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Dustin got a lot of attention at school. His dragon installation, which he called Speciocide, had been shipped and assembled at the end of September. New York Magazine had phoned the school, asking for him to do an interview.

He’d declined.

Cary was back but had been staying at his apartment above the tow shop. Shane let Laney drive the truck to check on the house a few times now that she had her learner’s permit, yelling at her from the passenger seat to focus and reaching across her lap and grabbing the wheel whenever she talked with her hands and took them off it. He always looked like he was going to have a heart attack, when she drove.

Nobody had heard from Linette since Christmas.

Sarita showed up at Jerry’s one night, screeching into Jerry’s driveway and banging on the door, screaming at them that it was their fault that Cary had left her. Jerry drove her home in her car, Shane following in his truck to bring Jerry back. They smoked a lot of hash on the porch, that night.

Shane drove Dustin to the bus stop every day, and then drove Laney right to school. If he didn’t take her she wouldn’t go, preferring to lay in Shane’s bed, trying to get him to skip work. Sometimes she succeeded. It grossed Dustin out, whenever he heard the moans and grunts and other sounds coming from Shane’s room.

It grossed Jerry out, too, and Jerry started spending a lot of time in the detached shop with Dustin, watching him work on his next piece.

Mr. Bard had insisted on an exclusive contract for Dustin’s next three pieces of installation art, but Dustin was taking a break from the heavy metals, his fingers burning in the cold, and was working on a series of large paintings instead, four canvases ten feet wide. He was trying to find a way to get the paint to look like metal, but it was hard work, and he fell into bed exhausted and stained with oil paint every night, the constant sounds of Shane and Laney’s love-making the backdrop of his nightly dreams.

As Christmas approached, the canvases took on a decidedly ominous feel, the blues bleeding into blacks, the yellows into greys, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn’t seem to work any colour into the pictures.

It was like the canvas was trying to warn him that something was coming.

He wished he’d listened.