“Nearly doesn’t count,” I say.
“Silver, gold, blue, red and yellow.” He looks at me in the rear-view mirror. “You get yellow.”
“Are we going to do this or not?” Mel yawns.
“I vote not,” I say.
“Enough, Mikey,” Henna says, scornfully enough to make my stomach hurt. She gets out of the car.
The back seat follows her and I’m last, looking like I’m pouting as I accept the can of yellow paint.
The bridge isn’t actually all that big, crossing just two lanes of an old logging road. There are embankments either side leading up to it, and people sometimes paint the concrete ledges of these, too. We don’t. We don’t want to waste any time. I follow Henna up the right embankment where she’s walking with Mel. Jared and Nathan head up the other side. The idea is you stand on the bridge and lean over the top, writing whatever you want from above.
There’s a lot of shaking of paint cans, a lot of the metallic pinging sound of the ball-bearing they leave inside to stir the paint.
“We don’t have white,” I whisper, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You’re supposed to have white to paint over what went before.”
“Not if you’re creative enough,” Nathan says. He’s already reached the far end of the bridge, and with his can of gold paint, he turns a shoddily painted cardinal – our sad school mascot; I’ve never seen a live one the whole of my life I’ve lived in this state – into, I’ll admit it, a fairly nifty-looking bumblebee. I see Jared nod in appreciation, and my irritated stomach growls some more.
Mel’s got the dark blue and has made her way to the middle of the bridge, leaning over decisively and painting “A Year Too Late” in puffy blue letters over some streaked puffy pink ones that obviously got rained on.
“Do you really believe that?” I ask her.
“Oh,” she says, “I had no idea this was about what we really believed.” She pops the cap back on her paint can, takes out her phone, and starts texting Call Me Steve, who’s on nights.
I lean out over the bridge to see what Nathan’s finishing up. The bumblebee now flies away from a golden arm that it’s just stung. “Leave Your Sting Behind”, he writes.
“Bees die when they do that,” I say. Henna nudges me, annoyed.
“It’s a metaphor,” Nathan says.
“Metaphorical bees die, too.”
Jared’s at work with the silver paint, covering up a heart celebrating the no doubt eternal love of Oliver and Shania. He takes the gold paint from Nathan and sprays a circle and some markings against the still-wet bed of silver.
“What’s that?” Nathan asks.
“Kind of my own personal tag,” Jared says.
I don’t recognize it, but I can see a line of cats stopped just outside the streetlight down the road. I wonder if it’s a kind of standing blessing for them, as long as it lasts. They don’t come any closer, and I also wonder if they know Jared doesn’t want them to. No one’s told Nathan that anything’s different about Jared. It’s a pact we all silently keep. Who’d believe us anyway? Indie kids are dying before their eyes and no one’s even guessing at what’s probably the real reason. These Immortals that Meredith found. Or not. But it sure as hell isn’t accident or suicide.
“Why are you in such a bad mood?” Henna says to me, shaking her can of red paint.
I shrug, still pouty.
“I like Nathan,” she says.