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C H A P T E R -10- forever counting eternity

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SIR NATCROSS EMBODIED something of substance in the regal halls of Royal Imperial. In the same way the Bastille prison symbolized the oppression of the French government during the revolution, perhaps (at least that's what Vincent told me. He's manic with the idea of delving into historic past, certain that the past shapes the future with its war-worn hands). NatCross wasn't as clear cut in that analogy.

From a distance of a few meters or inches or centimeters (they measured the same distance for god's sake), his painting beside Sheridan's office door, framed in ornate gold that refused to tarnish, was bleak and objective, selectively rich brown, a dapple of marigold here and there, largely overshadowed by tints of black. But up close, the colors bled together, an effigy trapped in continuous motion. Pupils mingled with irises to give the impression of altered perception.

A sly metaphor hid in the tilt of his mustache and in the tilt of his stance but it was wasted on boys like me who didn't know more than the numbers in their head. I counted the wrinkles smothering his cheeks and the firm lines in his coat as I waited for my turn.

The others had acted alarmed when an announcement earlier this evening summoned us five Golden Boys to Director Sheridan's office but I knew what this was about. In Royal Imperial every action bested for a consequence and we'd be the last to go unnoticed.

The door of Sheridan's office finally opened. Chase stepped out with lethargy weighing his movements. His chin was lifted indignantly but he livened when he saw me and came over for an amicable arm slap.

"Good luck."

I should've asked him what Sheridan wanted to know but the seconds moved faster than they were meant to and I found myself propelled towards the ominous oak door with NatCross's sideways gaze leering me on.

I stepped inside the office. It was an optical illusion. Sheridan in the middle, twisting slightly on his seat, one knee crossed over the other. He made the room look bigger than it was. Pretentious or not with golden plaques around him, he was easily the most flamboyant article among these walls. He hadn't aged well for a man in his late forties. Crows feet extended to his mouth. Silver hair peppered with streaks of black hurried back from his hairline. I would've counted how many there were had it not been for the reality of how despicably I tended to amuse myself. What would the others say if they knew?

"You wanted to see me, sir?"

He was holding his face up with the fingers of his left hand splayed across various pressure points – his temple, the start of his cheek, the corner of his mouth. "Trust me, Elijah, if I didn't want to see you, you wouldn't be here. Why don't you take a seat?"

I did. The leather was still warm with Chase's shadow. Sheridan smiled. Not the friendly smiles my parents gave me as a child but the kind I saw Vincent smiling when he'd stepped over that freshman three days ago. A smile that concealed calamity. "I assume you know why you're here?"

I hesitated.

"Oh, don't be in such a hurry," Sheridan taunted. "I have some questions. If you answer them truthfully, we'll be fine. Is that understood?"

"Yes, sir."

"Good." He paused for a bit, dramatically pursing his lips. "So I heard a group of boys left the campus last night, around eight o'clock. Am I correct in saying that group consisted of yourself, Vincent Cross, Chase Stetson, Johnathan Westham and Ryder Quinn?"

What Vincent had told me earlier this evening sounded like warning bells in my head. Don't deny anything but the drugs. I held Sheridan's eyes. "Yes."

"Where did you go?"

"A nightclub."

He didn't seem very impressed by the vagueness of that answer but he didn't press the matter. A skilled warrior, he steadied his finger on the detonator.

"What time did you get back at?"

"Half one."

"Ah." His fatal smile widened. "And between those four and a half hours, did you indulge in any illegal substances?"

There it was. The bomb. I swallowed hard. Ryder and I had been sober, but the rest of them . . .

Sheridan's chuckle was short. "Are you going to lie to me, Mr. Greyson?"

"No."

"Which question does that answer?"

"Both of them."

He pursed his lips. Royal Imperial didn't believe in CCTV because us boys were expected to be disciplined but suddenly I was terrified that somehow he had evidence against me, somehow he had seen Johnny kiss my cheeks and jaw and sleepily bury his face in my neck. Blood gushed exponentially to my wrists. I clenched my fists to revive the feeling in them.

"So that wasn't you I saw carrying Chase Stetson back to his room last night?"

I could've cried with relief. I'd dropped Chase back to his dorm after dealing with Johnny while Ryder walked Alaska Finton back to St. Jude's. "Chase fell asleep in the car," I said. "He wouldn't wake up so I carried him back."

Sheridan's expression became abruptly dead. Dead like the table between us. Dead like our hearts. Dead like NatCross. What had I said wrong? Twelve threadlike lines weaved themselves along the dry expanse of his forehead. I thought, fuck, he knows. His eyes bore into mine. They blurred. Or was my vision tainted?

"How nice of you," Sheridan said finally, shrewdly. "I'm sure Chase appreciates the favor. Though isn't it strange that a sober boy would be such a heavy sleeper?"

I shrugged and tried to smile unknowingly.

Sheridan waved a hand, thin lips pulled over ivory teeth. "You may leave now."

I stood as quick as I could, nearly stumbling over myself. As I reached the door Sheridan called out, "Oh, and Elijah?"

I held my breath and turned. "Yes, sir?"

His cruel eyes held me at gunpoint. "I've spent years making this school what it is. I won't let a group of boys too big for their boots ruin that."

I nodded sharply and opened the door and hurried out of his office. As soon as the door closed behind me, I leaned against it and released the breath I'd been using to suffocate my lungs between lies. Staring up at the ceiling, I counted the exhale for three seconds before he spoke up.

"How'd it go?"

I looked down but I already knew who it was. Johnny rose from the bench opposite me and walked over. It couldn't have been in slow motion, it couldn't have, but time felt awfully warped these days. There was half a foot between us and on top of that the expanse of empty hallway. Anything could easily tear us apart, each other at the top of that list.

"I don't know," I said.

He stepped closer. There was a measurably small space between us. "What did you say?"

"I don't know," I repeated because I knew he wasn't asking about that. He was asking about last night. I thought, please don't make a scene. We were chest to chest. His coarse, copper hair had a relentless curl to its tips. I longed to push it over and around his ears, trace the soft, rippling shadows pooling under his hazel eyes. With my fingers, my mouth. Taste the sunflower flavor of his skin but also taste the person no one knew.

"Thanks, I guess," he mumbled softly. "For last night, for–" he stopped. I didn't ask him to continue. Didn't know how.

He was looking at my mouth and I was staring into his aloof eyes and both of us had a desire behind each action but which one was the lie? "Meet me tonight," he said finally.

"No."

He pushed forward again, nearly meeting my mouth if he didn't stopped himself. At this point I thought we'd both fall back into Sheridan's office. "Please."

It was the strangest thing hearing him plead, quiet as if he was unsure of doing it, as if he was speaking along in a dream. I didn't know what I wanted from him except everything but these days that didn't feel like enough. "I can't."

"Eli." He tried to press against me again. I stared at the deliberate scattering of freckles across the bridge of his nose; rose petals strewn across milk-swathed marble. With the last rays of the evening sun slanting behind him, outlining his frame in subdued gold, his shadow stretched for miles along the pristine floor. I felt like I'd found the missing side of the moon.

I moved past him, and to my dismay, he didn't try stop me again, just looked at me sideways with an expression so pointedly sad that I paused.

I don't know how you make me feel. I don't know how to say it. I don't know if I love you. I said, "You should go," and pointed to the door.

I didn't wait for him to move and quickly strode past him, down the hall, to the lounge room. Ryder was already there with Chase and Vincent. Vincent was saying, preposterous and scandalized, "I can't believe you assholes let me go near her last night."

"Please. You were more than willing."

"I was smashed. I wouldn't have touched her if I was sober."

"I don't think anyone with functioning eyes could," Ryder added brazenly. "She looks like the fucking floor."

Chase was the first to notice me. A rarity. "Eli! Wasn't Vincent sober when he went off with Avery Fernandez?"

I raised a brow at Vincent as he rubbed his mouth.

He waved a hand and spoke for himself, the way he could without my uselessness. "I mean, in all fairness, she has a great rack. That was probably the only reason I partially agreed to making out with her, but she fucking jumped me, man. She's an animal."

Ryder laughed at that. He was wearing his glasses today, thin, grey wire frames—another rarity.

Chase stood from the couch and grabbed me by the arm, heaving me back towards the door. "Look at this." He pointed at one (out of the many) photographs lining the pale blue wall and tapped it. "That's Alaska's brother."

I peered at it more closely, and sure enough, it was a faded photograph of the infamous dead boys of Royal Imperial. Charlie Finton stood in the center. The plaque under it read: In loving memory of William Camden, Darren Jones, Charles Finton and Hassan Al-Ahdal. Gone but never forgotten.

"Hang on," Chase said, not exactly to me, and hurried out of the room, returning just as quick with a black jacket over his arm that I instantly recognized as Ryder's. He'd given it to Alaska Finton last night after she'd stripped out of her soiled dress at the side of road. "Alaska had this. She said thanks."

Ryder hesitated before taking it. "Yeah. She was freezing last night and you were too wasted to offer her a jacket so I gave her mine."

I raised a brow at him. Why was he lying?

He cleared his throat without meeting my eyes. "How did things go with her?"

"Good, I think? We might be going out Friday night."

"Actually," Ryder mused, "I need to go somewhere on Friday as well." He turned to Vincent. "Think I could borrow the Mustang?"

Vincent was absentmindedly running his hands through his black hair with the mannerisms of a magician shuffling his deck. "What—you don't want to take Stella out again?"

"It's not exactly a good neighborhood."

That caught his attention. "Are you—?"

"No."

A moment of terse silence passed. Vincent twisted his mouth in thought. He thought he was being secretive in his musing but I knew. After all, I was the one who'd found Ryder shot up on my bathroom floor in sophomore year. Two years was a long time but broken boys like him scouted opportunities to relapse.

"Okay," Vincent said at last, a martyred expression on his face, and only with that did I realize the detachment. Like I'd been encased in a snow globe all my life and suddenly someone had shaken it, jarring me back to reality. I was looking in on them, through a window. Nothing but a spectator in their lives, counting the steps they took.

Someone knocked on the open door. I flinched. "Ryder Quinn?" The secretary, Mary-Ann stood in the doorway. Her hair was tied in a bun that looked like it'd been spun from Scriptures. "There's a call for you in the main office."

Ryder, puzzled but only momentarily, said, "Be right back," and followed Mary-Ann out the door. I would've taken his seat beside Vincent but that was too big a void to fill so I stood like an idiot for ten minutes beside the photograph of four dead boys until Vincent stretched his legs.

"Guess I should leave as well. I've piles of homework to do. Chase, you want to come over to my room and catch up on those math notes we missed?"

Chase shrugged but there a fleeting moment of strain on his face. "Sure."

Vincent looked at me. He hadn't the most memorable of faces, with brows of forgotten emperors and eyes the color of their ashes, but once you saw him there was no going back. To even have him glance at you felt like a blessing. "You coming?" The way he said it sounded like he was poised for me to say no. Who was I to disappoint?

"Nah, I think I'll stay here for a while."

"All right." He and Chase walked past me without a second thought. I had the room to myself and it should've felt bigger with a population of one but the walls seemed to draw nearer, burying me inside their tombstone lined with ghosts. I took a seat on the lonesome couch and counted the photographs on the wall to occupy myself. Even that was futile.

I was looking for metaphors in all the small things these days, to account for numbers gone amiss in my calculations. The thing was, though, that mathematicians couldn't suddenly equate philosophy with theorems. There was a balance, a symmetry to maintain. X's to x's, y's to y's.

I was living life so damn wrong.

Ryder walked back in and startled the shit out of me because of how silently he'd crept inside. He sat next to me, governed by something other than himself so for a moment, I was afraid to ask.

"Who called?"

"Home." His answer was grammatically incorrect. Even literally because I literally couldn't associate anyone with his version of home. Mother long dead and father long gone, playing a game of abandonment with his only child. Unless . . .

"Home, as in—"

He looked at me. The way the light hit off his glasses made it near impossible to see his chaotic eyes but it gave me my answer. I asked again, slowly, apprehensively, because when it came to Ryder's father, you never knew how he'd react.

"Is he . . ."

It was disconcerting, how he was looking straight at me without looking at me. The distance between us in that moment was immeasurable. "He wouldn't go out that fast."

"How much longer does he have?"

"Too long."

I stared at him. He smiled ruefully. "What? It's just me and my 'bullshit morals', right?"

I'd told him that last night when he'd agreed to leave Avery and Vincent at the club to drop the rest of us home but wouldn't go looking for the other three St. Jude girls who had fucked off earlier. It'd been apt then. I didn't think he'd remember.

"I didn't mean it like that."

"I know, Eli. I know." I didn't know if that meant I was forgiven. But that was life and life was comprised of the unknowns and the unknowing. Johnny would never know that I forgave him, just as I would never know if Ryder forgave me, just as we all would never know what the hell Vincent said to Chase on Friday because this was us, our world, our secrets, and we'd bring them to the grave because that's what it meant to be golden, right?