Page 6 of Dark Ink

He stared at me in continued shock.

I sat down, carded my fingers under my chin. “I need to teach something all third-year students are required to take.”

He’d asked if I was high.

I said “quite”.

That’s how I ended up here, in front of a lecture hall of third years at the start of term.

“Would she have gotten these emails?” I asked, glaring at the clock. Fifteen minutes past the start of class. And counting. Each second reducing the chance she would show up.

“She?” my star student asked.

“Yes, her,” I said.

I received nothing but confused looks. I scooped up the chalk from the board and sketched her. My Raglan Road girl. It was easy enough. I’d already practiced dozens of times. I stepped away from the board and smacked the point of the chalk against it.

“Her!” I said loudly. “Did she get the email about this class?”

They were all just as clueless as before. All just hunks of clay with unblinking glass beads wedged deep inside. Clueless about love. Clueless about passion. Clueless about pain.

I jabbed the piece of chalk at the boy in the front row. The one with all the answers. The one who knew fucking nothing. Nothing at all.

“Listen, kid, your grade in my class depends on telling me. Your future in the art world itself depends on you telling me. Tell me and I’ll connect you with every black-turtlenecked asshole in Dublin. Don’t tell me and you’ll be lucky to paint a spare piece of cardboard with a McDonald’s ketchup packet, okay?”

He’d gone white.

“Did she get the email?!”

I jammed the piece of chalk so hard against the board that it snapped in two. The kid stammered. I glared at him, which only made it worse.

“Professor M—Me—Merrick,” he tried. “I—I—I mean, I’m, I’m sorry. I—I don’t know her.”

I sucked in a shaky breath and leaned with my elbows against the lectern. My head fell between my shoulder blades and I let it hang there. Maybe I shouldn’t have gotten so high before class. But I didn’t sleep the night before. It was either thinking of my father and the phone call with Liam or thinking of the girl.

The phone call was something real, tangible. It was a pit in my stomach, a wound through the heart, a black eye that would only get blacker. I could touch it, feel it inside of me. I knew its shape, even in the dark.

But the girl was elusive. She was mere shadows. Mere light. The flicker of sunlight and shadow on the grass beneath a tree. I tried to grab ahold of her, but she always darted away. Always just out of reach.

She was exhausting me. And so it was the weed to calm down. It was speed to wake up, to keep going.

“It’s okay,” I said, holding up a hand as I tried to shake my head clear. “It’s fine.”

When I looked up, my classroom of little owls were clearly concerned. I had a well-earned reputation for being a little…eccentric on campus. My art was experimental, my drug propensity common knowledge, and my behaviour erratic. This was perhaps a step too far.

This was a little too close to the real me. The tattered, torn, falling apart me. The “can’t keep doing this” me. The “something has to give” me.

“It’s fine,” I repeated as I began to gather my things into my bag. “It’s fine. Really. I’m fine. I’m totally fine.”

The girl wasn’t coming. I’d made a wrong conclusion somewhere along the line. She either wasn’t a third-year art student. Or she was the one student at Dublin Art School uninterested in taking my class.

Or she never existed at all and I was just way too high out of my mind yesterday. I told Conor and Mason as I drew her obsessively last night, trying to grab ahold of something solid that wasn’t pain, that she was real. But maybe she wasn’t.

Maybe I was just chasing a ghost. My mother maybe. A woman to love me. To heal me. To protect me.

My hands shook as I fumbled with the clasp on my old leather satchel.

“I’m not going to go there again,” I muttered, remembering that familiar cliff face, that sensation of falling, that peculiar feeling of not caring at all about hitting the bottom. The drug den. The indiscernible passing of time. The pain of clawing my way back out… “I’m not going to go there again.”

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