He nodded.
“Great!” I laughed; Alex looked up like I was insane. “Plain is the most amazing, brilliant-minded man I know. If you grow up to be anything like him, then we’re gonna have the best time!”
A half-smile leaked out, but he drew it back in. “I don’t have much time, Red. My dad started going mad around thirty—lost his job by forty. If that’s all the time I have then I need to work harder to find this cure. For George.”
“Then I’m with you on that,” I promised. “All the way. From genius to madness. Don’t shut me out.”
Alex sighed, looking over at his untouched food.
“Have you been eating?” I asked.
“Not much.”
“Why?”
“I dunno.”
I studied him for a moment. I knew why. I knew it was because his heart had been broken, his world shattered when an outsider came in and tried to make sense of it with outsider eyes.
“Alex.” I waited until he looked at me. “You are remarkable. Even now that you’re all plain and boring with this ‘all-work-no-play’ business,” —Alex laughed— “but your boring life is still my magic world, and I miss you.”
“You miss me?” He laughed again. “I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“But you have. In here.” I made a circle around my heart, and it took Alex back to the worlds we used to create. I could see his eyes move up and along the cafeteria walls, seeing strange lands of lake and sea for the first time in so long. “Just don’t go away forever, ’kay?” I finished.
“I won’t.” When he touched my hand, my skin tingled because it’d been so long since we’d touched. “I just have to get through these exams.”
I nodded. “And I’m here to help you if you need it.”
“Thanks,” he said, and picked up his sandwich. I thought about walking away—going back to the table with the others—but after what they’d said about Plain I could now see how narrow-minded and unremarkable they all were. I didn’t feel like talking to them. So I stayed by Alex’s side, even though I got the sense that he wanted me gone.
As the bell went, after we’d sat in total silence for the remainder of lunch, I stood and pulled my bag onto my shoulder, a little disappointed that I didn’t think of anything to say to strike up a conversation.
Alex stopped me, making real eye contact for what felt like the first time in forever. His eyes were so pretty in the daylight, even though they were ordinary and a kind of plain muddy color, but when I looked right into them from up this close I could see worlds within those worlds, and I wanted to keep staring at them all day.
“It’s my turn to cook tonight,” he said. “You wanna come for dinner?”
“Sure you’re not too busy to spend time with me?”
“Yeah, I am busy, Red,” he confessed, and it seemed like, even though he looked at me, even though our eyes connected, this was the first time he’d actually noticed me. His face softened then. “But I miss you too.”
“Then I’ll come over straight after school.” I decided. “Maybe we can study together.”
“I’d like that.” He smiled again, and another first happened: the first time he noticed my heart flutter when he smiled. He looked confused by it for a moment, and then I saw his face change as it caught on—saw the ghost of a triumphant grin slip in across his lips as he bent to pick up his bag. He liked that I liked his smile. And I didn’t even try to deny that I did.
***
Late one afternoon I came in to find Alex on his bed, shirtless, arms behind his head. With his earphones turned up so loud he didn’t notice me come in until I was standing right above him.
“Hi.” My mouth broadened with a beaming grin, watching the horror move in over his sleepy eyes.
“Shoot.” He rolled up, ripping his headphones off, and reached for his blanket. “What are you doing here?”
I gave a little hop and sat on the bed beside him, laughing at the way he covered his nipples with the blanket. “What, I can’t come see my best friend?”
“I just…” His eyes went to something beside him then and he grabbed it, stuffed it under his covers so fast that I didn’t see what it was. “It’s fine. I just didn’t know you were coming.”
“You want me to get you a shirt?” I offered, smirking.
“Uh… yeah.” He nodded across his room. “Second drawer.”
“I know.” I got up and walked over, but at the last second, when his guard was dropped, I spun around with wolf speed and flew at him, sweeping my hands under his blanket until they connected with what he hid: a book.
“No!” he cried, chasing me off the bed. But I was too fast. I darted across the room and flipped the book open, angling it into the ray of sunlight streaming through his window. “You’re invading my privacy, Red.”
“Too bad.” I laughed, turning away from him and arching my back as he tried to grab the book. His fingertips caught a page and almost ripped it, but I shifted it away just in time. Then I stopped. I stopped fighting and even breathing, letting him snatch the book.
“You weren’t supposed to see that,” he snapped, shaking his head at me.
“Alex.” I followed him, my stomach tight and my blood running really hot in my ears. I felt that same build of deliciously intoxicating pressure inside of me that I’d once felt with Luther—when we were close in my room, before I knew how evil he was. “Why did you draw a picture of me naked? And how did you even know what I look like naked?”
“I’ve seen you shift, Red. What, you think I didn’t look at you?”
Well, yes. Naïvely I had thought he didn’t look. And now I was pretty embarrassed, but also flattered. “Can I see it?” I nodded at the book.
“No—”
“Please.” I gave him my best puppy eyes.
“Argh. Fine,” he said, flipping the book open and showing me the image. “Just… don’t hate me.”
“I won’t. I couldn’t,” I noted, walking over to touch the sketch. It was a simple sketch in black and white, shaded in areas to make it look almost real. And he’d gotten it so right, even down to how many of my ribs showed. It made me feel a little dirty, but also beautiful. Everything I hated about my body, he’d captured in perfect light with eyes that obviously didn’t see a thing wrong with the way God made me. But what did it mean, if anything?
I felt my eyes go to his nether region and my cheeks filled with extra blood. He was a teenage boy, right? So, yeah, he probably had thought about having sex with me. It didn’t mean anything. Or maybe it did. But I wasn’t willing to challenge this friendship right now—not while things were still fragile and exams were just four days away. I wanted him to admit that he thought of me that way—maybe even take this friendship to another level—but it would have to wait until the graduation dinner.
“Red, I…”
“It’s okay.” I took the book and closed it, noticing a sketch of me as wolf when the pages turned.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said timidly. “I wasn’t trying to be a pervert—”
“I know. I mean…” I shrugged. “You drew me as wolf, too, right? And you drew me human. It’s just art.”
“I’d never show anyone though, Red, you know that—”
“So it was just for personal use?”
Alex laughed, knowing I was joking, although I did take a half-glance around to see if there was a pile of tissues where that book had been sitting on his bed. There wasn’t. Thank heavens.
With the tension easing back a bit I walked away and sat on his bed, leaving him to get his own shirt. It smelled like him here, and I just wanted to lie down on his pillow and be close to the unguarded version of him again. I missed him so much. I missed the magic and the connection we used to have. I missed feeling like, at any moment, I might be able to tell him I love him and have him say it back.
“So is that what you do now?” I said. “I mean, because you could not draw like that six months ago, so have you been teaching yourself?
”
“Yeah.” He came over in a white T-shirt and sat down right next to me, our legs touching. “I needed something to distract me from homework once in a while and, well…”
“And I couldn’t be that distraction?”
“Not really.” His mouth pursed in a sweet, shy smile. He ran a hand through his curls then and laid back on the bed, chest open, as if inviting me to lay there.
“What does not really mean?”
“It means I’m… I’m a guy, Red.” Alex lifted his head a bit to give me a cheeky grin. “I’d never disrespect my dad by looking up porn on the Internet, but, you know… guys have needs.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying I coulda used a dad that would buy me dirty magazines—or at least have some under his bed. But my dad is mad, so…”
“And so… why does that mean you couldn’t let me distract you?”
“Because I needed a ‘certain kind’ of distraction, Red—the kind you don’t do with your best friend.”
My mouth rounded as my eyes did, and I nodded. “Oh.”
“Yeah, oh.” He laughed, reaching up to slap my arm. “So, no hard feelings, ’kay?”
“’Kay.” I laid down beside him, wanting to lay on his chest but choosing the bed instead. “So why not draw someone else—or an imaginary naked person?”
I felt him shrug beside me, but he didn’t answer.
“So… did you… um…” I laughed. I couldn’t say it and keep a straight face. “Did you use a box of tissues when you drew that—”
“Red!” he said loudly, rolling up onto his side to express his distaste right in front of my face. “You can’t ask me that.”
“Why not? I think I have a right to know what’s happening with naked sketches of me.”
“I think you’d rather not know.”
I scoffed out my high-pitched disbelief, smiling.
“Don’t take it personal,” he said, getting up on his knees, hands pressed firmly into the bed beside my shoulders. “I’m a teenage guy. We pretty much do that over everything.”
“Even Mrs. Labroke?”
Alex laughed deeply in the back of his throat. “Okay, so maybe not everything.”
With him this close to me, no parents around to walk in on us, it would have been so easy to tell him right now that I think about him like that too—that it wasn’t because teenage girls thought that way about everything, but because I loved the way his shirt pressed against his chest to show the ribs, and I loved the way his hair fell in his face when he looked down at me like that, and I loved the stubble that’d gone from growing only on his chin last year to down his neck now, and I loved how warm his hands were and I wanted them pressed to my hip. My bare hip—my top lifted slightly so he could see my skin. It was the wolf in me, maybe; she was all animal and sexually mature. But I wasn’t. Neither was Alex.
“We better, uh…”
“Yeah,” he said, taking the hint. He slinked back away from me and I quickly averted my eyes when I saw the proof that he wanted me bulging in his jeans. But I reminded myself that it was four days until exams. Neither of us needed this kind of distraction right now. Like I told myself a moment ago, it would have to wait until the graduation dinner.
Part Four: Chapter Seven
How It Ends is Never The End
Graduation came around so fast I could barely remember the chaos of my exams. Looking back tonight it seemed like my entire life had been made up of extreme moments that felt like the most important and never-ending events; every fight, every tear, every assessment, every lunchtime even. Now they were just fleeting memories that never really held that much importance—or at least not as much as I placed on them at the time. I don’t know, maybe I was just wiser now that I’d officially graduated, or maybe I was just feeling mature being back here at the mansion after avoiding it for so long.
I looked along the crowd of wolves, all seated elbow-to-elbow in the Great Hall for the first annual graduation dinner. Theo sat at the head, with Katy right beside him, their son in the cradle right behind them. They looked so happy. In fact, tonight everyone looked happy; Mom, Anne, Plain. Even I was happy. After all, we’d just gotten the best news today: Sacha and Max were expecting puppies. What better graduation present could I want? Well, maybe aside from Mom buying me a car. It was a rust-bucket, and needed a lot of work, but it was the best present ever. Certainly better than what Plain gave Alex.
I laughed to myself as I looked at him, seeing his face again as he opened the box and saw the old pocket-watch on the chain—something given to Plain on his graduation day from his father. Alex hadn’t ever expected a car, but I wasn’t sure he really knew what to do with a pocket-watch, either.
He tried to smile back at me when our eyes met, but it was so forced that I looked away. By the time dessert had been served and the guests dwindled away to the louder part of the mansion, where music played and disco lights had been set up, Alex was gone.
I went off in search, and eventually came up on him in a window seat on the second floor. His knees were tucked up to make himself small, his hands cupped tightly over a pair of headphones, the music so loud I could hear it coming up the stairs. I stood for a moment, waiting for him to notice me.
“Sometimes you just need to be wrapped up in it,” he said, taking off the headphones and smiling awkwardly at me, as if he’d been caught talking to himself.
“In what?”
He offered the headphones. “Music.”
I took them and pressed them over my ears, feeling the tune weep inside of me. It made me sad and yet somehow it made me feel free. I felt what Alex meant then, wishing I could take the waves of this song and throw them over me, wrap myself up in it, as if maybe the sadness within it would be okay in there.
I looked out over the blackness of night for a while, just listening to the song, connecting with Alex on a new level to before. When it ended, he pressed pause so the next song wouldn’t play.
“Do you like it?” he asked.
“Is that what you listen to these days?”
“Yeah.”
“Who is it?”
“Luke Sital-Singh. That song was ‘Benediction’.”
I nodded, sitting back on the wall opposite him, my feet touching his. “Do you like it because it makes you sad?”
He twitched in thought, shaking his head when he caught the train he was searching for. “I like it because it understands my sadness.”
That admission moved me, altering my opinion of Alex a little. Not in a bad way, but I felt like maybe I understood him better now too; understood that maybe he didn’t go looking for things to be sad about, but instead looked for sad things that he could relate to. “You were quiet at dinner.”
“I didn’t feel right being there.”
“Why not?”
“They’re all wolves.”
“Katy’s not. Plain’s not.”
“Yes, but… the rest are.”
“And you’re an honorary wolf,” I said with a smile. “This is your graduation party too.”
“I know. I just…” He looked out the window again. “I don’t feel much like celebrating.”
“Any reason?”
“I think I’m in more of a reflective mood, I guess.”
I smiled, tucking my knees in closer to my chest. “Yeah, I kinda know what you mean.”
We sat silently again for a bit, listening to the party going on downstairs without us. I thought about the conversation between Theo and Mom at dinner—how he offered to fund my dog shelter, to which Mom said no. Apparently it was something I needed to work for, save for, strive for. Earn. So now I had ahead of me a long few years of crappy jobs to save a few bucks, but at least she offered to match me dollar for dollar. So there was that. But I would rather have taken Theo’s offer. And then, on the other hand, I was sort of excited about earning it on my own. Owning it because of that, and not owing anyone for my success. It’d be hard, but it’d be worth
it.
When I came up from my thoughts Alex was looking at me, a soft smile underneath the permanent pain in his eyes. I wanted to ask him if he was still sad about George, and then I realized something; he wasn’t sad about George. Alex had always been sad. Even on the first day I met him. It was just a part of who he was deep inside. It wasn’t like he was permanently on the brink of tears, but he was in a constant state of reflective thought. He felt so much more sadness in this world than anyone I knew, and he felt it for a lot longer too, and I couldn’t fix that. It couldn’t be fixed. I couldn’t talk it away or wish it away. And as his best friend, I couldn’t just sit around and wait for it to end. It was a part of him—a forever part of who he was—and he needed me to love him sad as much as I loved him happy.
I reached over and took his hand, stole it I guess, because he tried to keep it to himself when I touched him. “Are you scared?” I asked.
“Of what?”
“College. Leaving.”
His eyes went down to the ground, head moving in a nod. “You know why, right?”
“Because of George,” I suggested. “Because he never made it.”
Alex nodded.
I shuffled a bit closer, and boldly, unafraid of how he’d react, I parted his knees and turned my body, pressing my back into him and closing his arms around my waist. He exhaled heavily, resting his lips on my head, his breath warm and tinged with mint gum.
“Maybe I can drive you,” I offered.
His arms tightened around me. “I’d like that. I wouldn’t be so afraid if I had you with me.”
I slid my fingers down his arm and linked them over his, letting myself believe that this embrace meant things had evolved between us. “Will you ever come back, do you think?”
“Come back?”
“When you leave, when you finally invent that cure, will you ever come back here to live?”
When he didn’t answer I took that to mean exactly what I knew it did. And it hurt. Deeply. But Alex needed to know it was okay to leave here and do what he needed to do. For him. For George. I’d survive it, even though the sadness would eventually leave my bones and live on my skin for a very long time; I just needed him to know we’d all be okay.
Red: The Untold Story Page 29
