Burn Read online



  Burn

  Daniel Swensen

  Text copyright © 2012 Daniel Swensen

  All Rights Reserved

  Dedicated to my wife Gina, president of the fan club.

  Special thanks to:

  Tracy McCusker for the magnificent cover illustration, editing, and painful cuts.

  Anna Meade, Angela Goff, Ruth Long, Emmie Mears, and JoAnne Teal for reading and believing. #NoInklings4ever.

  Two years ago, Cav saved my life.

  Even admitting it is hard. I'm not the kind who needs saving. If you'd told me before I met him and the rest of the Omen Project that he'd be sweeping me off my feet, I'd have laughed or punched you in the nose. He pulled me out of a death spiral. If you've ever known anyone with a penchant for self-destruction, you know they romanticize that kind of crap. Failure becomes poetry. Anger and sadness become indistinguishable from love. It's no way to live, and Cav helped me see that.

  It's going to make killing him that much harder.

  *

  "I just want to help you, Alexa," Cav says.

  He's smiling at me across the diner table. Blond hair and a five o'clock shadow, the gray shirt that shows off his arms like he knows I like. Between us, chipped Formica and old coffee cups. Looking casual and immaculate at the same time, like he always does. But his face looks ragged and tired. Finding me couldn't have been easy. Two minutes at the table, and part of me already wants to comfort him. Touch his hand. Anything.

  But no. This has to be done.

  I close my eyes and he's gone. Open them and he's there again. Still looking at me with that hesitant grin I know far too well.

  I could make him gone. One blink and he'd vaporize into a spray of ash. Screams and overturned tables, a downpour like summer rain as the heat touches off the sprinklers. I glance up, behind his left shoulder, to see if they even have a sprinkler system in this shitty little nowhere diner.

  They don't. It would all go up. One blink.

  I look down at Cav again, and I know he knows what I was looking for. He was there in Louisville, after all, and in Columbus, and in Glendora. We were a team. The team. We've been through too much for him not to know what I'm thinking.

  He knows I'm here to kill him. He has to. It's what he'd do in my place.

  I don't speak. His smile starts to curdle. Those dimples I once thought were so charming look hollow now.

  "Alexa," he says, and reaches across the table to touch my hand. I warm it up a little, just for fun, and when he touches my fingers they're steaming from where the waitress slopped Folger's onto the table. He pulls his hand back quickly and rubs it with his other hand, trying to look nonchalant. No one looks over. No one cares.

  "I just­– "

  "– want take me away from all this. I know."

  "Yes." A note of hurt in his voice.

  "Take me away from what? Going where I want? Doing what I want? Not getting stuck with needles? Not barbecuing people for the good of society? You'd better put a stop to that, huh, Cav?"

  "That's not what I meant."

  "Don't lie, sweetie," I tell him, and throw his own smile back at him. The waitress stops by and asks us if we want some pie. I say yes. Blueberry. With ice cream.

  "You want it warmed up?" she asks.

  My gaze locks with Cav's. "No thanks."

  *

  Twenty-one years ago. I'm six months old for this part.

  At first, my mother thinks it's a fever. I'm wrapped in a pink blanket, Fisher-Price mobile rattling merrily above my head. Mom tries to tuck me in and the blankets are warm, as if fresh from the dryer. She feels my forehead and I'm burning up. I'm not crying.

  She yells for my dad, who drives us to the hospital without a word, even though he's half-drunk and my mother is pretending not to notice. He's always half-drunk, except for when he's full drunk.

  When we get to the hospital, I'm not warm anymore, and I'm not crying. The doctors tell my mother that I'm fine. No fever. All she gets is a bill she can't afford because Dad's insurance is for shit.

  They bring me home, and it all starts over again.

  It turns out I just didn't like the mobile. The tinkling bells and the motion. The fat plastic angels whose cherubic faces looked malevolent. I got upset. Things around me got warmer. That's how it began.

  I was too young to remember any of that. Mom told me about it, shortly before I killed her.

  *

  "Look," Cav says over pie. I'm eating mine. He's not eating his. "All I'm asking is that we go someplace and talk."

  "We are talking," I say. A sip of coffee. The bitterness cuts through the sweetness of the pie.

  "I mean in private. The kind of things we need to discuss–"

  "People don't care," I cut in. "You taught me that, remember? Nobody cares, not about some freak of nature." I smile, tilting my head at him, like we're lovers sharing old memories. Which I guess we are.

  "I care," Cav says softly, without the usual smarm, and suddenly I'm wary. He's being earnest. I take another bite of pie, wanting to check the corners, the street outside. He didn't come alone after all. I knew he probably wouldn't. But I'd hoped, because I was still an idiot when it came to Cav.

  *

  Eleven years ago. I'm in fifth grade.

  I'm in the fields with Chris, playing in one of the old abandoned boxcars that litter the place like discarded cracker boxes. It's late August and the grass is brown from drought. Chris has stolen some kitchen matches – a box full of smaller boxes, like fiery little Matruska dolls – and we're lighting them up, a box at a time.

  We'd been trying to float them on the pond behind his house and light them there, but the lit matches fell into the water and snuffed out, or the boxes themselves just sank. So now we're burning them on the floor of the boxcars, dropping lit matches into the boxes, watching them go up in baby infernos.

  Three years ago, Chris was in a fire. A blanket dropped onto a space heater and nearly burned their house down. Chris had burn marks all over his chest and back, which he showed me once – ragged continents of scar tissue, porous and pink. I'd asked to touch one of the scars. The skin felt spongy and hard, and I wondered what it must feel like from the inside.

  I still wouldn't know. I've never been burned.

  I remember thinking Chris should have been afraid of fire. He should have wanted to avoid it. But he didn't. He loved it. I didn't understand at the time how you could possibly love something that hurt you and scarred you forever.

  The afternoon is hot, and I'm getting nervous. Chris' father is a terror – fat, loud, always angry, ready with a slap for anyone unlucky enough to come within range. He'd already dealt me one across the face when he'd caught Chris and me near the thresher. "Dangerous!" he'd bellowed. Then a slap hard enough to rock me back on my heels.

  I didn't tell Mom. If I did, then I wouldn't be able to see Chris anymore, and I liked Chris. I didn't tell Dad because he and Chris' father were buddies and I knew whose side he'd take.

  This was worse than the thresher. This would be more than one slap across the face. The next box of matches makes a flame three feet high. Chris stomps on it to put it out. Time for a fresh box.

  I'm suddenly aware of the dryness of the grass around us, the wooden floor of the boxcar, the bright pink scars running up Chris' arm as he fishes out another matchbox.

  "Maybe we should quit it," I say. "I need to get home."

  "Just one more," Chris says. "Don't be such a sissy." He's trying to wrestle another tiny box out from under the plastic lining.

  "I'm not a sissy," I say. "I don't want to get in trouble."

  "You're not going to get in trouble." he says. He's not looking at me.

  Nothing in particular sets it off. Chris doesn't
make me angry, or hit me, or threaten my life. I just blink, and the box of matches lights up in jets of hissing flame. Setting each other off. Feeding each other. I don't mean for it to happen. It just does.

  His sleeve is aflame, and now he looks like I imagine he must have looked that night when he was eight. Howling and flailing. He pitches the flaming box out of the train car, into the dry grass, and sure enough, it goes up, just like I imagined.

  Chris stops, drops, and rolls, like they taught us in school. When his sleeve is out we run from the train car, flames already lapping at the oiled metal wheels. Chris runs to his house. I run to mine. The fire trucks come, and later the news van. We gather to watch the flames from afar, and I see Chris' dad staring at me. A small part of me thinks his arm is going to snarl out like a pink rope and slap me from fifty feet away.

  We try to lie, of course, but it doesn't last long. I get grounded. Chris, I imagine, gets worse.

  But eventually, everyone forgot about it. Just stupid kids playing with matches.

  Dangerous.

  *

  "I'm not going to say that we haven't made some mistakes. All of us." He gazes at me with the flat honesty that first attracted me to him. He looks naked, vulnerable.

  I imagine heating up his eyeballs until they swell and burst like marshmallows in the microwave. I need to stay angry at him. It's the only way to make this happen. The only way I can be free.

  I should kill him before he says another word.

  "All I'm asking for is another chance," he says. "Let us make it right."

  "Us? What exactly are they going to make right, Cav? Are they going to give me my life back? I can do that myself."

  "They can give you a life, period. Someplace where you can be safe. The world isn't going to accept you, Alexa. But I can. We could finally be together."

  He reaches for my hand again, but then pulls it back. "It doesn't have to be like it was before."

  I'm staring at his hand, because I want to touch it. Hold it. This isn't going the way I want it to.

  "Oh, I can imagine," I say. "One weekend a month to leave the compound. Visiting rights if I'm very good. An extra scoop of ice cream on Sundays." I swirl my fork around in the blue-white runoff on my plate. "Nothing but sunshine and lollipops."

  His cool is starting to fray now. I can see it.

  "I don't think you're getting me, Alexa," he says. "The Project can give you your life back. They can also take it away."

  *

  Seven years ago.

  My mother tells me I can't go to the dance. I'm grounded because I was out two hours past curfew, driving with Chris around the big loop out by the dam because he just got his license. We hadn't done anything. We hadn't even made out yet, that's how shy Chris was. But I was still grounded.

  I don't blink. I don't do anything but hand her my plate, a messy pile of chicken and rice still on it. She takes it and drops it with a howl. It shatters on the floor. She weeps a little as she runs it under cold water. After about ten minutes there's a big half-moon welt on her palm, bright red and puffy. When my mother looks back at me, there's fear in her eyes. My dad barely glances at us, shoving forkfuls of greasy Rice-a-Roni into his face. Already on his third beer. He growls something about breaking the good dishes.

  He doesn't understand. He doesn't even see.

  Years later, I'll think of that moment, and it will make me sick all over again. It's the first time I deliberately hurt someone with what I can do. Long after I learned the truth about my mother, long after I'd done far worse to her, it's still the thought of her, weeping at the kitchen sink, that rises up at three in the morning and puts a blade in my heart.

  *

  Cav reaches into his jacket and pulls out a tiny bud microphone, the size of the tip of his thumb. He places it next to his coffee cup. He looks at it, and then at me, and nods his head slightly. This is the part, I suppose, where he gains my confidence.

  I decide to play the game. I don't blink. I breathe deep, and the microphone crackles. A curl of smoke rises from the plastic seams. The plastic pops and turns brown.

  "Alone at last?" I ask.

  "There's an agent across the street, on the second floor above the bank," Cav says quietly. "He has a sniper rifle aimed at your head, Alexa. He's under instructions to shoot you if I give the signal."

  "Or if you burst into flames?"

  He shrugs, as if it's no concern of his.

  "So I guess I owe you one," I say, trying to seem confident, but my stomach is a sudden knot. I thought maybe the Project wouldn't have the brass to gun me down in public. I'd underestimated them again. I want to look left but I don't dare.

  If there even is an agent. Maybe this is just another Cav lie. That's always been the problem. He's a brilliant liar, but at his heart, Cav still believes. He still thinks the Project works for the greater good. Even when they're pointing a rifle at his lover's head.

  "Won't they think something is up now that your mic's cut out? How long do I have to live, Cav?" I hear my voice break a bit and I hate myself.

  "We have a little time," Cav says, and palms the fried mic. He sips his coffee. His hand shakes just a little. "I don't want you to go back to the Project, Alexa. I never wanted that for you. When I say we can be together, I mean just you and me. I know a place where we can be safe. Where the Project won't find us. Just you and me."

  Now I know he's lying. There's no such place. He proved that.

  *

  Five years ago.

  The thing finally happens. The defining moment, I guess you'd say.

  Mr. Barker, the gym teacher, is overlooking detention, and I'm the only one in the room. There's every chance he orchestrated it this way. His perversity is a school legend, from the rumors of peepholes in the girls' locker room and gropes in the auditorium, to the time Sharon Maisee claimed she walked in on him jerking off in his office.

  Barker's not stupid. He knows how not to get caught. A teacher won't get fired for a look down a girl's blouse or an accidental bump. He also knows how to pick the girls who won't be believed when they accuse him. Like Sharon Maisee.

  So now I'm here, in detention. It's one of the claustrophobic classrooms just off the gym, windowless, peeling yellow wallpaper. Barker sits at his desk, writing on a tattered slab of legal paper, paunch bulging out of his striped shirt, his eyes occasionally flicking up to me.

  I pretend not to notice. I'm staying calm. Doing a slow burn.

  He gets up a couple of times to go do something. "Stay put," he commands each time, as if I would otherwise make a break for it. He passes right by my desk when he returns, looking down my shirt each trip. I sit back when I realize what he's doing, giving him another chance to ogle me. Go on, you've earned it. The wife won't mind.

  I didn't realize at the time how badly I wanted him to cross the line. So I could hurt him for it.

  The third time, he brushes my shoulder and back with his hand. "Some fun, huh?" he breathes. Like we're two old pals caught in the same shitty situation. Like I'm not in homeroom with his daughter.

  His touch makes my skin crawl. I smile shyly and make myself blush. It's no trick by this time to heat my own skin, to turn the flesh bright red. I've faked a dozen sick days that way already. I can pop popcorn without putting the bag in the microwave. I'm downright talented by this time.

  I toss a glance at Barker and he's looking at me with slack adoration, like he's just won the lottery.

  Just a little closer, fucker.

  At about twenty minutes to the hour he finally breaks. He gets up for the fourth time, coming to sit in the desk next to mine. He turns it around to half-face me. "Thought we should have a little chat," he says authoritatively.

  He looks at me like I'm the prey. I almost feel bad for him. Almost.

  "You know, you're a smart girl," he says, as his gaze wanders down the front of my shirt again. "Your grades are solid, and I think you're a very passionate young lady.
And I know that you've had some troubles at home– "

  His words trail off into some trite bullshit. I'm not even hearing it anymore. I've gotten the old you're-so-bright-and-pretty so many times I can recite it verbatim. I look down and see that his hand is on my knee. It's calloused, rough. It slides up my leg. I feel the edge of an old hangnail scrape against my thigh.

  I think of Chris and his bright pink scars. I open my legs, because I want his hands there, in places he can't pretend are innocent, so there can be no mistake. I close my eyes for a moment. Bright pink scars, a half-moon welt, puffy and red. I open them and his gaze is hungry, drunk with what he thinks is my permission.

  I touch his wrists. I blink and feel a white-hot pulse, building and exploding like a sneeze. I won't lie. It feels good. When Cav gives me my first orgasm in our tiny apartment in Glendora three years later, I'll feel a flash of recognition, like an old familiar scent. But all I smell now is singed hair, and Barker is reeling on the floor bellowing, red arms swelling with blisters.

  I take my books and walk out. I don't want to be there to corroborate whatever lie he makes up. I go to the school nurse and tell her I heard someone screaming near the gym.

  Barker makes up something about spilling boiling coffee on himself. He spends some time with his arms all wrapped up. He stops looking at me, in gym class or anywhere else. He never touches me again. The stories stop circulating.

  I want to say that I did it for those other girls. The truth is, I did it because I disliked him and wanted him to hurt. I'd make a shitty superhero.

  I briefly cultivate self-righteous fantasies about killing him. Telling his wife what a monster he is. Lighting him up like a tuft of dry grass. But I'm not serious. They're just fantasies.

  At the school, no one called the cops, or my parents. But the Project hears about it all the same.

  *

  "I have a place," Cav says. "It's something I set up, with money I put aside from what the Project pays me. No one knows where it is. We can go there. We can be safe. It's the middle of nowhere."

  "This is the middle of nowhere, Cav," I say, gesturing around the diner. "This town has maybe three thousand people in it. I live in a shelter and my job pays me under the table in cash. And yet, here you are. Does it look like I got away?"