Burn Before Reading

by Sara Wolf

  “You sound just like your dad,” I snarled. Wolf froze.

  “How do you know what he sounds like?”

  Hot panic choked my throat. “B-Because. He talked to my Mom and Dad when I first got accepted. He sounds just as mean and callous as you do.”

  Wolf, despite his suspicion, still didn’t turn to look at me. I couldn’t let him get a clue. Not now. Not when I’d barely made friends with his brothers.

  “You want to be enemies?” I asked quickly. “Fine. We’re enemies, Wolf Blackthorn. So don’t expect me to ever help you again.”

  It was petty of me. It was something a shrink would never do – threaten to stop helping a patient. But I did it because he was my enemy, not my patient.

  I did it because I was confused, and angry, and apparently to him, pretty in that dress.

  Pretty stupid, in my opinion.

  If I was smarter, pen-and-paper, I would’ve figured out what his laughter meant. What his words meant. What his heartbeat meant, that day.

  But I didn’t.

  I didn’t until it was too late.

  Chapter 13

  WOLF

  I don’t dream. I nightmare.

  If my sleep ever gets interrupted by a dream, it’s always a bad one. The kind that leaves you soaked in sweat and gasping for air, wide awake at two in the morning. I dream about wandering into a massive crowd and the people ripping me apart, limb by limb. I dream about diving into the ocean, the shadow of a huge shark just behind me, sharp teeth on my back. I dream about things hunting me, killing me, eating me alive.

  So I don’t like sleeping very much. Or at all. I force myself to get five hours, but some nights are impossible. Some nights, all I have are my rings, and the moonlight, and the sinking, awful feeling that I’m never going to be able to escape whatever’s hunting me. Sometimes, the dreams feature Mark. Mark watching as I’m torn apart. Mark laughing as I’m shredded to nothing more than skin. Mark, holding the torch to my dry pile of wood, watching me go up in flames.

  Tonight, though, is a different night.

  The nightmare takes place in school, for once. I’m walking down a long, impossible hallway, and Mark is at the end of it. Everything is eerily quiet, his face all smiles. I walk towards him, knowing I have to, knowing I can’t escape him even if I try. And as I’m walking to him, Beatrix comes between us. She’s telling me to stop, begging me to. And then Mark transforms into a beast, a monster, something huge and dark that lunges for her and bites her head clean off, blood and bone crunching, and I’ve lost her – my insides freeze over – I’ve lost the only girl who’s ever made my heart jump, the only girl who argues with me, pushes back against me instead of giving in, the only girl who held me without question, accepting my fear without judgement or laughter –

  The only girl I’ve ever wanted.

  The only girl who will never want me.

  And then there’s fire – fire everywhere, the scent of gasoline and blood fresh in my nose, and I’m upside down, the dirt in my hair, and Mom won’t move, I keep calling her name but she won’t move, or say anything, and the blood pool beneath her keeps getting bigger, and bigger -

  I bolt awake, sweat cooling on my clammy skin. The moon outside is full and ripe, but the light it gives off feels cold and uncaring. I throw my blankets off and pull on a shirt, desperate to get away from my bed and my scraps of the nightmare still hanging there.

  This new house is too quiet, too big and empty at night. Even in the day it echoes, my footsteps louder than I’d like. The paintings on the wall are just impartial snapshots of oil and watercolor, not a single family photo there to greet me.

  I wander down to the kitchen and open the fridge, rummaging around for a soda.

  “You’re up late.”

  The voice is undoubtedly Dad’s. I groan inwardly, and straighten. He’s sitting at the kitchen table by the French windows, in the dark, the only thing in his hands a necklace I recognize instantly – Mom’s amethysts.

  “What do you want?” I ask.

  “That’s no way to speak to me,” Dad says with a sneer. “Why don’t you come sit down?”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Nightmares keep you up again?”

  I narrowed my eyes. “How do you know that?”

  “Because they keep me up, too. But for different reasons, I assume. Mine are about your mother, and yours are about, I don’t know. Being homosexual, or somesuch.”

  I don’t even allow him the pleasure of seeing me flinch. “And people wonder where I got my asshole genes.”

  “It’s true,” He agrees. “You got everything negative from me. Your mother was an angel.”

  “She was a person,” I correct him. “She was impatient, she was too hard on herself, she –”

  “She was none of those things,” Dad says immediately. “Time has warped your perception. She was good, and kind, and we didn’t deserve her.”

  “You’re the one who’s time-warped,” I snap. “Speak for your own damn self. Sure, you didn’t deserve her. But we did.”

  Dad straightens, his eyes burning.

  “You deserve nothing. You were the burdens that drove her to carelessness – she was worried the whole morning about your ear infection, she was sleep deprived the whole night before, worrying about you –”

  “Fine!” I shout. “You want to bring that up? Fine. I’m the reason she died. Are you happy? Does that make you feel better about your sorry, self-pitying ass? Does it make you feel good to blame me for losing the only person you ever fucking cared about in this world?”

  The silence after my shout rings. Dad stares me down, and for a second I swear to God he’s getting ready to deck me.

  “This is how you three honor her memory?” Dad asks, so cold it chills me to the bone. “By wasting your youth on….parties and drugs? Wasting it on….on men.”

  This time, I can’t hide my flinch. Dad stands, his full height amplified by shadow.

  “You disgust me,” He hisses. “And its nights like these that I wonder why I still care about you. It’s nights like these that I wished it would’ve been you, not her.”

  I stare at the wall, past him. Through him. I’m used to it, to the these exact words, said over and over again in so many different ways, at so many different times since she’s died. I learned to put up a barrier between the hurt and me. But tonight, I’m left raw and bleeding, and his words burn like salt in my wounds.

  He leaves. He doesn’t stick around to take his words back. He never does. And after this long, I’d never believe his sincerity if he did. He genuinely believes everything he says. He believes I should’ve died, back then. He wishes I did.

  It’s only when he’s gone do I dare to move, to breathe. Fury and helplessness war with each other in my lungs, and I throw the soda can at the wall, watching it dent. Useless. Everything feels so useless, when I talk to him.

  I promised myself long ago I’d never think of him as my father again.

  But sometimes I want to. Sometimes, I desperately want to.

  *****

  BEATRIX

  When I want to, I do a great job of forgetting people.

  It took me a week, but everything Wolf-related in my mind went into my mental trash can. The way he looked at me in the dress – gone. The way he glared at me when I tried to stop him from ‘bullying’ that freshman – gone. The way he dumped a vase of puke on Eric to get him away from me – gone.

  The way he held me in the garage, smelling like oil and cinnamon and laughing – gone.

  Wolfgang Blackthorn was officially a zero in my head; someone I was convinced I’d never think about again. He wanted to be enemies, so I erased every nice memory I had of him, stored it so far back in my head I’d never remember them again. It helped a lot of big tests were coming up, and I had to study for all of them. The flood of information served as nice, fertile dirt to bury him under.

  I was going to study,
ace these tests, spy some more on his brothers, and – once my scholarship was secure - live out the rest of my time at Lakecrest minding my own business, all the way to NYU’s doorstep.

  Dad hadn’t fully recovered from his locked-room episode. He’d linger there for a day before coming out and making a bunch of food for me, and then disappearing again. The food was an improvement, at least. I don’t know what he did in his room, but I knew sometimes, when TV wasn’t enough of an escape, he’d start writing again. He used to be a novelist, after all, before the depression got so bad he couldn’t put two words to a page anymore and his editor and publishing house dropped him. If I pressed my ear to his door, I could hear the steady ‘click-clack’ of keys on a keyboard.

  Man, it’d be nice if he started writing again. I used to love reading the stories he’d write for me when I was a kid – chock full of dragon-slaying princesses and evil troll-witches. But maybe that was childish of me. Wishing for those stories was just that – wishing. And wishing was pointless. I’d learned that much already.

  I tried not to think about how Mom was coming home less and less. I tried not to think about the word ‘divorce’, because everything was teetering on a razor’s edge already and if the ‘d’ word came into it, I felt like everything would come crashing down. Maybe Mom felt the same way – which is why she was staying out so many nights when she didn’t have work. Maybe she too knew that divorce would collapse what was left of our family into nothing more than dust and bones.

  Maybe she knew it would hurt Dad most of all, in ways that might not be reparable.

  So yeah, for a brief week and a half, I forgot all about Wolf Blackthorn. I had too much going on. Getting up earlier to run with Burn started to get easier, and I almost stopped completely hating running. Panting and sweating wasn’t so bad after you did it a bunch and your body got used to it. Fitz and I agreed to stop the whole ‘fake tutor’ thing, even though I kept letting him believe I was crushing on Wolf. It lead to a couple of awkward situations, the least of which was Fitz trying to force Wolf’s number on me.

  “Go on, stop being stubborn about it,” Fitz sighed. “It’s just a cellphone number.”

  “What would I even say?” I asked. “’Hey, it’s me, this girl you don’t care about, creepily texting you with your number I got. Somehow’. “

  “You wouldn’t be the first girl to try it.”

  “Fantastic.” I threw my hands up. “Just what I wanted to hear.”

  It turned out pretending to like Wolf was a lot easier than hating him. Or maybe my hate for him was mistaken by Fitz as love. Whatever the case, I barely needed to act different at all, and Fitz never once questioned me. We walked to lunch together, which was weird in and of itself, but Fitz insisted it was for ‘tutoring’ me in how to get his brother’s attention.

  “Are you ready for the tests?” He asked. “There’s a thousand and seven of them this week. If you need something -” He quirked his eyebrows. “To, you know, get through it – I’m your guy.”

  “No thanks. I think I’m good without your illicit substances,” I sighed. “But you never know. I could pretend to be dumb again for a hot two seconds and tank my academic career.”

  “Don’t even joke about that. Who would start giving me a run for my money if you played dumb again, hrm? Do you know how boring it is being the smartest one in this place?”

  “I’m sure it’s agonizing.”

  “Agonizing!” He agreed loudly. “I was on the verge of shriveling up and dying before you came along.”

  I picked up a burrito and rolled my eyes at him. “I’m flattered.”

  “Hey, I’m just trying to prepare you for the flood of romantic nonsense that’s gonna come your way whenever Wolf finds out you like him back.”

  I tried to hide my flinch. If only he knew the truth.

  “I-I seriously doubt he likes me.”

  Fitz doubled around, shaking a chocolate milk in my face. “Bee, look at me. Do I look like the type of guy who would lie to you?”

  His golden hair caught the sunlight and his freckles scrunched with his devilish grin. I sighed.

  “Yes. Always.”

  “Fair enough. But do I look like the type of guy who doesn’t know what’s going on around him at all times with piercing emotional accuracy?”

  He posed with the milk, and waited. I groaned.

  “I dunno. Maybe?”

  “I’m his brother, Bee. I still remember when he gave his first Valentine’s card in kindergarten to Elise Baker. I know what he acts like when he’s got it bad.”

  “Asshole-ishly?” I guessed.

  “Terrified! The poor guy’s so divorced from his attraction to other people he barely knows how to handle it! So he stuffs it in the back and hopes it goes away, until it builds and builds and then explodes like Mount Vesuvius. That’s just how he is.”

  “So what you’re saying is, it’s hopeless.”

  “It’s not hopeless,” He corrected. “It’s just…annoying. I’d love it if he could deal with his shit in a, you know, normal and healthy way, but after Mom –“

  He stopped, and the air suddenly got heavy. Something was lying just beneath the surface of his words, tantalizingly close to coming out. His smile faded, bit by bit. But he shook it off and smiled so bright again I was nearly blinded.

  “Maybe it’s a good thing you’re studying to be a psychologist, huh? God knows he needs one of those.”

  “Fitz, what happened with your Mom?” I pressed.

  “You already know,” His eyes got sharp. “Don’t pretend you don’t.”

  “I mean – I know she…” I flinched. “I know she – “

  “You can say it,” He demanded. “Died.”

  A few people heard him and started staring. I sat down at my usual table and lowered my voice.

  “Sorry. I know she died.”

  “When I was eight,” He barreled on. “In a car accident.”

  I felt like a jerk for pressing him. What was I thinking? “I’m so sorry, Fitz.”

  “It’s fine. I didn’t get the worst of it.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I wasn’t there. Not like Wolf was.”

  My chest felt like it was trying to cave in on itself. “Wolf was –“

  “There, when it happened. They pulled him out of the wreckage. Or, they tried to. But he wouldn’t let go of Mom’s hand.”

  Ice and fire waged war in my veins. Is that what Wolf really meant in the garage? ‘The first time since Mom died’? I’d thought it was ‘the first time since Mark’. But maybe I’d been wrong. Maybe the truth was so much sadder than what I’d inferred.

  “And your dad,” I regained my voice. “Your dad didn’t send you to counseling? Or at least get counseling for Wolf?”

  “Oh, he tried.” Fitz opened his milk. “But Wolf refused to talk to any of them. It used to be a lot worse. He used to wake up screaming. I guess time helps – he hasn’t done that in a while. But on the downside, he can’t, you know, stand shaking hands with someone. So. There’s that.”

  I felt like my brain was frozen, glitched as it tried to process everything.

  “You should’ve seen it,” Fitz laughed. “The one time I tried to give him gloves. A nice Yves Saint Laurent pair, very sleek and stylish. Black leather, with clips. I thought it would help with the whole skin-to-skin thing. But he just threw them in the fireplace. Said it was pointless to try to hide behind a piece of clothing. Didn’t even give them a chance.”

  Fitz put his head in his hand, scowling at the graffiti etched into the table.

  “Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t want to get better.”

  Those words freaked me out – it sounded exactly like the things I used to think, back when Dad was first diagnosed. In the darkest parts of me, when I’m down and out, I still think like that. Reading the psych textbooks helped me, so much so that I knew I’d be lost in despair if I didn’t read
them.

  “Fitz,” I put my hand over his. “Listen – I’m the one trying to go to NYU for psychology, right?”

  He snorted. “Yeah.”

  “You know how many of those textbooks I check out a week.”

  “A hundred million.”

  I chuckled. “Yeah. A hundred million. So when I tell you it’s not a matter of Wolf wanting to get better, you understand me, right?”

  Fitz shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Nobody wakes up one day and says ‘I want to get better’,” I shook my head. “Well, sometimes they do. But that’s a very rare occasion. And getting better isn’t as easy as going to see a shrink three times a week. It doesn’t work like that. If one part of your body is hurt, you don’t just put a band-aid on the spot and call it a day. You wash the wound, you put antibiotic ointment in there, and you wrap it up. You change the bandage, you put more ointment on. Over and over, until it’s healed. Sometimes it gets infected, and you have to go get that taken care of, with pills and stuff. And then sometimes, no matter how hard you try to keep it clean and dry, it gets re-infected. And then, maybe after it’s all healed, the scar’s skin is too tight, or you lose all feeling in that area, or maybe it aches so bad you can’t get out of bed some days.”

  I took a breath.

  “That’s what it’s like. It’s not easy, okay? And it’s even harder to know where to start. All you can do is offer a listening ear, a shoulder to cry on. Sometimes it’s not even that dramatic; sometimes all you can do is sit down and watch TV with them. Sometimes all you can do is throw a microwave dinner in and bring it to them with a glass of juice. Sometimes, you can’t do anything at all.”

  Fitz was quiet. I fell silent, suddenly feeling awkward about how much I’d talked. I’d sounded preachy. I knew there was nothing worse than someone trying to tell you about how hard it was for someone else, when they were the ones suffering, too.