CHAPTER FORTY
getting used to the rhythm

ON FRIDAY, the full moon hung small and yellow and gibbous, like an inconvenient blister waiting to be lanced. In the corner of the room, Professor Sinistra had procured a magical clock that chimed every time a half-hour elapsed. Their test tonight was on possibly exam material, which entailed all the questions the class had spotted together last week under Sinistra's logical guidance, and over the weekend, Jeremy and Quinn had helped Sawyer cram for this test until she had pieces of information about the planets and magical implications coming out of her ears for days. Floating out of her body in the haze of her medication, Sawyer wasn't too concerned about the test. Reading the questions and writing the answers was going to be frustrating, but Professor Sinistra had offered her the option of taking extra time, knowing her dyslexia would be holding her back. When the test finally commenced and the timer started, the flutter of test booklets flapping open sounded like a flock of starlings taking off at once.

"If I don't get a perfect score on that test I'll set something on fire," Quinn grumbled, rubbing her eyes as they exited the classroom. She'd spent days burning the midnight oil in the kitchens, pouring over the material from class.

Wyatt did a double take. Eyes narrowed, he glanced at Sawyer, sandwiched between himself and Quinn. "Something tells me you're responsible for this reaction."

Sawyer levelled him with a flat look. "Who else?"

"Alvarez, for one," Oliver said, coolly, coming up behind them. Sawyer lagged behind a little, so she was walking beside him now.

"Indirectly, maybe," Quinn said, coyly, shooting Sawyer a surreptitious glance over her shoulder. Last year, Sawyer had let Quinn into the secret of true catharsis, inspired by Rio, who set things on fire because his blood was gasoline and if he couldn't set himself on fire, then he could destroy something else to supplant the feeling. Burning things was a form of unburdening. If that thing didn't exist in physical form anymore, it wasn't an issue. Problem solved. "Speaking of Rio," Quinn added, as an afterthought, "did you see him at all today? It's like he's vanished off the face of the earth completely."

In retrospect, Sawyer should've kept a tighter leash on Rio. After the Christmas break, he did seem to be getting better. But recently, it was as if he was leading some other life entirely that neither of them knew about. One moment he was here, another was was making excuses to get out of meals early. Meetings with Professor Snape about his Potions essay could stretch for hours, and nobody would see him. He almost never came to breakfast anymore. Every Tuesday he would be waiting outside Sawyer's Transfiguration class so they could walk to the library together, but lately, it was as if he'd scattered time. It was Oliver who would offer to walk her instead, since Rio would be nowhere to be found. Marcus had been ranting about how he'd miss Quidditch practice every now and then. They hardly saw him on the weekends either. It felt like fourth year again, watching her best friend grow thinner and thinner, more gaunt and blue-veined ghost than boy, watching him disappear for days on end until she was convinced he'd slipped between the walls. At that time, Sawyer had refused to believe he was ditching them, or that they were losing him. And she refused to believe that now.

On Christmas Eve last year, he'd told her to do whatever she needed to do.

The following summer, he'd broken his promise again. He didn't have to come clean about what he'd done. She knew. She'd just been waiting for him to come to her about it, because his main motivation seemed to have been getting Marcus back, but that was already a shipwreck on its own. Sawyer supposed that Rio had given up on picking up the pieces. Breaking things was far easier than putting them back together, and if destruction was a boy wrapped in scars and combustible impulse with broken glass for teeth, then fixing something wasn't going to be on his agenda for long. Some people didn't change. They just learnt to hide their ugly a lot better, buried the damage done to their system deeper. Except, Rio was doing a terrible job at both, and Sawyer was going to exorcise the truth out of him, no matter the cost.

"No," Sawyer said, "but I'm going to find out."

Quinn frowned, but thankfully didn't press.

It wasn't until lunchtime, the following day, that Sawyer found a way into the Slytherin common room. Over the seven years she'd been attending Hogwarts, Sawyer had spent a measurable amount of time in the Slytherin common room with Jeremy and Rio, enough to know where Rio's dorm room was, and that there was no spell preventing girls from entering a boy's dorm unlike the other way round. Before she got here, she'd told her friends that she was going to take a nap because she hadn't slept much. Part of it was true. She'd stayed up past midnight on the Quidditch pitch messing around with Oliver—and by messing around, she meant trying to score on him using various unorthodox methods entirely disregarding the rules, clearly pissing him off.

Since the Slytherin common room was empty because everyone was in the Great Hall, Sawyer took her time. Fractured sunlight fell in silvery lines through the glass ceiling separating the bottom of the lake and the common room beneath it, fissuring the mossy green gloom in a watery veil of phosphorescence, moving with the water that was mysteriously clear yet murky enough to obscure its inhabitants at the same time. Sawyer chalked it down to magic. Almost everything in this side of the world seemed to be able to be explained away with that one arcane word.

Even during the day, the Slytherin common room looked like a villain's lair with its dark green walls and silver-embroidered sofas that looked less comfortable and more like thrones. Instead of torches or a fireplace, they had silver candelabras holding up thin green candles tipped with white flames that flickered elegantly and threw tall shadows along the expensive-looking carpet. Sawyer wasn't sure which part of the lake the Slytherins were placed, but they were deep enough so Sawyer could see blurry silhouettes darting behind the glass in periphery, gliding gracefully between the submerged plants growing from the bottom of the lake. Before Hogwarts, Sawyer had never imagined both the possibilities that mermaids were real, and that they didn't look like the ones she saw in paintings or in The Little Mermaid. They couldn't speak the same languages that humans did, but Jeremy had told her once that some of the Slytherins in the previous years had taught the mermaids sign language, and they'd passed that little nugget of knowledge down to their juniors.

One of them drifted so close she saw its tentacles pressed up against the glass, its mouth stretched in a silent scream, displaying tiny rows of jagged teeth. The glass must be soundproofed as well, since she didn't hear anything besides the air current within the common room. It didn't cause too much of a commotion, so Sawyer paid it no mind, and continued up to Rio's dorm.

His bed was the most obvious one. Clothes were strewn everywhere, and so were half-tattered textbooks and a set of quills. Sawyer's foot nudged a stack of miscellaneous items gathered in a mountainous pile by his bed, and sent something skittering under it. Coming here, she didn't know what she was looking for, but whatever it was that Rio was hiding so clandestinely from them would make itself apparent. Bad things had a way of surfacing at the worst times, the ugly truth among them. Sawyer always had the impression that Slytherins were creatures of order. When it came to the quintessential Slytherin, Sawyer saw Marcus, who had everything in order, every variable laid out before him in four categories—controlled, independent, dependent, and confounding. He might not be the sharpest tool in the shed sometimes, and he was the opposite of charming, but he knew his way around things. But if anything, neither Jeremy nor Rio fit the stereotypical ideals of Slytherins. She saw some of the qualities in them, but their personalities weren't ruled by their house. Just the same, Rio's bed was the only unmade one amidst the five.

A corner of something black was poking out from under his pillow, and Sawyer went for that first. Tugging it into the open, Sawyer lifted a brow when she saw that it wasn't anything even remotely suspicious. Just a sketchbook with Rio's name scribbled in white ink on the hard cardboard cover. To any creator, their creations were private, but nothing about Rio could be private anymore. After all, Sawyer had the sense that if she went too easy on him, he'd vanish quicker than he already was. The last she'd seen of him was at dinner, when he'd excused himself midway through. In the same instance, she spotted Dominik Nott get up from the Ravenclaw table just seconds before Rio stepped away from the Slytherin table. Whatever their relationship had been, Sawyer assumed it'd just been physical, that Rio had been using him to get over Marcus. Sawyer didn't see Dominik often enough to question him about it, since he was pretty much also a ghost around campus. Nobody knew where he went in the time he wasn't in class, and apparently he never spectated Quidditch matches.

Sawyer had resolved to disinter that one mystery too.

Flicking through the pages, surprise struck Sawyer so hard she let out a maniacal laugh that might have worried anyone within earshot. On one of the pages, there was a study on hands, posed in different positions, different proportions. Some were crossed out so hard Sawyer felt Rio's mounting frustration where the grooves of the pencil dug in through the paper like claws on a floorboard, threatening to rip the page. On another, was a detailed, colourless sketch of Jeremy and his owl, Mab. Sawyer flipped to a page in the middle of the book, landing on a drawing of Rio's black-feathered owl, Chainsaw soaring over a mountain range. Sawyer turned the page. Her gaze lingered on the drawing for longer. Unmistakably, it was Marcus' side profile, and the date under the drawing was last year's, just after they'd broken up. Sawyer didn't know where Rio had found the time to pour his entire heart into this one page, but it was clear that he had.

If all the pieces of barbed wire tangled inside him didn't come out in the tempestuous fury of fists cracking against glass jaws and roaring explosions moments after the shatter of a glass bottle against the dashboard of a car, then it slipped out of him in quieter moments like shadows. Secret moments, where this pocket-sized sketchbook held pieces of his guts he never showed anyone else. Not even his friends. Compared to the other drawings, Marcus was a vision of sharp edges, a cutting jaw, dramatic cheekbones, striking eyes, and a nose that'd been broken but never healed quite right. Rio got it all on paper. Even devoid of colour, it felt like the picture was breathing. The detail was astounding. There was no denying how much attention Rio paid Marcus. Then again, Rio noticed almost everything.

Who knew Rio Alvarez was an artist? And a talented one, too. How hadn't they known this? Granted, Sawyer understood why Rio wanted to keep this private. There was nothing incriminating within the pages. Just sketches of people around him. Some of Sawyer, some of Quinn, and in more recent pages, Rio's art grew more and more abstract. One of them was a message-in-a-bottle, except there was a heart crammed into it. A real heart, a soaked organ of ventricles and dark veins, the kind you saw in diagrams in a clinic, or on the back of a packet of cigarettes talking about heart burn.

Setting the sketchbook back under Rio's pillow in the same way she'd found it, Sawyer moved on. One secret uncovered. Entirely harmless, but still a secret. What else was he hiding?

Sawyer crouched down on her hands and knees, ducking her head so she could peer under the bed. Nothing. Just a coat of dust on the floorboards and a few broken pencils. Sawyer went through more of his things, digging her hands into the pockets of his jeans, rooting around his bags, the bottom of his truck where he had too many things crammed in places that weren't meant to be hold this many things—but Rio had a way of defying physics. He could intimidate an iron beam into doing what he wanted.

There was so much evidence of him living here, and yet no trace of his existence with them.

"What are you hiding, junkie?" Sawyer muttered musingly, recalling Dominik Nott's nickname for Rio when they'd found the two boys in the middle of an argument in the hallway, only to be met with a non-answer. Something tugged her in the direction of his Quidditch bag, a navy blue duffel bag that Rio had been carrying around since the dawn of time, and even though the strap was already fraying, Rio insisted that it was still in mint condition. Sentimental value, Sawyer supposed, as she unzipped it and rifled through the contents. Nothing. She tried the side pockets. Loose change caught in the seams like silver fish and expired gum crushed to the point of lost appeal and a single glove. None of which were causes for suspicion.

Until her fingers brushed against something solid at the bottom of the side pocket, and the indubitable rattle of pills caught her attention.

Instantly, Sawyer felt something click inside her, like the first hiss of a lighter sparking before the rag of a molotov cocktail caught fire, as her fingers closed around the too-familiar plastic shell of a prescription bottle.

Rio didn't take medication. As far as she knew, all his known ailments were in his inability to resist rebellion and impulse. Despite the fact that there was an unquestionable abundance of trauma in him, he had too much pride to admit that he needed help. Psychiatric help, most of all. Rio wasn't stupid, but even he had to recognise that he needed it. Direly. Still, you couldn't help someone who didn't want to be helped. Sawyer had learnt that from personal experience. Which meant that Rio most certainly wasn't legally prescribed anything. And Sawyer only let Jeremy and Marcus hold onto her medication. Quinn had her own, and had expressed that she didn't want to be responsible for mixing up the different prescriptions and risk giving Sawyer the wrong pills in her pre-medicated state.

As she inspected the transparent prescription bottle, Sawyer realised she didn't recognise the pills. They weren't Valium, or any kind of anti-depressants or anti-psychotics she'd seen before. Then again, Sawyer had only been exposed to a handful of types. These could be an atypical group, but Sawyer didn't believe it. Somehow, they felt wrong. Part of Sawyer didn't want to believe it, but this was the ugly truth. People weren't ready to stomach it, but Sawyer's entire life had been a string of ugly truths, so, those, she could swallow down. Lies, she couldn't. Especially when it endangered the people she promised to watch over.

Turning the bottle over in her hands, Sawyer searched the otherwise unlabelled bottle for any indication as to what Rio was taking, and found one hastily scribbled word at the bottom in black permanent marker that'd been scratched up and almost illegible, and particularly torturous for her dyslexic brain to handle. Thankfully it seemed to be four letters in block writing.

APEX.

She hadn't heard of it before.

Anger curled around Sawyer. Coils of rope, tangling her limbs, choking her circulation and cutting off her air. She stuffed it down, tying it in suffocating knots and tried to drag her drug-addled brain back into focus.

Sawyer had to take a few deep breaths, counting forward and backwards, one to four, four to one, just to keep from lashing out and ripping Rio's precious sketchbook to pieces in light of her new discovery. It was hard not to jump to conclusions, especially after seeing Rio fall back into this cycle time after time, losing weight, the delicate web of veins striving against the skin of his eyelids blue and stark against his pallid complexion, the flat look in his eyes, the giveaway ticks that presented themselves each time he went into withdrawal, the rare periods of time where he could stand on his own two feet, the constant disappearing, the flaking out on plans, skipping class, the shakes, the haunted look on his face, the inability to look them all in the eyes.

It wasn't hard to conclude that APEX was something that Rio never should've stumbled upon but ended up in his hands anyway. The emergent question was: where was he getting this from? Who was supplying him with the poison in his veins?

Before she left, Sawyer reached back into the duffel bag and did a thorough inventory of all of Rio's possessions. She'd deal with him in due time, but for now, she had to set something in motion. In doing so, she'd swiped three more bottles from Rio's bag.

I don't mean to hurt you, Sawyer thought, as she pocketed the four bottles of APEX, careful to replace everything in their original positions, so as to not arouse any suspicion in Rio. But I made a promise, and I always keep my promises. You're the one who's failed me, Rio. Don't take this to heart.

* * *

FURY THUNDERED ACROSS RIO'S FACE. His expression seemed to shift like the desert sands, pulling apart and reforming over and over, never in a constant shape or pattern, as he stormed over to their table in the library. His hands were clenched into white-knuckled fists at his side, and he'd thrown the door open, startling a cluster of fresh-faced first years, and invoking the librarian's venomous wrath, but he ignored every single one of her scornful rebukes. His vicious glare cut Jeremy's smile into two, and Quinn shrunk back in her seat. Entirely disinterested in Rio's predictable foul mood, Sawyer barely looked at him, her attention focused on the star chart before her. Marcus furrowed his brows.

"Hey, are you okay—"

"You," Rio snarled, vehemently, looming over Marcus, rage crackling in his voice, knife-bright and razor-sharp. His lips were pulled back to bare his teeth. The accusation was a shot of poison to the heart as he slammed a hand over Marcus' Charms textbook. Instantly, the atmosphere grew chemical. "You have some fucking nerve, going through my shit like that. After everything I told you— Last I checked, you're not my boyfriend, Marcus. You were the one who called it quits. Don't act like you suddenly care."

It was an age before anyone responded. Jeremy blinked, shell-shocked. Quinn drew in a sharp inhale. Sawyer flicked the pen she'd loaned from Jeremy back over to his side of the table. It made a clattering noise against the wooden table, but didn't slide off the edge.

Like the shutters drawing closed, Marcus blinked, and his expression morphed into a cool mask. One he used whenever he had to deal with insubordinate underclassmen on the Quidditch team. With infuriating restraint, Marcus sat up straighter, levelling Rio with a tempered look, and said, "I don't know what you're talking about, and I am not going to talk to you until you calm the fuck down and stop throwing accusations in my face."

"Maybe sit down and explain what you mean, Rio?" Quinn asked, her voice timid, touching a hand to Rio's elbow.

Ripping his hand away, lips curled in a disgusted snarl, Rio cut her a sharp glare. "Fuck you. Don't tell me to sit down." He slanted Marcus an incendiary glower, teeth gritted. "Stay out of my shit."

"Why?" Sawyer asked, cocking her head, her mind reeling to the three prescription bottles of APEX she'd stashed under her bed, and the one she'd kept in the pocket of her school robes in the case that she needed leverage, "you have something to hide?"

Rio's piercing stare snapped to Sawyer. His eyes gleamed with a fresh fury. "Not any more than you do."

Sawyer took a swig from her water bottle and grinned around the mouthpiece. "That depends. If you ask, I'll tell. But your defensiveness tells me you're not so willing to make the same trade. What is it that you think Marcus would find, if you have nothing to hide?"

The bottle of APEX suddenly felt like a live coal sitting in her pocket.

But Rio didn't know about that. Anger feathered at his clenched jaw, but he had nothing to say to Sawyer. Nothing that wouldn't put him in an incriminating position. He knew what she'd do. What she was capable of. There were no mountains that would withstand the seismic repercussions of Sawyer's bone-crushing rage.

Instead of coming out with a counter-argument, Rio spat, "fuck you." And then he turned on his heel, and stalked out of the library.

Sawyer didn't miss the way his hands shook before he shoved them into his pockets.

* * *

BETWEEN OLIVER AND SAWYER, the silence in the kitchen was a mounting static, like the hum inside a seashell. Around them, the house elves were bustling around, cleaning up the day's mess. Earlier, Sawyer hadn't been able to concentrate with their constant clamour, so she'd blocked them out with her music. Only just coming down from her last dosage of Valium, Sawyer didn't want to say anything about the exhaustion crashing down on her as she removed her earphones, hit the pause button on her Walkman, cutting off Debbie Harry's smokey rasp, and pushed her partially completed Transfiguration essay aside. She felt Oliver's gaze land on her as he looked up from his incomprehensible Quidditch diagrams.

"You okay?"

Sawyer shrugged, rolling out her neck. "If I see one more word, I'll punch someone."

Oliver snorted. He picked up the keys to the equipment room on the table. They gave a reluctant jangle as he pocketed them. "I'm assuming you don't want to play today."

Sawyer shook her head. After a beat of silence, she let out an explosive sigh. "Has Wyatt ever lied to you? About something so big it'd ruin him?"

A puzzled look crossed Oliver's expression. He leant back in his chair, hands shoved in the pocket of his red hoodie. "I don't think so. I mean, we don't tell each other everything, but the basis of our friendship isn't total transparency, unless it's something detrimental and important. Like stuff with my dad. Or his spine problems since the fall. I don't think it's in him to lie, anyway." He pressed her with a curious look over little puddle of books and parchment paper sitting between them. "Why?"

At first, Sawyer considered deflecting to a non-answer, but Oliver wasn't someone she had to shield the truth from.

"Rio's been lying to us," Sawyer said, "about something pretty serious."

"Serious, as in—"

"Unsustainable," Sawyer said, his confusion not deterring her. "Like he'll die if there's no intervention. Which is what I'm doing. If it's something that serious. Say that secret will kill him in due time. There's nothing wrong about me taking matters into my own hands and doing whatever it takes to keep him alive. What would you do, if Wyatt was hiding something like that from you, and you were working on past experience and a hunch?"

Oliver's brows furrowed in contemplation. "There are boundaries I wouldn't cross, because it's still his life to lead, but if it really is, like you said, going to kill him, I'd probably confront him face-to-face first. If he's not willing to talk, then I'll probably go to you. In all honesty, I probably wouldn't know what to do. I've never had to deal with this kind of stuff before. With the boys, it's all just dicking around and stupid shit to piss each other off."

It struck Sawyer then that her group of friends wasn't a quintessential teenage bunch. They were all fractured isolationists pulled together by Jeremy, glued together by individual commitment. Otherwise, they'd all be truly alone. All their traumas had grown skin and cast shadows. There would always be forces pushing a group of friends apart, but none so violently as theirs.

"I know this is stupid to ask, but is Rio in trouble?" Oliver asked, leaning forward, arms folded over the table. "We had a team captain meeting last week, and Marcus mentioned he'd curated a whole new lineup. Rio's name wasn't on the list. Apparently, he's been too flakey on practice, and when he's on the pitch, he doesn't have his game." When Sawyer didn't answer, Oliver frowned. "Are you okay? You make a lot of promises you hate to break. Is this one of them?"

Eyes flashing, Sawyer let out a shattered laugh. "He gave me his back. I told him I'd keep it. I told him that I'd do whatever it takes to keep him alive. I'm used to failure, but this— this is new. This was never supposed to happen under my watch. So, no, I am not okay. I'm fucking fuming."

It wasn't sympathy that crossed Oliver's expression, nor was it pain. Oliver's collected composure didn't slip, but it'd been a flicker of something that told Sawyer he registered she was a live wire at the moment because everything was slipping right out of her hands like sand in an hourglass, and her sanity was quickly following and Sawyer was tired. So, so tired of being the thing that everyone clung to. But if she wasn't exactly that, then who else would anchor her friends in place? Who else was there to share the burden? Jeremy would continue keeping quiet and letting the world push shards of broken glass into his skin. Quinn would retreat into herself. Marcus would rip himself to shreds in his strive for perfection. Rio would vanish completely. But where did that leave her?

Anger wasn't synonymous with fear, but right now, with that last thought, she couldn't distinguish between the two. It was the first time she was forced to confront this. And she hated it. She had to curl her hands into fists to keep her hands from shaking, but even that didn't fool Oliver.

The scrape of a chair against the floor slashed the silence of the kitchen apart. Oliver rounded the table, and then he was pulling the chair beside hers closer until there wasn't anymore space between them and gathering her into his arms and letting her press her face into his shoulder. His arms encircled her waist and even though her arms were limp at her sides, she didn't pull away. Didn't stop the Atlas-heavy sigh that escaped her lips. Didn't stop him from holding her so firmly, so tightly that the rest of the world could disintegrate and she wouldn't care. Nothing else would matter. Maybe he was silent because he didn't have the words, or he didn't know what to say, but Oliver didn't have to say anything as she stayed there, unravelling quietly—the first time she would let herself do this—but knowing he was there to catch everything.

This, Sawyer thought, closing her eyes and breathing in his familiar scent, this was what safety felt like.

AUTHOR'S NOTE.
5