CHAPTER 20

Nastya

I hate my left hand. I hate to look at it. I hate it when it stutters and trembles and reminds me that my identity is gone. But I look at it anyway, because it also reminds me that I’m going to find the boy who took everything from me. I’m going to kill the boy who killed me, and when I kill him, I’m going to do it with my left hand.

***

Clay Whitaker is chasing me on my way to first period on Thursday, hair as disheveled as his clothes, looking every bit a refugee from the Island of Misfit Boys. His sketchbook is closed up and tucked under his arm the way it always is, like it’s attached to him or something. I would still love to see what’s in it. I wonder how many of those he goes through and how fast he fills them up. It can’t be the same book all the time. Maybe he goes through as many sketchbooks as I do black and white composition books. His closet probably has a stack of them from floor to ceiling, and I bet if you flipped through them you wouldn’t find the exact same picture on every page. Not like in my notebooks. His are probably like a photo album of memories, where he can look back and know exactly what place he was at in his mind when he drew the picture. Mine aren’t like that. I can’t flip the pages and read what I wrote and tell you what was happening in my life, in my mind, at that time. I can only tell you what happened on one particular day, and it’s the one I’m not supposed to remember.

“Hey, Nastya!” He’s panting when he reaches me, smiling through heavy breaths. I stop and step off to the side so we aren’t standing in the middle of the hallway. I’m curious because Clay will say hello to me if I run into him, but he never seeks me out.

“I wanted to ask a favor, and I figured since you kind of owe me, you’d say yes.”

Really? I’m not worried about whatever favor he wants but I am trying to figure out what I owe him for. I narrow my eyes at him and his smile is still there.

“How many times have you gotten into the English wing at lunchtime because a certain book has been propping the door open? A book which, by the way, is dented to hell and I’m probably going to have to pay for, so you kind of owe me double.”

I’ll concede that. Come on. Bring it. I motion with my hand.

“I want to draw you.” Not what I was expecting but I hadn’t really stopped to think about what I was expecting. It’s not really an unusual request, considering that it’s coming from Clay Whitaker, but I don’t know why he wants me. I hope he doesn’t think I’d pose naked for him because that’s not happening. I tap on his sketchbook and motion for him to open it. I’ve been dying to see what he does and he couldn’t have handed me a more perfect excuse. If it’s possible, his smile gets even wider, but now it’s genuine, too. He’s not trying to sell me something anymore, even though that’s exactly what his drawings are going to do.

We’ve been facing each other but he moves over to stand next to me, leaning his back against the wall so he’s shoulder to shoulder with me. He drops his backpack to the ground and opens the sketchbook. The first drawing is of a woman, older, with a lined face and thin lips. Her eyes are sunken and it’s horribly depressing. I look over to him and he’s waiting for my reaction. I don’t know what reaction to give him so I motion for him to turn the page. The next picture is of a man’s face. He looks like an older version of Clay, and it must be his father, unless it’s some sort of future self-portrait. Just like the first drawing, it’s jarringly real. I swear I can look at the eyes and tell what they were thinking. It isn’t just inspired; it’s almost frightening. The next one is a woman with eyes I can tell are bloodshot even though the drawing is black and white and my reaction is almost visceral. I can feel it. I want to touch her and find out what’s wrong. But it’s nothing compared to the feeling I get when I see the page he flips to next.

I’m staring at myself. The picture is me but not me. It’s me he’s never seen. My face looks younger and my eyes are clear. There isn’t a trace of make up on me and my hair is smoothed back in a ponytail that is pulled over my right shoulder. This one I do touch. I can’t help it. My hand just goes there. I pull it away as soon as my fingers meet the paper. I wish he hadn’t shown this to me here. I can’t look at any more. I close the book and shove it back at him.

Now I’m not so certain that the second picture wasn’t actually a future self-portrait after all. I’m sure he could easily look at a face and age, not only the skin, but the person behind it. It’s what he did to me in reverse. He regressed me. Took the age and the days and the years and everything that happened in them away and drew me the way I used to be.

When I turn to face him, I don’t know what’s in my expression. It could be any of a thousand emotions I don’t want to try to sort out right now in the hallway before first period. The bell is going to ring soon and the corridor is filling up around us.

Clay is staring at me. He’s waiting and he’s not smiling anymore. He must have been watching the entire time I was looking at the book, gauging my reactions while he showed me his soul. No matter how proud he may be, I know that showing me his work still has to be like ripping off his clothes, spinning around in front of me naked and waiting for judgment. I used to feel the same way when I played anything I had composed.

“So?”

I pull a spiral notebook out of my backpack. The first of two pre-school warning bells just blasted through the hall and I have to get to class. Time and place? I write and hand it to him just as Yearbook Michelle comes running up and grabs his arm, pulling him away.

“Come on! We’re gonna be late!” I don’t think she even noticed that he was talking to me.

“Find me at lunch!” he yells over his shoulder as I walk off in the opposite direction, haunted by my own face.

***

“To the right. Just a little. Back more. Forget it. The light in here sucks. Let’s go back downstairs. The kitchen is the only room in this house with enough decent natural light.” Clay picks up his sketchpad, charcoal pencils and some other art crap, and I follow him back down the stairs of the townhouse I’ve spent the past three days in. He’s obsessed. I can’t blame him. I recognize it. I know the overwhelming need to create something. I watch him draw and hate him a little bit for it. I don’t feel bad about it. I feel justified. I miss it. I want it back so badly that I would break my hand apart all over again just to give myself something else to feel. Sometimes the wanting almost kills me again.

It’s a little bit devastating being surrounded by people who can do what you can’t anymore. People who create. People whose souls don’t live in their bodies anymore because they’ve leached so much of themselves into their work. Josh. Clay. My mother. I want to steal from them to let myself live.

“Back downstairs?” Maddie Whitaker has been here every day that I’ve come. She works doing data entry from home, so Clay says she’s always around. He sees his dad on the weekends on the other side of town which is why he’s been having me sit for him during the week.

“Crap light,” he says, and it’s enough of an answer for her.

I sit for the next hour, watching Clay, charcoal in hand, with his eyebrows pulled together the way they get when he’s concentrating. He hasn’t let me see anything he’s done yet. I don’t even know how many he’s drawn. I thought I was agreeing to one picture, maybe two, but we seem to have gone beyond that. By like eighty.

He finally takes pity on me and lets me up to use the bathroom.

“How many more?” I write down on a pad of sticky notes I find on the kitchen counter, because I’m stalling before I have to sit again.

“I don’t know. I’ll know when I’ve got them all, but I won’t know how many that is until I’m done.”

“Cryptic, much?” I scribble back. Because if I’m going to be spending this much time with him, I have to at least be able to communicate a little. Plus, Clay won’t sell me out.

“Not trying to be. Some people I can capture in one picture. For most, it’s two or three. For you, it’s more.”

Now he’s got me. I’m in. Why does it take so many pictures to capture one face?

“I’m not trying to capture one face. I’m trying to capture all the faces.” He stops to see if I’m getting this. “Most people have more than one. You have more than most.”

He tears apart faces and puts them back together whole, like I would a piece of music. I could play it a hundred ways, imbue it with a different emotion every time and try to find the truth of it. He does that with faces, except he’s not putting the truth in, he’s drawing it out. He’s looking for the truth of me. I wonder if he’ll find it, and if he does, maybe he can show me where it is again.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 624