All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 62

62

At lunch Patch sat alone on a fallen oak and stared at his map as Misty Meyer walked toward him wearing a navy jumper over a white turtleneck, her blonde hair scraped back tight. She took a large box from her bag and set it down beside him.

“You missed your birthday. When you were gone.” She opened the box to reveal an iced monstrosity with several frosted protrusions fixed atop.

“My mother sends me to culinary class each week.”

He looked at the cake, took in the sloped crown, the deep cracks in each side. “Oh.”

“It has a skull and crossbones,” she said, and beamed.

He stared at a black sphere. The food coloring bled down one side.

“Chef Pierre said my ball-work is coming along nicely.”

He frowned at that one as she took a silver cake knife from her bag and cut him a slice so large she needed two hands to pass it.

Patch regarded the dense, gluey streaks as she watched him intently. He

took a bite and managed to swallow.

“Salt,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I like your patch today,” she said.

“Satin,” he replied with instant regret.

“My uncle works with pirates.”

He took a little interest despite himself.

“He helps prevent copyright piracy.”

His interest died.

She looked over at his lunch, the buttered bread and a single apple he’d pulled from the Baxters’ yard on the walk to school. “Are you on a diet? If you are I can get you pills from Christy Dalton. I mean, you’ll pass liquid shit, but—”

He glanced down at the bones of his arms.

She retreated quickly.

That afternoon he stole paper from the supply closet at school and made a batch of twenty posters that did not give much detail at all. Just a vague age and height and size and a name.

Saint caught up with him at the school gates and together they walked in silence.

She stayed by his side and boarded her grandmother’s bus and took the seat next to him.

He slept on the hot leather seat, his head printing the glass with sweat as the bus made its route, Norma watching out for him like he was the last of his species. As he slept Saint looked at his hand and made to take it till she caught her grandmother’s eyes in the mirror and the slight shake of her head.

They peppered surrounding towns, from Fallow Rock to Alice Springs, the Edgewood Canyon through the Coldwater Dam. He’d narrowed Grace’s age to somewhere between thirteen and seventeen for no other reason than he’d pieced together particles of her stories and formed a kind of timeline that made little sense to anyone but him. He knew that when they were standing the top of her head nestled just beneath his chin. That sometimes her hair skimmed her shoulders, in other memories her chest. She was slight enough that he felt the bumps of her spine, that he could circle her wrist with his thumb and forefinger.

At a bus station they stared at the noticeboard where a single picture of Callie Montrose remained.

“Her father’s a cop, and still they can’t find her,” Saint said.

“Just like they couldn’t find me.”

She slipped her hand into his.

And tried not to feel him flinch.

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