Black Mist: Seedling

4. Suffocating Silence

Alastair was up early again, sitting in his dorm's first-floor lounge. Having stayed with Rose and Cowdrey until after 10, he had yet to get any homework done. Students at Whitman Academy for the Gifted, or WAG, as they affectionately called it, were expected to complete three to four hours of homework daily. The schedule was such that most students had time to work from four until dinner, which was flexible. Students could eat anytime between five and seven, and student officers and seniors were allowed off campus during that time. Then from dinner until lights out at 11, everyone was expected to complete the rest of their homework. There was little time for recreation during the week, and even less tolerance for missed assignments.

Alastair had cradled Rose on the piano bench until nearly six, when Mrs. Cowdrey placed her palm on Rose's neck, seeming to break the adhesion. When Alastair had looked up, there was a feast of food enough for a dozen people set out on one of the drawing tables. He and Rose moved to the table and ate the deli take-out silently. Rose did not look up from her plate, he noticed. The whole meal. Even while Mrs. Cowdrey talked about living in France, her husband, and their three dachshunds.

Rose had fallen face-first into her cheese sandwich sometime after eight, fatigue winning out over hunger. Cowdrey continued right on talking for awhile, then had Alastair carry Rose down the hall into her apartment's guest bedroom. She had kept him there in the sitting room talking for almost two more hours. He had worried that she would ask about why Rose was crying or why he had held her. Instead, she had simply babbled incessantly in her squirrelly way. Occasionally, she would mention something of interest, like how she and Rose's great-aunt had gone to school together and how the same relative had just died. He wondered idly if her injuries and the great-aunt's passing were related. It had been closing in on 11 when he finally crawled into bed, more emotionally exhausted than physically. Sleep came quickly but not easily, and it left him feeling unrested in the morning.

And now, this morning, Alastair found it difficult to concentrate on his homework. He was haunted by Rose's song. It had obviously come from loss, from agony, from trauma. He understood it because even though he had only witnessed his mother's beatings, he knew the pain, the terror that Rose must have been feeling. From the earliest age he could remember, which he guessed was about three, he had observed his father's drunken tirades turn into physical attacks. His father had never hit him, but he always wondered when he would. Many times he had said to himself, "I'm next."

And thinking about it now was only making it harder for Alastair to focus on his work. He was in trouble. His grades were going to be screwed from day one, hardly a perfect start.

Frustrated with the way his year had begun, Alastair decided to go to the twelfth-floor student lounge. The large space on the top floor of the administration wing was used by many students as a quiet room for meditation and studying. It had a wall of windows that looked out onto mid-town Manhattan. When Alastair walked in, it was deserted, as expected at this hour, and he could see the lights of the city fading into the dawn. Fog encircled the amber-lit top of the Empire State Building so that it looked like the sun was rising right in the middle of 34th street, just a few blocks down from the school.

"Hey, Alastair," Maggie said from behind him.

"Hi, Maggs," he yawned, meeting her eyes, reflected by the window.

She walked over and pressed her forehead against the glass, gazing down at the gray street. They stood in quiet watching the sun burn off the fog and glint off the now-dark Empire State, creating an orange-red gleam. New York at dawn is a sight everyone should see at least once, Alastair thought. Maggie and Alastair had watched scenes like this a hundred times over the years.

"Did you do Bennett's homework?"

"I haven't done any homework at all."

She reached her tiny hand up and placed it on his forehead. "Are you sick?"