The room goes still.
Before I can take my next breath, I realize what a terrible thing I’ve just said
Dorien doesn’t show the hurt on his face but I can feel it. I can feel the wound I just reopened.
“That’s not fair,” he says quietly. His voice is stripped bare, leaving a boy who made a terrible choice at nine and never stopped paying for it.
My throat closes. The anger breaks apart inside me and what pours out is the truth underneath. “I’m scared.” My voice cracks. “I’m scared of losing him, Dorien. I can’t lose someone again.”
He moves past me toward the stairs until only his back is facing me. “You think I’m not scared of losing people too?” he asks.
“You don’t act like it.”
“Acting like it and being it are different things. I’m terrified every damn day.”
We’re the same in this. I hold too tightly and he just doesn’t hold on at all, but neither strategy is working, and we both know it. But knowing just confirms what I’ve believed since we were children: that we’re cursed. That being in the same room, on the same side, will end with someone getting hurt.
“Stay away from my brother,” I say. “Please.”
He walks to the bottom step and then stares at his boots. His voice is too gentle in comparison to the adrenaline coursing through me. “He can make his own decisions,” he says. “And I say this not to be cruel, but to wake you up to what you’re doing. If you lose your brother, it’ll be because you pushed him away by trying to control every last thing in his life. So stop.”
His footsteps on the stairs are slow. The basement door creaks open. Then he’s gone.
I press my palms against my face and cry.
Mom finds me a few minutes later in the hallway, after I tried reaching my room, only for my body to give out.
She sits next to me and pulls me into a hug. “I heard shouting and Dorien looked upset when he left. Honey, what happened?”
“Dorien, obviously.” I wipe my face with my sleeve. “He can be so insensitive sometimes.”
But that’s not the full truth. I’m awful too, just in a different way.
She puts her hands on my shoulders and studies me with her whole attention. “You know,” she says, “the reason we learn to ride a bike is because someone we trust stays close once the training wheels are off. They stay close, just in case we fall, until they know we have the strength to ride on our own.” She pauses. “That’s been Dorien with you. In his own clumsy, stubborn way. He stays close.”
It’s a caring thing to say, but she doesn’t know about the bong. She doesn’t know about Aeron. She thinks this is our usual friction. In any other moment her words might land gently.
But all I can think is: he stays close, and people get hurt.
I say goodnight then climb the stairs to the attic studio.
The skylights show a dark sky. I pull a fresh canvas from the stack against the wall and squeeze paint directly onto it from tubes: cadmium red, burnt umber, titanium white. I lay into the surface with a palette knife. Slashing. Dragging. Scraping in long, violent streaks that leave ridges of thick paint standing up like welts.
I don’t think about composition or value. I paint the way you scream—whole body, no technique, no intention beyond getting it out. Half a tube of vermillion gone. There’s paint on my hands, my forearms, specks on my neck. Red on the canvas bleeds into brown, white cutting through both.
When I finally step back, the canvas is a mess of furious color. And in the center of it, barely recognizable but unmistakable, is the shape of an ice cream truck.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
DORIEN
The clay is cold. I’m supposed to be refining the torso study from last week, but my fingers keep pressing too hard into the shoulder, caving in the form I spent an hour building up yesterday. Professor Cheng glances over once, says nothing, then moves on. He knows when to leave me alone; the mark of a great teacher.
I’ve had a headache since I woke up. I smoked too much last night, sitting on the floor of my dorm room with the window cracked, going through half a bag because my thoughts wouldn’t shut up.
June’s face in the basement.
Her anger.