Greer stood on the stone steps outside of the Youth Rec Center and greeted each rambunctious child as they skipped up the walkway and barreled through the entrance door.
“Welcome to art camp!” she shouted over their cackling laughter. “Roll up your sleeves! Hunter will get you situated! Go on inside, you can’t miss him!”
Finally, the yellow school bus that had dropped the children off lurched down the road, allowing the train of cars behind it to roll forward. One by one, boys and girls sprang out of the vehicles and jogged into the building, their parents having deposited them on the sidewalk.
“Damn,” said Greer under her breath, as she shielded sunlight from her eyes with her hand. “That’s a lot of kids.”
She reminded herself that not all of them were here for sculpture class. A good third of them were aspiring painters. Another portion would spend the morning taking photographs around the Riverside Recreation Area, but still the sheer volume of them intimidated her.
A pickup truck arched up the road and Greer spotted Scooby Doo panting happily in its bed. Seated behind the steering wheel was Amy Maguire, but she wasn't the reason Greer squealed excitedly. Her best friends, Tasha Buckley and Jennifer Okimoto were in the pickup as well and spilled out as soon as the vehicle came to a stop.
“How cute is this place?" asked Tasha, throwing her hands up in wonderment as she started for the walkway, Jennifer trailing tightly behind.
“Did you make it in okay?” asked Greer, pulling her friends in for a group hug, as Amy clasped a dog leash on her Great Dane's collar so he wouldn't pounce on them.
“Just barely,” said Jennifer with a sigh. “We almost missed our flight.”
Tasha planted her fist on her hip, glancing around at the landscape. “It's so beautiful here, I don't know what to do with myself,” she said. “Crazy to think I’ve never taken photos of nature before. This is going to be amazing.”
Once Scooby Doo was seated on his haunches, Amy tucked her hair behind her ear and said, “Did everything check out okay last night?”
“Yes, everything’s perfect,” said Greer.
“Ladies,” she said. “I’ll get you introduced to your groups if you’ll follow me this way.”
As Amy led Tasha and Jennifer into the building, a rusted-out Volvo station wagon caught Greer's eye. She lingered, watching the vehicle fly up the road and come to a screeching halt in front of the rec center.
“Be there in a sec,” she called out over her shoulder then turned to find Jamie Sand wriggle out of his seatbelt and ease the passenger’s side door of the Volvo open.
There was something downtrodden in the way the kid lumbered out of the vehicle. Not a second after his feet hit the sidewalk, the Volvo tore off into the street, its door slapping shut, Jamie tripping, his knapsack spilling across the asphalt.
“Hey!” Greer shouted at the driver not that she'd seen him. She jogged over to Jamie, as he began collecting his belongings off the ground. “You okay?” she asked, noting the long-sleeved shirt he was wearing, the same dusty jeans and worn-out sneakers.
“Yeah,” he sighed, glancing up at her.
His pale eyes brightened and when he smiled, his gapped teeth angled over his bottom lip in a way she found endearing.
“Need help?” she said, bending over to pick up his lunch bag.
"It's okay," he said in a small voice, snatching his lunch and shoving it into his knapsack.
As he padded alongside her, he took hold of her hand and together they entered the rec center.
Hunter had gotten the students situated at sculpting stations around the room. Each station had a pedestal with a few bricks of clay on top. As Greer walked Jamie over to one of the stations, Hunter spoke up over the children’s laughter, explaining, “You’ve all got clay, a tub of water, and two tools.” The kids fell silent, listening intently, as he went on. “A carving tool, which you can use to cut off chunks of clay from the bricks, and also a curved tool that looks like a spoon, which you’ll use to shape the clay.”
Greer hunched over Jamie’s station, pointing to each tool, as Hunter began demonstrating how to use both from the front of the room. But she became distracted when she realized the boy's long sleeves were going to get dirty. “Want to roll up your sleeves?” she whispered.
Jamie folded his arms and didn’t look at her.
“The first thing you’re going to want to do,” Hunter continued, walking around his own station, “is to visualize the sculpture within the brick of clay. It’s already there. Is it a dog? A flower? What are you going to sculpt? The shape is hiding inside the clay and it’s your job to free it.”
Greer straightened up, watching Hunter as he went into further detail. He plowed his fingers through his shaggy hair and for a moment she got lost in the lines of his body—those broad shoulders, his tee shirt pulling taut as he moved, his firm chest beneath it, those tight jeans that made her want to grab his ass. He picked up the spoon-shaped tool and began molding his brick of clay, inviting the kids to follow along.
Hunter hadn’t touched her last night or this morning. By the time she’d woken up and rolled onto her back, reaching for his side of the bed, he'd already snuck into the bathroom. She’d tried to kiss him as soon as he’d emerged, hoping to connect. But he’d only feigned a smile and urged her back. Breakfast at Sue Ann’s Cafe had been just as gut wrenching. They’d eaten in silence and almost as soon as she’d worked up the nerve to again ask him what was wrong—daring to mention Jamie Sand—Amanda and Justin had interrupted, having entered the small coffee shop.
Though Hunter had been tight-lipped all morning and had refused to open up, Greer was intuitive enough to understand that for some reason Jamie Sand had touched a nerve. She’d never seen Hunter around kids before so it was possible that children in general made him uncomfortable, but that wasn’t the impression she was getting. Jamie in particular had triggered her boyfriend's dark mood, and she couldn't for the life of her grasp why.
Wondering about it now was doing her no good. It wasn't as if she could pull him aside in the middle of art class and demand that he spill, but that didn’t stop her from joining him at the front of the room.
From the corner of her eye, she caught sight of Amy leading Tasha and Jennifer through the back of the room. A trail of kids followed after, as they crossed towards the main door. She smiled at her friends and Jennifer gave her a little wave before disappearing outside.
As the morning unfolded, Greer wove her way between the clay stations, checking on the students and offering tips. Hunter did the same, working the opposite side of the class. At times he touched eyes with her and offered the slightest smile, but as soon as he diverted his gaze, his expression grew long again.
When she reached Jamie’s station, he was mangling his clay, but that wasn’t what held her attention. The hems of his sleeves were dangling over his fingers and had gotten dirty because of it.
“Honey,” she said, kneeling beside him. “You really have to roll these up.”
As she reached for his hands, he jerked away, glaring at her.
“Alright,” she said, holding her arms up in surrender and backing off. “What are you making?”
“It’s going to be a cat,” he said frankly, assessing the lump of clay he had brutalized.
Greer tried not to screw her face up at the vast divide between what he was going for and what he’d achieved.
“What about taking a lump of clay and balling it to make a head?” she suggested. “Then you can shape some pointy ears and build out the cat’s body?”
He seemed to like that idea and, using the carving tool, worked off a chunk of fresh clay from his second brick. Before moving on to the next student, she watched him for a moment, as he rolled clay between his hands, forming a ball.
It dawned on her that Hunter hadn’t once stopped by Jamie’s station. He'd returned to the front of the class so she walked through the room, checking each student’s progress as she neared him.
“Hey,” she said softly, wiping her clay-stained hands on the thighs of her jean shorts.
He offered her a half-hearted smile, barely meeting her gaze before taking hold of his own lump of clay that was resting on a wooden pedestal.
She didn’t want to push him, but she couldn’t fight the impulse. “Is something wrong?"
“I’m fine,” he said, talking over her.
Letting out a breathy laugh to lighten the mood, she said, “Jamie won’t roll up his sleeves.”
“Let him be.”
“I have,” she said quickly. “Look, Hunter, I have a feeling we’re thinking the same thing-”
“I doubt it,” he snapped, leaving her in favor of checking on one of the students in the second row.
“I don’t,” she said, not that he could hear her.
Another hour passed. The kids progressed on their sculptures, transforming bricks of clay into animated characters. Hunter avoided her, keeping his arms folded and his gaze down. She checked her wristwatch, anticipating the lunch break would commence shortly, and discovered she was right.
She walked around the side of the class, eyeing each student as she went, and came to Jamie’s station. At first she was pleased to discover he had finally rolled up his sleeves, but soon she noticed scars on his forearms. Circular and red—some faded, others fresh—she immediately knew what had caused them.
Lit cigarettes.
Tempering her shock, she swallowed hard and hunched over, planting her palms on her knees and catching the boy’s attention.
“Jamie,” she said in a discrete tone. “What happened to your arms?”
Quickly, he shoved his sleeves down and clammed up.
She attempted to coax him into disclosing who had burned his skin with cigarettes when her gaze landed on his sculpture.
It wasn’t a cat.
Unless her eyes were playing tricks on her, Jamie had sculpted his clay into the grotesque figure of a little boy—its legs bent in mindboggling angles, its spine twisted to an inhuman degree, its arms hooked around its back. The eyes were two hollow pits, the mouth open and twisting downward as if in the throes of agony. Even more disturbing was the carving tool sticking out from between its shoulder blades.
Jamie grabbed the tool, yanked it out of his sculpture, and then stabbed it into the clay skull. When he angled his pale eyes up at Greer to check her response, the dark smirk on the boy’s face knocked the wind right out of her.
Though it wasn’t easy, she kept her tone steady as she said, “Tell me about your sculpture.”
“He’s bad. No one likes him,” he explained.
“Why is that?”
“Because he doesn’t belong.”
When it was evident he had nothing more to say, she reached out and cautiously took hold of his shoulder. He didn’t recoil or jerk away, but rather met her gaze. There was something about the glint in his eyes that told her he was seeking praise so she did her best to smile, though it felt stiff.
“It certainly tells a story, doesn’t it?”
He glanced at the mangled figure and nodded.
“Jamie,” she said, forcing eye contact. “I need you to tell me who burned you.”