I turn a corner and stop abruptly, stunned by the sudden riot of color. Flowers. An uneven circle of lilies and daisies, lavender bursts of chicory and pale constellations of Queen Anne’s lace. A hot red riot of poppies, wildly out of place among the gray stone and shadows of Starling House.
Arthur is kneeling among them. There’s a pile of weedy green beside him and his hands are black with earth. Rows of gray stones surround him, stark and sinister among the riotous flowers. It’s only when I see the name STARLING repeated on the stones that I understand what they are.
Arthur is kneeling beside the newest and largest gravestone. It bears two names, two birth dates, and a single date of death.
I should say something, clear my throat or scuff my bare feet on the grass, but I don’t. I just stand there, barely breathing, watching him as he works. All the twist has gone out of his face, gentling the line of his brows and the arch of his nose, unpinching his lips. His hands are tender around the fragile roots of the flowers. The ugly, brooding Beast I met on the other side of the gates has disappeared entirely, replaced by a man who tends his parents’ graves with gentle hands, growing flowers that no one will ever see.
The house exhales at my back. A sweet-smelling breeze pulls the hair out from behind my ear and bends the heads of the poppies. Arthur looks up then, and I know the second he sees me his face will rack and warp, as if someone turned a key in his flesh and locked him against me—except it doesn’t.
He goes very still, the way you do when you see a fox at dusk and don’t want it to disappear just yet. His lips fall open. His eyes are wide and black, and God help me but I know that look. I’ve gone hungry too many times not to recognize a starving man when he kneels in the dirt before me.
I’m not pretty—I’ve got crooked teeth and a chin like a switchblade, and I’m wearing one of Bev’s old T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off and swipes of Antique Eggshell across the front—but Arthur doesn’t seem to know that.
He looks at me just long enough for me to think, in desperate italics: Fuck.
Then he closes his eyes very deliberately, and I recognize this, too; this is what it looks like when you swallow all your hunger. When you want what you can’t have, so you bury it like a knife between your ribs.
Arthur stands. His arms hang wooden and awkward at his sides and his eyes are a pair of sinkholes. The light is still warm and honeyed, but it no longer seems to touch him.
“What are you doing here.” There are no question marks in his sentence, as if all his punctuation has calcified into periods.
“I didn’t mean—are those—” My eyes flick to the gravestones at his back, then away. “I just got turned around in the house and ended up out here somehow.”
The flesh of his face contorts, pulled taut across the bones. It’s that same bitter fury I’ve seen so many times, but I’m no longer sure it’s directed at me.
“I—” I don’t know what I intend to say—I understand,or I don’t understand or maybe I’m sorry—but it doesn’t matter because he’s already striding stiffly past me. He pauses at the wall of Starling House, his silhouette rippling in the window. Then, in a quick, passionless gesture, he puts his fist through the glass.
I flinch. Arthur withdraws his arm from the jagged hole. He stalks around the corner with his shoulders hunched and his left hand a mess of blood and dirt. A door slams, and the wind whistles sadly through the missing tooth of the windowpane.
I don’t follow him. I can’t stand the idea of being in the same room, facing him with the memory of his eyes on my skin and the weight of his stolen keys in my pocket. Betrayal works best when you don’t think about it, and now I can’t think of anything else.
I slip past the door to grab my shoes and slide into the cab of the truck. I press my forehead hard against the steering wheel, digging the plastic into my skull, and remind myself very firmly that I am in this for the money. That Arthur Starling and his mysteries and his stupid-ass eyes—however ardent, however ravenous—are not on my list. That today is Friday and Elizabeth Baine will be expecting a reply.
I pull out my phone and open her last email. Sorry, tried my best! I type back.No luck. I add an insincere frowny face and—before I can think twice, or even once—I hit send.
There’s no response that night. For a little while, I can pretend there won’t be one at all.
FOURTEEN
I‘ve dodged enough consequences to know when there’s one coming. I feel it as a weight in the air, a thundercloud massing above me, raising the small hairs on my arms.
I spend the weekend waiting for the lightning to strike, checking my phone too often and sniping at Jasper over nothing. I try to make it up to him by driving him to Bowling Green to see a movie, but he’s fidgety and distracted the whole time, and when the credits come up he “doesn’t feel like” sneaking into the new slasher movie playing on the next screen over, even though the poster is scary enough that I see a mom shielding her kid’s eyes as they pass.
He makes me wait, blinking and sweating outside the Greenwood Mall, while he films some ants swarming over a half-eaten apple.
“How’s the video coming? The new one, I mean,” I ask.
“Is that really what you want to talk about?” His tone is perfectly neutral.
“Look, I don’t know what’s up with you, but—”
“Finished it last week.” He passes his phone over, casually, as if he hasn’t shown me all his other projects just as soon as he finishes them.
I step into the shade and hit play.
A young Black girl standing in the middle of the road, her back turned. The camera circles, bringing her face into view: eyes tightly closed, mouth seamed shut. I recognize her from Ashley Caldwell’s Facebook posts—one of their foster kids, kept for a while and returned, like wrong-sized clothing. The camera gets closer and closer, until the girl’s face fills the screen, her face tight as a fist.
Then she opens her mouth. I can tell she’s screaming, hard and long, but no sound comes out. Instead, a stream of white smoke pours out of her mouth. It rises and thickens, obscuring her features, swallowing the frame until there’s nothing but swirling white.
I wait, staring, nerves singing. Just when I’ve decided the video must have glitched, something moves in the mist.
An animal. A long jawbone, opening wide. A snap of teeth, and the screen goes dark.
I exhale for a long time. “Fuck, dude.”
Jasper smiles for the first time all weekend, shy and pleased. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. I mean, how did you even—those effects were unreal.”
The smile turns young and eager, the way it only does when he talks about film. “First I tried renting a fog machine, but it looked like ass. Dry ice was better, but in the end I just had to wait for actual mist. Making it come out of Joy’s mouth like that was basically just trial and error—”
“No, I meant the thing at the end.”
Jasper’s smile fades. “What thing at the end?”
“The . . .” I don’t know what to call it. I thought it was an animal, but the shape doesn’t make sense in my memory. The neck was long and doe-like, but there were so many teeth, and the eyes were so far apart.
“Were you even paying attention?” Jasper takes the phone out of my hands, shoulders slouched again. “Christ, it was only like a minute and a half long.”
“Yes I was—”
But he’s already striding back to the truck.
We drive back in silence. I break it only once, to ask if we should stop for pizza rolls in Drakesboro. He shrugs with the perfect, insolent nihilism of teenagerhood, and I very seriously consider dumping the last of my Sprite down his shirt.