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Last night, Mason was ready to maul him during their fight, but when Kieran walks into the classroom today, Mason waves him over and grins at him like there’s no problem.
He pulls Kieran into the chair where Marcelle sits, and Marcelle herself is notably not present, even though she’s always first in the classroom. All of Marcelle’s things, including her pencil case with the massive purple zipper and her bag slumped against the table leg, are now at Kieran’s seat.
“Marcelle wanted to swap seats,” Mason explains. Kieran did not agree to this, but Mason fidgets like he’s asking his crush out, and his gaze bounces off the walls and traces constellations, anywhere but Kieran’s face. Whatever he’s got to do with this, he’s not a bully, and if Kieran refused him straight out of the gate he would respect that, and so he deserves a chance to speak.
Mason looks fresher today, more energetic in his bouncing and twitching and expression-switching. Even his skin is warmer where he had touched Kieran, and golden.
“Look, I’m sorry about yesterday,” he says. “I don’t know why I got so upset, and I definitely shouldn’t have restrained you like that.” A red flush suffuses his face like sunlight.
So that’s what he’s nervous about. Kieran himself is no bully, and he would have talked it out with Mason, or so he tells himself. He’s glad that it’s this way, that Mason’s this way, for if it were him he would have waited and waited for the perfect moment to land in his lap where the both of them were left alone together, and borne the silence between the conflict and its resolution gracefully.
Or as Marcelle would put it, “You’re so awkward, Kier.”
“It’s fine,” Kieran replies. “Don’t tell me Marcelle wanted to swap our seats to have you apologise to me though.”
Mason bristles. “There was no ‘having’, I asked her to do it.” His eyes widen when he realises what he’s said. “I mean,” then he sighs.
Kieran bites down a smile, but not hard enough, because Mason spots it and complains of Kieran laughing at him.
“No, no, no one was laughing at you here. Can you feel it? An air of utter solemnity. No laughter, scouts’ honour,” Kieran promises.
“You’re in the theatre club, you can’t say that.”
Mason has so many expressions, but this one is new. Mason, with his blocky teeth protruding at the margin of his grin. His face when he’s fixated, knotted with frowns, or when he’s happy to see someone, as he is with everybody, or when he’s outraged, eyes wide open and teeth out like some wild wolf, screaming and squeezing his fists and slamming people against walls without ever hurting them really. Kieran cannot picture, despite yesterday’s fisticuffs, Mason hurting somebody, and he can’t quite put his finger on why. Maybe that’s the impression people get of Mr. Instantly Popular, or of beautiful people.
This expression looks earnest. With his head cocked to the side, and his eyes bright, immersed in brilliance, it makes Kieran’s head spin. He slumps onto the table. “Well, why’d you do it?” he says, but it comes out muffled.
Kieran can barely make out the silhouettes of the earlier students settling down. Besides the shuffling of papers and tables, it’s quiet. Mason rests his head on the table and turns to look at Kieran. From where he lies, his vision is engulfed by Mason’s greyish-blue eyes, now focused on him with none of the earlier nervousness.
“I want to be friends with you,” Mason says. “I think you’re cool, sitting over there quiet and handsome and diligently taking notes and—yeah. Let’s not hurt each other.”
Handsome, Kieran echoes to himself.
”I wasn’t taking notes, I was drawing,” he corrects. “I never take notes. Sorry if your sparkling impression of me is foiled now.”
Mason grins at that. “I like your drawings too. So, friends?”
What would it be like being Mason Kane’s friend?
Ever since Mason arrived just days ago, he’s been the campus superstar. People flock to him and ask him how his day is, chat with him, sit with him, confess to him, share secrets with him, and why like that, so easily, even when they know they’re nobody special to him, when whoever he sits with at lunch depends on who’s the fastest to sweep him away? The Mason craze doesn’t show signs of dying down.
Maybe it’s his natural good looks, Kieran is loath to admit. The fact that he does basketball, has ‘wavy tousled hair that gleams with sweat’ or whatever the people in the hallways are fantasizing about, the easy way he walks around, long-limbed and strong. But just as likely, it’s the way he talks to people, smiling with dimples, nodding at all the right times. He towers over most people but never lets them feel it. Beside them, he’s just another person, no matter how popular he is.
He’s rich in the currency of touch, and gives it away magnanimously: taps someone’s shoulder to tell them something, grabs their wrist, ruffles their hair, slings an arm around their shoulders, leans onto them and hugs them, even perfect strangers. He might do this because he knows how much everyone likes him, but just as likely he doesn’t. Somebody like that seems to be liked wherever they go. Even if he might be a werewolf.
Maybe Kieran could learn something from him. Sue him if he wants to feel that kind of friendship because Mason, with all his quirks, would be a great friend. A better friend to have than an enemy for sure. So he says, “Sure,” and is shocked out of his seat by a smile brighter than the sun.
—
One of Mason’s favourite pastimes after that day is saying Kieran’s name. He rolls it around like candy melting on his tongue. When he enters the classroom in the morning, it’s “Hey, Kieran!” and during lunch times it’s “finally found you, Kieran!” and when the bell rings and Kieran is packing, a shadow will descend upon his table and say, “Kieran, let’s go home together!”
The shadow is smiley, like a second sun. It’s Mason. He smiles the same every time even though he knows that ‘going home together’ for them is only walking to the bus stop and chatting, then parting ways on different buses.
Kieran can barely keep up. He tries to say Mason’s name more, because name-dropping is another one of those tricks Mason pulls to charm others to him, but sometimes Kieran slips and stumbles—introvert things. Mason says he enjoys saying others’ names, and maybe Kieran would too if every time he said someone’s name they basked in it like a holiday. Mason seems to like the sound of Kieran saying his name, at least.
If Mason likes it, then all is well. Kieran’s already getting stares from people whenever he and Mason are together, people whispering, “Who’s that pale-skinned guy next to Mason? Is he anemic or something?” He derives amusement from listening to them being horrifically wrong. The ones who know he’s a vampire shush the others and continue eyeing the grip Mason has on his shoulder. Eyes, heads, whispers crowd around him, and he tries to shut them out, focusing on Mason’s eyes, what he’s saying.
After two or three weeks of this, Kieran succumbs. It’s better to clarify this, even, he knows. Someone like Mason likely wants something from him—he’s just not revealing it yet.
“Why do you keep eating lunch with me?” Kieran says one day when they’re mid-meal and Mason’s too busy stuffing himself to reply, though he frowns and says something muffled.
“Can’t hear you, just finish your food first.” Kieran pokes at his lasagna and breaks the tomatoes at the side, then lifts the box to his lips and gulps the tomato juice down, careful not to spill. The juice is too translucent and too orange to look like blood, but it’s sweet, and the ripe tomatoes, bursting with their plump red roundness, would be wasted if he didn’t drink them down, because he’s not eating them.
Mason is redder than the raw chunks of tomatoes when Kieran looks up.
“What?”
”Nothing,” Mason deflects. He looks away, but his eyes land on Kieran’s throat. “I eat here with you because—hey!” he frowns. “What kind of question is that? We’re friends!”
His face falls. “Unless I’m annoying you?” he asks, softer.
“Never, Mason,” Kieran says immediately, and is himself shocked by this speed, even more so than Mason, who beams at him. “I just mean… you have so many other friends. I bet some of them are watching you right now.”
From behind the wall beside Mason, someone yelps, and someone else hushes them. They bolt away in a storm of pattering footsteps.
Why is he not surprised?
“Just like that, see? They all like you so much. And there are definitely better conversationalists than me there, or whatever it is you like, and—“
Too late, he realises he’s doing it again.
Marcelle told him not to. “If you like somebody, stop pushing them away!” she complained. “What kind of logic is that?” He didn’t know either. Marcelle, the new kid whom everybody liked, his childhood friend he thought didn’t remember him, sat beside him on her very first day in this school. “Kieran, it’s so nice to see you again,” she said. He remembered sitting there stock-still, frozen in his own body, and he did not come to Earth for a long time until he remembered to reply, “A-ah, yes, hi,” then ignored Marcelle for some weeks until they finally talked.
The mini-Marcelle in his head has made one mistake, however: Mason’s not Marcelle. They’re different. With Marcelle, it was a strong longing for friendship, silently put aside. But with Mason, he’s just latched onto Kieran, and what Kieran feels about him, he doesn’t even know.
“I like you,” Mason says.
“Explain,” he replies instinctively.
“I mean, it’s just a me thing, but I know there are better ‘conversationalists’ and all that, whatever people use to measure how good or bad of a friend someone is—I don’t really think that’s a thing. I think everyone has people they naturally click with, you know, that they like more, and for me that’s you.”
Is it now? He doesn’t say it, but he’s warm all over, some frosty thing banished and forgotten. How is he supposed to repay that sentiment? It’s as simple as a fire during winter. ‘I like you.’ A genuine, clear-cut diamond phrase.
“I like you too,” Kieran says, because to say otherwise would be to lie. If Mason were caught in the rain, Kieran would share an umbrella with him; if Mason wanted to ask deep questions, Kieran would philosophize with him; and if Mason got hurt, Kieran would rush to his side, perhaps to find him obscured by the crowds of his adoring fans. He’s just one more of them. How special he is, he’ll never know, if he is at all.
“I like you more,” Mason asserts, as if he can read Kieran’s thoughts.
“No such thing,” Kieran retorts.
“No, I really do. I feel like you’re the only one who sees me.”
”That’s such a cliche, Mason. Don’t tell me it’s only because I’m a vampire.”
Mason’s eyes widen.
Kieran grins. “Did you not know, or did you think I wouldn’t tell you? It’s common knowledge, anyway. Might explain why even with you here, there’s a zone of empty tables around us—the vampire social distancing. Only your fans can penetrate this anti-Kieran barrier. Our energies cancel out like that.”
That isn’t as funny to Mason as it is to him. “No, I know, but they shouldn’t,” Mason says, frowning. “You wouldn’t hurt anyone. And no, it’s not only because you’re a vampire.”
The tiny wrinkles at the tanned, speckled bridge of his nose bob about and change configuration a few times before he releases his frown. Mason could be a personality, if he wanted, and all he’d have to do is exist.
“You’re a werewolf, aren’t you?”
Mason says nothing.
“Then it makes sense why you’d think like that. It’s okay if you like me because I get it. That’s our common interest.”
This he can work with. His brain re-establishes and rearranges all his facts, which fly here and there and crash into each other and mold into new ones. Mason likes him because he understands.
“I didn’t say that," Mason grits out. “Look, I—”
He closes his eyes and sucks in his lip.
“It’s okay if you don’t believe it, but I’m going to prove it to you. I like you, Kieran, and it’s not just because of whatever werewolf-vampire solidarity thing you think it is.”
Mason wolfs down his food and waits for Kieran, and the both of them walk to class in silence, then when school ends, to the bus stop as well. Today many of the students are staying back for some event, and so the bus stop is a veil of quiet, punctuated with slight sounds of people chattering, the jingling of bicycle bells, and his and Mason’s shoulders and bags jostling, their steps soft. The trees flutter in the wind and cast green shadows on the sunlit road. A bus whirs by in a blur, but it’s neither of theirs.
They wait it out, sitting on the benches, swinging their legs, talking about random things. “That’s such a beautiful bird,” Mason says, and points to something on the opposite tree. A thick branch blocks Kieran’s view of it.
“I can’t see it, but if you say it’s beautiful, then I guess it is,” Kieran replies.
“Well, I’ll be your eyes, then. It’s got this furry red head and a shiny brown beak, and its eyes are so keen—I wonder what it’s watching—and a yellow belly that I really want to pet, oh but it’s so high up, and wings with country-shaped patches of green and blue on them. It twits every so often like it’s counting something, and it hops about so fast you almost can’t catch it.”
Everyone’s eyes are biased a little their way, but even without seeing, he can see what Mason is telling him.
“It does sound beautiful,” he concludes, and then Mason’s bus, number 33, pulls onto a nearby stretch of road. Mason flags it, and says goodbye to Kieran, then thinks better of it.
As the bus comes to a stop, Mason takes his hand in his long, tough fingers and presses his lips to the back of one of his knuckles. “Bye,” he says again, and runs into the bus.
Kieran’s mouth fails him, and he can only watch Mason pull away from him and wave back weakly. On the back of his hand, the places Mason touched, especially the centre of it all where his lips were, are trembling with heat as if Mason left stars on his palm, reacting and exploding and creating new sparks.
—
Life goes on, and on, and on. Kieran continues to show up at school, and Mason continues to wave at him and smile at him like he’s made his entire day, and Kieran continues to wave back, confused. In a month or two, this will disappear, because he can’t provide Mason with whatever validation he’s looking for, so he clings to Mason and breathes him in but tries not to show it.
Which is what he keeps telling himself as the months extend and the new year begins, but Mason is still knocking on his door asking his mother, “Good morning, Ms. Callisto! Is Kieran in?” in his chirpy voice.
Throughout all this, Kieran can’t help but look at Mason. There’s nothing he reveals about himself, and when they steer the conversation to centre on him, he bats it away with a one-liner or excuses himself to say hi to somebody. Kieran only knows the things that outline him, what music he likes (upbeat pop, but mostly no preference), what subjects he falls asleep during (languages and biology), and funny stories from his childhood, etcetera.
He’s less of a wolf than a beautiful hurt bird, whose wings won’t open, whose nest is high in the trees, who only sings what everyone wants to hear. As if he thinks Kieran is the one who will run from him.
Kieran’s never been pushy though, and he settles for what he can have. He hugs Mason more, because he likes that, and asks him about his day, and tries to say without saying: I’m here. He might know what eats at Mason from the inside: the way when Mason tries to say hi to his juniors some of them flinch, the way he breaks so many things because he accidentally used too much strength, and the way, for all his extroversion, he’s tentative with the vulnerable core of their friendship. Mason likes sleepovers, the idea of them, but he’s never had one; when he came over, they smacked each other with pillows until they were both panting and laughing, but still insisted on sleeping on the floor. Maybe it is selfish of him to want someone snoring and hogging the space next to him, instead of a dark, lonely body on the floor and his own dark, lonely body on the bed.
“I wouldn’t mind if you slept up here though,” Kieran told him that time. “My floor is tough. And you’re the guest, I’ll take the floor.”
”No, I insist.”
He insisted. At the time, Kieran chalked it up to some gentlemanly behaviour or whatever new charm it was, but in hindsight he sees it better now—did Mason think Kieran would break if he slept on the floor, or would hate him for it? It pains Mason so much to hurt others that he is rendered worse for it.
Kieran has no plan except to wait and give Mason the time to open up. Then one day they’re both walking and chatting in the corridors, Mason going on about some patisserie he saw the other day that they could try—“it smells fantastic, Kier, and there’s so much chocolate bread…”—when Mason turns the corner and slams into someone holding their art piece. A vase, glossy with cloudlike patches of red and blue and green, with a thin mouth and neck.
They both crash to the floor, and Kieran only just disentangles himself from it.
Mason, half up on his feet, is already busy with apologies. “So, so sorry, here, do you need any help?”
He fusses over the student, who’s thin, angular, and already well-bruised on the arms and legs. “I am clumsy,” they admit, “I should be sorry as well. It’s no problem, Mason, thanks. It’s okay about the vase, really.”
Kieran knows by that dazed look in Mason’s eyes that he hadn’t even noticed. Normally he’d just brush it off, but Mason gazes at the shattered fragments that Kieran is picking up and bends down to cradle one of them himself, runs his thumb over a tiny swan trapped in the ceramic.
“I can’t repay you anything for it,” Mason says.
“It’s okay,” the student replies. The three of them sweep up the shards together, and the mutters from people watching fade away. Mason’s shoulders are tense, and Kieran rubs a circle into his back. “It’s okay,” he repeats to Mason, softer.
Mason’s quiet after that, throughout class and throughout theatre. He does his sums during maths and takes notes during biology, and when Kieran prods him, he imitates a smile.
What’s wrong? Kieran mouths.
Nothing, Mason says. You said it yourself, it’s okay.
But it’s not, not if his eyes are so hollow.
When they’re walking home amidst the orange evening, the violet trees, the white lights and faint buzzing of the street lamps, a gust of wind blows by, and Mason stops in his tracks.
“I’m so strong,” he mutters, almost to himself. “I could—I don’t—“
”Mason?”
Mason grips Kieran’s shoulder, tight but not fierce, and frowns. Something winds up in the woeful corner of his lip that he doesn’t know how to tell. “Take your time,” Kieran says.
Mason stands there a long time and even being so broad he seems to sway with the wind. Eventually he loosens his grip, which left short crumpled indents on Kieran’s uniform, and sighs.
“I’m so strong,” he says. “I could do so much. People look up to me. They fear me. I could hit them, I could beat them up, I could break their bones, but I—I would never.”
His pupils tremble within the sea of his eyes.
“I don’t know why I keep thinking about this. I don’t know why people look at me like that. I don’t even know if they do. Kieran, don’t you ever wish you weren’t a vampire?”
”Sometimes, yes,” Kieran says. “But I have a feeling we’re not the same.”
Mason frowns again and presses his lips together. “Let’s go find somewhere to sit.”
They end up getting two drinks from the convenience store, Mason with a bright pink strawberry milk bottle because ‘I want to try something new’ and he has no opinions on strawberry. He asks Kieran to take the first sip.
“Not that bad,” Kieran comments, and Mason looks relieved.
“Good that I didn’t waste my money on something weird, then,” he replies.
The sky is turning the deep blue of pen and marker ink, and billowing grey clouds advance to cover its endless plains. They might be in for a storm, but Kieran has an umbrella large enough for the both of them, and a feeling that whatever Mason wants to tell him, this is the right time.
“I wish I weren’t a werewolf. I wish I weren’t so strong,” he says. In the low light, Mason’s face from the side is half shadow and half glow. “Just now, I could have hurt you—I felt it. I could have broken your shoulder, or hit you, or left you for dead—I’m sorry, I don’t know why I think like this, I’d—I would never—“
He turns his head away and falls silent.
Kieran takes his hand. Mason has large hands and long fingers and exceptionally tanned palms, and now those same features are cold, stiff. “Is this okay?” he asks.
“Yeah.”
Kieran plays with his fingers while Mason tries to find words. In the twilight, Mason’s ears darken.
“When I was younger,” he mutters, “I would morph randomly. And I didn’t really control it. I couldn’t be bothered to, and I thought it was amazing and free, and I let myself run wild. Then one time when I turned back, my friend’s parents came to our doorstep and showed me this long scratch on their kid’s arm. He was wailing and hiding behind the door, not wanting to see me, and I still remember his tears. I was a kid, Kieran, and that was another kid. And that was something I could do. I was made to be powerful. And I—I don’t want to—hurt anyone. I can’t. But I keep thinking, and it scares me so much, not what I could do but what I might, one day, if I don’t control myself.”
Kieran doesn’t know the perfect words to respond to this, so he can only try just like Mason tried. In the unfathomable darkness, his face breaks into a small smile.
“Then…I guess you’ve said it. You thought of it, and you controlled yourself, and you’ve never harmed anyone. Nobody thinks you would harm anyone, Mason. You’re holding back,” he says. “You can do anything you want with me. Don’t worry about hurting or not hurting—I trust you. If it hurts I will tell you, and I know you’ll hear me. That’s really all there is to it. You’re—“
He falters. There aren’t good words for this.
“You’re wonderful,” he settles on.
Mason’s lips part slightly, then he closes them. They’re silent for a while before Kieran pulls Mason’s hand closer to him and kisses it on the knuckle, the exact place Mason kissed him but on the other hand. They match.
“You’re good, and you’re strong. Both things to be proud of,” he says again.
Mason breathes in and trembles, then relaxes and ruffles Kieran’s hair. “You’re right,” he says, “you are right. That’s correct.”
“Hey,” Kieran complains. “Watch the hair.”
Still he leans into it, because Mason’s hand is warmer now and he can nearly hear the susurration of the blood in his palm. Mason brushes his hair back and grins at him, then gulps down his strawberry milk and throws the empty bottle into a nearby bin. “Also no comments. It’s not bad, I guess,” he says.
”You should stick to chocolate if you like it that much.”
”Yeah, maybe I should,” Mason concedes. “We should go. It’s gonna rain soon.”
On the way home, there are no sounds except for their footsteps, and the giant lake near both their homes glitters with the threads of light from ships, churns the fluffy trees’ silhouette to become one with the darkness of the rest of the world. They are friends now, something’s changed today, and Kieran can sense it in the way Mason slings his arm over Kieran’s shoulder unapologetically and pulls him close, and Kieran basks in the way he smells like sweat and a zing of summer and artificial strawberries, a light moustache of milk still on his lips. God, Kier, you’re so cold, Mason says, and Kieran calls it the wind, and then they’re talking on and on again.
Even without it being said, Mason must know that the day he and Kieran fought, Kieran hadn’t been scared with that primal fear of facing a werewolf with its claws and jaws out, because he knew he could’ve been hurt, but would’ve been safe.