes are most rampant. But then I’ve learned even the worst crimes can happen in the nicest towns and in the most beautiful homes. It is about how well those who commit these crimes hide them and how much influence and power they wield. Tim works for the Trenton police department, and his position as sergeant affords him a lot of authority. There aren’t too many people lining up to question his actions. We arrive at church with ten minutes to spare, and Tim takes a second to instruct us to go find our seats before resuming conversation with fellow church members, Rachel, the dutiful wife, firmly plastered at his side.

  “There’s Emily and Sally,” Sarah says, at my side, her head craning above the wandering crowd to better see the two girls. “Do you think Daddy will mind if I sat with them?” She turns back to me to ask as we find a place to sit in the second semicircle row of red chairs facing a wide stage with a podium at the center. It isn’t hard for me to find the answer to her question because Tim has always been different with Sarah, more lenient, more tolerant. But then why wouldn’t he be? She was his flesh and blood. There was no comparison to be made between me and Sarah because I wasn’t a factor. Tim’s affinity for little girls didn’t seem to extend to his daughter. Thank God for that.

  I’m hesitant in replying, “I think he might be okay...”

  “Great, just let them know where I am.” She bounds away before I can stop her.

  The moment I take a seat, Rachel and Tim come in from the opposite direction, gradually making their way down until they reach me. I’m spared from sitting next to Tim as Rachel takes the closest seat next to me. A cursory glance around prompts her to ask where Sarah disappeared to.

  “She’s sitting with her friends,” I whisper, tilting my head a bit toward her to point at the trio of girls seated at the front right side of the service room. She gives a brief nod before turning to Tim to relay the information. There’s no more exchange between us after that as the band walks up the stage to start the customary fifteen minutes of worship. Soon after, the pastor glides onto the stage and I tune him out. The hour of service crawls by but soon we’re filing out of the service room and split up for hour two and three of Sunday classes. Everyone has a place to be, even the toddlers, who are shephered downstairs to the nursery. The rest of us are broken up by age and gender. The men remain in the service room for elder meetings, while the younger population, ages thirteen to seventeen, are led to one of the classrooms on the first floor for deacon preaching. With the women of the church outnumbering the men two to one, we’re given the entire second floor for classrooms for our meetings. The women’s devotional is Rachel’s group, the eighteen and older crowd, and while I’ll be there in a few months, I’m grateful I don’t have to join her today. My class is the young women’s devotional, and I head upstairs with the herd, though I purposely linger behind. Watching Rachel turn the corner and head inside the first room to the right of the staircase, I proceed down the carpeted hallway, but rather than follow the rest of the girls my age into the last room to the left, I continue forward, tension making my muscles tight as I silently hope that no one stops me.

  “Aylee, sweetheart, where are you going?”

  My abrupt stop causes my heart to lurch against my chest, crashing against my breastbone. Closing my eyes, I silently curse. I clutch the beige double handles of my bag as though they’ll keep me in place when all I want to do is ignore the inquiry and keep going. But propriety forces me to turn around. Janet Leeson is the church gossip, she talks about everyone, minds everyone’s business but her own. And the irony is her own home life is in complete shambles. Her husband is a known adulterer in the community, her son’s a crossdresser who left home when he was fifteen because her intolerant bigotry chased him away, and I once overheard Rachel tell Tim people suspected her of dipping a hand or two in the tithe and offerings. Everyone in the church community is good at pretending here, so they smile and laugh with her when in actuality, they hate her guts. With all that going on you would think she’d have the sense to feel a little bit of shame and not pry into people’s lives. But that doesn’t seem at all likely.

  “Just need to go to the bathroom, Sister Leeson.”

  She smiles with a nod, “Oh, all right, sweetheart. I’d hurry if I were you, I wouldn’t want to miss devotional.”

  “No, of course not. I’m just going to head in and come back.” That’s a lie. I have no plans of returning until church is good and over. I’m sure she’ll mention this interaction to Rachel, but I count on the fact that Rachel can’t stand her so she won’t take anything Janet says seriously. She rarely ever does. “I’ll see you later, Sister Leeson.”

  “Bye, sweetheart.”

  I’m down the third step before she calls her goodbye out to me. I make it out of the back exit without any more interruption and step out into the sunlight. The midmorning sun beams down on me. Fall is in the cool breeze that sweeps against my skin, rustling leaves around me, and tousling the short tendrils of hair that manage to escape my two braids. I brush them behind my ears as I follow the beaten path into the forest behind the church. With the tree crowns forming a barrier above to protect the habitat below, only rays of filtered sunshine trickle through the canopy of green leaves, giving the forest a shadowed, magical appearance that would’ve made an awesome shower. The water is a great subject to sketch. But it’s the cemetery just beyond the forest that I’m interested in. I discovered it a few months ago, over summer vacation when I first started skipping devotional to explore the forest. I loved it the minute I saw it because it wasn’t like anything I typically drew. There was nothing conventional, or beautiful, or even picturesque about the old cemetery that had been abandoned many years ago by the church because I assumed there were no more graves. It was in badly need of upkeep now, but doing that would strip it of its allure. It’s unrepentantly ugly, with years of decay painted across sunken, cracked, or listing tombstones overtaken by mold and moss. It’s silly of me to think of a place as being lonely, but this cemetery has that feel to it. The crows, its only occupants, have made it their home. Some of them are perched on the tombstones, while others gather like a bad omen to peck and scavenge at the ground for food. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by it, but the dark, haunted setting always makes my fingers itch for charcoal and my sketchpad.

  My places to sit are limited, but I’m not too picky so I settle beneath a tree, positioning myself so I have the perfect vantage point of the cemetery from where I’m seated. Retrieving my sketchpad and charcoal case from my bag, I set it against the base of the tree and flip through the pages covered with various pencil sketching until I arrive at the page I’m looking for. I grab a piece of charcoal pencil from my open case and start from where I left off last Sunday. My fingers flit across the page, gentle and light, as
I occasionally look up to make sure I’m capturing every tiny nuance—everything that makes the cemetery special. It’s the brown, broken kindling scattered along the moss-covered grounds, the branches of the trees eerily stretching out over the graves like the mangled fingers of the grim keeper, the murder of crows crying out into the muted silence, and the trees that stand like specters, casting long shadows across the cemetery. Crosshatch shading makes the sky look far more ominous than it currently is, highlighting and darkening tombstones so that the image takes on the aspect of a black-and-white photograph rather than a pencil drawing. I forget everything, the world blurs on the edges of my peripheral as I lose myself in this dark, almost macabre world I create.

  But then the illusion shatters, fragments of inspiration falling around me like precious glass as I’m startled out my concentration. The sudden acceleration of my heartbeats sound like a stampeding herd of wildebeest in my chest. I turn my head to the right toward the location of the noise and spy broken beer bottles a few feet from where I’m sitting. Someone had hurled it against the tree and as my eyes search wildly around, I’m not left wondering for long who the culprit is when seconds later I notice a small group of three across the cemetery. One girl, two guys. The girl has her back to me, in fact, she’s slowly walking backward while engaging the two guys in conversation. She has a head of dark green hair that’s hard to miss; it skims past her shoulders in layered waves. She’s in a pair of dark-rinsed skinny jeans, with a white camisole on top that shows off her golden-hued skin. Her feet are encased in a pair of black low-tops.

  With the guys lingering behind and facing my direction, it’s easier to make out their appearances, and instant recognition has me inwardly face-palming for not putting two and two together. Bria Daniels, the girl with the dark green hair, always hung around Noah and Maddox Moore. Twin brothers who couldn’t have possibly been more different. The similarities between them are like night and day. Opposite sides of the same coin. Noah always reminded me of a painting I once saw at an art exhibit downtown of the towheaded Lucifer before the fall. Blindingly beautiful—yet distinctively masculine. He has enviably high cheekbones, and a straight-bladed nose that gives way to a kind, smiling mouth. Thick, dark hair frames his face, skimming just past his angular jawline. He’s tall. They’re both equally tall in fact, but Noah has a slight advantage over his brother, but it’s not by much. If I had to guess at their height, I’d put them somewhere between 6’2 and 6’3. Noah has been on the cross-country team since freshman year, a year before I joined track and field as a sprinter. I’ve seen his body from far away, studied him as an artist would a subject, and so I know beneath the dark blue jeans and burgundy sweater he’s wearing, there’s the body of a long distance runner. Lean muscles, long legs and arms built for speed and endurance. I also knew him from art class, held every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, fifth period in Mr. Kauffman’s class.

  I follow the slight shift of Noah’s head as he looks to his left to say something to his brother. They’re too far away for me to hear the conversation, but the rich sound of his laughter cuts across the cemetery. His twin fails to share in his humor and seemingly unaffected, Noah shrugs a shoulder before retuning his gaze to Bria. But unlike Noah, I’m incapable of dismissing Maddox so easily. Noah is beautiful. Maddox—Maddox is something else altogether.

  He’s covered in tattoos. That’s the first thing you notice about Maddox Moore. Under the white T-shirt he’s wearing is stylized pieces of artwork, each one probably telling a story of their own, covering both his arms down to the knuckles of both hands. There’s a geometric star that’s set at the base of his throat. It’s a pentagram within a pentagram enclosed around a red eye situated at the center. The points of the larger pentagram trail up the length of his neck, over his Adam’s apple, stopping just beneath earlobes that have been stretched to the size of nickels with hollow, black O-rings. The blood-red of the eye is the only shot of color in the otherwise black ink canvasing his pale skin. I’ve watched him from a distance. Studied him with the keen eye of an artist consumed by a muse. He rarely ever came to school, but when he did, I instinctively knew where he was. Watching him from my shadowy corner—I will never admit it out loud to anyone that he’s become my obsession. I’ve sketched him numerous times, dusted charcoal-covered fingers down the blade of his nose and across the fullness of his unsmiling mouth. I have a sketchpad filled with his likeness. I know how that makes me sound. Like a stalker. But my obsession stems from the need to capture his image to paper. I’ve never been able to get it right. His image in my memories never quite did him justice.

  Though I know most by memory, the white V-neck T-shirt he’s wearing makes it possible to see the tattoos on both his arms. There’s a skeletal tree on the left, branches snaking down his forearm into an explosion of black birds that stop at the dark band around his wrist. From this angle, I can’t make out the images on his right arm because it appears to be a mesh of faces. Aside from the white T-shirt, he’s wearing a pair of slim-fit, black jeans that stop over beat-up, black VANS.

  I take in the partially empty beer case he carries in one hand, while the other is wrapped around a bottle he brings to his mouth. He tips it back and guzzles it down like it’s water.

  There’s no time for me to do anything but close my eyes and flinch in the span it takes him to drink and hurl the bottle in my direction. I jump, and a squeak makes its way out of my mouth when it slams and shatters against a tombstone a few yards from where I’m sitting. The small fear that it might’ve hit me has my heart racing but it’s nothing compared to the moment I open my eyes to find him staring directly at me. I didn’t realize they’d come this close.

  I hear the blood rush between my ears, my heart beats too fast against my chest, like a hummingbird looking for a way out of its cage. Sweat gathers on my skin as time seemingly trickles to a stop. He looks at me and I look at him. I can’t hold the intensity of his stare but I can’t look away either. There’s something a little off about his gaze, about him in general. He’s not at all like his brother. There’s no softness, no gentleness to be found anywhere on his sculpted features. But there’s a meanness there, a raw and menacing sort of malice that’s reflected in his near arctic stare. It takes an effort to break from his ensnarement. When I do, it’s to look at everything else except his face.

  “Jesus, Max, you almost hit her.” Noah speaks, his tone almost reprimanding as he draws nearer to me. While the other two hang back, he comes to stand directly over me, and I have to crane my head up to look at him. “Are you okay, Aylee?” I’m instantly uneasy. I know he’s not a threat, but I can’t help feeling overwhelmed by his immense height, especially when he’s standing over me like this. Giving him a brief nod, I close my sketchpad and stuff it back inside my canvas bag along with my pencil case. I find my way back to my feet and although I’m 5’5 I’m still relatively short compared to him, but at least now I’m not at a horrible disadvantage.

  I nod. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  He smiles and I’m struck by its brilliance. “Sorry about that, my brother likes to make a nuisance of himself.”

  “It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

  “Hey, I saw the piece you did for Media Day last week. I thought it was brilliant.” There’s no hint of artifice in his voice. Everything about Noah seems genuine, including the kindness I see reflected in his royal blue eyes. Blood gathers hotly. Scalding hot. Beneath my cheeks, it burns with the way he’s looking at me. It’s a far cry from the hard, emotionless tundra belonging to his brother. I don’t know why I do it, but I tilt my head a little to the left of Noah’s body to find Maddox. He’s partially sitting on a tombstone, the case of beer set on the ground between his long, parted legs. He’s working on another beer while listening to Bria talk. People talk about him. They talk about Noah, too. But Maddox is infamous. There isn’t a lot that’s known about them, but his extensive criminal record is public knowledge. It’s not hard to believe when just last month I sa
w him threaten someone with a knife behind the track field. I ran off before he could see me.

  “I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I admire your work.”

  I return my gaze to Noah. “Thank you,” I answer, and duck my head. “Your work is beautiful, too.” It sounds insincere. But I mean every word. He did an acrylic painting titled, “Black Static,” for last year’s young artist show that blew me away. That painting is what sparked my inspiration for my macabre side of art.

  He chuckles. “Thanks.”

  I look down at my feet, and dig the toe of my left sandal into the dirt. My social graces are severely lacking. I don’t have many friends, in fact, I only have one friend. And it’s taken Mallory nearly three years to begin to understand just how awkward I am. It’s not intentional. I’m not very good at entertaining people. Even holding a simple conversation takes effort. This is torture. It’s even worse for Noah, I’m assuming, since he has to deal with my weirdness.

  “…you doing something?”

  “…I should go…”

  He grins crookedly down at me. “You should join us, but if you have to go…”

  He trails off, leaving it open for me to either jump on the invitation or turn it down. I open my mouth to speak but Bria’s bark of laughter draws my gaze back to Noah’s left, and my eyes like magnets clamp onto Maddox’s face. I don’t expect to meet his gaze dead-on. Coldness greets me, so chilling I feel it in my bones. I shudder.

  “Cold?”

  It’s safer to just look at Noah.

  “No.” Adjusting the shoulder straps of my bag, I’m unaware of how tightly I’m holding onto it until the woven straps bite into my palm. “Not really.” I slacken my hold a little only to feel the explosion of needle-like pain in my hand. A small part of me likes the sensation.