SCRATCHED

Chapter 17

2020, Off course, Fifteen miles to Lampton.

Jay was never one to let the morning croons pass him by. He gingered his way past his roommates, wondering how they were able to remain silent in their sleep. No heaves. No snores. Not even the slightest of movements. He also wondered if he had maintained the same level of silence. Camie always said he was a subtle person, incapable of making the usual teenage noise.

She's even more beautiful in her sleep, he thought, resisting the urge to pick up his brush and blend the colors to resemble her angelic subtlety, her princessy aura, her elegant calmness. He could only try to make the splashes of white, brown and golden resemble the beauty that dripped like raindrops onto her morning face, for not even art itself could replicate it.

Alex was the only one who had slept on her back. Her wound was still fresh, the vicious holes created by the trap's teeth still visible in his eyes. It would take some time to heal, even though touched by the painful coldness of vodka. Yet she didn't stir in her sleep.

Brandon sat beside her on the longest sofa, his hand still softly tight on her unwounded leg, his head aback, hair disheveled, chest rising and falling silently. Even in his sleep, he looked alert, ready, like the slightest sound would spring him into action.

Camie's head rested gently on Amy's shoulder, and Amy's head fell obliquely on Camie's, completing a perfect frame of friendship. For a reason, looking at Amy reminded him of Aiden, whose absence they all silently mourned.

They had met on a rainy Thursday, a day Jay marked as the first he had heard Aiden stammer. So many others followed. The stammering eventually stopped. The paralysis did not.

Jay slipped his way into the kitchen and out the backdoor, where nature seemed greener and the grass looked taller. He watched the sky, still grey, the sun asleep. In an hour or two they would all have to come out for breakfast, and yet again Brandon would have to dump any leftovers and disposables somewhere in the woods. Jay thought of offering to do so. Maybe he would find something he could draw, something to itch his fingers back into the arts. Because like the sun and his friends, they were asleep.

It dawned on him, like the rays of the awakening sun, that he was worrying about his fingers at a bad time. It could be a sign of fearlessness, which he was sure it wasn't, or it could just be his mind telling him that there was no chasm between art and his floating soul.

Survival is the first instinct, he had once read somewhere. But with Jay that sentence was untrue. His first instinct was art. It had always been. His tears were art. His pain was art. Art led him to Camie, and somehow Camie always led him back to art.

The first thing that played in his mind whenever he dived into the past was the sound the door made whenever it was opened, whenever he came back from school, the only place that was necessary enough to draw Jay out of his solitude, away from the four walls of his room.

For an artist, his room was colorless. It was littered with splashes of dark everywhere. The high walls were a thick grey, the same color as his towel, his bedsheet and the frames of the black paintings that adorned the walls and added to their growing blackness.

He made the room that way shortly after moving into the house, where he lived alone. He didn't have it in him to continue living in the biggest house on Franklin Street, where he grew up, after his parents died in a plane crash on their way back from a business meeting.

Jay never saw much of them, so he thought he had grown used to the loneliness. But on that day, his eighteenth birthday, he realized how terribly wrong he was.

"We'll make it back in time for your birthday honey, I promise."

His mother's soft voice and touch visited him like the subtle morning breeze. Tender, but painful. Had she lived, she would've fulfilled that promise. She always did. But his father was never one to make promises, or hug him, or smile at him.