Stain (4 page)

My places to sit are limited, but I’m not too picky so I settle beneath a tree, positioning myself so I have the perfect vantage point of the cemetery from where I’m seated. Retrieving my sketchpad and charcoal case from my bag, I set it against the base of the tree and flip through the pages covered with various pencil sketching until I arrive at the page I’m looking for. I grab a piece of charcoal pencil from my open case and start from where I left off last Sunday. My fingers flit across the page, gentle and light, as I occasionally look up to make sure I’m capturing every tiny nuance—everything that makes the cemetery special. It’s the brown, broken kindling scattered along the moss-covered grounds, the branches of the trees eerily stretching out over the graves like the mangled fingers of the grim keeper, the murder of crows crying out into the muted silence, and the trees that stand like specters, casting long shadows across the cemetery. Crosshatch shading makes the sky look far more ominous than it currently is, highlighting and darkening tombstones so that the image takes on the aspect of a black-and-white photograph rather than a pencil drawing. I forget everything, the world blurs on the edges of my peripheral as I lose myself in this dark, almost macabre world I create.

But then the illusion shatters, fragments of inspiration falling around me like precious glass as I’m startled out my concentration. The sudden acceleration of my heartbeats sound like a stampeding herd of wildebeest in my chest. I turn my head to the right toward the location of the noise and spy broken beer bottles a few feet from where I’m sitting. Someone had hurled it against the tree and as my eyes search wildly around, I’m not left wondering for long who the culprit is when seconds later I notice a small group of three across the cemetery. One girl, two guys. The girl has her back to me, in fact, she’s slowly walking backward while engaging the two guys in conversation. She has a head of dark green hair that’s hard to miss; it skims past her shoulders in layered waves. She’s in a pair of dark-rinsed skinny jeans, with a white camisole on top that shows off her golden-hued skin. Her feet are encased in a pair of black low-tops.

With the guys lingering behind and facing my direction, it’s easier to make out their appearances, and instant recognition has me inwardly face-palming for not putting two and two together. Bria Daniels, the girl with the dark green hair, always hung around Noah and Maddox Moore. Twin brothers who couldn’t have possibly been more different. The similarities between them are like night and day. Opposite sides of the same coin. Noah always reminded me of a painting I once saw at an art exhibit downtown of the towheaded Lucifer before the fall. Blindingly beautiful—yet distinctively masculine. He has enviably high cheekbones, and a straight-bladed nose that gives way to a kind, smiling mouth. Thick, dark hair frames his face, skimming just past his angular jawline. He’s tall. They’re both equally tall in fact, but Noah has a slight advantage over his brother, but it’s not by much. If I had to guess at their height, I’d put them somewhere between 6’2 and 6’3. Noah has been on the cross-country team since freshman year, a year before I joined track and field as a sprinter. I’ve seen his body from far away, studied him as an artist would a subject, and so I know beneath the dark blue jeans and burgundy sweater he’s wearing, there’s the body of a long distance runner. Lean muscles, long legs and arms built for speed and endurance. I also knew him from art class, held every Monday, Tuesday, and Friday, fifth period in Mr. Kauffman’s class.

I follow the slight shift of Noah’s head as he looks to his left to say something to his brother. They’re too far away for me to hear the conversation, but the rich sound of his laughter cuts across the cemetery. His twin fails to share in his humor and seemingly unaffected, Noah shrugs a shoulder before retuning his gaze to Bria. But unlike Noah, I’m incapable of dismissing Maddox so easily. Noah is beautiful. Maddox—Maddox is something else altogether.

He’s covered in tattoos. That’s the first thing you notice about Maddox Moore. Under the white T-shirt he’s wearing is stylized pieces of artwork, each one probably telling a story of their own, covering both his arms down to the knuckles of both hands. There’s a geometric star that’s set at the base of his throat. It’s a pentagram within a pentagram enclosed around a red eye situated at the center. The points of the larger pentagram trail up the length of his neck, over his Adam’s apple, stopping just beneath earlobes that have been stretched to the size of nickels with hollow, black O-rings. The blood-red of the eye is the only shot of color in the otherwise black ink canvasing his pale skin. I’ve watched him from a distance. Studied him with the keen eye of an artist consumed by a muse. He rarely ever came to school, but when he did, I instinctively knew where he was. Watching him from my shadowy corner—I will never admit it out loud to anyone that he’s become my obsession. I’ve sketched him numerous times, dusted charcoal-covered fingers down the blade of his nose and across the fullness of his unsmiling mouth. I have a sketchpad filled with his likeness. I know how that makes me sound. Like a stalker. But my obsession stems from the need to capture his image to paper. I’ve never been able to get it right. His image in my memories never quite did him justice.

Though I know most by memory, the white V-neck T-shirt he’s wearing makes it possible to see the tattoos on both his arms. There’s a skeletal tree on the left, branches snaking down his forearm into an explosion of black birds that stop at the dark band around his wrist. From this angle, I can’t make out the images on his right arm because it appears to be a mesh of faces. Aside from the white T-shirt, he’s wearing a pair of slim-fit, black jeans that stop over beat-up, black VANS.

I take in the partially empty beer case he carries in one hand, while the other is wrapped around a bottle he brings to his mouth. He tips it back and guzzles it down like it’s water.

There’s no time for me to do anything but close my eyes and flinch in the span it takes him to drink and hurl the bottle in my direction. I jump, and a squeak makes its way out of my mouth when it slams and shatters against a tombstone a few yards from where I’m sitting. The small fear that it might’ve hit me has my heart racing but it’s nothing compared to the moment I open my eyes to find him staring directly at me. I didn’t realize they’d come this close.

I hear the blood rush between my ears, my heart beats too fast against my chest, like a hummingbird looking for a way out of its cage. Sweat gathers on my skin as time seemingly trickles to a stop. He looks at me and I look at him. I can’t hold the intensity of his stare but I can’t look away either. There’s something a little off about his gaze, about him in general. He’s not at all like his brother. There’s no softness, no gentleness to be found anywhere on his sculpted features. But there’s a meanness there, a raw and menacing sort of malice that’s reflected in his near arctic stare. It takes an effort to break from his ensnarement. When I do, it’s to look at everything else except his face.

“Jesus, Max, you almost hit her.” Noah speaks, his tone almost reprimanding as he draws nearer to me. While the other two hang back, he comes to stand directly over me, and I have to crane my head up to look at him. “Are you okay, Aylee?” I’m instantly uneasy. I know he’s not a threat, but I can’t help feeling overwhelmed by his immense height, especially when he’s standing over me like this. Giving him a brief nod, I close my sketchpad and stuff it back inside my canvas bag along with my pencil case. I find my way back to my feet and although I’m 5’5 I’m still relatively short compared to him, but at least now I’m not at a horrible disadvantage.

I nod. “Yeah, I’m okay.”

He smiles and I’m struck by its brilliance. “Sorry about that, my brother likes to make a nuisance of himself.”

“It’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”

“Hey, I saw the piece you did for Media Day last week. I thought it was brilliant.” There’s no hint of artifice in his voice. Everything about Noah seems genuine, including the kindness I see reflected in his royal blue eyes. Blood gathers hotly. Scalding hot. Beneath my cheeks, it burns with the way he’s looking at me. It’s a far cry from the hard, emotionless tundra belonging to his brother. I don’t know why I do it, but I tilt my head a little to the left of Noah’s body to find Maddox. He’s partially sitting on a tombstone, the case of beer set on the ground between his long, parted legs. He’s working on another beer while listening to Bria talk. People talk about him. They talk about Noah, too. But Maddox is infamous. There isn’t a lot that’s known about them, but his extensive criminal record is public knowledge. It’s not hard to believe when just last month I saw him threaten someone with a knife behind the track field. I ran off before he could see me.

“I’ve been meaning to tell you how much I admire your work.”

I return my gaze to Noah. “Thank you,” I answer, and duck my head. “Your work is beautiful, too.” It sounds insincere. But I mean every word. He did an acrylic painting titled, “Black Static,” for last year’s young artist show that blew me away. That painting is what sparked my inspiration for my macabre side of art.

He chuckles. “Thanks.”

I look down at my feet, and dig the toe of my left sandal into the dirt. My social graces are severely lacking. I don’t have many friends, in fact, I only have one friend. And it’s taken Mallory nearly three years to begin to understand just how awkward I am. It’s not intentional. I’m not very good at entertaining people. Even holding a simple conversation takes effort. This is torture. It’s even worse for Noah, I’m assuming, since he has to deal with my weirdness.

“…you doing something?”

“…I should go…”

He grins crookedly down at me. “You should join us, but if you have to go…”

He trails off, leaving it open for me to either jump on the invitation or turn it down. I open my mouth to speak but Bria’s bark of laughter draws my gaze back to Noah’s left, and my eyes like magnets clamp onto Maddox’s face. I don’t expect to meet his gaze dead-on. Coldness greets me, so chilling I feel it in my bones. I shudder.

“Cold?”

It’s safer to just look at Noah.

“No.” Adjusting the shoulder straps of my bag, I’m unaware of how tightly I’m holding onto it until the woven straps bite into my palm. “Not really.” I slacken my hold a little only to feel the explosion of needle-like pain in my hand. A small part of me likes the sensation.

“Thanks for the invite, but I have to get back to church.” It’s a lie. But it’s better than the alternative. Even if I did do something completely out of character as to accept Noah’s invitation. I know I’ll be unwelcomed. The look on his brother’s face is a clear indication I’m not wanted.

“Okay, well, I guess I’ll see you at school?”

“Yeah.”  

I turn away from them. “Bye, Aylee.”

Looking over my shoulder, I give Noah what I hope is a nice smile. “Bye.”

Chapter 4

Maddox

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you had a hard-on for her.” With my gaze trained on her retreating back, I tip back the bottle of Heineken and guzzle down the little bit that remains. Doing what I’ve been doing since we entered the cemetery, I swing my arm back and hurl the bottle. It flies through the air and explodes against the tree in front of her. When she stops, I wait for her reaction, wait to see if she’ll turn around and reveal that startled, wide-eyed rabbit look I saw on her face earlier. I’m thinking she’ll say something, maybe even flip me off, but when she peers over her shoulder, it’s to look at me with those eyes. Eyes that are like the stained-glass windows at St. Peters on Main Street. My mom used to go to that church a lot, to pray to a God who didn’t give a shit about her. I broke in a few months after she died, trashed the altar, spray painted the cross, and shattered the windows with rocks. All simply because I could.

Eyes locked, she shows me nothing but her well-maintained mask of composure. It’s a pretty mask, made of golden skin touched with a hint of flushed pink undertones. She’s like a living doll with that heart-shaped face and sunlight-blond hair. It’s almost wrong of me to imagine her Cupid’s bow lips wrapped around a cock.
My cock
, to be precise. I can see her on her knees, between my legs, her cheeks hollowing as she struggles to take every inch of my nine inches between those lips. I’d guide her, too, help her out a little because I’m Mr. Fucking Generous. Bria would be there, too, showing her exactly how to take me in.

“Not everything is about sex, Max,” my shadowed self replies, with his typical chastising tone effectively breaking my nice little fantasy. My eyes flick back to where she’s standing just in time to see her turn and walk away like nothing happened. 

“But then again, what can I expect from someone who makes a living out of it?”

A switch flips inside of me and suddenly my impartial indifference switches to annoyance. I know where this conversation is going. That little dig is the beginning of Noah’s shit stirring, and honestly, I’m not nearly drunk enough for the lecture. One of the major differences—and there are many—between me and Noah is he has morals. I don’t. It pisses me off that he wants to impose his self-righteous bullshit on me, though.

I scoff, “Not a whole fucking lot, little brother.” Pulling my vibrating cell phone from my back pocket, I glance at the screen. I send a quick reply before putting it away. “Look, we about done here? We did the whole monthly grave visit shit you wanted. I’m ready to head out.”

“I thought we were chilling later?” Bria—not exactly a friend, but someone who did occasionally provide a great distraction—looks at me expectantly.

“Not really my problem, Bree.” Heading to the grave I was sitting on earlier, I set the empty case of beer next to the gravestone marked, “Laura May Moore, Beloved Mother.” Then finally answer, “Got shit to do.”

“Then why the fuck did you call me?”

I shrug. “Don’t need you anymore. But you can tell Noah all about
Two-4-One
. Tell him how great you look in front of the camera, and don’t forget to mention how much you made last month. I think he’ll appreciate hearing how lucrative fucking for a living can be.”

“Max…”

Walking away, I raise my hand in the air. “It’s been great, Noah. We’ll do this again next month. Mom will be so proud.”

***

When you’re born into the sort of family I was, you’re pretty much fucked before you even realize the meaning of the word. Every time I think of our past, I relive that shit all over again. Dad was a sick piece-of-shit pedo who taught my brother and me the fine arts of fucking at the ripe ole age of seven. Incest kiddie porn put food on our table and paid for our house. I guess people paid a fuck of a lot for illegal shit. Mom was a manic depressive wife driven batshit crazy by her abusive husband. She put thirteen bullets into his head before blowing off her own in front of me and my brother. That’s what’s in our portfolio. The thick folder labeled: Noah and Maddox Moore. People in the foster system learn your story pretty fucking quick when you come with heavy shit like that. Potential foster parents, the good ones anyway, hoping for a good little, parentless kid they can foster and raise to be an upstanding member of society, were always warned about our history. Mine specifically because I’m the troubled twin. They were told about the fights I got into at school. They were told about my supposed disregard for authority. They were told about the frequent run-ins with the law. They were told about my tendency to run away and the time I spent in juvie for repeatedly bashing a kid’s head against the wall at school for calling my brother a fudge packer. They were even warned of my alcohol and drug use and my violent fits of rage. The good ones wisely opted to keep looking, steering clear of me. But not Noah. People generally prefer Noah because Noah is the better twin. He came out of the shit show that was our family relatively unscathed. Noah toes the line while I bulldoze it. He’s the one they chose. The Ridleys. Jan and Alan. They’re an interracial couple who seemed like decent enough people, not the quintessence of suburban living, but they were the closest thing to normal Noah had ever had. Jan’s a lawyer, and Alan is a chef. The best part about them is that they’d genuinely wanted Noah from the beginning. Me? Not so much. They only took me in because Noah begged them.

I didn’t last a month with the Ridleys before they kicked me out. They caught me fucking their oldest daughter on their bed. Apparently that was a big no-no. That one really pissed Noah off. He accused me of fucking up shit on purpose because I didn’t want anything good to happen to me. That wasn’t it. I genuinely didn’t give a fuck about anything. Except for him. I still don’t. Mom had asked me to look out for him before she put a hole into her head. That’s exactly what I did. Noah was happy. He was loved for the most part, and cared for by these people. He had all the elements to thrive. To become something other than a fucking drain on society. He had so much potential. He had what I didn’t want. A future. And I was the only thing holding him back. I was a reminder of the cesspool we came from. A reminder of the fucked-up things Dad made us do. I was something he didn’t need. So I eliminated myself from his life as much as I could. We saw each other in school—when I bothered to go, and did the monthly cemetery visits to Mom’s grave. But for the most part, I made sure to stay away from him.

Six months after Noah was fostered just before our sixteenth birthday, I ended up as some afterthought in a piece-of-shit housing project on the other side of the city. My foster dad was a blue-collar sort of guy, a welder by the name of Droski who liked his booze like he liked his women. Cheap and wet. He dealt drugs on the side. Heroin, pills, and weed.

“The government check I get from feeding your ass ain’t enough, kid. You wanna stay here, you’re gonna earn your keep.” Dealing came surprisingly easy for me. But then again, it wasn’t like it was that difficult selling drugs to high schoolers looking for a good time. I moved the pills and weed pretty damn quick. It was a good flow of cash. Dro took his cut, which was a huge-ass percentage, but he wasn’t a complete dick. He let me keep some of the money I made.

I’ve learned a lot from him.

“You don’t shit where you eat.” I learned that lesson the hard way. Two broken ribs, a busted lip, and a broken nose. “You gonna work for me, kid, you better remember not to fuck with my shit.” My mistake had been thinking I could take a few of his drugs for my own personal use. Apparently Dro had full count of his product. “Here.” On the floor, feeling like I’d gotten hit by a Mack truck and with the taste of my own blood coating the inside of my mouth, I looked past his extended hand at his hard, bearded face, his beady eyes like marbles staring back at me. There was a lot that was said in those few, prolonged seconds of tense silence that words couldn’t have properly expressed. But when I finally took his calloused hand and he hauled me to my feet, I could tell something had changed. Mutual respect and understanding. He didn’t take me to the hospital. He did the next best thing. Lit up a joint and gave it to me. Best fucking medicine of my life.

The second thing I learned from Dro was how to cut up the merchandise to double up on profit. We did this for obvious reasons; more money in our pockets. There was also the fact we had a dirty cop we needed to pay off each month in order to keep dealing. Dro always did the payoffs and occasionally he’d let me tag along. It was roughly a year into showing me the ropes that he let me make my first drop-off. Saturday night, quarter past nine, I headed to the meet-up spot. Driving the white, beat-up truck I picked up a few months back at a salvage yard and was slowly restoring, I had nearly three grand on me and a few bags of pills stashed under the passenger seat. So of course the fucking cops chose that exact moment to pull me over. Seeing the flashing red and blue lights in my rearview, I was tempted to stomp on the gas and hightail it the fuck out of there. The only thing that stopped me from doing exactly that was the pickup truck wouldn’t go that fast if my life depended on it. Pulling up to the left shoulder of the road, I knew I was fucked six ways to Sunday. Not only did the inside of the truck smell like the bud I smoked earlier in the night, but I had a warrant out for my arrest. I’d skipped out on my court date two months earlier for beating up that kid who’d talked shit about Noah. They found the money and the drugs, slapped a pair of shiny cuffs on me, and hauled my ass to jail. I was looking at hard time. Nearly eighteen, they could technically charge me as an adult. I wasn’t stupid enough to call Droski. I had only one other option, and it took me practically the entire night before I finally folded and called Jan.

***

“This is it, Maddox. After today you don’t get any more chances.” She turned and said as we came out of the court house. The expression on her face was supposed to be serious. But she couldn’t really pull it off when she looked like a twelve-year-old year rather than the thirty-three-year-old she was supposed to be. “I had to call in a lot of favors to get Judge Sims to go easy on you."

I scoffed, raking a hand through my hair in agitation. “You call a thousand hours of community service and anger management classes getting off easy?”

“Yes,” she hissed through clenched teeth that looked flawlessly white against her chocolate complexion. “If it’d been another judge, he would’ve thrown the book at you.”

“Well good thing we had your buddy here to save my ass from the pen. I’m curious as to the sort of favors you had to call in though. Maybe you’re letting good ole Judge Sims get in a few good billable hours?”

“You’re such a fucking little ingrate. Alan and I have tried to do the best we can for you, but I guess there’s no helping someone who doesn’t want it. I don’t know how you and Noah can be related, let alone be twins. You’re lucky he cares about you so much, otherwise...”

“Save it. I don’t need the goddamn lecture. But thanks for bailing my ass out, you’ve been a real doll.”

“You better show up for that outpatient group therapy, Maddox. You miss one and you end up in prison. And I won’t be there to represent you.”

She was saying all this to my back as I walked away. “Say hello to Carle for me.”

“Stay the hell away from my daughter!” The smirk on my face grew a little wider as I heard her curse the hell out of me.