“Makayla?” I said. I wanted to put my arm out, put my hand on her shoulder. “Maybe you should let go of the closet for a while? Maybe you should take a break and let someone else worry about it?”

She grabbed the key hanging around her neck. “I’m fine. I’m fine. Fine. And I can take care of this. Don’t worry about it.” She tucked the key away under her shirt. I saw how much her hands were shaking. “If you need anything else, let me know.”

“Okay,” I said. All things considered, it hadn’t gone as bad as I thought it would. One single misgendering, and she’d almost apologized for it the second it happened. And now I had something new to focus my mind on, which was that Makayla was, beyond a shadow of a doubt, losing her shit.

I started wondering what would have to happen to get her out of the building and to somewhere she could get help for whatever kind of nervous breakdown she was in the middle of having. But no matter how I thought about it, I couldn’t figure out a single thing that would ever make her leave.

The artist heard of a place they were living better than most. Where there was no violence, where there was something like camaraderie, where there was giving and working together. He heard of this place and crossed the river one day. He waited until night fell. As he climbed a ladder he had dragged out from a ransacked store, a boy came outside. The boy watched as he used his spray cans on the buildings. He brought the boy up on the ladder and let him spray crooked lines and primitive faces. He worked them right into the painting.

On one side of the wall, he painted the city full of dark figures with bones and hooded eyes, scratching and wailing. Farther along, he painted the river, glowing with diamonds of light under the full moon. On the farthest part of the wall, he painted a temple that grew with vines that seemed to move as the paint dried. He painted dawn and a cerulean sky, and beautiful people who were not bones, not skeletons, not death’s-heads. The hands worked together over a ball of bright blue light that burst and shone and fl like lightning, bringing the dawn ever closer to their joyous faces.

Part Thirteen Makayla—May

PART THIRTEEN

MAKAYLA—MAY