Cogent

EIGHT

Noah woke up covered in dry, black paint. It was clumped in his hair and had set permanent wrinkles in his t-shirt. As soon as his eyes opened, he focused on his surroundings, listening. It had to be very early still, because he could detect no sounds of movement. He wasn't sure what woke him. Maybe it was the quiet.

Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew his cellphone and checked the time.

4:37 A.M.

He tossed the phone beside him onto the sofa and sat back, grazing his face with his sore, paint-roughened palms. His fingers and knuckles were swollen. They ached from the beating they'd taken the night before. He clenched and unclenched them a few times, wincing as the movement sent bolts of pain from the tips of his fingers down into his wrists and up to his twitching biceps.

The phone started to vibrate on the cushion next to him. He glanced down at it, his hands in mid-air, half-clenched and still aching.

The caller ID said Jen.

It was his mom. He never called her by her name, but somehow putting mom in the contact name box had felt sort of...wrong. He wasn't sure why. He'd meant to ask Lenny about it and almost had, once. Talking about his family was like trying to cut through concrete with a butter knife. Nothing came of it except a few ugly scraping noises.

"Why are you calling me?" he asked aloud as he cradled the phone in his left hand, careful not to touch the screen and answer the call. He didn't want to talk to her, because he knew exactly why she was calling. There were so few reasons why she'd want him this early, he barely had to venture a guess at all. Either she'd run out of cigarettes or booze, or there was something up with Kaleb. Maybe he'd gone missing again.

Noah glanced up at the ceiling. He didn't want to care.

"Leave me alone." He tossed the phone with a flick of his sore wrist. It landed somewhere between the remaining stacks of paint cans on the other side of the room, still ringing a toneless, mechanical melody that soon played itself out.

Leaning on his knees, he rubbed his hands up and down his face, scratching at his cheeks where patches of hair poked at his skin. He couldn't remember the last time he'd gotten a haircut. His mom had taken him to a barber once, but it was expensive, so she didn't do it again. Noah had tried trimming it but the last time he took the shears to his head he'd ended up with a deformed Mohawk. It wasn't worth it to try again. Now his hair grazed his shoulders. Every once in a while he'd tie it back with a rubber band, but most of the time it hung loose and covered his eyes. It was comfortable like that.

Noah toyed with several strands, trying to peel the paint from his hair. After a short while he realized it would have been easier to get bubble gum out than the paint he'd used on the wall last night. Speaking of which...

Wincing at his stiff muscles, he rose from the sofa and turned around to face the mutilated wall. Gashes like manmade rivers zigzagged across the surface, forming a pattern that was nothing but chaos. He wasn't sure it was supposed to be anything else.

Noah tapped his fingers against his thighs, starring at the wall for several minutes. He wasn't reading into the results of his harried behavior the night before. He was just looking, taking in the splotches of black and the claw-like divots in the sheetrock.

A tub of plaster sat beneath the workbench, a flat metal trowel balancing on its lid. Noah grabbed them both and gripped at the edges of the lid, ripping it forcefully from the top of the tub. He dipped one corner of the trowel into the thick gray plaster as he approached the wall. Maneuvering behind the sofa, he slapped the plaster on top of one of the deepest gouges. The soft, thick mud spread over the wound, filling it in, making it disappear. An hour later, the blackened, carved wall was smoothed over by hardening plaster.