Page 4 of Haven't Killed in Years
By nightfall I foundmyself back at Painting Pots. I’d attempted to stay quarantined at home, scrolling through the options on Netflix, but my increasing agitation was a warning I knew to respect. I needed a distraction and a dose of human interaction. If someone wanted to kill me, they could try it surrounded by hyperactive children.
The store ended up being a bit of a ghost town, but fortunately for me, Porter’s essence could make an empty ballroom buzz. I allowed him to coax me away from the wheel and we sat cross-legged on top of one of the tables, painting Christmas ornaments that he pulled from the back of the stockroom. I was adding lightning bolts to a snowman for absolutely no reason. Porter was working diligently on a Santa head.
“My masterpiece.” He presented it to me, cradling it in his hands. The Santa looked possessed. There was red paint dripping from his eyes and big red lips, the two reds bleeding together.
“That’s beautiful,” I said. “Not disturbing at all.”
He turned the ornament back around to admire it. “It’s an Expressionist piece.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You wouldn’t understand,” he teased, blowing an errant strand of hair out of his face.
I smirked and went back to my bolts.
“I’m bored,” he said, throwing down the demon Santa and lying back on the table. “Entertain me.”
“You could clean the brushes.” I tipped my head toward the overflowing sinks.
He crossed his eyes and held them that way until I reached over and flicked him on the bridge of his nose, freeing him to turn on his side, propping his head up with his elbow. “I’m going to a party tonight. Do you want to come?”
“No.”
“You never say yes to anything,” he protested.
“You never ask me to do something I would actually want to do. It’s always some sort of house party that you, yourself, complain about being mostly high schoolers. It’s creepy enough that you still go; someone my age is borderline criminal.”
“What do you want to do? Get coffee? We talk here all the time. Why would we need to go talk at Starbucks?”
“Exactly,” I said, and he rolled his eyes.
Porter had taken a gap year after high school, which was a fancy way of saying his parents had blown the small savings they had sending his older sister to two years of college before she dropped out. He’d told me that on a night much like this, when we were alone in the store and he had pulled a bottle of vodka from his bag. We drank too much and got too chatty. Well, he did. I knew better than that. People feel comfortable talking to me when I want them to. It was a skill I mastered in those crucial years after I was taken frommy parents, left in a facility surrounded by children and teens with an array of poorly treated mental disorders.
Porter had told me his life story and admitted he feared that he was destined to be a townie instead of one of the pivotal voices of our generation. It seemed to unburden him and we became close-ish after that, as close as I would allow. His gap year had turned into two, and it was the only real friendship I had. I suspected it might be the same for him.
He lay back on the table, exhausted by the weight of the world. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” he asked.
“I am grown up.”
“Garbage. We need to get out of here. Let’s quit our jobs.”
“I like my job,” I said.
“You are literally the worst,” he said. “Let me come over tonight. I’ll bring drugs.”
“That’s the vaguest offer I’ve ever heard. I don’t want you showing up with a handful of Tylenol PM.” I laughed.
“Wait, can I really come over?”
“No.”
“Fine, then, I’m going to that party, but it’s your fault and I won’t accept any judgment.”
“Fine.”
“I have to shower…” He waited. I had to offer. He was polite enough to never explicitly ask.
I looked at the clock. I was technically a customer, but at this point I was more like a volunteer. I had my own keys and often came in alone early in the morning to start the kiln in exchange for the opportunity to use the studio before I had to be at work. “I can lock up.”
