All the Colors of the Dark — Chapter 67

67

Saint took her piano lesson early each Saturday, Mrs. Shaw tutting as Saint fumbled her way through “Claire de Lune,” her left hand fucking up the quaver till Mrs. Shaw told her enough and sent her out into the morning air to clear her mind.

She saw Nix taking coffee beneath the okame cherry across the street.

He raised a hand, his smile so sad she drew everything from the past year and returned to her seat and finished what she had started.

“Don’t rush. Sometimes it’s the notes you don’t play,” Mrs. Shaw said.

On Monday when he didn’t show in class, Saint asked to use the restroom and walked down the faded parquet floors.

She peered in classrooms, ignored a smile from Jimmy Walters.

She found Patch sitting alone in a corridor. He looked slight then, the boy she had lost, the swelling by his eye already turning a shade of green against the delicacy of his skin.

She sat on the small plastic chair beside him and glanced up at the constant second hand as it rounded off another hour of their lives. She wondered if she would always straddle that confusing place between child and adult, if it was printed on her skin like a warning that she could not be depended on or desired.

“Was it because of what happened this morning? I heard about Chuck.”

The principal’s door opened, and he led Chuck and his father out.

Chuck’s nose crusted with blood, the dark already circling both eyes.

“What did he do?” Saint said to Patch.

Luke Bradley, Chuck’s cornfed father, glared. “Chuck brought in a football trophy. Joseph stole it.”

“Why would you steal his trophy?” Saint said to Patch.

“So I could fuck his mother with it. Apparently Luke ain’t up to the task,” Patch said.

“Jesus,” Saint said beneath her breath as Chuck and his father took a moment to react. They might’ve gone for the kid had Principal Rodriguez

not stepped in front of them.

Patch stared after them.

“Nice eye patch,” she said.

Patch touched the blue star with an absent mind.

Saint spoke, “Hook-Handed Pete changed the color of his star each time he took a life. He cycled through most of them because he was a bad man.

Then one day he drew his pistol and aimed at it a guy but was so drunk his bullet sailed by and landed in the heart of a girl named Nancy Blue. Hook- Handed Pete never took another life, and, for the rest of his, wore blue in tribute and feeling.”

“I’m not a pirate,” he said, as the principal led him into the office and told Saint to get back to class.

She waited the thirty minutes alone, and when the door opened once more she hid herself around the corner. Only when she heard the light steps

did she join him.

“Suspension,” he said.

She followed him out of the school, and together they walked back to his house in silence. He did not invite her inside, but she followed and saw Ivy sleeping on the couch, the blanket pulled beneath her chin though her legs were bare.

She followed Patch back out front and did not say anything when he opened the Fairlane and sat in the driver’s seat and started the engine.

Saint opened the passenger door and sat beside him.

“You’ll get in shit,” he said.

“We’ll get in shit,” she said, as he eased from the house.

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