Uncertain
Adrift
Sad
His heart was beating harder now, and tension was settling into his shoulders, his arms, his fingers where they gripped the pencil.
FUCKING ANGRY
Noah underlined those two words so hard he broke the point off his pencil. He dropped his head into his hand and sighed.
“Here, use mine. I’m done,” Mo said.
“Thanks,” Noah managed, pressure building inside his chest.
Re-reading the list, Noah had prickles running over his scalp and an uncomfortable, hollow ache ballooning behind his sternum. Because, holy fucking shit, he’d just admitted more in the two minutes it’d taken him to write that list than he had to any doctor—any person, period—since the IED explosion that had caused his injuries almost a year ago.
Noah pressed a hand against his chest and heaved a deep breath. Christ, he was going to have a panic attack. Right here in front of all these people.
Mo slid out of his chair, stepped behind Noah, and gave him a single, solid squeeze on the back of the neck. Without a word or even a look, the big guy headed to the front of the room to help one of the students who was getting started with her clay.
And that single touch was filled with so much fundamental understanding that it pulled Noah back from the edge.
In that moment, despite the crush of bullshit in his head, Noah tossed aside his ignorance about the potential usefulness of an outlet like art and opened up to the possibility that this process—and these people—might actually help him start to get better.
At least, it had to be better than the nothing he’d been doing.
Jarvis interrupted them to explain the basics of using the molding clay, showing a short video tutorial on the screen at the front of the room to demonstrate the process. Afterward, Noah dumped the soft, colorful rectangular blocks out onto the table. The colors didn’t matter, since this was just the base on which the actual papier-mache mask would be made, but Noah still found himself gravitating to the red and blue clays nonetheless.
He squeezed the cool material in his hands, making it go pliable, as h
is gaze skimmed over his list of words again. Broken, wrecked, blind, deaf, and muted jumped out at him, and ideas started coming to mind.
The room was mostly quiet as everyone got to work. Noah pressed the clay thin and began to lay it out flat all around the face. Whatever he did was going to reflect his reduced hearing and sight on his left side, which made him realize he needed to shape a little clay on the right side—and only on the right side—for an ear.
Hmm. He wasn’t entirely sure how to do that. And that wasn’t the only place where he wasn’t sure how to get the clay to do what he wanted it to do. Because he felt like the side of the skull on the left side also needed to be misshapen or cracked or maybe in pieces. Somehow.
Which made him realize he needed to ask for help. It was suddenly very important that he get this right, that he use it to reveal his truth. Because maybe he could start finding himself again if he could just stop running from the wreckage in his head.
Noah had been working at the clay for a few minutes when Jarvis stopped at his table. “Jack Jarvis,” he said, holding out his hand.
“Noah Cortez,” Noah said, returning the shake. “So, I have a couple questions about how to do some things.”
Jarvis stepped around the table to his side. “Shoot.”
It took everything Noah had to resist the urge to flip his list face-down. “Okay, well. I want to create an ear on this side, and I’m not sure how to do that. And, uh, I think I want the skull up here by the temple and forehead to be cracked or broken.” He spoke quietly and swallowed around a lump in his throat, working hard to ignore the embarrassment spreading heat across his face as he spoke. “And I was thinking that I only want the lips to be raised on one half of the mouth. Can we, uh…” He shrugged as an uncomfortable idea came to mind, but then he thought, To hell with it, and gave it a voice. “Can we maybe decorate the finished mask with something like duct tape? Because I’m seeing something like that on the one side.”
Jarvis nodded thoughtfully, his gaze on the mask. And Noah appreciated the hell out of that because he wasn’t sure he could handle eye contact right now. Not when just asking those questions felt a whole helluva lot like he’d just flayed off some of his skin. “Absolutely on the duct tape. Any detail work you want will be done at the papier-mache stage. So if you wanted to do cracks in the surface, for example, those can be carved in with an X-Acto knife when the mache is dried. But if you wanted to do some that was irregular or bumpy, you would do it now with the clay. Just build it up along this side however you want.”
Ideas raced through Noah’s head as the other man spoke. He liked the idea of carving cracks into the mask. “And the ear? Because this looks like Mr. Potato Head,” he said, pointing to one of his attempts.
Jarvis laughed. “What about something like this?” The guy had magic fingers, apparently, because within a few minutes he created something that was exactly the right size, shape, and proportion for the mask.
“Yeah,” Noah said. “Thank you.”
“You got it,” Jarvis said. “Holler if you need me. For anything,” he added. And that time he not only made eye contact, but communicated in one quick look that he got what Noah was going through, even though he hadn’t asked why Noah wanted to disfigure half the face or only put an ear on one side.
Noah glanced around the room at all these people. People with feelings and challenges not so different from his own. Teaching a class like this probably meant Jarvis had a lot of experience working with vets like Noah.