Sneak Peak…
Time for a sneak peak at The Light Between Us..
Chapter 1 - The Girl with the Sketchbook
Sean
By the time art rolled round, Sean had already done two laps of the new-boy circuit: the Geography teacher who paused just long enough on “O’Connell” to make the class turn and look, the way a crowd checks the scoreboard when a substitute jogs on; and Maths, where the seating plan was a map he couldn’t read and where the boy next to him hid a calculator in a pencil case like contraband. Names were called, heads swiveled, eyes made their small judgements and then pretended not to. The morning had been a series of doors the colour of old mustard and the clack-clack of a clock that seemed to skip when no one watched.
Fourth period Wednesday, 11 September 1985. The door to Art B swung with a heavy fire-door sigh that smelled like varnish and last year’s turpentine. The handle was cool and faintly sticky, the way handles are in rooms where paint dries and people forget to wash their hands properly. Walking in felt like stepping into a cupboard of light.
The room itself looked tired in a cosy way. Paper strips were stapled in uneven bunting along the pinboards—colour wheels sun-faded to polite pastels, a few with thumbtack bruises. A drying rack crouched in the corner like a metal accordion full of other people’s wet seascapes, waves arrested just before they lost their edges. The sinks were scarred with a century of rinsed-out blues and browns; someone had tried to scrub the stains into submission and given up. The taps whistled as soon as you asked anything of them, which made you feel guilty for wanting water. On the windowsill, a tray of misfit jam jars held turps, water, two brushes with chewed ferrules, and a single white carnation that no one confessed to bringing.
There was a smell he didn’t have words for—part pencil shavings, part that chalk-dust lemoniness of old rubber, part glue that called itself “non-toxic” purely out of optimism. The radiator under the window ticked itself warmer, even though it wasn’t cold. Sun arranged itself in oblongs across the tables, lighting up the daisy-snow of eraser crumbs . When someone scraped a chair, dust motes lifted like tiny startled birds.
He picked the desk by the window because the light was better and because he could see the field through the glass. There—half behind a PE shed and half in view—stood his tree, the crooked one, leaning into the day like it had heard a joke. From the right angle it looked heroic; from most of the others, it looked like it had lost a fight with a storm sometime in the seventies and decided to keep the scar. Just looking at it settled something and unsettled something at the same time. He opened his sketchbook, stroked the elastic flat against the cover—two strokes, left to right, his new ritual—then slid the loop off and felt the book sigh open.
Mr Ellis did his roll call in a voice that had retired from caring and then returned part-time. “Perspective,” he announced, underlining the word on the board in capitals that looked like railway lettering. “Lines that converge at a vanishing point. All right? We’re going to draw the windows. Two-point perspective. No, you can’t draw Transformers, Darren.” He wrote VANISHING and the G fell heavy, as if even letters wanted to lean. Mr Ellis’s beard, Sean decided, looked like someone had drawn it on with willow charcoal and fixed it with hairspray. He had, everyone said, a bottom drawer containing three confiscated Walkmans and a tangle of orange-foam headphones, trophies from corridor skirmishes. The drawer was famous the way a shark is famous: you didn’t want to meet it up close.
Sean tried to pay attention. He truly did. But the rectangles of light kept dragging his eyes to the field, to the way sun fell across the grass differently here than in his old school—the green a shade yellower, the shadows a little sharper, as if someone had turned the contrast up on the borough. The window glass had a bubble in it that smudged one corner of the world and sharpened the rest. He looked back down at the page, hovered his pencil over the paper, then lowered it. The lead bit cleanly. He began with the obvious: the window frame, the sill, the latch like a bent finger. The lines came out too confident, then not confident enough. He rubbed one and watched a grey blur appear like a bruise.
A movement caught his eye: two desks ahead, middle row. Dark hair, shoulder-length, clipped back with a tortoiseshell slide, a graphite streak on the side of a forefinger. She was hunched over her page in that way that meant she’d forgotten the room; her pencil moved in sure, staccato gestures, flick-flick-pause, a rhythm you could set a metronome by. She wasn’t drawing the windows. Of course she wasn’t. She’d turned her body to steal the same sightline as his—out to the field, to the tree.
If you enjoyed that sneak peak into the life of Sean O’Connell, you can pre-order the kindle version of The Light Between Us by clicking here.
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