I hurry up the stairs.
Inside my room I set the bowl on my desk. I was hungry for pasta, but my appetite left the second Mom reminded me that I only exist in this house when June vacates it. She never makes this effort when I’m not the only option.
I lock the door.
The baggies are in the bottom drawer of my dresser, tucked inside a rolled-up pair of socks. I bought more this time because my body is starting to adjust to it. This is my routine most nights: tap a line onto the desk, roll a scrap of sketchbook paper into a tight tube, inhale. I love the chemical drip that slides down the back of my throat because happiness soon follows.
After three minutes, my face goes numb, then the numbness spreads down through my neck and into my arms. The hollow feeling in my gut fills with heat. My thoughts, which were sluggish and dark ten seconds ago, snap into focus.
I feel capable and present.
(I feel like I matter.)
The euphoria isn’t what it was that first night. Tonight is a copy of a copy, but it’s still better than my baseline, which feels like sitting in a dark room observing the rest of the world through a tiny window.
Instead of working in my room tonight, I go up to June’s attic studio. Since she’s at the cabin, I carried my sculpture home from the university on Thursday. The piece has been living in the Advanced Sculpting studio, but I couldn’t leave it there over the weekend. Not when I have this kind of focus and June’s studio is available.
The attic smells like turpentine, June’s signature scent. I click on the desk lamp clamped to her worktable and aim the cone of light at my piece.
The torso stands twenty inches tall now. The clay exterior is deliberately fractured, split open along the left side to expose the welded metal armature beneath. I ran the welds myself after Dorien taught me. They’re rough and uneven, but honest in a way that polished joints wouldn’t be. The jute fibers I threaded through the fractures have taken on a life of their own, pulling the two halves toward each other without fully closing the gap. And the LED I embedded in the metal framework a few weeks ago casts a faint glow outward through the cracks when I switch it on.
Light, coming from inside. Leaking out through the broken places. The sculpture never receives light, only gives, gives, gives.
I get to work and my hands move with confidence. I smooth the clay around a new fracture line, building it out more so it looks organic, like the torso cracked under its own tension rather than being split by force. The jute in one section has frayed from handling, so I re-thread it with a tighter weave, pulling the fibers through the gap with a needle I bent from wire.
This is the best work I’ve produced all semester. I can feel it in my hands and forearms, the way the material responds, the way each decision leads cleanly to the next without hesitation or doubt.
My high fades after forty minutes, and my focus scatters. My hands slow down and the confidence drains. The torso in front of me stops looking like a breakthrough and starts looking like a pile of broken clay held together by string.
I hate the crash and just want to live in the high forever. Nothing bothers me when I’m in the high—not being an unwanted child, or getting controlled by my sister, or the woman I love discarding me after using me for a night of fun.
I tap another line onto June’s worktable. The second hit brings me back to my happy place.
I know how this ends; I’m not stupid. Every time I do this, the effects shorten and the crash cuts deeper, and I need more to reach the same place. I know I’m getting addicted, or I already am.
But I really don’t give a shit.
I need this. I need the version of myself that can make beautiful things and feel alive while doing it. The sober version of me just sketches the same tired faces until 3 a.m. and then lies in bed wondering if anyone would notice if he disappeared.
I lean back over the torso and keep working. Outside, kids are ringing the doorbell downstairs and I can hear their muffled voices through the floor. Mom’s laugh carries up faintly.
Yeah, she wouldn’t notice if I was gone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
DORIEN
Halloween night.
Carter is wearing a hotdog costume. Full-body foam, mustard stitched down the front. He’s on the sectional sipping beer and explaining to Aubrey why his Hargrove buddy Kyle would “objectively be a great boyfriend.” Aubrey adjusts the brim of a pointed black hat she said she sewed herself. It’s a structurally sound hat.
On the other side of the living room, Cinna and June have been whispering for twenty minutes. Cinna’s in a white toga dress with a gold laurel wreath on her head. June is in neon leggings and an oversized blazer with shoulder pads, a massive scrunchie pulling her hair into a side ponytail. The eighties. She looks ridiculous, but also stunning.
I’m wearing my dad’s deerstalker tweed hat and holding an empty tobacco pipe that belonged to my grandfather. My grandfather gave them to my dad, so he then put them in a box. He never smoked and never wore the hat, so I figured he’d never notice they’re gone.
A horror movie plays on the TV, but no one is watching it.
I glance at June again because my eyes have been returning to her all evening. I figure she and Cinna are whispering about that douchebag guy June brought.
