Burn for Burn

by Jenny Han

  “My mom says that when they were in high school, Aunt Bette could get any boy on the beach to buy them ice cream. They never had to bring change with them.” I thread some of my hair behind my ears.

  Kat tucks a cigarette between her lips. “No kidding,” she says, and the words make the flame of her lighter dance.

  And then there’s a long, somewhat awkward pause.

  Lillia clasps her fingers together and puts on a big smile. “So, Kat and I came up with a way to get revenge on Rennie at homecoming.”

  “Oh! That’s great,” I say, and then force a swallow. “Is she, like, dating Reeve? I heard some girls talking about that at the football game.”

  Lillia shakes her head. “No. I mean, she definitely has Reeve in her crosshairs, but I don’t know if he sees her that way.”

  “Oh,” I say, sitting up straighter. “I was just curious.”

  Kat leans in and says, “All right, back to business. Homecoming ballots are passed out the week of the dance. Everyone votes, and then the ballots are put in the locked box they use for student council elections, which is pretty effing ridiculous, if you ask me. What we’re gonna do is break into that box and change enough ballots so that Rennie loses homecoming queen.” She cackles. “It will be the greatest disappointment of her sad little life.”

  Lillia puts her hands on her cheeks and says, “I can’t wait to see her face!”

  “And then Lillia wins, right?” I say.

  “No!” Lillia says, shaking her head. “I don’t want to win.”

  “Why not?” Kat says, surprised. “Rennie will freaking short-circuit with jealousy.”

  Lillia bites her lip. “I think it’ll be even worse if someone else takes her crown. Someone she would never think could beat her. Like Ashlin.”

  “Oh, yeah! Ashlin. My replacement. I always forget about her. Does she even have a personality?” Kat asks.

  “She’s a nice girl,” Lillia says, glaring at Kat. “And she’ll be happy to win.”

  Kat shrugs, and takes a drag off her cigarette. “Fine, whatever. But we still need a plan to get Reeve.” She blows out the smoke in a long, thin line. “Did you have any ideas, Mary?”

  I shake my head.

  “Okay,” Lillia says patiently. “Well, what do you want to have happen to him? Let’s start there.”

  I chew on my nail and think. All the anger I’ve got starts to bloom up inside me. This is part of the reason I try not to think about Reeve, if possible. It’s a Pandora’s box. I’m afraid to open myself up and relive exactly what happened. But maybe that’s the only way I’ll know what kind of revenge will make me feel like justice was served.

  After a deep breath I say, “Whatever we do has to be big. It has to be cruel. It has to hurt him on the level that he hurt me.” If that’s even possible.

  Kat and Lillia look at each other, startled by my intensity, I guess. I know what’s coming before Lillia even says it.

  “What did he do to you?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper.

  “You can trust us,” Kat says. “We won’t tell anyone.”

  Lillia moves her hair over to one shoulder and makes a little cross over her heart. “Promise.”

  I drop my chin to my chest and let my hair fall around my face. I know I have to do this. I have to tell someone the whole story of what happened.

  I lift my head and wet my lips. “Reeve had a special nickname for me.” I feel the words come into my mouth, hot and metallic. “Big Easy.”

  I can tell by the way Kat’s face wrinkles up that she was expecting something worse. “What’s the story there?”

  “I looked different back in seventh grade. I was fat. And we were studying New Orleans in social studies.”

  “Seriously? You were heavy?” Lillia’s surprise is like a compliment.

  I nod, and push the sleeves of my sweater up to my elbows. “Huge, actually.”

  “So he made fat jokes about you,” Kat snarks, her top lip curling into a snarl. “How totally Reeve.”

  I twist around and look back up at my bedroom window, to make sure Aunt Bette isn’t watching. She’s not. The curtains are still closed. I turn back around and keep going, sure to keep my voice low. “You remember how Reeve and I went to the Belle Harbor Montessori, right? Well, we were the only two kids in our grade from Jar Island, so we both had to ride the ferry back and forth every day. I tried to stay away from Reeve, because we didn’t get off on the right foot on his first day.”

  Then I tell them the story of that day in the cafeteria, when Reeve made the joke about me eating off his tray. How he made it so nobody wanted to be seen with me in public. Kat and Lillia don’t interrupt, but every so often they tsk or shake their heads. Each response is a bit of encouragement that helps me keep talking. I tell them about the pocketknife day and the time we went out for ice cream, too.

  “After that we developed this weird kind of . . .” I take a second to pick the right word, but nothing seems to fit, so I just go with, “friendship,” even though that’s not exactly it. “The ferry ride was kind of our time-out. Reeve used to say, ‘Us islanders have to stick together, right Big Easy?’”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kat says, rapid-fire. “Wait up. You let him call you ‘Big Easy’ to your face?” She’s fired up, rolling onto her knees and leaning forward.

  It’s hard to look at her. “It was different when we were on the ferry, just the two of us. It didn’t sound as mean, for some reason.” I pull my sweater tight around myself. “But once we’d get to the mainland, thing would change. He wouldn’t talk to me in public. Well . . . except to make fun of me.”

  “What a two-faced bitch,” Kat says. “He’s worse than Rennie!” She grinds her cigarette out in the dirt and then immediately lights another.

  Lillia’s staring at me, unblinking. “Why would you let him do that, Mary?”

  “Because he’d tell me things,” I say. “He’d complain about his dad, who I think was a pretty bad alcoholic. He’d tell me how his dad would drink, and then his dad would yell at Reeve and his brothers. I felt bad for him.”

  “You felt bad for him?” Kat says incredulously.

  “He hated his dad. He said his dream was to get a scholarship to go to a big university off Jar Island and never come back.”

  Lillia scoffs. “Scholarship? Reeve makes Bs and Cs! He only gets As in gym.”

  Kat shakes her head. “You don’t know because you didn’t grow up here,” she tells Lillia. “Reeve used to be the smartest kid in our grade. I remember him getting sent to that fancy school on a scholarship. It was a big deal, because his family wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise. Our teacher threw him a good-bye party with cupcakes and stuff.”

  “It wasn’t because I was special to him, or anything like that,” I clarify. “We were just passing the time together. I knew how hard the other kids at school worked to get his attention. Everyone was a little in love with him. I guess I felt a weird sense of pride for getting to spend some time with him every day.”

  Lillia grumbles, but Kat says, “Lil, you have to admit Reeve can be a charming bastard when he wants to be.”

  “All right,” she concedes. “I guess I could see that.”

  I stare at the dirt and say shamefully, “I let myself think that there was something real between us, that I knew Reeve in a way that no one else did. But really, the Reeve I thought I knew didn’t exist. He was just setting me up, tricking me into letting my guard down, so he could hurt me even worse.”

  Before I know it, I’m crying. I guess because I know what happens next. The story I’ve never told anyone.

  The wind suddenly picks up, like a storm might crack open the sky above us. My hair whips around my face, stinging my cheeks. Lillia zips up her coat; Kat tucks her hands inside her sleeves. Neither of them move.

  A voice inside me tells me to stop talking, because once I tell Kat and Lillia, there’s no turning back, no pretending it didn’t happen. But I swallow the fear do
wn and keep going, because holding on to this secret for one second longer suddenly feels like it’s going to kill me.

  * * *

  I didn’t expect to see Reeve that afternoon. Ms. Penske kept a few of us after school to discuss plans for the student mural we’d be painting in the gymnasium. I missed the three o’clock ferry, and figured I’d catch the three thirty. But Reeve had stayed late too, playing basketball with a few of his friends. When I walked by the fence, Reeve sank the last basket, and everyone started grabbing their books and putting on their jackets. Reeve saw me. I kept walking toward the water, but slower than I had been, and eventually he caught up with me.

  We’d almost reached the dock when a bunch of guys he’d been playing basketball with ran up from behind us. They had a notebook in their hands, one Reeve had apparently left at the courts. When they saw us, their mouths dropped open. Reeve and Big Easy walking together? It didn’t make any sense.

  Reeve didn’t say anything to me, but he suddenly picked up his pace. I walked faster too, to keep up with him. The boys called out, “Hey, Reeve! You forgot your book!” but Reeve pretended he didn’t hear them. He practically sprinted the last few feet to the ferry, like he was afraid he might miss it.

  The cars and trucks had already driven onto the freight deck, and it was just the people left, lining up to climb the plank onto the ferry. Reeve and I took our place at the end, him first and me right behind him. Then the boys from class came up and stood a few feet off to the side. They handed Reeve his notebook, and Reeve mumbled a thank-you. They started to walk away.

  I don’t know where this surge of courage came from. Maybe because things had been good between us. Maybe because I wanted to put Reeve in a spot where he’d have to admit what was going on. Maybe because I knew he didn’t really care about what these guys thought of him, from our conversations.

  There was one thing I did know for sure. Reeve had started the Big Easy thing, and it had caught on like wildfire. But if he showed everyone in class that we were cool, I knew it could end just as quickly. That’s how big a deal he was.

  I stepped forward so Reeve and I were side by side, and shouted at the boys, “So what? We’re friends!” as loudly as I possibly could. Then I threw my arm around Reeve’s shoulder and smiled at him.

  Reeve stared at me with unbelieving eyes. Once he blinked, though, he looked furious. He shouted, “Get the hell away from me!” And then he lunged. His palms went straight into my chest, and, throwing all his strength behind it, he shoved me toward the guys.

  The force of it was unbelievable. I didn’t have a chance. My sneakers skidded over the gravel. The boys quickly stepped out of my path, revealing the edge of the dock. I tried to just fall down, to keep myself from going into the water, but I kept flying backward. At the last second I put my arms out to try to stop myself from going over the side of the dock, and tiny splinters embedded in my palms. The pain had me gasping for air, my last breath before I plunged into the water.

  It was so cold, I could barely move. I could tell my hands were bleeding by the way the skin burned despite the chill of the water. I could hear their warbled laughter above me.

  “Yo, she looks like a manatee!”

  “Hey, manatee! You need a net?”

  “Swim! Swim for shore, manatee!”

  I flailed my arms and kicked my legs, trying to get to the surface. But my clothes weighed a hundred pounds, and I barely managed to get my head above water. I was gasping for air, and I kept swallowing mouthfuls of salty water.

  The dockworkers came running, and one of them tossed me a life preserver. It took two of them to pull me out. The ferry passengers leaned over the edge of the deck to watch.

  As soon as I was on land, I threw up a gallon of that salty water. That was when the boys finally stopped laughing and shrank away from the spectacle. The only one who wasn’t there was Reeve.

  My hands were bleeding, my clothes were soaked and stiff and speckled with gravel, and there was vomit on my shoes. It took me a minute before I realized that my white T-shirt was completely see-through, clinging to every one of my fat rolls. I started shaking, but I wasn’t cold. I was about to lose it. And then I did. I started crying, and I couldn’t stop.

  One ferry worker helped me up to the galley, then left to find me a blanket. He came back with a stack of brown paper towels from one of the bathroom dispensers. I tried using them to dry off, but as soon as they got wet, they disintegrated into ropy bits of pulp.

  The whole time I was sobbing.

  Reeve was there, in the galley too. He sat in the first row of seats near the deck windows, the seat he’d carved his name in. He looked straight ahead, out the window at Jar Island off in the distance. He didn’t acknowledge me, or what he’d done. He didn’t even turn around once. No matter how hard I cried.

  When we reached Jar Island, Reeve took off right away. I waited for the other passengers to disembark, and then I snuck off the ferry and hid behind a delivery truck that was waiting to drive aboard for the return trip. I could see my mom waiting there. As Reeve ran off the boat, she waved at him. He didn’t wave back. He pretended not to see her.

  If she didn’t see me, I knew she’d stay and wait for me to come in on the next boat. I couldn’t stand her seeing me that way. I didn’t want her to know that the boy I’d told her so much about, the boy we took for ice cream that rainy day, had done this to me.

  I decided to sneak home, change my clothes, and pretend to have come back by the next boat. She would never have to know what happened. Dad, too.

  I crouched down and used different cars for cover. Once I was out of the parking lot, I huffed it up the hill to our house, my sneakers squishing with every step. All I could think about was how he’d acted all those times when we were alone. Like he cared about me. Like we were friends. I couldn’t imagine facing him the next morning. Both because of what he’d done to me, and because I knew I’d never get that back again. As pathetic as it was, Reeve was the only friend I had left.

  I went up to my room and opened my closet with the intention to change clothes. Really. But instead of doing that I found myself staring up at the beams on my ceiling. Then I got a rope from the basement and, after a couple of tries, looped it over a beam and tied it into a noose. I dragged my desk chair over, slipped the rope over my neck. And then took a big step off the chair, and dropped.

  But as soon as I fell, I realized that I didn’t want to die. I started to fight, kicking my legs to try to get the desk chair to roll back to me. But the rope was so tight, and I couldn’t breathe. My weight swung me like a pendulum, and my feet kept knocking into the wall. I was starting to black out, lose consciousness.

  Luckily, my mom came home. She heard the tapping of my feet against the wall. She came in and screamed at the sight of me. She got me down, slipped the rope off my neck, and laid with me on the floor while she called 911, stroking my hair, until the paramedics arrived.

  * * *

  Kat and Lillia stare at me, horrified.

  “As soon as I was stable, my parents had me transferred to a different hospital, one far away from Jar Island. I was out of school for a whole year doing therapy and stuff. I had to live on a psych floor for months, trying to convince the doctors and nurses that I didn’t want to kill myself anymore. And the truth is, I didn’t want to. The one thing that kept me going was the thought of coming back here one day and making Reeve own up to what he did.”

  I let out a breath, and already I feel lighter, just a little bit lighter.

  “Well, that’s that,” Kat says. “We have to kill Reeve.”

  I can’t tell if she’s joking or not. I hope she’s joking. “I don’t want to kill him,” I say, to be clear. “I just want him to feel one ounce of the pain I felt.” I’m not even sure if that is possible.

  “We’ll help you, Mary. We’ll make him pay for what he did.” Tears are spilling down Lillia’s cheeks, but there’s fire in her eyes.

  “Thank you,” I whisper. />
  Kat’s legs are shaking. “I want to drive over to Reeve’s house right freaking now, and punch him in his face. But I know we can do better, hurt him worse if we wait and think this through. We’ve got to take Reeve Tabatsky down in a major way.”

  Lillia wipes her eyes. “So, what do we do?”

  “You know him the best of all of us,” Kat says. “What does he care the most about?”

  Automatically Lillia says, “Football. He cares about football more than anything.”

  “That’s it!” I cry out. “Even back at Montessori he used to talk about how he was going to be some big football star when he got to high school!”

  “Done,” Kat says. “We’ll get him kicked off the team.”

  “How?” I ask. Is that even possible? Reeve’s the star quarterback. There’s no team without him. Even I know that.

  Lillia’s face lights up. “Drugs! Jar Island has a super-strict no-tolerance policy. Ever since that kid from Menlow High got caught smoking weed, our coaches have been watching us really carefully, making sure we don’t do anything stupid. If we could somehow plant drugs in Reeve’s locker or something, he’d be kicked off the team for sure, even if he is the quarterback.”

  “But what if he says the drugs aren’t his, and the school believes him?” I say. “He could take a voluntary drug test to prove it.”

  “I guess we’ll have to slip him the drugs without him knowing,” Kat says. “Acid or ecstasy or something that will make him trip out.”

  It’s one thing to plant drugs in the guy’s locker; it’s another thing to actually drug him. I look over at Lillia, expecting her to protest.

  But she doesn’t. Instead she nods and says, “Let’s do it at homecoming, when everyone will be watching. He’ll definitely get homecoming king. We might as well knock him and Rennie out at the same time.” Twirling her hair around her finger, she says, “He might even get expelled. Then you’d never have to worry about him again, Mary.”

  “What do you think?” Kat asks me. “This is your kill.”