Mason Read online

  In the seat ahead of his, Hunter Wallace was making faces at Julia Landry. The boy with the funny lines painted on his arms flicked his tongue in the air, and his bearded face scrunched in an ugly way. Julia dropped her head and stared at the paper in front of her. In her chair by the window, Lara Pearce stared at Hunter and Julia. To Mason she looked sleepy as she chewed on the end of her pencil. When Lara caught him looking, her eyes got really wide for a second and she looked away.

  “Now, I know these exercises may seem rudimentary to some of you,” Mrs. Denver said. “But by utilizing simple geometric shapes, you’ll learn perspective, depth of field, and negative space, while building a strong foundation for your future artistic endeavors.”

  On the green chalkboard, Mrs. Denver drew a square and then another, smaller square, and in no time, Mason found himself looking at a nice little house with a chimney and smoke rolling like fluffy clouds up the surface of the blackboard. The house looked a little like his aunt Molly’s house, but the picture on the board didn’t have a porch.

  “Hunter,” Mrs. Denver warned, catching the boy in mid tongue flick. “Why don’t you come up and show the class your talent instead of showing them your foolishness?”

  Hunter threw back his head in defiance. Next to him, Julia turned bright red and covered her mouth to keep the giggles inside. The rest of the class laughed. Mason didn’t know why everybody was laughing, but he liked to laugh, so he did. Hunter spun around and fixed a mean look on Mason, who dropped his eyes back to the notepad and the happy cartoon mouse he’d drawn there.

  “You don’t laugh at me,” Hunter whispered. “You don’t never laugh at me.”

  “Hunter,” Mrs. Denver said.

  “Mason said he wants to go first.”

  Hearing his name, Mason looked up in confusion. Did he do something wrong? Was he supposed to do something? He searched the faces of his classmates and the face of his teacher for answers.

  “I think Mason is able to speak for himself,” Mrs. Denver said, giving him a warm glance. “Would you like to draw for us, Mason?”

  Now the whole class was looking at him, and some were still laughing. A hot flush rose on his cheeks. Mrs. Denver lifted a piece of chalk from the tray and pointed it in his direction.

  “S’pose,” Mason said, already prying himself out between the chair and the desk.

  Julia Landry stared at him like he had a bug on his face, and Hunter Wallace smirked. Embarrassed, Mason walked to the front of the class with his head bowed. He took the dusty stick of chalk from Mrs. Denver and asked, “What am I s’posed to do?”

  The class broke up with fresh laughter, their shrill voices slicing the air like a dozen shards of glass to slash Mason’s stomach. Now he didn’t feel embarrassed so much as afraid.

  “Just draw a house,” Mrs. Denver said in a quiet, comforting voice. “You don’t even have to draw the same house I did. You can draw your own house if you like.”

  But when Mason turned away from his teacher, chalk in hand, and faced the freshly erased chalkboard, a different picture came into his mind. He saw a big house with a lot of curlicues and a pointed tower and really neat pillars in the front. Mason touched the board with his chalk, and the lines and shadows of the big Victorian home in his mind slipped onto the dark green surface before him. He began to trace them.

  Lost in the lines, Mason forgot Mrs. Denver and the class full of students sitting behind him. He felt as if he’d been pulled out of the classroom and dropped into the front yard of this pretty house with the curlicues and the front door open in welcome.

  When he finished the picture, he did not look at it. He looked back at the other kids in the class, and he looked at Mrs. Denver to see how he’d done, because it was important to do well on assignments since he didn’t do so good on tests. His classmates and his teacher wore matching expressions of disbelief, and Mason felt certain he’d done something wrong.

  His cheeks burned—physically burned—as he put the chalk back in the tray. His head lower than it had been when he walked to the front of the class, he started to walk back to his chair.

  “Mason,” Mrs. Denver said. She grasped his shoulder and made him look at her. When he did, he was surprised to see her smiling. “Where did you learn to draw like that?”

  He chewed on his lower lip, not quite understanding what Mrs. Denver meant. She turned him slowly toward the blackboard, but even as he saw the drawing, he didn’t see it as something he created. The picture was in his head and then on the board, and he just traced it.

  “It’s exquisite,” Mrs. Denver said. From the back of the class, Hunter Wallace made a farting noise, and she shot him a warning with her eyes. “But where did you learn this?”

  “It’s just a picture,” Mason told her.

  “Will you stay after class?” Mrs. Denver asked.

  “Am I in trouble?”

  “No, Mason, you’re not in trouble. You may take your seat now.”

  Once the other students had filed out and Mason Avrett was left alone in her classroom, Charlotte Denver closed the door. She could tell Mason was uncomfortable and she knew her best approach was to be direct, so that he didn’t unduly worry himself.

  “I’d like you to draw some things for me.” She put a sketch pad and a sharpened pencil on Mason’s desk. Taking the seat next to his, she thought for a moment and asked him to draw a dog, a man, and a boat.

  “All at once?”

  “You can draw them on separate pages if you like.”

  Mason lowered his head and stared at the sheet of blank paper before him as if expecting to see something push its way through the page. Then his eyes went blank, and his hand started to move quickly.

  He doesn’t even know I’m here, Charlotte Denver thought, watching Mason frantically scribble over the page. He gets lost in it; the picture consumes him.

  When Mason finished, Charlotte took the drawing from him and was again amazed. The dog he drew was a sleek golden retriever suspended in midair as if to catch a ball. Never in all of her years of teaching had she seen such precision. The depth of form was perfect, as was the rendering of the animal’s fur. Looking at the image, she felt her stomach roll because it looked like the dog might actually jump off the page to land in her lap.

  “That’s Lightning,” Mason said. “He was my best friend until he ran away.”

  “I’m sorry he ran away, Mason,” she told him, still transfixed by how he had brought the lines and smudges of pencil lead to life. “Can you draw a man for me?”

  “What man?”

  “Any man you think of.”

  This request seemed to confound Mason, but Charlotte wasn’t surprised. He was just overwhelmed. She would have asked Mason to draw his daddy, but he didn’t have one. The boy lived with his single aunt and an older brother. His daddy was gone, mama too.

  Charlotte Denver remembered Mason’s father, Nelson. His absence was probably the best thing that could have happened to the boy. The man was unstable. Oh, he’d been a looker when he was young, but even then, folks knew something wasn’t quite right with the man. For years, Nelson Avrett had been seen talking to himself or laughing uncontrollably or gaping in awe at people for no apparent reason. He was crazy as a rat in a bell jar—that was certain. Still, everyone in town was shocked to hear he’d killed his wife.

  Thinking about Nelson Avrett, Charlotte was reminded of her own father, his anger and his fists. The memories made her shiver.

  Better to just look at the wonderful drawing of the dog, or back at the blackboard to see how beautifully Mason had sketched the house. From this distance, she noticed that the Victorian architecture, even the gingerbread patterns that Mason had created, were exactly like those of her own house.

  Isn’t that something? she thought. Maybe he knew where she lived and drew the place from memory to please her.

  “I don’t know him,” Mason said, tearing the sheet from the sketchbook. “He looks scary and mean. I didn’t want him to be mean, b
ut he is.”

  Charlotte attempted to laugh off Mason’s anxiety, but the smile died on her face and a terrible weight settled in her chest when she saw the picture. She followed the cruel brow and the piercing eyes, flinched at the sight of the balled fists, and choked back a sob as she remembered vile words spewing from a hateful man’s screaming mouth.

  Her father stared back at her from the page.

  4

  Outside the Lines

  A lot of Rene’s friends complained about Marchand being too small, but she liked it well enough. She imagined she would go off to college and maybe find a job in another city far away. Once she graduated high school, she might never live in this town again, and that was okay, even a little exciting, but she certainly didn’t think Marchand was the cesspool of boredom many of her classmates called it.

  She walked along Main Street. The evening air felt good on her face.

  Her parents were way quiet over dinner, which meant they were about to have a fight. It happened about once a month, and when Rene saw the signs, she got out of the house. She didn’t worry about it, because her parents’ arguments never lasted long. Tomorrow everything would be fine and normal again.

  For now, she walked down Main Street, peeking into the shop fronts. Some were already decorated for Halloween, which was still more than a month away. On either side of brightly colored cardboard witch and jack-o’-lantern faces, she noticed the familiar merchandise on the shops’ shelves. Toasters and shovels gleamed in the window of Marchand Hardware; laptop computers sat on pedestals in the window of the Tech Smart; a dark painting of a creepy hillside hung on a partial wall at the front of Gallery North.

  Rene took comfort in the familiar. Even her parents’ arguments were something of a comfort because they were so predictable and short-lived.

  Two boys with long hair passed her on the sidewalk. They weren’t old enough to go to Marchand High, but they dressed like a lot of the kids there, and both eyed her sheepishly before hurrying past. They would be cute in a few years, she thought, but for now they still had the eager faces of children.

  Seeing them reminded her of another boy though. A boy she had thought cute: Carter Dane. Carter was a tall, dark-haired boy with beautiful skin. He used to go to school with her. He was a straight-A student who always seemed distracted, his eyes often looking sad. Rene had crushed on him for two years, even when she was dating other boys. He just looked so thoughtful and intense.

  Earlier in the year, during spring break, Carter had died in a boating accident. The news had shocked Rene to the point she didn’t believe it when her mother told her. Rene went to the funeral. She cried and prayed and felt empty for two months—all for a boy she’d only said hi to in the halls.

  Since then, Rene had found herself weighing other boys against her memory of Carter. None of them could compete, of course. This one was too short. This one was goofy. This one belched in the caf’. To Rene, they were just boys. She’d found her prince, and he had died tragically. Who could follow that?

  “Hello, Rene.”

  The voice startled Rene badly, and she jumped a little. She hadn’t realized someone was walking so close.

  Placing a hand over her chest to quell the rapid tip-tap of her heart, Rene turned. There stood Mason’s older brother, Gene. The sight of him amplified her quickened pulse, making it sound like thunder in her ears.

  “Oh hi, Gene,” she said with a trembling voice.

  “Did I scare you?”

  Yes, Rene thought, you always scare me.

  Gene Avrett was a few inches taller than Rene. He kept his hair short and neatly styled. He wore a gray silk T-shirt over fashionably distressed black jeans. Gene always smiled, but unlike his brother’s sweet and childlike grin, Gene’s humor came from a much darker place, never touching his eyes, which were as clear and blue and toxic as window cleaner.

  “I’m so very sorry,” Gene said in a voice slow and measured. The words seemed to slither from his lips.

  That was another creepy thing about Gene—the way he spoke. He was only three years older than Rene, but he tried to act so grown up and sophisticated. It was like he was trying to be superior to everyone.

  “It’s okay,” she said.

  “Were you headed to Frank’s?” Gene asked.

  “Yes,” Rene lied. She wished she hadn’t answered so quickly, because it showed how scared she was, but it was too late to take it back. “Yes, I’m meeting friends.”

  Though people passed them on the sidewalk and she stood right out in the open, Rene felt alone with Gene, like he’d locked them in a room far from help and hope and saving. Her skin pimpled with unease, and she turned away from him to look down the sidewalk.

  “Then we’ll walk together,” Gene told her. “That’s the very place I was headed myself.”

  “Um…oh…okay.”

  Frank’s was only a block down, but it looked miles away with Gene at her side. Rene kept her eyes on the sidewalk, occasionally casting glances at the pedestrians who passed, wanting them to see her.

  “Have you seen little Mason lately?” Gene asked.

  “No,” Rene said. “Well, at school. I see him at school sometimes.”

  “Isn’t it wonderful how they allow him to pretend to be normal?”

  Rene clenched her jaw and nodded her head.

  “It’s really quite progressive of them. I mean, not long ago, they would have locked someone like him up in an asylum or used him as the village idiot. I can’t help but think you did the right thing…freezing him out the way you did.”

  “I didn’t freeze him out,” Rene said uncertainly, a twinge of guilt sliding into the knot of fear tightening in her stomach.

  “Of course you didn’t,” Gene said. “My mistake. Whatever happened, it was for the best.”

  Rene heard something unsavory in Gene’s tone. She had no interest in what he had to say, but he kept talking anyway.

  “Someone like Mason isn’t really in control of himself. It isn’t his fault, but that doesn’t make it right, you know? I mean, when he used to draw pictures of you, they were very nice. You were both just children, and certain thoughts never entered his mind. But children grow. Their bodies change, even if their minds are slow and can’t keep up. Hormones and all.”

  Rene saw where Gene was going with his comments and wanted to scream at him to stop. She remembered the pictures Mason used to draw of her. They were nice. She hadn’t really appreciated them then.

  Weird, though. Last night on the phone, Lara had mentioned something that had happened in her art class, but Rene hadn’t really been paying attention. Something about Mason. Something about a house. It didn’t matter. Gene was just being cruel the way Gene was always cruel.

  “Mason’s a great guy” was all she managed to say.

  “I’m glad you think so, and I’m certainly glad you don’t have to see the pictures he draws of you now. A young lady should never have to view such filth.”

  Disgusted, she looked at Gene, who smiled innocently as if he waited for the answer to a simple question. Her anger went a long ways to loosening the knot of fear.

  “Good night, Gene,” Rene said.

  “Aren’t you coming in?” He reached out and grabbed the chrome handle of the door. “Won’t your friends be waiting?”

  “They’ll understand,” Rene told him, turning away.

  Through the window of Frank’s she saw Lara, standing at the end of the counter with several boys. She held a glass in her hand, a straw clamped between her lips. Lara blinked and looked away from the tallest of the boys, and then looked back at him through her eyelashes.

  She was flirting, and that wouldn’t have been bad, except that Lara was flirting with Hunter Wallace. For a moment, Rene thought about charging into Frank’s and saving her friend from making a huge mistake, but she felt Gene staring at her, knew he was still holding the door open behind her.

  Rene shuddered, cast another look at her stupid friend—Lara, what are
you doing?—and then walked quickly down the sidewalk.

  Gene appreciated the fact that he was feared; it proved the lame-ass hicks in this town were smarter than he had thought. They should be afraid of him, and not just because he knew how to throw down a hurt. In fact, that was the least of it. Considering the things he’d pulled off over the years without having spent so much as a blink of time in juvie or jail, he figured his mind was far more dangerous to the fine folks of Marchand than his fists, his knife, or his Beretta 9 mm.

  Not that he was above violence. Only a handful of years ago, he was sitting in a coffeehouse out by the college and calmly listening while a couple of frat boys gave him a hard time. Gene’s eyes twinkled as he laughed. He even bought his hecklers a round of cappuccinos and wished them a good night before excusing himself from the establishment.

  Despite the smile on his face and the twinkle in his eyes, the comedic comments and the amity of friendly raps on the back, Gene’s temper shrank and grew tight, coiled like a snake. Even as he freed a twenty from his wallet to buy the college boys their coffee, his thoughts were over an hour into the future, out in the hot air of the parking lot.

  He beat two of them unconscious with a tire iron. The third lost an eye. They all lived, but not one of them talked. He’d made it clear enough what would happen if they did.

  That had worked out really well for him.

  He knew it was all about appearances. You showed your happy face to the world and kept the nastiness hidden in shadows where it belonged. And Gene never bragged about his business. No way. You talk and it sinks you.

  Besides, his reputation got around just fine without him saying a word. Seeing the scared face of a kid like Rene Denton was all the proof he needed of that. Hell, he stood at the front of Frank’s now and saw a room full of the same fearful expressions. It gave him a good charge.