He goes very still, the way you do when you see a fox at dusk and don’t want it to disappear just yet. His lips fall open. His eyes are wide and black, and God help me but I know that look. I’ve gone hungry too many times not to recognize a starving man when he kneels in the dirt before me.
I’m not pretty—I’ve got crooked teeth and a chin like a switchblade, and I’m wearing one of Bev’s old T-shirts with the sleeves ripped off and swipes of Antique Eggshell across the front—but Arthur doesn’t seem to know that.
He looks at me just long enough for me to think, in desperate italics: Fuck.
Then he closes his eyes very deliberately, and I recognize this, too; this is what it looks like when you swallow all your hunger. When you want what you can’t have, so you bury it like a knife between your ribs.
Arthur stands. His arms hang wooden and awkward at his sides and his eyes are a pair of sinkholes. The light is still warm and honeyed, but it no longer seems to touch him.
“What are you doing here.” There are no question marks in his sentence, as if all his punctuation has calcified into periods.
“I didn’t mean—are those—” My eyes flick to the gravestones at his back, then away. “I just got turned around in the house and ended up out here somehow.”
The flesh of his face contorts, pulled taut across the bones. It’s that same bitter fury I’ve seen so many times, but I’m no longer sure it’s directed at me.
“I—” I don’t know what I intend to say—I understand,or I don’t understand or maybe I’m sorry—but it doesn’t matter because he’s already striding stiffly past me. He pauses at the wall of Starling House, his silhouette rippling in the window. Then, in a quick, passionless gesture, he puts his fist through the glass.
I flinch. Arthur withdraws his arm from the jagged hole. He stalks around the corner with his shoulders hunched and his left hand a mess of blood and dirt. A door slams, and the wind whistles sadly through the missing tooth of the windowpane.
I don’t follow him. I can’t stand the idea of being in the same room, facing him with the memory of his eyes on my skin and the weight of his stolen keys in my pocket. Betrayal works best when you don’t think about it, and now I can’t think of anything else.
I slip past the door to grab my shoes and slide into the cab of the truck. I press my forehead hard against the steering wheel, digging the plastic into my skull, and remind myself very firmly that I am in this for the money. That Arthur Starling and his mysteries and his stupid-ass eyes—however ardent, however ravenous—are not on my list. That today is Friday and Elizabeth Baine will be expecting a reply.
I pull out my phone and open her last email. Sorry, tried my best! I type back.No luck. I add an insincere frowny face and—before I can think twice, or even once—I hit send.
There’s no response that night. For a little while, I can pretend there won’t be one at all.
FOURTEEN
I‘ve dodged enough consequences to know when there’s one coming. I feel it as a weight in the air, a thundercloud massing above me, raising the small hairs on my arms.
I spend the weekend waiting for the lightning to strike, checking my phone too often and sniping at Jasper over nothing. I try to make it up to him by driving him to Bowling Green to see a movie, but he’s fidgety and distracted the whole time, and when the credits come up he “doesn’t feel like” sneaking into the new slasher movie playing on the next screen over, even though the poster is scary enough that I see a mom shielding her kid’s eyes as they pass.
He makes me wait, blinking and sweating outside the Greenwood Mall, while he films some ants swarming over a half-eaten apple.
“How’s the video coming? The new one, I mean,” I ask.
“Is that really what you want to talk about?” His tone is perfectly neutral.
“Look, I don’t know what’s up with you, but—”
“Finished it last week.” He passes his phone over, casually, as if he hasn’t shown me all his other projects just as soon as he finishes them.
I step into the shade and hit play.
A young Black girl standing in the middle of the road, her back turned. The camera circles, bringing her face into view: eyes tightly closed, mouth seamed shut. I recognize her from Ashley Caldwell’s Facebook posts—one of their foster kids, kept for a while and returned, like wrong-sized clothing. The camera gets closer and closer, until the girl’s face fills the screen, her face tight as a fist.