Not a French Artist from the '30s

or alternatively: First Impressionism

Tucker knew as soon as he woke up that today was not going to be his day.

At first he put it down to the splitting headache from staying up until 3 a.m. playing Black Ops XXIII. He smacked his phone screen to stop the alarm (set to the zen xylophone-ish thingy, which ceased to be soothing around the seventh time it woke him up) and rolled over to face the wall and doze for just a few more seconds…

Tucker knew when he woke up the second time that there was more to it than a headache brought on by his own lack of regard for his health and wellness. There was an itch in the clumps of tendon and the marrow of his bones, and it made him uneasy. Reluctantly, he rolled out of bed and landed carefully on the balls of his feet. His limbs didn't feel like they belonged to him, and he found he suddenly hated the feeling of friction pulling at his skin. Something's coming.

He padded across the wooden floorboards toward the long, thin rectangle of light at the bottom of his window curtain. It picked out the reflective surfaces of his room in a sort of dreamlike, dusty blue. Something's close. He wrapped his fingers gingerly around the cord–something's!–and suddenly pulled with all his might. The curtain whirred upward with a noise like a chainsaw, drenching the room in bright morning sunlight, and Tucker stumbled back, blinking, the feeling dispelled and his limbs once more his own. Still awkward, too-long teenager limbs, but no longer floating or itching in the silence.

Tucker wondered why he was shaking.

He stared out the window for a minute at the sun-stained telephone pole and the five crows balanced on its crossbeams. Occasionally one would rustle its wings, and then another would object to being jostled and take a quick snap at it, and there would be a brief flurry of motion before all again went still, watching the sun. Tucker watched it with them until he could feel that the sweat had dried on his hairline.

Then he turned around to grab some clothes. God damn it, where was his beret?! Did his mom seriously expect him to wear a normal hat? At least yesterday's shirt passed the sniff test, so he had that going for him.

The rest of his morning routine went much the same way. At 9:27 he pounded down the stairs to find his mom, a short woman in her fifties with cropped hair and an easy smile, sitting at the kitchen island reading the newspaper. Light wooden cabinets protruded over the granite countertops at just about head height around the room, and in the center was the kitchen island, finished in the same dark granite with an inset white sink. He swept past toward the pantry with a quick "Morning!"

"Morning, baby, you've got toothpaste on your cheek," she responded without looking up. How did she even know? Her mom instincts were truly terrifying. He swiped at his cheek with one hand (ineffectually, as a look in the mirror would tell him later) as he snatched the cereal box out of the pantry with the other and dumped about half of it into a bowl.

Tucker's dad strode in as he was halfway through a gigantic, milk-sodden bite and raised one skeptical eyebrow. "Where does it all go? That's enough cereal for two hollow legs and an arm, Tuck."

"Two words: growth spurt." Tucker grinned around his bite of cereal.

"Aren't you getting a little old for that, buddy?"

Tucker glared at him as he chewed the last of his bite. "I'm about to hit a growth spurt that will have all the ladies swooning over me. Aaany minute now, just you watch."

The corners of Mr. Foley's mouth twitched upwards. "Oh, we're watching. Right now I'm watching you eat a borderline blasphemous amount of Lucky Charms. The chemicals in that stuff are more likely to stunt your growth than anything."

"I'll eat a salad for lunch or something."

His mom, whom he'd all but forgotten, laughed from behind the newspaper. "Sure you will."

"Hey, whose side are you on?!" Tucker took another indignant bite.

She folded down the paper so just her eyes were showing and gave him a deadpan look. "I've spent the last fifteen years trying every trick in the book to get you to look at a vegetable; whose side do you think I'm on?"

Damn, he was outnumbered. They won this round. It was extremely unlikely that he was going to eat a salad for lunch. He lapsed into half-serious sullen silence as he plowed through the remainder of his Lucky Charms and his dad headed upstairs to grab his suitcase.

Tucker's dad was an associate at a law firm that had first grown in Chicago and then begun to slowly but surely crop up in the surrounding cities and counties of Illinois. Amity was decent-sized, so the offices here took up a few floors of the tallest building in the business district, and the commute from the suburbs was an easy twenty minutes by car. That was also convenient for his mom's job as restaurant manager at Amity's hippest new hipster eatery (not restaurant–that wouldn't be hipster enough), Nagual's on 7th. Maurice Foley was a lean man in his fifties with a hairline just beginning to recede but a full goatee still going strong. He wore slightly outdated suits not because he couldn't afford new ones but because Tucker's mom, Angela, was the only one in the family with any sense of style (which was also why she kept trying to get rid of Tucker's beret in various creatively sneaky ways).

He had almost finished his bowl and was fishing out the last of the marshmallows so he could slurp the rest when his mom looked up again. "Oh, Tucker, you remember you're supposed to help Tristan with his project today, right? Something about photography?"

"Yeah, that's why I'm up before noon on a Saturday." He gave her a quick hug around her shoulders from the back before heading toward the stairs. "Love you!"

"Love you, too," she called back absently, already returning to the paper.

That is, until he stopped at the foot of the stairway. "Hey, mom? You wouldn't happen to have seen my beret anywhere, right?"

Mrs. Foley's voice was very deliberately casual from behind the paper. "Can't say I have. Looks like you'll have to go out without it. The horror!"

Tucker crossed his arms and employed his best (very manly) pout. "Mommm…."

She set down her paper with an exasperated sigh. "You're always saying you want girls to like you, and then you wear a beret 24/7! You are not a French artist from the '30s, Tucker."

"I like the beret."

"You also like all-nighter video game sessions, even though you're the one who claims it makes your brain feel like feta cheese the next day."

"Can I please have my beret?"

She sighed again and cast her eyes heavenward. "It's in the laundry room."

"Thanks, mom!" Tucker shot her his best roguish grin and jogged down the hallway. He swept back through the kitchen on his way to the door, but this time she didn't have a perky farewell for him; she'd set the newspaper on the table and was leaning down close to it, brow furrowed in consternation. "Tucker, honey," she asked, "do you know a girl named Amber McClain?"

Tucker thought about it. It sounded familiar, but…. "Nope. Why, who is she?" But his mom just waved him off, eyes sliding intently down the page. Tucker shrugged and pulled on his beret.

Now properly uniformed and armored against the day, he headed out the door just in time to beg a ride into town from his dad. In the car, he checked his texts: two pictures of him making weird faces in middle school from Sam, a notification from his own specially coded calendar app that his science lab was due Tuesday, and one from his cousin Tristan asking if Tucker could bring his heavy-duty filming gear. Luckily, he'd assumed it would be needed and packed accordingly.

His dad dropped him off in the parking lot of Amity Park's main park (heh), and he pushed through the slightly rusty metal gate to find Tristan and his senior friends already waiting for him. Tristan was a tall kid, with lighter skin than Tucker but the same honey-brown eyes and strong nose Tucker's mom shared with her sister. "Tuck!" he called from the nearest weathered wooden table, where he was arranging a variety of props that seemed to include a polyester toga, a bunch of plastic breastplates, and a surprisingly realistic-looking trident. "Did you bring a tripod?"

"Yeah, dude, I got it." Tucker wrinkled his nose at the objects on the table. "What's this play about again?"

"We're supposed to adapt a piece of classic literature or theater into the modern vernacular, and try to apply a modern theme," spoke up a blonde girl voice, breaking out of the conversation she'd been having with the other two seniors. "We're doing Agamemnon by Aeschylus."

Tucker struggled for anything witty to say about a Greek play he knew nothing about, but by the time he'd thought of something besides "Cool" she'd already turned back to her friends, who were now arguing with Tristan about which "guard" would get to use the trident and which one would be stuck with the boring yet historically accurate sword. Tucker started pulling the legs of his tripod to full length in silence. What did you expect, they're seniors.

Amity Park Park (it was actually named after some old rich dude, but that was how Tucker liked to think about it) was a broad expanse of mostly yellowing grass abutted by a shady treed area, some fenced-in tennis courts, and a tiny library. The library looked very Brady Bunch-era with its beige brick walls and low, boxy '70s architecture. Tucker wasn't a great reader and hadn't gone in since he was a little kid, but Sam assured him he wasn't missing much in terms of variety. Scattered around the park were weathered tables with twin benches like the ones Tristan's group was sitting on right then. The lack of buildings seemed like a problem to Tucker, but when he asked, the blonde girl told him they'd film the indoor scenes at the courthouse a few minutes away (it had columns) and then went back to loudly arguing about the historical accuracy of plastic weapons.

Things got increasingly awkward as time went on; after that first stumble Tucker's tongue kept tying itself in knots, and he felt increasingly self-conscious. The only person he really knew here was his cousin, and Tristan was busy planning with the others. At least no one was really talking to him, but he kind of hoped they'd stop planning and start acting so he could do something other than fiddle around with his already-prepped equipment. He drifted over to the water fountain and was just considering re-downloading Instagram (despite his tendency to lose track of time and spend hours going through memes on Explore) when Tristan clapped his hands. "Alright, guys, let's get going! Tuck, is everything ready?" Tucker gave him two thumbs up.

The next two hours were a lot more fun. Tristan had a lot of interesting ideas for camera angles, and the Latina girl playing Clytemnestra was actually really good. They were halfway through the final scene ("But Iphigenia's never coming back, and for that I could never give you the death you deserve, not if I had a thousand more knives and you a thousand more breaths to suffer through. So I didn't do this for revenge. I did it because she deserved a better world than the one she got. A world without you") when Tristan, his character having just died offscreen, sneezed loudly from behind the camera. Clytemnestra giggled and then quickly tried to cover it with a wild, expansive gesture of one bloodsoaked hand, only to accidentally smear red food coloring on the nose of her co-conspirator and boyfriend, "Aegisthus." Tristan yelled, "Cut!" and everyone groaned.

"Once more from the top?" questioned the blonde girl (Tucker hadn't actually caught her name, so he was just thinking of her as her character, Cassandra). "I'm down to redo my monologue, but I still think Tristan and I should die on-screen. We've got more than enough ketchup."

"But we don't have retractable knives, and anyway it's not in the actual play! I don't want to get marked down, we talked about this," complained "Aegisthus."

"But what better way to contrast Cassandra's impotence with Clytemnestra's agency outside of the moral system?"

"Jesus, Caeley, it's a high school project. We're not submitting this to the Cannes Film Festival."

Tristan sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Alright, you guys can fight this out again if you want. I'm going to the bathroom." He turned and started to walk toward the library, which was about fifteen yards away.

Tremors exploded across Tucker's skin. All of a sudden he was shaking and short of breath and cold even in the heat of a hot September afternoon. The itch was back in his joints, but ten times worse, and all he could do was stare at Tristan's retreating back with his heart in his stomach and his throat at the same time. Something's coming. Now. Tristan pulled open the door of the library, the bell over the door somehow managing to tinkle loud enough across the whole park to overpower the bickering behind him, and Tristan paused, door open in his hand, for a long few seconds. One hand clutched absently at his chest. Don't go in there, don't go in there, don't go–

Tristan marched purposefully into the library.

Tucker's tremors subsided enough that he could catch his breath, but he was sweating buckets, and he couldn't look away. The deep feeling of unease in his chest only grew stronger, making him queasy. And Tucker knew something bad was about to happen.

Not just as an instinctive thing, though. Not like "I've got a bad feeling about this." Intellectually, based on precedent, based on so many little past incidents and big ones, Tucker knew to trust his hunches. But he tried so hard not to think about them and it had been so long that he'd almost been able to dismiss it this morning, almost been able to convince himself this nameless thing was something he'd outgrown–

And he should go to the library, but he was freaking out because he also knew he wouldn't like what he found, but he didn't know what it would be, and that was terrifying. And he thought of all the times he'd had a bad feeling about a place or a stranger and ignored it, and how if anything bad had happened he'd never found out, so he could almost convince himself nothing had happened at all–

And he thought of his aunt and uncle, Tristan's mom and dad. Then he mumbled something to the rest of the group and took off running toward the library.

The librarian looked up in surprise from the book she was stamping for a little girl when he threw open the glass door. The bell pealed almost reproachfully, the high pitches piercing through the tight knot in his chest, and he made a beeline for the checkout desk. "Miss? Where's the bathroom?"

She laughed–the mystery of his entrance solved–and leaned over the desk to point in and to the left. "Right back there, through the nonf–" He was gone before she could finish her sentence.

Tucker sprinted past rows of shelves, not even noticing the two little girls on a high ladder or the shifty-looking man with a ponytail who turned around, startled, as he pounded by. Something is–someone is–! By now he was breathing hard for normal reasons: Tucker was really out of shape. He started to lag, but then a faint thud from the bathroom had him redoubling his speed. He threw open the door and stopped short, almost tripping over oh holy fuuu–

Tristan was sprawled across the dirty tile floor, muttering something. There was blood on his head and on the door of one of the stalls, and his shirt looked dark and sticky and there was something sticking out of it. There were grainy red smears across half of the bathroom. Someone in a hoodie was dragging him through another door on the other side of the room, ten feet away—and the door behind Tucker had just swung shut.

The person's head snapped up, showing Tucker a cheap plastic mask. The fluorescent lights flickered and went out. Tucker grabbed behind him for the door handle with sweaty hands and tried to yell, but his voice wouldn't work. Tristan made a noise–was that Tristan? He turned to the door, but it still wouldn't open–and he felt movement behind him and he yanked at the door handle with his entire body and SOMETHING WAS COMING and he screamed.

A heavy weight thudded against his back, and he was dragged down, banging his shoulder on the door as he kicked and fought frantically to get away from whatever had its arms around him. Then there was a hand on his mouth and he bit and the weight was off of him with a cry of pain. He wrenched himself off the floor and threw himself back onto the door handle. Behind him he heard a door open and shut, just as he got his own door open and fell into the bookshelf opposite before scrambling up to his feet again, back against the bookshelf, eyes locked on the open door of the bathroom. His heart was going to beat out of his chest.

The bathroom was empty.

Well, no, Tristan was there, laying on the ground, and the ground was red, and the grout between the tiles was never going to be unpleasantly greyish-white again because the stains would never come out. But the other door (maintenance closet, his brain supplied helpfully) swung shut again, and the bathroom was empty.

The man with the ponytail and the two little girls were staring at him with wide eyes from the end of the aisle. The librarian was sprinting toward them. "Oh my god, are you okay?" One of the little girls started crying, and with a start Tucker realized he was, too. He was sobbing. Slowly, he slid down to the ground, feeling the wood shelves bump, bump, bump against his spine.

He looked again at Tristan, bleeding on the floor, and he knew he should check on him, but he wouldn't. He wouldn't go back in that bathroom.

Instead, he turned to the librarian, slowly, fighting through a bone-deep exhaustion like he'd never felt before. "Call 911."

~(*0*)~

Tristan was awake when they bundled him into the ambulance, head lolling to the side and mouth muttering things that Tucker couldn't understand until the EMTs finally strapped the oxygen mask on. Three hours and a trauma blanket later, the policeman with the short red beard allowed Tucker to leave with his parents, though not before making sure to obtain a phone number in case the police needed a follow-up statement. Tucker's parents hugged him for a full two minutes in total, and they had an early dinner at his favorite restaurant, Steak Your Life on It, on the way home. Somehow everything tasted bland. He just wanted to go to sleep.

Before she would let him go upstairs, though, his mom took him through to the right and sat him down at the dining room table. The dining room's blue walls looked almost a sickly brown in the orange-yellow light of the small iron chandelier that lit the room. Two of his dad's amateur paintings on the walls showed leafy outdoor scenes, and Tucker found himself distracted by the way the lights also reflected in the polished mahogany of the table, turning the table into a stagnant pond and the dining room as a whole into a murky swamp lit by fireflies. Angela Foley looked him in the eye. "Tucker. I know you're going to be very careful from now on, and I'm sorry for how you had to learn, but your dad and I think it's best you understand everything. Did you hear about Mrs. Ainara? Her son Kwan is in your class."

Tucker, who had been sort of staring at the ground next to her, looked up and made eye contact at that. "Yeah, we had a memorial assembly last week. Second day of school."

"What I doubt they told you, and since you don't read the newspaper what you might not know, is they think she was murdered by someone who was already responsible for two other deaths in Chicago. And last month they found the body of a girl who used to go to your school, Amber McClain, within Amity city limits. They're still investigating."

Tucker's eyes widened. "So I–was that…?"

"No. Look at me. We don't know anything right now, but the police are inclined to investigate in that direction as well as all the others. So if some of their questions seemed weird, that was why."

Tucker started. "They...they asked me if Tristan had ever been to Chicago. I didn't know."

"Right. So we don't know anything right now, but–and I'm sure I don't have to tell you this–you need to be very careful from now on. Anywhere you go, I want you to bring a friend. If you're sleeping over at Sam's house, make sure her parents will be there as well, and if they're going out of town offer to let her stay with us. And if you see anyone weird or suspicious around the school or really anywhere, you call the police and let them know. Got it?"

Tucker nodded. His mom regarded him sternly for another moment, and then her face broke and she pulled him into a tight hug. "Whoever it is, they're going to catch him soon. Okay, baby? You're safe with us. You're safe." He nodded into her shoulder, eyes finally dry.

But if he really paid attention, the feeling was still there. Like a mosquito buzzing just out of hearing range, like knowing there's something crawling across your skin even though you can't actually feel it. And with a start, he realized he'd felt it before, that this was something he could classify based on past experiences and the ache of hard-won instinct in the back of his skull, based on the crawling sensation that had plagued him in the weeks before Mikey Sullivan's dad was diagnosed with cancer and the memory of some several-celled organism that saw a dot in the sky 66 million years ago and for the first time understood the true meaning of death from above.

Something was still coming. In fact, something had just begun.

~(*0*)~

Tucker woke up from a turbulent sleep at noon on Sunday, then stayed in bed and played video games for the rest of the day. He ate a lot of chips, and his mom kept bringing things like apple sticks with peanut butter and pizza pockets for variety. It was a good move. By the end of the day, he'd managed to spend a few hours forgetting, not thinking about it at all. He was also bored out of his mind, bored enough to actually willingly finish the rest of his homework besides CompSci (he'd finished that Friday since it was actually interesting, even if the pace of the class was a little slow). By 10:00 he'd realized something surprising: He wanted to go to school the next day.

His mom was exceedingly shocked at this declaration, mostly because he'd never before in his life expressed an actual desire to go to school the next day. Quite the opposite, actually. But Tucker was bored, and there was only so long one could subsist on pizza pockets and peanut butter.

(And if his skin was still itching when he sat still for too long...well, he wouldn't have been able to put it into words if he'd tried. The concept didn't really translate into English. He wondered if there was some perfect word out there, if a few hundred hours and a Duolingo account would allow him to define and categorize the feeling of wrong in his chest and the backs of his nostrils. He suspected not.)

The next morning he got up in the usual way, with only a vague feeling like cat's paws running down his back. He brushed his teeth in the usual way, he had a slight pounding behind his eyes but no headache, and he didn't flinch at small noises or anything like that. His nervous system had settled down, as much as it ever did. And that, somewhat ironically, was making him nervous.

He caught the bus to school and sat with a vague sort-of friend, occasionally making conversation but mostly scrolling through memes on Reddit. The bus had a funky smell to it, like the unholy lovechild of Axe body spray and the fungal cultures in AP Biology classroom, which contributed to his desire to keep his mouth shut for the duration of the ride.

So Tucker didn't really talk to anyone until he got to first period, where Sam glommed onto his wrist like a starfish with a wild look in her eyes. "Tucker! Why the hell didn't you answer my texts?! I heard something happened at the library, and then my parents heard from Mrs. Rodriguez that your cousin got hurt, and then we didn't know what was happening and you could've been hit by a truck or something and I—"

"Woah, Sam, calm down! I'm okay." He subtly tried to pry her hand off his wrist and failed, which was a bit humiliating because his gaming fingers were really the only muscles that he exercised regularly and strenuously. "And they think Tristan's going to be okay too. I'll tell you what happened at lunch; I don't want to" —he side-eyed the rapidly filling classroom— "make a big deal out of it."

Sam gave him an assessing glance. He tried for a smile and added, "Plus, showing this much emotion in public is not your style. You're going to ruin your rep."

Sam hmphed and slid into her seat. Tucker did the same, wincing when his bruised hip from hitting the bathroom floor banged into the metal bar attaching the desk to the chair. A few idle conversations fluttered through the air around them, and Tucker just as idly tuned in. Certain voices, mostly the A-listers since to a man they all talked unnecessarily loudly, popped out and then faded back like he was switching between distant, staticky radio stations. "—4th of July? That was insane dude I don't even rem—" "Yeah, his name's Josh and he's super sweet, I—" "—do the reading last week, it was a total waste of—"

Mr. Lancer strode into the classroom five minutes late and everyone immediately quieted down. Baldness, literary swearing, and conspicuous gut notwithstanding, Lancer was a good teacher and an intimidating one. You could tell he enjoyed his power by the faint smirk that drifted across his face when silence fell.

He gave the room one imperious survey as he walked to his desk and then gestured impatiently to someone standing just outside the door. A skinny, pale teenager with black hair took a few reluctant steps into the classroom and stood to the side of the desk. He looked like a normal high schooler besides the huge backpack, which made him look like a snail who was also an apocalypse prepper.

Tucker's skin immediately tried to crawl off of him.

Sam gave him a weird look, and he realized his breathing had gone funky. He consciously controlled it and looked back at the the new kid, whom Mr. Lancer had just introduced as Denny Feldman or something, from Chicago. The new kid hooked his thumbs behind his backpack straps and scanned the room nervously. Was nervously really the right word? No, warily. That was it.

Tucker's goosebumps revolted one more time, pointedly, and then the feeling settled down to a dull hum in his capillaries. But as the new kid hiked to an open seat at the back of the room, Tucker still couldn't keep his thought from earlier from ricocheting around his mind with even greater urgency.

Something had begun, and the something that had been coming? It was already here.

Notes: have I got a mystery for you

Secondary notes: I've never read agamemnon by aeschylus, but the wikipedia page was super interesting lol