Feast of Sparks

Chapter One Eight Years AgoSt. Sebastian knew better than to look. St. Sebastian always knew better. He looked anyway. As the lector read aloud from the Book of Romans and the usual rustle of coughs and shifting seats filled the nave, St. Sebastian Perth Martinez turned his head and he looked. “I do not understand my own actions,” the lector said, and the microphone on the pulpit sent the words echoing everywhere. “For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate.” Across the aisle, in the very front row, Auden Guest listened along with the reading. He didn’t listen the way his parents did—with stiff-straight backs and bland expressions—no, Auden had his head bowed over a Bible and followed along with a pencil. He had glasses on, St. Sebastian noticed with a twist in his stomach. No one at school wore glasses if they could help it, and here was Auden in tortoiseshell frames like a professor, bent over a f*****g Bible, no less. His hair had grown out just enough that it waved over his eyes, and every few moments he had to shake it free so he could keep reading. It pissed St. Sebastian off. Everything about Auden pissed St. Sebastian off, actually. The glasses, the Bible, the hair. The expensive trousers and the shirt that pulled across his shoulders and his f*****g tie. The awful way his Adam’s apple knotted above his collar whenever he glanced up at the lector. The stupid swoop of his upper lip, which he would not stop tracing with the eraser of his pencil, tracing it the way St. Sebastian sometimes traced his own mouth at night, alone, imagining it was someone else. Anyone else. “For I know nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh,” the lector continued, and St. Sebastian’s mother glanced over at him. St. Sebastian immediately threw his gaze forward, as if he’d been paying attention all along. When Jennifer Martinez looked, she looked, and the look was the only warning you got. If you ignored the look and kept goofing off, there was hell to pay. She was already on edge because he’d worn eyeliner and his Thirty Seconds to Mars T-shirt to church, and St. Sebastian knew she wasn’t going to be tested a single bit more, not today. St. Sebastian didn’t always mind this; his mother’s scolds and swats came from the same place her smiles and hugs came from, and as much as he’d sulk and scowl and storm up to his room after getting in trouble, it was an indisputable fact that his mother loved him. She loved him when he f****d up at school, she loved him when he f****d up at home. She loved him when he told her he hated her, when he told her he wished he’d never been born, when he told her he was going to run away because he hated it so f*****g much in Thorncombe he could scream. So she loved him even when there was hell to pay. The hell was part of her love, and such an embedded curl in St. Sebastian’s DNA that he didn’t know what to do without it. When there were teachers who let him get away with mischief and other adults who let him get away with mayhem, he felt strangely bereft. He felt unmoored. Because love meant hell sometimes. This made sense to St. Sebastian, even if he didn’t always like it. But he didn’t want to be in trouble now. The Guests only came to Dartmoor a few times a year, which meant St. Sebastian only got to see Auden a few times a year, and seeing Auden was like touching one’s tongue to a battery—pleasantly unpleasant. A shock one couldn’t help but repeat over and over again, as if expecting each time to be different. It was never different. The lector finished, and then it was time to stand for the Gospel reading. St. Sebastian noticed that Auden’s mother seemed pale and shaky the entire time—a hand trembled so badly that Auden took it in his own, and she gave her son a watery, grateful look in return. A look that vanished the moment she saw her husband looking at her. It was St. Sebastian’s experience that most happy or grateful looks disappeared in the presence of Ralph Guest. He sometimes imagined what it would be like to go up and push him, go up and hit him, for no other reason than that St. Sebastian used to be terrified of him as a boy and therefore resented him. I’m almost as tall as him now, he thought fiercely. I could do it. He’d have to get in line behind Auden though, from the looks of things. Auden glanced over to his father and gave him a dirty enough stare that St. Sebastian could feel it even from across the aisle. And then Auden gave a quick look around, as if to make sure no one witnessed the painful family display the Guests had just put on for the congregation. Those hazel eyes flicked around the nave and then landed on him. St. Sebastian could tell the moment Auden recognized him; he could see the widening of those hypnotic eyes and the part of his expressive mouth. He looked as if he wanted to say something, and St. Sebastian felt his hand twitch, like he was going to wave, and then self-loathing spiked through him and he scowled and looked away. He refused to look at Auden again for the rest of the service. He knew better after all.