Liv, Forever (8 page)

“I didn’t see you there,” I said.

“But you see me now?” She seemed anxious.

“You just surprised me.” I studied her face. I thought I’d become familiar with all of the faces on campus, but I did not recall this peculiar girl.

“You see me? You do?!” She looked down at herself, touching her limbs excitedly as if she’d just grown them. Then I saw her wrists. Both had gashes. They were bleeding. I sucked in a breath.

“Are you okay?”

“No, I’m not. I’m not at all okay.”

“Should I get someone?”

“Yes! We need to get someone! But not one of them,” she said, eyeing Old Homestead.

I looked down, fumbling in my bag for my phone, and when I looked back up she was dashing away.

“Hey, wait!” I rushed after her, weaving through the tombstones, but she vanished into the woods. I paused at the edge of the dark forest.

“Hello!? Are you going to be okay?!” I yelled out after
her. But no response. No girl. I immediately started to text campus security, as Mrs. Mulford had instructed us to do in the event of an emergency outside the dorm. I typed:

wounded girl in cemetery ran into woods.

“What are you doing way over there?” Malcolm said from behind, jolting me.

I turned to him, rattled. “The strangest thing just happened. This girl was here—dressed all retro—acting really weird. And her wrists were all bloody, then she just ran away.”

At first he looked confused but then he sighed, kind of annoyed. “Must’ve been a prank. It’s Headmaster Holiday. Wickies go
nuts
with pranks on this day.”

I nodded. Of course. What else would they do with a day off? Looking down at the text, I realized how absurd it was. It obviously wasn’t real. I deleted it.

“Ha. Ha. Very funny!” I shouted toward the forest, just in case she (or one of her conspirators) was still lurking nearby. “I bet it was Abigail,” I said, remembering the look on her face as Malcolm abandoned her earlier. “Or maybe even Gabe.” He didn’t seem like the pranking type, but maybe he was still mad and just trying to freak me out.

“You’re friends with that Gabe guy?”

“Well, we do work-study together.”

“He kind of weirds me out.”

I nodded—if Malcolm only
knew
—and Malcolm smiled, brushing any thought of Gabe aside, and gestured toward Old Homestead. “But come on. The coast is clear.”

“OKAY, THIS
HAS
TO
be against the rules,” I said as Malcolm unlocked the front door to Old Homestead. He had the keys; I didn’t ask how.

“Don’t worry,” he assured me. “I promise, we can’t get in trouble for this.”

“It just feels wrong.”

Being there reminded me of that night. And that room with no door. And his friends—Kent and the others. And Abigail laughing at me.

Malcolm sensed my reluctance. “I swear to you, if there’s another prank waiting in here, you can disown me forever. But I have to show you this. It’s worth it. Trust me.”

And so I did. He led me into a small room I hadn’t been in before. It was painted a dark velvety brown. And the walls were empty except for one small artwork. I recognized it immediately and rushed over.

“It’s a William Blake,” I breathed.

Malcolm nodded. “Supposedly Minerva’s parents knew him.”

“But he wasn’t famous while he was alive.” I knew Blake’s story well; I’d read two different biographies. “He didn’t mingle at all with the upper class. People thought he was completely insane.”

“Okay, Livipedia.”

I looked down, embarrassed by my freakish knowledge on the subject.

“Well, I’m equally obsessed with Banksy,” he admitted. “I saw his movie fourteen times.”

“Fourteen?” I asked.

He nodded. “And I conned my dad into taking me to London so I could secretly see his work.”

We both just started laughing. Laughing at our dorkiness or our wonderfulness or maybe just the welcome relief of finally sharing our secret obsession with somebody else.

“What I’m really jealous of is Banksy’s mystery,” Malcolm added. “What I’d give to be nameless. Faceless. Invisible.”

I wanted to say:
That’s exactly how I feel at Wickham Hall: nameless, faceless, invisible. Except when I’m with you.
But then I felt it again. A chill. I whipped around. Nothing. I thought again about Gabe and his ghosts.

“What’s the matter?”

“I just got a chill, I guess.”

He wrapped his arm around me. “Maybe your clothes are still damp.”

“Maybe.”

I looked around again and then hesitantly asked, “So, there are rumors …”

“That the school’s haunted,” he said, finishing my sentence.

I nodded.

He said, “Who knows. Maybe it is.”

WE ENDED THE DAY
(I can confidently say it was the best day of my life) in my studio at the Art Center, working. As usual, it was a ghost town—all the other studios were empty—so we had total privacy.

I started a collage, a picture of the two of us jumping off the cliff. I played with the blur of our movement, so you couldn’t really tell if we were falling or floating. Floating
or falling. This was being with Malcolm. The picture was more an impression than an actual depiction of the moment.

He sat near me, working on his own piece. We were silent. Just being together and creating. We were Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe. Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo without all the philandering and substance abuse. It was the kind of scene I might have conjured as the Perfect Boy Scenario if I was the kind of person who sat around and thought about things like that.

He closed his sketchbook, put it down, and came over to me. He looked at my collage.

“It looks like we’re flying.”

I smiled. He leaned closer, studying the details carefully. It made me both thrilled and uncomfortable, as if he were examining me. Or looking
into
me, because that’s really what he was doing. However cryptic and controlled, every single thing I drew revealed something about me.
I’m afraid. I’m lonely. I feel invisible. I feel out of sync with the world.
But this one, the one he was looking at, said:
I like this boy. A lot. I feel so free I could fly with him.
I wanted him to see that. I wanted him to understand what I could never say out loud.

He turned to me. “Draw on me.”

“What?”

“Draw on me. Tomorrow we’ll be in classes. Apart. And who knows when I’ll get you to hang out with me again. I want to have you there with me.”

After he said that, he took his shirt off. His body was
perfect. I don’t mean “six-pack” perfect. I’ve never understood why girls even liked that so much. No, Malcolm’s body was perfect in a different way. His shoulders were broad and strong, from rowing I guess. But he was skinnier than I’d expected. Lanky. Not much hair on his chest. And his skin was like warm cream—smooth and soothing—except for a single mole on his right shoulder just beyond the clavicle. I guess his body was perfect the same way every other part of him was perfect, in that it
wasn’t.
His flaws perfected him.

I chose a plum-colored Bristol marker. “Are you sure you want to be my canvas?” I asked in a French accent for no particular reason.

“Oui,”
he replied.

I laughed. “It won’t come off for days.”

“Good.”

I paused. “Will you draw on me, too?”

“If you want me to.”

I nodded. So he reached over and selected a marker—a deep green. “Like your eyes,” he said. I looked down, and my face went hot. No boy had ever noticed the green in my eyes before. On first glance they appear brown, and I guess most guys had only ever given me one glance.

I positioned him on his back on the floor, like a patient on the operating table. And I stretched out on my stomach, propping myself up on my elbows right at his shoulders.

He looked straight up at the ceiling. “I can see us,” he said.

“I do that, too, sometimes. It’s like I fly out of myself and hover, watching.”

“No, I mean I can
literally
see us,” he said, chuckling and gesturing above.

I looked up and there we were, a faint reflection. I lay on my back next to him and put my arms over my head. “Look, it’s like we’re flying. Superman style.”

“It is.”

I noticed our reflections were speckled with the stars that shone through the glass ceiling. “Or like we’re nothing.”

“Just vapor,” he added.

Then I turned back onto my stomach and started to draw. I had to start at the mole. I placed the marker right on it and wrote
vapor
up across his shoulder. Then I wrote
invisible
down his upper arm, moving the word with the curve of his muscle, defined but not bulging. Solid. I gently leaned on top of him, and a wing took shape across his chest and bloomed—not into a bird as I’d first intended, but into an angel. Rather than have the angel spread her wings across his chest, I made her kneel, one wing pulled into herself. A resting angel. Banksy frequently did those.

He couldn’t really see what I was doing. He looked up at the reflection to get a clue, but it was too far away for him to decipher much. “Is it you?” he asked.

“Maybe.” I kept drawing. Words folded into wings. A tree sprouted, poised on a cliff that hung over water. And in the water were his hands. His strong fingers. Eventually everything I associated with Malcolm figured across his chest. Our story. I worked slowly and he lay still, receiving. He trusted me. He watched my face and seemed to enjoy
feeling every mark, as if each one was a stroke of affection. And each one was.

When I finished, I lay down on my back next to him. “Thank you,” he said and turned on his side to face me.

I turned my head and looked into his eyes. They were an almost unreal, saturated blue as if painted by Yves Klein himself.

“I really want to kiss you right now,” he said.

“I really want to kiss you, too,” I confessed, not even embarrassed to say it. But, just then, we heard the footsteps approaching, padding across the concrete studio floor. I sat up. It was Ms. Benson.

“I saw the light on. You’re just about to miss curfew. You need to go. Both of you.
Now.
”

She saw his shirtlessness. It was a major infraction—to quote section 4, part 2e of the student handbook: “Under no circumstances should a student disrobe in the presence of a student of the opposite sex.” But Ms. Benson just said, “Interesting canvas, Liv. However, not exactly what I meant when I said your art should live and breathe.”

MINUTES LATER MALCOLM AND
I were briskly walking across campus along with many other Wickies rushing to make curfew. But I doubt any of them had just drawn all over the chest of someone they were falling in love with.

Suddenly we were at Skellenger. Abigail stuck her neck out, looking for latecomers. She pretended not to see me—or him—and stepped back inside.

“Let’s sneak out,” he blurted.

I hesitated. Wickham Hall’s campus security was omnipresent.

“Not tonight. But when the time’s right. Then I can draw on you.”

He held up the green marker, which he hadn’t had time to use. He’d pocketed it. But I was still reluctant.

“It’s the only way to have any time together. Alone.”

“Okay,” I said and then turned to run into my dorm, not looking back.

I wanted to know more about the Wickhams, specifically how and why they’d ended up with a William Blake. So I did some research. The Wickham archives were preserved at Old Homestead and all the school records were maintained at the Headmaster’s Quarters, but there was a tiny section in the library dedicated to the early history of the school.

Minerva Savage met Wallace Wickham in 1849. Wallace was thirty-four and Minerva twenty-four, which was already considered an old maid back then. Wallace was a lot higher on the social spectrum than Minerva, and so his family was not pleased. They’d chosen another woman for him, but Wallace loved Minerva and insisted on marrying her. Apparently it was so scandalous it even made the cover of the Sunday edition of
News of the World.
(Yes,
News of the World
was already peddling gossip way back when.) Wallace’s parents practically disowned him, but because he
was their only son, he received his inheritance when they passed anyway.