I’m hesitant in replying, “I think he might be okay...”
“Great, just let them know where I am.” She bounds away before I can stop her.
The moment I take a seat, Rachel and Tim come in from the opposite direction, gradually making their way down until they reach me. I’m spared from sitting next to Tim as Rachel takes the closest seat next to me. A cursory glance around prompts her to ask where Sarah disappeared to.
“She’s sitting with her friends,” I whisper, tilting my head a bit toward her to point at the trio of girls seated at the front right side of the service room. She gives a brief nod before turning to Tim to relay the information. There’s no more exchange between us after that as the band walks up the stage to start the customary fifteen minutes of worship. Soon after, the pastor glides onto the stage and I tune him out. The hour of service crawls by but soon we’re filing out of the service room and split up for hour two and three of Sunday classes. Everyone has a place to be, even the toddlers, who are shephered downstairs to the nursery. The rest of us are broken up by age and gender. The men remain in the service room for elder meetings, while the younger population, ages thirteen to seventeen, are led to one of the classrooms on the first floor for deacon preaching. With the women of the church outnumbering the men two to one, we’re given the entire second floor for classrooms for our meetings. The women’s devotional is Rachel’s group, the eighteen and older crowd, and while I’ll be there in a few months, I’m grateful I don’t have to join her today. My class is the young women’s devotional, and I head upstairs with the herd, though I purposely linger behind. Watching Rachel turn the corner and head inside the first room to the right of the staircase, I proceed down the carpeted hallway, but rather than follow the rest of the girls my age into the last room to the left, I continue forward, tension making my muscles tight as I silently hope that no one stops me.
“Aylee, sweetheart, where are you going?”
My abrupt stop causes my heart to lurch against my chest, crashing against my breastbone. Closing my eyes, I silently curse. I clutch the beige double handles of my bag as though they’ll keep me in place when all I want to do is ignore the inquiry and keep going. But propriety forces me to turn around. Janet Leeson is the church gossip, she talks about everyone, minds everyone’s business but her own. And the irony is her own home life is in complete shambles. Her husband is a known adulterer in the community, her son’s a crossdresser who left home when he was fifteen because her intolerant bigotry chased him away, and I once overheard Rachel tell Tim people suspected her of dipping a hand or two in the tithe and offerings. Everyone in the church community is good at pretending here, so they smile and laugh with her when in actuality, they hate her guts. With all that going on you would think she’d have the sense to feel a little bit of shame and not pry into people’s lives. But that doesn’t seem at all likely.
“Just need to go to the bathroom, Sister Leeson.”
She smiles with a nod, “Oh, all right, sweetheart. I’d hurry if I were you, I wouldn’t want to miss devotional.”
“No, of course not. I’m just going to head in and come back.” That’s a lie. I have no plans of returning until church is good and over. I’m sure she’ll mention this interaction to Rachel, but I count on the fact that Rachel can’t stand her so she won’t take anything Janet says seriously. She rarely ever does. “I’ll see you later, Sister Leeson.”
“Bye, sweetheart.”
I’m down the third step before she calls her goodbye out to me. I make it out of the back exit without any more interruption and step out into the sunlight. The midmorning sun beams down on me. Fall is in the cool breeze that sweeps against my skin, rustling leaves around me, and tousling the short tendrils of hair that manage to escape my two braids. I brush them behind my ears as I follow the beaten path into the forest behind the church. With the tree crowns forming a barrier above to protect the habitat below, only rays of filtered sunshine trickle through the canopy of green leaves, giving the forest a shadowed, magical appearance that would’ve made an awesome shower. The water is a great subject to sketch. But it’s the cemetery just beyond the forest that I’m interested in. I discovered it a few months ago, over summer vacation when I first started skipping devotional to explore the forest. I loved it the minute I saw it because it wasn’t like anything I typically drew. There was nothing conventional, or beautiful, or even picturesque about the old cemetery that had been abandoned many years ago by the church because I assumed there were no more graves. It was in badly need of upkeep now, but doing that would strip it of its allure. It’s unrepentantly ugly, with years of decay painted across sunken, cracked, or listing tombstones overtaken by mold and moss. It’s silly of me to think of a place as being lonely, but this cemetery has that feel to it. The crows, its only occupants, have made it their home. Some of them are perched on the tombstones, while others gather like a bad omen to peck and scavenge at the ground for food. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by it, but the dark, haunted setting always makes my fingers itch for charcoal and my sketchpad.
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.