Page 3 of The Villains of Winter

James knew which band he drummed that week, which electrocuted Elliott with surprise. No one knew if he was drumming Van Halen or A Tribe Called Quest or Buddy Miles. He never showed anyone his cassettes. Elliott and James normally stood in silence around each other, always at a distance, as though words themselves didn’t hold enough magnitude for everything they might murmur to one another. As though the sentences were heavy in their mouths, useless and insufficient, in the importance of their moments alone. The moments were sacred to them.

Instead, they exchanged expressions and glances, across the arched corridors, across the chandelier-drenched hallways, a currency that Elliott understood without the need for words.

Elliott willed for no one to notice them, but it was impossible for James not to attract attention. He came from an extensive lineage of politicians, his father was the British high commissioner, the United Kingdom representative to the commonwealth of Canada, and his grandfather before him was Governor Wilde. It was predestined for him to become a politician.

Beyond that, James was dangerously beautiful, he held everyone’s gaze without trying. It was given to him without cost, therefore he was careless with it. He was recklessly charming and he didn’t deign to disguise it beneath his smirk.

He had a hereditary condition that whitened his hair, and even the defect made him majestic. Mythic.

Elliott was fascinated by aberrations. The strangeness made him want to sketch to understand it. Every part of James was an enigma for him to deconstruct in his hands.

“Do you speak, Elliott the drummer?” James whispered, his warm breath on Elliott’s nose. He had grown close, only an inch apart from him.

Elliott could taste the river salt on his breath.

The brine of the rapids in his aroma.

Elliott forgot language, and he formed an awkward, bizarre string of sounds instead of words. His voice was incoherent. “You know—I drum?”

Sugar maples and elms populated the river front around them with warm notes of dew-kissed leaves and earthy, damp bark. The Connecticut River flowed into the Atlantic Ocean a hundred meters from them. Beneath Elliott’s feet were sprays of wildflowers–marigolds, goldenrods, dogwoods–choruses of brightly florid beauty. Sweet, migrating birds soared above their close heads. Elliott couldn’t think of proper words.

His words were stammered and ill-formed, as if in a dream.

James inhaled Elliott’s soft breath in anticipation for his words.

“Everyone knows the orphan kid with the drumsticks,” someone else laughed. Finch Hudskin broke the silent exchange of breath between Elliott and James. A few new boys dove into the water with rowing oars, unloading from a parked Porsche. “Do you have a cigarette?”

Elliott shook his head; he hadn’t even heard Finch approach from behind. Finch threw his arm around the nervous boy. “If you lend me a cigarette, I won’t break the other side of your jaw next time at hockey try outs. I’ll only break your nose.”

“You’re an asshole, Finch,” James remarked, but he laughed all the same. “How good of a fighter are you, Elliott?”

“Not at all.”

“That can’t be true, hit Finch,” James provoked, as though a kill switch had been engineered within him in the presence of the rest of the boys. Fights interested James; he never flinched at scraped knuckles, but Elliott hyperventilated. James piqued his dark brow. “Are you afraid of losing a fight?”

“Yes.” Boys in their hubristic, prideful town didn’t admit fear, but Elliott preferred his bones intact. He hadn’t made the hockey team for a reason.

The referees permitted hard-knuckled brawls that left him curled on the ground.

Aside from that, the costs of the equipment alone was inconceivable.

With one sweep, Finch had stolen his biology sketches. “You study flowers?”

Elliott explained, “Paleo-botany examinations for biology club.”

“Same thing.” Finch rifled through the pages with impunity, getting his damp, muddied hands all over the book. He rummaged through Elliott’s backpack afterward, discovering dozens of sketch scraps and cassettes. “All you do is paint planets and flowers?”

Anxiety rose in Elliott’s chest, nerves stirring in the pit of his sternum. There were pages Elliott needed to keep hidden. The pages he’d drawn of James in the fields, in the pines, in the mountains.

The pages of James dying in earthquakes, avalanches, typhoons. James was a myth to him. The only myths Elliott knew ended in tragedy.

“Aren’t you the only biology club member?” James questioned with a knot of confusion in his brow. Sweat dripped down his rib cage as he emerged from the current, toweling himself with Elliott’s jacket. “I’ve never seen any other student with you. Why can’t you fight out here?”

Abruptly, Finch coughed before Elliott could respond. The phlegm congealed in his chest, leaving him strangled for breath. A spittle of bile spattered onto his lips. He was dying, Elliott heard.

All the adults said Finch would be dead by twenty-one from lung disease; he worked as a welder and the chemical fumes were severely corrosive, abrading his internal organs with aggressive deterioration. He urgently needed an organ transplant, but Finch refused to believe it. He still had weeks where he could forecheck and backcheck for hours with ease and he concealed the weeks he couldn’t. He hid his portable respirator from their sight.

Out of respect, Elliott kept his eye contact on James. The rowing captain.