Burn (14 page)

He doesn’t know his fists are curled until the lock is cutting into his skin. Doesn’t know he’s moving, flying toward the showers until he’s there. Pinon’s crouched behind the wall, looking up at him. Cameron doesn’t even know it’s real, not a dream, until his hand is around the kid’s throat. Until his hand with the lock comes down on Pinon’s skull. The harsh
swack
vibrates up his arm, almost knocks the lock from his hand.

He lifts his arm again, brings it down with the same crushing force.

Blood. Everywhere. He looks at his hands, dripping onto the white tile floor, the lock clenched so tightly he has to pry his fingers loose. He looks down at Pinon, blood pouring through the cuts in his head. He’s dead. Cameron stands over him, looking for his chest to lift. It doesn’t. He’s not breathing. He’s dead.

Dead.

Cameron’s body jerks; he drops the lock. He moves toward the lockers, stops when he sees he’s leaving footprints, bloody footprints. He needs a shower. He stands fully clothed under a spray of water and watches the pink runoff whirl down the drain. He looks over at Pinon’s crumpled body.

He was a pervert.
Cameron’s heart dips, then jumps into his throat, threatening to strangle him.
He was a pervert.
He was. He stands under the shower, crying and telling himself it’s the same thing as with the fire. Nerves.

He doesn’t look at Pinon again. He strips off his clothes and bundles them in his arms. At his locker, he pushes his clothes into his gym bag, dries his body and hair with a towel, then changes into his PE clothes. From upstairs comes the muffled sound of basketballs hitting the wood floor.

He’s late. Really late.

He ties his sneakers. Shuts his locker and slides the combo through it. He climbs the stairs to the gym and stands on the sideline, hands dangling at his sides, watching a game in progress.

“Grady!”

Cameron turns toward the coach’s voice.

“You’re over here.”

Cameron’s legs are heavy and it’s an effort to shuffle along the sideline to where the coach is pointing. He pulls a blue jersey over his head, and takes position. He sucks at basketball. He probably won’t get much play. The kids never throw him the ball.

FRIDAY

10:35AM

Cameron is the first one in the locker room. PE was a blur. He can’t remember any of it. He opens his locker but doesn’t change his clothes. He grabs his gym bag and heads back up to the courts, where the coach is collecting balls, pushing them into a mesh bag.

“I’m going home,” Cameron says and walks past him.

“Hey, hold on, Grady.” The coach jogs to catch up. “You want to talk?”

“No.”

“You at least want to change your clothes?”

“No. I’m going to run the lake path. It’s good for me.”

“It is,” the coach agrees. “But I can’t just let you leave school in the middle of the day.”

“You’re not letting me,” Cameron says.

The locker room door bursts open and several guys spill out, tripping over each other. Both Cameron and the coach watch them, their white faces, their mouths opening, stretching. Cameron can’t hear them, with the blood rushing through his head again, sounding like the pounding surf, but the coach does and takes off.

Cameron pushes through the double doors and into the hall. It’s empty. The closest door to the outside is fifty feet to the left. Cameron slips through it.

He keeps to the sidewalk, looking straight ahead, not turning even when he hears a horn blast, a guy yell out his store window, “You should be in school.”

When he gets to the lake path he pushes his arms through the gym bag, wearing it like a backpack, and starts to run. It’s seven miles to home. It’s not raining, but the air is damp and sticks to him. He pushes his body through the motions until it remembers on its own exactly what it should be doing.

I killed someone today.
The thought curls around his brain, picks at it like a piece of flint. His head hurts. Hurts worse than it ever did.

I killed someone.
But it was only Pinon. The kid was a pervert.

He shouldn’t have watched.

Cameron feels his life spin away from him, looks up at the sky and sees himself cartwheeling toward the clouds.

I took control. Today is the beginning.

The thought bounces off his brain, slips through his fingers. He doesn’t feel in control. Control means calm. It means he’s ahead of the pack, he determines the course of his life.

He thinks of Pinon, folded up like an accordion on the shower floor, washed in his own blood, and feels like heaving.

He shouldn’t have watched, like I was a freak show. A porno freak show.

Cameron holds on to that. It makes the world stop spinning. When he remembers the Pinon who peered over the shower wall, watching him, he remembers there was no other way. He did the only thing he could do.

PART II

FRIDAY

1:00PM

Cameron stands in Mrs. Murdock’s backyard, shovel in hand. He wants to finish the job he started here, at least get her garden ready for seed, but he loses focus. He’s been working on the same patch of dirt since he arrived, twenty minutes ago. It’s like he falls asleep standing and startles awake to find himself here, covered with mud instead of blood, living a nightmare.

I killed a boy. Pinon.

He’s not breathing normally anymore. He can’t breathe at all. It feels like a giant fist tore through his chest and pulled out his lungs.

Why did Pinon have to be so annoying? Why did he have to be there? There to witness my shame. There all the time, snapping at my heels. There when the anger boiled out of me.

He wants to forget Pinon; he knows he never will. He’ll always see the guy, rolled up like a pill bug, his blood mixing with water and washing pink down the drain.

Cameron pulls air through his nose, hears the wet mucus, knows he’s crying. Like a damn baby.

He can’t take back what he did.

He can’t even say he’s sorry about it. There’s no one to listen.

Cameron feels his body shake. Not just his hands or his legs, but his whole body shakes so hard he drops the shovel and when he bends over to get it, he sinks to his knees.

I killed a boy. A kid like myself. How could something be that wrong with me?

“Cameron?”

Cameron hears her wobbly voice. It’s louder, stronger than usual. Mrs. Murdock must have been calling him for a while. When he looks up, she’s standing in the grass, leaning on her cane, her head bouncing like a bobble toy.

“Are you alright?”

Cameron wipes his face with his arm.

“No,” he says. “There’s nothing right with me.”

Her eyes flare and he can tell he startled her. He usually doesn’t talk about himself. He watches her gnarled hand twist in the pocket of her apron.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” she says. “Sometimes the world gets ahold of us, doesn’t it?”

“I think I’m going crazy,” he admits.

“I don’t think so. You’re a good boy. I see that in you.”

“I don’t feel good.” He hasn’t felt good in a long, long time. “I did something. I want to take it back, but I can’t.”

“Sounds like a situation where you have to learn from your mistake,” she suggested. “Life is full of moments like that.”

Cameron feels like he exploded in the locker room, and it wasn’t just anger that erupted from him, but the good parts, too. The parts of him he liked and he can’t even remember what they were. He only knows that he’ll never be that boy again.

“It was a big mistake.”

“Then there’s a lot to learn.”

He doesn’t like thinking about what he’s lost. It makes him sad, and then angry. Like the two emotions can’t exist separate from each other.

He doesn’t want to think about what comes next.

“I won’t be able to finish.” He nods at the solid ground, where she wants to plant zucchini and tomatoes. “I want to.”

She nods.

Cameron picks up the shovel and heads to the hose. It doesn’t feel the same anymore, all the things he used to do. Rinsing the shovel, hanging it in the garage, climbing on his bike, pedaling into the wind, none of it. He isn’t Cameron Grady anymore. He hasn’t been for a long time.

FRIDAY

5:30PM

Cameron sits at the table, folding paper towels into napkins.

“Make a few extra,” his mom says.

She came home from work with an already-cooked chicken, poured wild rice into a pot she filled with water and set on the stove, then started a slaw salad. Cameron was at the kitchen table then, with Robbie, working out a math problem the long way so his brother could see every step. It was slow, but he didn’t feel the plucking at his skin to move, go faster, run, outrun the fear. He didn’t have that anymore. The boil in his blood, the bubbles rising to the surface and popping against his skin, were gone. The weight on his chest, that made every breath an effort, evaporated.

He looked up. His mom stood in the door and smiled at them. She had a grocery bag in each arm.

“What?” Cameron wanted to know.

“Nothing,” she said. “I just like what I see.”

“Great,” Cameron said, but it felt right. Robbie never did well with numbers and before this year, before Cameron’s life became a heap of twisted metal, he had helped Robbie after school. They sat at the kitchen table just like this and Cameron set up problems and Robbie solved them.

Cut and paste.
The thought stuck in his mind. It was possible to go back, to edit out what didn’t work and then stitch together the two sides. He was proof of that. This moment was proof. He was back to being Cameron Grady. He fit.

“He’s a genius, Mom,” Robbie said. “I’m really starting to get it.”

She walked around with that smile on her face another fifteen minutes.

Robbie got up, closed his book, and went to organize his stuff for Monday. Cameron used to do that, too, get ready for school ahead of time.

“How was school today?” His mother’s voice breaks through his thoughts.

“I have history homework,” Cameron says. Mrs. Cowan gave an assignment in English, but Cameron can’t remember what it is. That was before, when his world was still cloudy, when he was hearing from a distance and even that was scrambled. “I need to read some of my English book, too.”

She nods. “Good. We’ll start right after dinner. How about Spanish?”

He knew it would come to this and he decided he would tell the truth. Or some of it, anyway.

“I ditched,” he confesses. “I left after PE and went running.”

He needed to clear his head. Needed to ditch the gym bag and his clothes that were covered with Pinon’s blood. That part wasn’t easy. He dove into the woods, crashing through the branches of trees grown too close together, and then dug a hole in the packed earth with his hands. He marked the tree, because he knew he’d have to go back.

He watches his mother’s back grow stiff and she takes her time placing the big stirring spoon on the counter. When she turns to him he can see she’s ready to back him. Her face is soft and open. Willing to believe in him.

“Has school been bad all year?” she asks.

“Pretty much,” Cameron admits.

Her lips fall into a flat line somewhere between anger and sadness. “I’m sorry, Cameron. I should have done something.”

Too little, too late.
But he gives her points for finally arriving.

“What, Mom?” he asks. “Guys like Patterson run the school.”

“It’s not supposed to be that way,” she says.

“It’s reality,” Cameron says, then he shrugs. “Maybe it’ll get better. At least until Wednesday.”

“Those boys aren’t going back to Madison.”

They’ll be back, Mom,
he thinks. That’s the way the world works. He went back. SciFi will be back. Patch them up and put them back on the lines. Patterson and Murphy will spend a few days planning the next attack, and how not to get caught this time. But they’ll be back and they’ll be ready to fight.

He looks up from the paper triangle in his hands, lets his eyes touch hers briefly, then skitter away.

The silence snaps in his ears like fire.

Funny, that he doesn’t feel that pull anymore. It was with him all the time, the sulphur smell in his nose, the burn on his fingertips. But he hasn’t thought about fire since this morning.

“It’ll get easier,” she says. “The first day back was probably the hardest.”

“It started off bad,” Cameron agrees. “I feel okay now.”

“Monday you’ll stay the whole day?” she asks.

“I think so.” No promises. He doesn’t know what will happen.

He might need to leave to clear his head.

To find a foxhole.

He figures the only way to stay alive now is to take the offensive. In this case, he knows there are plenty of Red Coats left and one might decide to take over where Patterson left off. He’ll be prepared for that.

“Call me if you feel like leaving, okay? I’ll come pick you up.”

He shrugs. If he leaves he’ll go running. By the time he got home earlier he had everything settled inside. His stomach had stopped heaving, his eyes had stopped tearing, and he had known life was all about the survival of the fittest.

He wanted to kill Pinon. He wanted to live. Black and white. Gray is for the people who stand outside Wal-Mart holding up pictures of deformed lab animals and asking for signatures. Black and white. Life or death. Choose.

“You want to get your brother? I’ll put dinner on the table.”

FRIDAY

10:45PM

Cameron is in his bedroom, splayed across his bed, when he begins to feel the silence in the house. It touches his skin like snow flurries. At first, his body heat zaps them, until there are too many, until a storm hits and he’s sure he’s living inside a snow globe that someone’s shaking. The layers build against his skin, pinning him to the bed. He feels the cold so deeply that his body slows down. Less oxygen in his blood, less blood pumped through the heart. Hypothermia. Embalming fluid.
So this is dead.
Cameron feels nothing. Like lying in a coffin.

Robbie walks in, closes the door, and stares at him.