The Color of Darkness COMPLETE NOVEL

Adoxography

True to her word, Nova stopped seeing Chris after that night. I felt sorry for her, of course, but I was also secretly pleased. The thought of some other guy having a sort of ownership over her really bothered me; Nova didn't belong to anybody. She was as free as the wind and the rain; a wild animal that simply could not be tamed.

She didn't even belong to me.

With Chris out of the way, Nova spent a lot more time hanging out with Rick and me. Sometimes we would go to the bowling alley and bowl a game or two if we had the money. Sometimes we would play video games in my room when it got too hot out—even Nova was better than me. Most of the time, though, the three of us would simply sit down by the creek and enjoy the fact that we had absolutely nothing to worry about.

"Have you ever heard of 'adoxography'?" Nova asked on a humid afternoon in mid-July. The heat had settled on Dale like a needy lap-cat and made the whole town sweat; we would have been hanging out in my room, but our A/C had quit running the day before and none of us had money for bowling. Rick and I were sharing a two-liter bottle of Code Red and lying on the bank with our bare feet in the water. Nova was sitting in one of the lawn chairs, scratching away with a pen in an old journal.

"Is that some kind of disease?" Rick asked through a belch. I laughed; Nova rolled her eyes. Though I read a lot, I had never heard of it either, so I told her to tell us what it was.

"Adoxography is beautiful writing about a subject of little or no importance." She explained, as if she were reading it from a dictionary. "Sounds cool, doesn't it?"

"Uh, I guess." Rick didn't sound too enthusiastic.

"Hey, Puck, you write, don't you?" Nova's eyes fell on me and for half a second I felt like she knew, knew the dirty secret about my mom I had never told anyone.

"I used to... a long time ago," I said, hedging the subject. "I don't have time anymore." I hoped my excuse would suffice. Nova raised an eyebrow and gave me a questioning look, as if she knew there was more that I wasn't letting on. "Do you, um, 'adoxographize' much?" I asked, hoping to distract her.

It worked and she laughed. "Not really. Maybe I'll start now, though, it seems like a fun idea." The conversation stopped there and we lapsed into a comfortable silence again. A few minutes later, Rick sat up with a sigh and looked at us.

"What time is it?" he asked, stretching. I looked at my watch.

"Four-fifteen. Why?"

"My brother is going to have a party tonight and he said I could help set up. Wanna come?" Rick's brother Michael was a senior at Dale High and was incredibly popular for his legendary parties. According to Rick, Michael had once packed the house with over a hundred upperclassmen for an end-of-the-year blowout for two whole days, a feat that wasn't so unimaginable given the amount of time their parents spent travelling the world. Only the really "in" crowd was invited to Michael's parties. The things that happened in that house stayed in that house, only to become the whispers of legend.

I looked at Nova and she shrugged.

"C'mon guys! It'll be awesome!" Rick grinned his grin that meant something would probably go horribly wrong.

"I'll go, but only if Puck goes," Nova said, closing her journal with a soft snap. I knew then that the battle, if there was one, was lost then.

"Fine," I sighed. "I'll tell my dad I'm spending the night at your place." Rick did a fist pump (something that he had picked up recently) and jumped up, ready to go already. "Are you sure your brother won't mind?" I asked. The last thing I wanted was to be those kids, the ones who got thrown out of a senior party.