A few students were splashing a girl in a puddle nearby.

Someone was FaceTiming with their grandma while being made fun of by their friends at the picnic table next to us.

I swatted at a fly that flew too close to my head.

The faint scent of weed hit my nostrils and then everything besides Grey disappeared.

He was at my side, strong and protective, his inviting cologne dripping with hints of woodsy balsam a heady mixture nearly crumbling me on the spot.

Grey herded us over to the outdoor picnic tables, one arm coming around my waist and guiding me there. Shit. That wasn't supposed to feel warm and comforting, was it?

No. Not after that confrontation that almost left me as mute as Grey. I wasn't supposed to feel safe and warm right after that, but somehow...he made me feel it, like he pushed back every wall and boundary I'd placed to keep that very thing from happening.

The faint echo of my words 'we need to talk' hung on the dew drops still steaming in the foggy air around us.

"No shit. You haven't texted me all week, you've barely been at school. I was starting to think you were friend-ghosting me."

It was a testament to Mori's personality that she didn't even question Grey's appearance once.

"I'm sorry. I had some...personal things going on."

Mo cocked one black eyebrow as her brown skin shimmered dark gold in the rising morning sun.

I'm waiting, her posture screamed.

"I...I don't really know how to say any of this," I started, slinking down onto the bench seat of the picnic table we'd decided on, the old wood of the table biting into my palms as a stray splinter caught in the tights I was forced to wear per the dress code at Hartingrove.

If I never had to wear another plaid skirt again, it would be too soon.

"When did you start hanging out with Carter and his friends?" I started, not knowing how exactly to steer this conversation but assumed that asking this was the doorway to unraveling what was going on.

"Uh...the day after Colton asked you out on the bus in front of everyone. Maybe I should be asking you when you started hanging out with them?"

It all fell down on me like a lead weight pressing down on my chest, but I didn't show it. I didn't breathe in and suck down the flames wanting to light me up from the outside in.

"Carter came up to me and invited me along to whatever they were doing that Saturday, and I said yes because he said you and Colton would be there, too. So I was pretty surprised when you fell off the face of the earth afterwards. I still went and hung out with them though in their basement. It was pretty fun."

Pretty fun.

Maybe Carter wasn't just like Colton, but could I take that chance? Could I let one of the only people I actually cared about in this godforsaken place get caught up in the same mess that I had?

Would I ever be able to forgive myself if I did?

"And look, I'm not judging. Whatever you had going on with him is..." she paused, looking pointedly at Grey before continuing. "Clearly over. I was just trying to keep up with you. But now, I got to really know Carter and he's actually really sweet and nice to me. Can you believe he actually helped me with my chemistry homework? Apparently he's some closeted genius."

"So you've just forgotten about all the 'scholarship pussy' remarks? All the times they made fun of us almost to our faces?"

I could tell the moment she started pulling away from me. I'd gone too far, but I didn't know how to put it all back together again.

"And? I could ask you the same exact thing. According to Colton, you guys have been together for months under the radar, not telling anyone. If anyone should be asking those questions, it should be me. Especially considering the fact that he kept up his actions while you two were supposed to be together. I don't know what I'm supposed to think, Cami. One minute we're as close as two friends could be, and then the next it's like I have no idea who you are. You have a secret boyfriend, you don't live at the address you gave me anymore, you're hanging out with a different guy now, and...I don't know. That's the whole point; I just don't know anymore."

"I'm sorry, Mo. I got placed in a new home, it's temporary, but it's--I'm staying with Grey and Parker, that's why everything has been so crazy lately. I just got moved to their place last week, right after Colton told everyone about us."

"Oh. So that's why emo-dude keeps following you around?"

"Uh, you do know he can hear you right?"

Mori sucked in a gasp and her eyes widened exponentially, gaze darting to where Grey sat beside us idly rolling his lip ring in between his fingers slowly, almost sensually, his focus anywhere but on us--almost like he could still see all the way out to the parking lot and directly into his brother's eyes.

"I am--so sorry, I honestly thought you were deaf and--"

"And that makes it cool to talk shit about me while I'm right beside you anyway, just because you thought I couldn't hear it?"

Grey scoffed and draped an arm across his leg propped up against the picnic table.

He pulled a lighter and cigarette out of his pocket and lit it up.

"Wow. Cliche much?"

"Fuck off. Not like I can smoke weed here."

"Thank god I know the sign for weed."

"What are you guys talking about?"

I glanced to Mori, still looking sheepish and a little bit guilty.

"Sorry, I guess I forgot not everyone knows sign language...basically--he said it's not cool to talk shit about someone right there even if they couldn't hear it."

"Well obviously, I wasn't talking shit, just stating a fact. I mean, he's basically himself goth or emo or whatever you want to call it with his outfits. Don't get me wrong, I'm all here for it--it just doesn't scream 'uniform appropriate' but I guess you can get away with it when you're the dean's son."

Mori's words drifted away as the wind shifted the leaves still clinging onto the scraggly trees in the courtyard, blowing an autumnal breeze by in a whispered song telling the story of a changing season.

That very same breeze tinted with notes of crisp cool air and the decay of summer ruffled the dark-as-night hair atop Grey's head, and I was struck with the irony of his name versus his appearance and personality.

Grey was the antithesis of the lack of color; a vibrant splash of darkness across a rainbow background desperate to taint him with their bright and eye-catching hues.

Grey was gloomy and bathed in shadows, drenched in darkness and drawn to life with a steady hand.

His canvas was a background of whorls of pink and purple sunset shades, but his outline was an ink stain blot against it.

The ground of Grey's portrait was verdant green and lush with wildflowers--like the artist was trying to regain the beauty in the pigment but forgot that the sun can't shine without the night--that you can't feel the heat without its absence.

His face, though expressive and full and entrancing was left blank. Unformed. Unfinished, untouched.

It could've been swathed in tan neutral shades to match his warm olive skin tone. It could've been cut with dark shadows to highlight his sharp jaw line and light stubble crawling across it.

It could've been painted with delicate strokes to capture his black metal piercings and slight peeking of tattoos reaching through the collars of his shirts like arms outstretched around his neck, as if their spindly, ink-wrought hands could erase the damage done to his throat.

It could have depicted the light pink fading scars around his throat that I'd been far too scared to glimpse up close, until now.

Until this moment in the buttery sunshine rays, lost in a stolen figment in the fracture of time, in the space between one breath and the next, when our eyes locked and refused to let go.

When his fingertips brushed against mine and that portrait suddenly came to life in my mind, all those rainbow colors lost their pigment but never lost their vibrancy--like they all turned perfectly translucent and effortlessly grey--the color of peace before a sunrise and the shroud of mist over a calm rippling pond.

Suddenly, the color grey wasn't nothingness—but the absence of pain yet the refusal to accept happiness—some kind of in between limbo where happy and sad didn't have a name, where 'good' and 'bad' were only words in some forgotten dictionary in a language no one knew how to speak anymore.

Grey's throat bobbed up, that scar moving up right along with it, and my mind suddenly conjured another figure in that portrait of Grey's, one that I was too scared to give color to. A figure that my brain could only outline, because her insides were empty and her soul a muddy brown color mixed up with too many others and indistinguishable from the brilliance of the serenity of the painting she was ruining with her presence.

Mori cleared her throat, and the painter in my head erased the second figure from Grey's figurative painting.

It would've destroyed the picture in the end, anyway. Grey was better off a solitary, lone figure. Perfect and peaceful and calm.

"Sorry. What'd you say?"

I didn't break from Grey's eyes until she spoke to me again, and then met her dark eyes and their confusion filled depths head on.

"Bell rang. You ready? We can talk more at lunch, but I'm sitting with Carter. You good with eating with his friends, too?"

And then that panic was back, rising up in my gut with such effective lucidity that for a moment, I was suddenly there in a darkened room with a forceful hand on my naked back, pressing, pressing--pressing down on me and I couldn't breathe.

Why can't I breathe?

"Sorry, gotta run. See you at lunch!"

She hadn't given me time to speak, because I couldn't catch my breath.

Maybe that was a good thing.

Because I didn't breathe in the scent of Colton's cologne as it became lodged up in my nose once more as he strode by with his friends in tow--

and I couldn't tell if it was relief, or...

some kind of twisted morbid disappointment that he didn't look back.

Didn't stop to see what a mess he'd made.

Didn't put the final nail in my coffin, didn't throw the last knockout punch.

I was

right

there.

I'M RIGHT HERE!

Can't you see me?!

Can't you see what you've done?

Don't you KNOW this is wrong?

Do you think you've done NOTHING WRONG?

But then Grey's hand was on my back instead of that searing print tugging me down deep into an abyss darker than the emptiness that I'd imagined encompassed the outline of my soul on that painting I wished I could've been drawn next to Grey in.

It was that shock and that reminder that we were both a little too fucked up for our own good that had me pulling away, turning from him so that he couldn't try to sign to me.

I didn't turn even as he gripped my shoulder.

I didn't even breathe as I ripped up that painting in my head and threw it in the trash where my good memories went, and cursed my brain for not allowing me to do the same with the bad ones.

If everything I know and remember is terrible, then it won't hurt as much if I can't remember a time when things were different.

You can't feel pain without first having felt joy or peace. Right?

So what would happen if I just forgot it all, and sunk myself down into the misery once and for all?

Would I drown? Or would the sting of the dark keep me afloat long enough to get my head above water?

I should've known that I was already breathing water into my lungs.