Burn Before Reading

by Sara Wolf

  "H-Hello, sir. Sorry, I didn't know -"

  "You and I have something we must discuss, I'm afraid," He interrupted me smoothly, and smiled with all his eye wrinkles. "It's about your scholarship."

  "Oh. R-Right." My throat-heart started tapdancing queasily. This was it, wasn't it? He was going to open his mouth and tell me my scholarship was revoked. "Please, if there's anything I can do to keep it –”

  To my surprise, Mr. Blackthorn chuckled.

  "Ah, so you're aware of exactly how much my son dislikes you. You've thought this would happen for some time already. Excellent. That proves you're much cleverer than I thought."

  I looked up, bewildered. "I don't understand."

  "In that case, would you be so kind as to meet me at Ciao Bella this evening?"

  The fanciest Italian restaurant this side of the city.

  "I'm not sure I should -"

  "I didn't mean to put you in an awkward position, Miss Cruz. I had simply hoped to talk with you in a place where neither of our families could be privy to the conversation."

  His words were heavy and slow, like they had a double meaning to them. I frowned, but Mr. Blackthorn kept going.

  "I'm offering you a way in which you can save your scholarship, Miss Cruz."

  I felt stupid for blushing, but I did anyway. "Look, Mr. Blackthorn, I don't think this is appropriate -"

  He laughed, this time, full-bodied and loudly. "Oh, dear. You're right. I would be quite the terrific scumbag if that was what I wanted, wouldn't I? But no. I'm quite happily widowed, thank you. My interests are in your position, Miss Cruz, within this school. I believe there is something you can do for me that I would much appreciate."

  He must've seen how confused I was, because he smiled.

  "Simply meet me at Ciao Bella at seven tonight. Ask for Blackthorn. We will discuss the finer points then. I look forward to it."

  He didn't wait for me to confirm, or deny. He simply rolled his tinted window up, and the limo drove away. And that's how I knew he was a Blackthorn for real - because he left without explaining anything at all.

  Chapter 4

  WOLF

  There’s a girl waiting for me by my bike in the parking lot after school.

  But that’s nothing new. Girls have always, for some reason or another, liked to wait around by my bike. I’d learned to live with it, the way you live with mosquitos. Living with it isn’t the problem. The problem is lately, it’s gotten a lot worse.

  The stupid ones sit on the bike like they own it. The smart ones just stand by it, admiring it.

  Today, it’s the former.

  She’s a junior in my Calculus class – Miranda? Minnie? Something forgettable with an M. She sits on the seat of my bike languidly stretched out, like it’s a bed. Her hair is dyed red and curled with almost as much agonizing precision as her eyeliner, and she wears her navy uniform skirt as high up on her waist as she can manage without getting looks from the faculty. She waves at me as she sees me walk over. I give her two seconds to figure out my glare means she needs to move. She doesn’t.

  “Hey, Wolf.” She smiles. “What’re you up to?”

  She – like everyone else in the school – knows I don’t like people who touch my bike without my permission. And yet she’s doing it. I’m still unclear about what these women think being near or on my bike will get them. My attention? Perhaps. Though why they’d want the attention of a short-tempered asshole like me, I have no idea. This girl has decided to skip respect and move straight to goading me for attention. And she’ll get it. Just not in the way she wants.

  “Move,” I request. The girl winks and strokes the handlebars.

  “Oh, come on, Wolf. We’ve been in the same class forever. The least you could do is give me a ‘hello’, or a ‘hi, beautiful’.”

  “Why would I do that?” I drone.

  “To be polite, maybe.” She inspects her nails.

  “I don’t do polite.”

  Her laugh is nice, even if her entire personality isn’t. “That’s why I like you. So I guess it’s fine. For now.”

  “Move,” I repeat, my words hard and biting. “Or I’ll punish you myself.”

  She blushes. “Well, if you insist!”

  I knead the space between my brows. She’s starting to give me a headache. If I was Burn, or Fitz, I could easily move her to the side with little damage on either of our parts, but that’s not an option for me. It never has been. My words and eyes alone have to burn her so badly she wants to move. I’d perfected burning people to an artform to survive. But it’s just not happening, today.

  A muffled crashing noise makes us both look to where a girl desperately scoops up several fallen textbooks from the ground. A girl who happened to chew me out, this morning. Beatrix Cruz.

  “Oh god, not her,” Miranda groans. “I was so pissed off at her for what she said to you, Wolf. I’m seriously going to fight her.”

  “Touching,” I drawl. “But I don’t need you to defend me.”

  “She’s so full of herself!” Miranda points at Beatrix. “Just look at her!”

  I do. Beatrix cradles the textbooks in her arms gingerly as she makes her way to her dusty, accident-scarred car. The way she walks is always a little unsure, but determined. The wind plays with her hair, some of it stuck in the corner of her cold-flushed lips. The uniform suits her in a way it rarely does girls – it makes her look younger than her world-weary eyes betray. It’s easier to overlook the heaviness she carries in her shoulders when they’re covered in a stiff navy blue blazer. At the right angles, when she’s caught up in some textbook or another and smiling at something she read, she almost looks like the carefree teenager she’s supposed to be.

  The enchantment of the moment is lost when Eric walks up, offering to help her carry her books. My skin heats. She has no idea what he’s done – and so she lets him help, their hands touching, her smile completely unaware of the evil that lurks beneath his.

  “That’s so hilarious,” Miranda laughs. “If she seriously starts to hang out with Eric, and he tries to do what he did again –”

  “Move, now,” My voice feels like acid in my throat, and Miranda jumps up.

  “Geez, okay.”

  I put my helmet on and rev my bike loud enough to have the whole parking lot looking at me. Beatrix and Eric included. Reminding Eric of my presence is enough to have him making some excuse to Beatrix and scuttling away. Good. Beatrix - as ignorant as ever - looks less than pleased about it, shooting me a nasty look as I glide towards the parking lot exit. Fine. Let her be angry at me. What’s one more drop of hate in the sea of disgust she’s already formed for me?

  If things had been different – if I’d handled it differently – if she and I had met some other way -

  I shake my head and stop at a stoplight. It’s pointless to think like that. What’s done is done, no matter how much I want it to have gone differently.

  “There’s our boy!”

  I look over at the voice to see Fitz, sitting in Burn’s convertible, with Burn driving. Fitz waves at me, his curly hair askew from the wind.

  “What’s with you today? Why all the ruckus? I could’ve sworn you wanted people to notice you, or something, but that can’t be right. You’re the antisocial brother! You’ve got a reputation to maintain!”

  I roll my eyes and say nothing. Burn nods at me, and I nod at him.

  “Dinner, tonight,” Burn says simply. I shrug. He isn’t wrong – it’s that time of month when Dad tries to get us all together in one room to eat. Sometimes it’s a restaurant. Sometimes it’s at home. But it’s always the same – food cooked by a chef, not him. Conversation desperate for answers. Pitying gazes and self-righteous screeds. Herculean attempts at manipulation.

  And the worst part? We can’t avoid it even if we want to. Well, we could. We used to, sleeping in Burn’s car on the side of the road, but that meant the next day would be even worse. And the day af
ter that. Avoiding The Dinner just made four more Dinners to avoid, so we’d agreed to attend just the first one and have it over with.

  The light is about to turn green, and Burn shoots a smirk at me.

  “Race you.”

  I nod, and rev my engine. He does the same. Fitz clutches his seatbelt for dear life.

  “Hey, uh, me here, being the voice of reason for once in my life; maybe this is a bad idea!”

  The light flickers green, and I shoot off down the road. Burn’s car might be flashy and powerful, but my bike accelerates to 60 from 0 in a blink. His takes far longer, but when he does catch up, he starts to pass me. I floor it, both of us neck and neck at 80 miles an hour. Fitz’s girlish scream is barely audible through my helmet and the roar of the wind. The road up to our house is mercifully empty, the winding hill the perfect test for my bike’s new hydraulics system. Burn’s convertible is always faster on these hills, with the more horsepower he has but I cut as close as I can to the corners of the road and gain some space on him. The hardest part of this run is coming up – a hairpin turn overlooking a forest cliff. I always take it slow. It’s complete madness to take it any faster than 35 miles.

  I look over at Burn – his smile plastered over his face. He isn’t one to show a lot of emotion, not since Mom died, but in moments like these, and especially when we race, he’s always over-the-moon-happy. Exhilarated. I know him; he pushes his body to the limit, doing whatever he can to make it just that one inch farther, faster. It’s his way of testing himself, and the world. Sometimes, it feels like he’s taunting lady luck, daring her to strike him down like he struck Mom.

  We both shoot towards the hairpin turn at 85 miles. It’s a game of chicken, now; who’s going to slow down first? Whoever does is the loser – it’s too hard to come back from a turn like this without flat road, and it’s a hill all the way up to the house. I always lose to him, and this is the exact spot where it happens every time. But not this time. This time I’ll go farther. This time, I’ll keep up with him like no one else can.

  The turn nears so quickly, my heartbeat skyrocketing. It’s now or never. If I don’t slow down, if he doesn’t slow down –

  I brake, and Burn whizzes past me, pulling the emergency break and drifting around the corner seamlessly. Goddamn him. He’s so good at that. Envy and irritation war inside my mind; he’s so damn good, but he’s such a moron. It’s an insanely risky move. If the road was any wetter, if his brakes were any worse, he’d go right over that cliff.

  I drive the rest of the way up to the house. The driveway is immaculately kept, of course. Dad pays for no less than four groundskeepers to keep the hedges and oak trees looking pristine. Appearances are, and always will be, most important to him.

  The house isn’t the one we grew up in – Dad sold that one when Mom died. It was smaller, and much less ostentatious than this one. This one has white marble floors, a grand staircase, two ‘sitting rooms’ and a piano room. All the paintings are originals, all the vases from Japan. After Mom’s funeral, Dad poured himself into material things, into putting on all the trappings of the ‘rich’ in order to hide his pain. It wasn’t always like this. Back when Mom was alive we afforded a big, serviceable house in the suburbs. Dad wasn’t head of the corporation, back then. But then he became CEO, and money changed him. Mom saw the change, too, and they argued constantly. And then she died. And instead of opening Dad’s eyes for the better, it did the exact opposite. It made him shut his eyes - tight as he could for as long as he could.

  So stepping foot onto the new property always feels a little sad, to me. Like it’s a shell, a coffin for the love Dad and Mom once had – a coffin for our family, and the way we used to be; innocent and happy and a thousand times less lonely.

  Burn and Fitz are already out of the convertible, Fitz frothed up in a trembling rage.

  “What part of ‘I’m never going to ride with you if you pull that stupid shit again’ do you not understand?” He demands. Burn ignores him and looks to me.

  “You lost.”

  I kill the engine and put the kickstand down, taking off my helmet.

  “Maybe you’ve lost,” I say. “Your mind. That was the fastest I’ve ever seen you take that turn.”

  He shrugs. “Had to test the new fuel injector I put in.”

  “That’s a tired excuse, and you know it,” I counter.

  “Next time maybe test it without me in the passenger seat?” Fitz snaps. Burn says nothing, getting in the convertible again and pulling into the garage to park it. I do the same. Fitz storms into the house, muttering something about ‘maniacs’.

  “He’s whiny, but he has a point, Burn,” I say. The dimness of the garage makes it hard to see his face, not that he’d show any emotion otherwise. “Don’t do anything ridiculous with him in the car.”

  “So it’s fine if it’s just me?” Burn asks. What do I even say to that? No? Yes? How can I explain to him none of it is fine – doing it on his own could get him killed or hurt just as easily. But he doesn’t care. He never listens – he just goes off and does whatever risky thing he wants to. There’s no point saying anything. So I’m quiet. Finally, Burn turns and walks into the house, and eventually I follow.

  I expected Dad’s personal chef to be in the kitchen preparing dinner, but there’s no one. Odd. I’d say we misjudged the timeframe of The Dinner, but that’s never the case. It’s happened so much we’ve grown an internal radar with pinpoint accuracy for it. I check the downstairs office warily – nothing. The upstairs office – empty. Dad’s gone.

  Mystified, I head to my room. I pass Fitz’s messy room, where he types away on his extensive computer system. Fast food containers litter every surface, his clothes flung around like a tornado got into his closet. The only neatly kept thing in his room is his computer. He has four monitors hooked up on a sleek black iron desk, and then two more monitors hooked up to the wall above those. His chair is massive and winged and he rolls around from keyboard to keyboard, typing on this or that. Sometimes he has a competitive game like Call of Duty going that he yells obscenities at, but not today. Today he just types, hundreds of lines of white text on a black screen that’s basically gibberish to anyone but him.

  “The chef isn’t here,” I knock on his open door and say.

  “Unless he’s cracked the code on how to make an invisibility potion,” Fitz offers without looking up from his monitors.

  “Which he hasn’t.”

  “You never know,” Fitz shrugs. “Maybe Harry Potter really is real.”

  “It’s not.”

  “Stop killing my hopes and dreams. Oh, wait, that’s your favorite hobby. My bad.”

  I know when Fitz is too angry to drop the whole ‘verbal battle’ thing. It’s pointless to talk to him until he’s had a good ten minutes to cool off, so I head to my room.

  Burn’s room is before mine, the open door revealing just how bare the walls are and how plain the furnishing is. Burn might be the most reckless of us, but he’s also strangely the most modest – everything from the curtains to the bedspread is a plain gray. A personal gym crowds one corner of his room, complete with a weight press, an elliptical, and a treadmill. Out of the three of us he’s the one who’s home the least – always hiking or running, so he doesn’t keep much inside his room other than his clothes. In the rare moments of downtime he chooses to spend in the house, he likes to whittle little bits of wood. Mom taught him to do it when he was a kid. He’s good at it, too; wooden animals with detailed fur and claws line the windows of his room.

  I walk into my room and lock my door behind me. I prefer privacy more than Burn and Fitz do. I’m not as Spartan as Burn, and I’m not as messy as Fitz. Somewhere in the middle. My bed is covered in a plaid blanket, my computer decent but nothing as high tech as Fitz’s. I keep a few free weights and medicine balls in the corner for stretching before and after swim practice. The only decorations on my wall are swords – my grandfather’s old World Wa
r II decorative Navy sword, my mom’s gold-leafed machete she got as a gift from a Mexican official, and an elegant katana from a traditional Japanese weaponsmith – Dad got me that one as a bribe. He knew how much I treasured my swords, and the katana was his attempt to win me over. I despise him, but I can’t despise something as beautiful and well-crafted as the katana, so I keep it with the rest of my collection.

  I throw my riding gloves and jacket on the bed, and settle at my computer. Sometimes Fitz and I play games together, but I know he’s too pissed for that right now. I flip boredly between Facebook and Twitter, nothing new or exciting going on. I don’t keep social media accounts for my own vanity or connection with others – it’s solely for my red carding. Social media provides clues into a person’s life as easily as a nutcracker pierced chestnuts. All it takes is a little digging into the Lakecrest network to find everything I need to know about whether something someone did was real or not. Pictures, tweets, timestamps, all of it was evidence I collected and kept in my arsenal. Fitz always offered to help, but I refused, knowing his help was the sort that’d land both of us in jail if he wasn’t careful. He likes to think he’s the best hacker around, and don’t get me wrong, he’s good. But I know better than anyone he’s suffering from big fish in a little pond syndrome. He’s good, but there’s always people out there who are better.

  So I refuse his help. I refuse anyone’s help. I do all my own research, all my own digging. Burn likes to call it my ‘stalking’. I can’t fault him there – it is pretty much stalking. But I’ve worked hard to make Lakecrest a better place. I’m not going to stop now.

  Fitz asked me ‘why’ once. Why I tried so hard to make the school better. I wasn’t sure. I’m still unsure. After Mark – I suppress the flinch that runs through me – I had nothing left. I was at the bottom, with no light in sight. I needed to do something, anything. It started out small; taking on the ruthless teasing and taunting upperclassmen did to underclassmen. And then it branched out to stopping fights, getting the drug dealers kicked out. It was a small irony that Fitz managed to get drugs even though I’d kicked out most of his dealers. His saving grace was he never complained that I was making it harder for him to fuel his habit; a habit Burn and I hate to acknowledge, but hate trying to interfere with even more. It’s hard to tell your little brother to stop popping pills when Burn seeks adrenaline highs and I mercilessly cut down anyone who messes with Lakecrest’s integrity. We all have our vices. Fitz’s is sloth, Burn’s is gluttony, and mine is wrath. Part of the reason we manage to get along at all is the fact we don’t call each other out on them.