One More Time (With Feeling)

6

It's barely nine a.m. when you get home. If the others are there, they aren't up yet, still behind the closed door of their bedroom. You pace your own bedroom until you get dizzy and your legs hurt, then you plop down in your bed. You stand back up and grab your sketchbook and pencil box out of your bookbag by the door. When you sit down, you hunch over with your long legs curled up awkwardly, laying down thin, light graphite strokes that slowly shift from circles and lines and curves into Chayton's face last night when you laid in bed together, his relaxed shoulders, his loosely curled hands. This is probably the last thing you should be doing, but you want to get the image down before you forget it. It was the closest you'd ever been to him. Now it might be the closest you'll ever be able to get.

You get lost in the drawing, in the angles of Chayton's face, in the shadow on his skin, in the chalky smudge of charcoal on your fingers you use to shade the pencil drawing in and the tear of newspaper every time you need a new blending stick. Slowly, your vision starts to blur, so you take off your glasses to clean off the smudges on your shirt. But it's not your glasses. It's the tears building up in your eyes you haven't let fall. You pull your glasses off again, dropping them on the sheets beside you, and bury your eyes in your hand. Your breaths are deep and shuddering. You close the sketchbook and put it to the side. But you don't cry. You're not sure you remember how, it's been so long. You've been sad and angry and even depressed at times, but you haven't felt so hopeless since your mom died.

Every five minutes or so, you glance over at your phone, but nobody's texted, nobody's called. He said he'd get in touch with you. You can trust him. He just needs some space for a while.

Your door is open, but Kyle knocks anyway.

"Hey," you mumble. He frowns, his brown eyes crinkling in the corners.

"What's up?" he asks.

You shake your head.

"Can I come in?"

You nod. You wipe your face and slide your glasses back on.

"You have charcoal all over your face," he chuckles. He pulls his sleeve over his hand and wipes it away. You can barely see the black smudges on the dark blue of his shirt. At least he'll be able to get it to fade enough it won't be noticeable. You push your shaggy hair out of your face and finally look up at him as it falls back into your eyes.

"What's wrong, Rabbit?" His voice is soft now, gentle, like his words are rocks and you're a cracked pane of glass and he's afraid he'll break you.

You open your mouth, but you don't know what to say, so you close it again and sigh, looking down at your charcoal blackened fingers. You wipe them off on the newspaper beside you, stalling.

"I fucked everything up, like I always do," you finally murmur.

"You don't always fuck everything up."

"Whatever. This time, I did."

"What happened?"

You wring your hands together in the hem of your shirt, fingers tight. When you move them to your knees, they leave wrought iron grayish smudges behind. Oh, well. Another shirt lost to the cause.

"Can we go out to the garage for this conversation?" you finally ask. "I need to keep my hands busy."

"Yeah." Kyle's voice is soft, concerned. "Whatever you want."

In the garage, you grab a medium sized canvas, one you have a few of, so you can waste it on this stupid busywork. You don't have a design in mind. You go straight into slashing and splattering color over the blank white without priming. Crimson red and charcoal black and carrot orange in sharp lines and chaotic blotches. For a while, Kyle lets you work in silence. But then he pulls the stool up beside you, sitting down with his legs splayed out and his elbows on his knees, stretched out like a cat.