All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 63

63

The next day Misty set down a Le Creuset dish, took sterling cutlery from her bag and handed it to him as she removed the enameled lid.

“Arroz de pato,” she said.

He stared at the congealment with ardent fear, scratched his head and fussed with his eye patch as she watched him eat. “Can you get the moulard?”

He nodded and made a silent vow to find out what a moulard was and punish it. And he waited until she turned to notice her friends before he wiped his tongue on a hawthorn leaf.

In the distance a couple of kids tossed a football, now and then throwing glances toward Misty to see if she noticed. She did not, but Patch noticed Saint at the window of her applied math class. And she saw him and made an O with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, before penetrating it with the index finger of her right.

Patch looked away quickly, his mind back in the basement.

“You know that means you want to fuck someone,” Grace said.

“It does not.”

“Think about it.”

He did. For a long, long time.

“Jesus,” he said.

“You were in the newspapers a lot. I made a scrapbook,” Misty said,

breaking him from it.

He wondered at her hobbies.

“Or maybe you just want to forget the whole darn thing and here I am coming to sit with you each day.”

That smile again.

It was a smile all right.

“You don’t have to do this,” he said.

“I mean, I enjoy the cookery and all.”

“You don’t owe me or nothing, Misty.”

She watched the sky, her eyes an even match for the blue. “I didn’t sleep much. Probably get a mess of wrinkles soon enough. Probably look like a waffle. Pocked.” She cleared her throat and looked at him. “We went to church and I prayed for you.”

He wanted to get up and walk away from her, this girl who had too much. He wanted to walk out of the school gates and down to the police station and burn the fucking place to the ground.

“Is this cutlery real silver?” he said.

“Yes.”

He made a mental note to feign choking and slip it into his pocket.

The school bell called, and he gathered his posters and walked away

from the building, cutting biology.

Misty took a moment and followed.

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