Polaris Skies

Chapter 22

"Yeller?" Nat asked, shrugging out of his hold.

"Sorry," Yeller mumbled again.

"Nat, I..." Deck looked away, confused and ashamed at having gone delving in his best friend's mind without permission.

"I came out to take a break for a while and see how you were doing." Nat walked around Yeller and sat down on the love seat to look down at Deck. "You look a bit green around the gills."

"I was doing pretty good for a while." Deck pulled Sun Hee closer to him.

"Yeah? That's good. I wanted to tell you Hana went back to sleep for a while, so you should be good. I was going to catch a nap out here, so I didn't wake her up." He thumbed over his shoulder to indicate the room. He could feel all eyes staring at him, and it wasn't related to what he was saying. His skin crawled under the awkward tension. Maybe it was all the gunk smeared on him. "I should probably go see if I can wash this stuff off." He stood to leave.

"You remember Mason Griswald?" Deck folded his hands in his lap.

The hair on the back of Nat's neck stood up as a cold chill ran down his spine. "Yeah, who doesn't remember Griswald?" He put himself behind the armchair, feeling a little more protected from the group's prying eyes.

"You remember Jeremiah Hills and Luke Amsburg?" Deck pushed further.

"Where are you going with this, Alexander?" Nat hissed, unease slipping down his spine. He hoped by dropping Deck's first name it would warn him off of whatever bunny trail he was trying to go down. He did not have fond memories of the jocks.

"Do you remember how you got those scars?" Deck flicked a glance at Nat's arms, continuing with his questions, ignoring the veiled jab.

"Is there a point to this?" Nat bit through clenched teeth, self-consciously trying to hide his arms against his chest. Of course, he didn't remember when he got the scars, but his parents and everyone else thought he had tried to commit suicide. It had been four years. Yeah, they were fairly obvious and ghastly. Twenty stitches up each arm, they were hard to miss in warm weather.

"You don't remember doing that, do you?" Deck persisted.

"No. As I've told you and every other person here, I don't. Is that what you want to discuss now? That you think I'm being suicidal about Hana?" Nat guessed.

"You have a memory locked down. Mason, Jeremiah, and Luke cornered you and slashed your wrists to make it look like a suicide," Deck informed him.

Nat raised a tired eyebrow. "The hell, Deck?"

"I didn't mean to yell at you earlier about your poetry," Deck made to apologise.

"No, you did mean it, or else you wouldn't have done it. Get better at your apologies. What do these," Nat raised his arms for the room to see, "have to do with fucking poetry?"

Benj avoided the scars, uncomfortable at the proximity to death that they represented.

"Do you remember anything about the day before you ended up in the hospital?" Deck asked. He had seen the memories in Nat's head, but he wanted Nat to see it, to unlock that memory. He knew, by getting Nat to realise the scars were not his fault, that maybe his friend would value his life a bit more and stop acting so recklessly.

"I was going to try out with the varsity drama team. They had a pretty good scholarship to my dad's university for the president of the team." Nat shrugged.

"You don't remember Mason being mad at you for ruining his best game the night before? Or of Jeremiah calling you the f word that morning in biology?" Deck prodded, working over the memories with a fine-toothed comb.