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Whelk came back from the library pale as a ghost and so, so quiet.
When Noah asked him what was wrong, Whelk didn’t answer. He left their dorm and walked down the stairs and got into his fancy car, and Noah followed. Noah always followed him. He really should have asked more questions, shouldn’t he?
Whelk’s car played some old 80s song while they drove to the ley line. Noah sang along at the top of his lungs—he was so full of life. Whelk smiled softly alongside him. He couldn’t help it.
That was them. Noah the wild thing, fiery and sparking, and Whelk, all too studious and determined.
Noah thought, later, about the hours leading up to his death—not often, but enough—and thought that maybe he should have been suspicious. But in the moment, Noah was a little dumb, a little young, and he had just thought Whelk was in one of his moods, because his best friend was quite the moody type. He ignored all the warning signs because he desperately wanted to.
And of course there was the secret. It was the second kind of secret. The one neither of them talked about, always present in the background, humming, as charged as an electric fence. The second kind of secret, because Noah loved Whelk and Whelk loved Noah back. (Not enough, Noah would soon learn.)
The first time Whelk spoke to Noah since he got home from the library was to say, “I know how to wake the ley line, I think,” just as the car sputtered to a stop. Whelk’s old cars had never sputtered. They had glided. Both of them noticed the difference. One of them would never care, and the other was terribly bitter about the whole thing. Bitter enough to do something terrible and completely unforgivable.
Noah’s eyes brightened. “How?”
Whelk opened the car door and got out. “It requires a sacrifice.” He shut the door to his car a little too loudly.
"What kind of sacrifice?”
"Blood. A few drops from our palms will do.”
Deep down, Noah knew that he was lying. It was the way Whelk licked his lips after he spoke, a tell that Noah had learned through long hours of observation, the way his eyes flicked up and down Noah, unable to linger on any part of him for longer than a second. It was the flimsiness of the lie itself—Cabeswater took and took and took, and surely it would not stop at ‘a few drops’. The forest was hungry. The forest devoured.
They trecked deeper into the forest, stopping once they found a nice opening in the dense trees, facing a clear, mirror-like pond. Noah watched as Whelk opened the large satchel on his back and pulled out some stones, a small pocket knife, and a skateboard.
The skateboard was Noah’s—he had taken a few lessons when he was a kid and stuck with it. Since he was young, he had gone to the skate park almost religiously, every Monday without fail. He loved it.
How ironic, to be murdered by the person he loved most, with something he loved so.
It took only a moment for him to realize why Whelk had it. Yesterday, he had given the skateboard to Whelk for safekeeping, Whelk had stuffed in hastily in his bag, and obviously forgotten to take it out.
Whelk’s hands were shaking as he sliced his left palm with the small knife. He flipped his hand, palm-side down, and let the blood drip into the mirror-lake. It vanished without a trace. Whelk gritted his teeth.
Noah stepped towards the lake, looking closer at the clear surface to see if any disturbance had been caused by Whelks ‘sacrifice’.
Unaware that, behind him, Whelk was plotting.
Maybe plotting wasn’t the right word. Plotting implied that Whelk had some sort of coherent thought process and that he was thinking through logical steps.
What Whelk was doing was staring down at the small pocket knife in his hand, suddenly realizing that its short blade would not be enough to stab far enough through Noah’s skin, to do any real damage.
He was beginning to realize that he really should have done more planning.
As Whelk looked around, his eye caught on Noah’s skateboard.
Noah stood there, admiring the lake, too far into his daydream to hear the rustle of Whelk grabbing the skateboard off the ground and raising it over Noah’s head.
Noah heard the whistle of the skateboard flashing through the air too late. He only had time to gasp a little before his head exploded in pain and he crumpled to the ground. He was floating between consciousness and the unknown for the second and third hit. He was gone by the fourth, and the fifth and sixth hit were completely unnecessary, simply insurance on Whelk’s part.
Whelk cried. Noah wasn’t there to see it, his soul too busy tying itself to Cabeswater.
Whelk cried over Noah’s body until the constellations that they used to study together began to dot the sky, and Whelk realized a most terrible truth.
His sacrifice hadn’t worked.
The life he had pined for was never coming back, and he had just killed the only thing that brought him joy.
He did the only thing he thought one could do in this sort of situation—he dug a hole, hasty and shallow, and heaved Noah’s body into it.
Dead bodies are so heavy. He thought as he pushed dirt onto the grave.
Then he walked out of the forest and drove home, and when the radio played the same song from the 80s, he slammed the off button so hard that the whole car seemed to shudder.
He got back to his apartment and washed the blood and the dirt from under his nails and off his neck.
By the time he got out of the shower, the sun had already risen. He was glad - he wouldn’t need to attempt to sleep, then. He wanted to sleep—he wanted to dream of another time, a time when he hadn’t raised that beaten up skateboard and heard the crack as it broke bone. He knew, however, that sleep would never come, might never come for him. He couldn’t stop replaying the moment of Noah’s death. He heard, over and over and over, that small little gasp he let out as he slumped to the grass, twitching. He saw his chest still and his eyes focus on a point far, far above them.
He hated everything, he was so bitter, he tasted blood, he wanted Cabeswater to reward him for all his pain, he wanted, he wanted.
He wished he couldn’t feel anything. He wished his father wasn’t a bastard and a liar and a terrible person overall. He wished he wasn’t a bastard and a liar and a terrible person overall.
He went about his life.
Sometimes he would see a boy out of the corner of his eye - a boy that looked like Noah, but blurrier. Smudgy. With a mark where the skateboard had hit. He always looked so disappointed. Whelk wished he would go away.
It was so much easier to pretend that you hadn’t done a terrible thing when the reminders didn’t keep cropping up everywhere. He didn’t want to remember Noah. He didn’t want to know the things he would do. He didn’t want to recall the way Noah smiled so widely at him, the way he lived so violently, the goodness he was so full of.
Had he loved him, once?