Burn Before Reading

by Sara Wolf

  “Maybe.”

  I don’t press him for details on the fight between them – the last thing he needs right now is someone interrogating him. We eat pizza and watch TV and I avoid my semi-broken phone, which, when it actually does turn on, lights up with a dozen text messages – all of them from Kristin. I can’t bear to answer her, or talk to anyone. I just want to be left alone.

  Dad talks about clearing some stuff out of his room – stuff he doesn’t use anymore – so I help him load cardboard boxes of old comics and baseballs cards and shirts and golf clubs. It’s sort of a repeat of what he helped me do with my old stuff, when I found out I was going to Lakecrest. We’d boxed it all up together. Something nags at me. I stop duct taping everything and look up.

  “Hey Dad?”

  “Hm?” He struggles with an old, broken typewriter, gingerly placing it into a box.

  “How’re you, um, feeling?”

  It’s a dangerous topic, but I have to ask. Dad doesn’t immediately fly off the handle, which I’m grateful for. He just heaves a sigh.

  “I’m fine, Bee. I just wanted to clear some of this old junk out. Start fresh, you know? Or, as fresh as I can get at my age.”

  He laughs, and I try to laugh with him. I really do. But all the textbooks I’ve read – everything points to getting rid of old things or giving them away as a bad sign. It’s called reconciling, I think, or something like that. And no matter how much he says he’s okay, I can’t help the uneasy gurgle in my stomach. He seems fine for the next two days – he eats well whenever I make pancakes or sandwiches, and when I check his pill bottle the correct amount is missing. Taking his meds regularly and eating right is a huge step up. So things can’t be going wrong.

  They can’t be.

  On the fourth day, Mom finally calls me. It takes her three tries, since my phone gives out twice.

  “Finally, honey! Is something wrong with your phone?”

  I swallowed. “I, er, dropped it in the sink.”

  “God, sweetie –“

  “I know, I know! We can’t afford another one. Don’t worry – I put it in rice. It’s just a little slower, is all.”

  Mom breathed out. “Well, if you’re sure. How are things over there?”

  “Good. Dad’s eating a lot.”

  “That’s good.” She said, though it sounded a little strained. “And how about you? How are you doing?”

  I’m shitty. I wish you were home. I wish you’d just come home and make up with Dad. I wish I was in school. I wish my friends didn’t hate me. I wish, I wish - so many wishes and not enough realities.

  “I’m okay. I think I’m coming down with something, though. My throat feels weird.”

  “Okay, well – don’t be afraid to take a school day off. God knows you work yourself to the bone to stay in that place. If they give you a hard time, just have them call me. I’ll set them straight.”

  “Thanks, Mom.”

  “Did you know the director of the hospital I work at went to Lakecrest, too? He studied at Yale, and when I told him you were at Lakecrest he was so surprised. I told him you were keeping a scholarship there, and oh, the look on his face, honey. You should’ve seen it. People are so impressed by you – people you don’t even know!”

  Every word is a red-hot iron nail straight to my heart. I clear my throat.

  “Yeah. Um. Mom, about that –“

  “What?” Mom shouts in another direction. Someone’s voice echoes, too distant for me to make out the words. “Okay! Bee, I have to go – I’ve taken Candace’s shift and they need me in ICU. I’m sorry, can we talk later?”

  “Yeah, no, it’s fine,” I lie, though I’m secretly relieved. “I love you.”

  “I love you too, Bee.”

  She hangs up, leaving me to empty silence and crushing guilt. I can’t keep putting off telling her forever. Or Dad. Eventually they have to know. Eventually my little façade will come crumbling down. But if I can put it off for even one more day, that’s good enough for me. That seems to be their mentality, too – avoid things. I guess I took a master class in avoidance from them while I was still in the womb.

  Eventually, I have to venture outside. Turns out the refrigerator doesn’t just automatically refill itself. I put on a jacket and big, old sunglasses and make my way to the grocery store. When I’m done, I glance at the paper bag in the backseat, the one I brought from the house. I figure while I’m out, I might as well tie up a few loose ends.

  It takes me a few tries, but I finally find the right streets and take the right turns. The houses become familiar. Unlike the first time I came here on the back of Wolf’s bike, all the leaves are gone from the trees, all the flowers brown and wilted and dead. It’s amazing how the world just loves to smack me in the face with sad metaphors these days. I park on the street across from Seamus’s house.

  I take the paper bag in my arms and walk up to his door. After a few rings of the doorbell, I wait. I almost turn and run back to the car twice – what am I even doing here? What if the brothers are here by some stroke of unluck? I don’t think I could face them. Would they tell Seamus what I’d done? Would he hate me?

  My fears are dispelled when Seamus answers the door, his glasses making his smiling eyes look huge.

  “Ah! Miss Cruz. It’s a pleasure to see you again. Come in, come in.”

  “Thanks,” I cross the threshold. He tries to steer me towards the kitchen for tea, but I stand my ground in the hallway. “I just came to give this back to you.”

  I hand him the paper bag, and he unfurls the wrapping inside to reveal the sky-blue dress. He shakes his head.

  “No, no no. I won’t take this.”

  “There’s no way I can repay you,” I said. “And – And I messed up. Taking care of the brothers. You asked me to, and I messed up, so. I don’t deserve this.” I can’t meet Seamus’s eyes, my own riveted to the floor as I sigh. “I let…a lot of people down.”

  Seamus is quiet, and then; “You’re awfully young to sound so old, my dear.”

  “It tends to happen,” I say. “When you mess up everything real badly.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it wasn’t that bad –“

  “It was,” I insist. “It was the worst. I’m the worst.”

  He’s silent again, and then; “Well, if you’re the worst, then you absolutely must keep the dress.”

  “Why?” I blink.

  “So that every time you look at it, you’re reminded of your mistake, and are inspired to become better.”

  “I –“

  “But for me,” He interrupts smoothly. “That dress has a very different meaning. For me, that dress is a reminder of just how pretty and happy you looked in it. And when you came out here,” He motions to the living room. “And the brothers saw you, they too became a little happier. Why, I never think I’ve seen Wolf quite as dumbfounded as he was in that moment.”

  My heart twists around. “Dumbfounded isn’t happy.”

  “No. But at least it’s something other than sad.”

  Something other than sad. I knew the value of that. Something other than sad was a good day, for Dad. Something other than sad is what I’d kill to be, at this moment. Seamus puts a gnarled hand on my shoulder.

  “For what it’s worth, my dear, life is very long, and memories are very short.”

  “But –“

  “Whatever you did can be undone,” He says. “It may take months. It may take years. But as long as there is breath in your body, there is a chance to make up for what you’ve done. It will be slow, and difficult. But some would say it’s worth it. If you care about the people you hurt, you cannot run away. That would only cause you more pain. You must be kind to yourself.”

  “I can’t. I ruined everything.”

  “Perhaps. But if you are powerful enough to ruin everything, then perhaps you are powerful enough to make it right again.”

  I’m struck quiet. Maybe, just maybe, he’s righ
t. Maybe I can see everyone else’s problems so clearly, and not my own. Maybe all the textbooks in the world can’t make me turn my knowledge in on myself. The longer I wallow, the deeper I inflict guilt and shame on myself. The deeper the cuts go, the harder it’ll be to think positively about myself ever again. I’m not all bad. I know that. I love my Dad. I love Mom. I love –

  “Wolf,” Seamus says, surprised. “What are you doing here?”

  Dread petrifies me, but I break out of it. I can’t lock up. I have to move forward, even if it’s just one aching step at a time. I whirl around to face Wolf, his leather motorcycle jacket and gloves as black as his windswept hair. His eagle brows knit when he sees me, jade eyes burning laser-hot holes in my forehead. He’s looking through me, not at me, like I don’t exist.

  “I see you’re busy, Seamus,” Wolf says, his voice quietly ablaze. “I’ll come back later.”

  He turns and makes for his motorcycle on the curb. I dash after him.

  “Wolf, wait –“

  He keeps walking, never once stopping. I try desperately to catch up with him.

  “Wolf, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. About everything.”

  He puts his helmet back on, lowering the visor without a beat and settling into the seat of his motorcycle. I might as well be the wind, a blade of grass, something inconsequential.

  “I know you can’t forgive me,” I say quickly. “I know that. And I don’t want you to. But I’ll work hard, I promise. Even if it takes a year, four years, ten years – I’ll keep working hard to be a better person. And then maybe someday – ” I swallow, my throat closing up. Don’t cry. Not now. Be strong. “Maybe someday, you’ll talk to me again.”

  He leans back, taking off the kickstand. He’s going to start it and drive away. And that’s fine. I smile.

  “I’d like that. To talk with you again.”

  There’s a second. Just one. And then he revs the engine and roars off down the street. I watch him go for as long as I can, until he’s a tiny speck. I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I look over to see Seamus smile at me.

  “That was a good first step. Come in, have some tea. I’m not much of a fixer, but I like to think myself good at listening. If you feel like talking, that is.”

  “I don’t want to bother you,” I say.

  “Nonsense. Wolf was my only client today, and he did say he’d be back later. We have some time.”

  I clench my fists. Seamus put his arm around my shoulder.

  “Come. The sidewalk is no place for a girl who looks as sad as you do.”

  Seamus has a way of making me feel at ease. It may be the sweet tea he serves, or his gentle accent, or maybe it’s how old and wise he seems. Whatever it is, two cups of chamomile and honey tea later, and I feel better. Slightly. But the worst isn’t over yet. I have a long way to go before I can even look at myself in the mirror, again.

  I pour through the old textbooks, searching desperately for some hint, some step. Something to tell me what to do, what to say, how to act. But there’s nothing. Nothing in the books tell me how to apologize after a royal fuck up. No one has the answers to that.

  The only thing I can do is try. Even if it’s stupid. Even if it doesn’t work.

  I start, of course, with Fitz. Because he’s the easiest. The easiest in the best way – the most open, the most clever, the most honest. I decide to draw him something, something small and simple, and leave it on my computer desktop. I’m sure he’ll get around to finding it. He’s not the type to ignore me completely like Wolf and Burn might. He’ll want to know why, why I did it, why he didn’t realize it sooner, and he’ll go snooping around on my computer for evidence.

  It might not be much, but it’s all I can do, right now.

  The picture is a bad Microsoft Paint masterpiece, complete with the terrible stick figures he and I liked to make in our tutoring sessions. Wolf, with his long hair and stiff uniform, perched on his motorcycle like a gargoyle. Burn, with his gargantuan height, skydiving from a badly-drawn plane. And finally I draw Fitz, sitting at a computer hacking, and his shirt reads; “World’s No. 1 Cool Guy”. I try to make it as ironic and dumb as possible. Stick-figure girls with huge boobs surround him, and I draw myself in the back of the well-endowed crowd, cheering Fitz’s hacking endeavors on with the rest of them. I sign the corner of it ‘Madam Cruz’, as if I’m some fancy renaissance painter. It’s perfect. Or at the very least, I hope it’s just good enough to make Fitz smile. I hide the file behind a bunch of folders, so deep in my computer that even I lose it for a second. I leave a trail of little notepad hints to the next clue inside my computer that ultimately lead to the picture, all of the clues labeled ‘To The Best Hacker Ever!!!11’. It’s like a scavenger hunt. If it won’t make him smile, it might at least give him ten minutes of distraction from his own busy mind.

  The second is, and always will be, Burn.

  There’s only one place I’ll be able to contact Burn, and that’s on the trail we ran on every morning. I went looking for him the first morning after that awful night, but of course he wasn’t there. He’s avoiding me. It’s a long shot, but maybe he’d come back to the trail, to that overlook on the cliff where we watched so many sunrises together in blissful silence. It’s all I have to go on.

  For Burn, there’s only one thing I can think of. Something to keep him safe, while he’s out there driving at breakneck speeds and standing on cliff edges and running marathons around the marathon-runners. I used to see them all the time – tiny keychains, words suspended in a sturdy plastic covering that said something to the effect of ‘keep this one safe’. Some were religious. Some weren’t. Some had stupid cartoon characters on them. But all of them were meant to keep the bearer out of harm’s way.

  So I make one. Cheap plastic keychain material isn’t hard to find, but I got worried it wouldn’t stand up to the heavy wear-and-tear exercise Burn put himself through, so I used up what I had left and bought the expensive, sturdy material, the kind you couldn’t snap in two if you ran it over with a car. That was the easy part. The hard bit was figuring out what to write inside. Everything I came up with either sounded too cheesy or too aggressive. But then I realized it just needed to reflect who he is – someone to-the-point. Someone pure and simple. I carefully outlined with dark ink, and filled the words in with sensible blue and gray colors. Colors that reminded me of him. I slide the paper into the keychain, the words fitting perfectly. I held it up to the light, watching it spin.

  ‘Be Safe’, it read.

  I put it in a box, inside a plastic bag to keep it dry. I walked up the trail one evening, leaving it below the bench he always sat on. It was stupid – I knew that the second I left the box there. Anybody else could pick it up. The likelihood Burn would ever receive it was slim to none. He probably wouldn’t come up here at all, anymore. If I was him, I’d want to put as much space between me and someone who betrayed me as I could.

  They feel like farewell gifts, and in a way, they are. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to speak to the Blackthorn brothers again. But these small things are my way of saying goodbye, to be safe, to smile. Now that I think about it, if they ever find them, they’ll probably just laugh at how pathetic they are. I made the gifts out of paper and plastic and pixels – nothing like they’re used to. Compared to the sheer amount of money they have, I’m sure stuff like this is just considered garbage.

  Sunday night comes, Monday is the day I have to go to Lakecrest, and I still don’t know what to give to Wolf.

  What can I give? I have nothing that suits him. Nothing good enough. All I hold is a handful of ‘sorry’s and an endless well of heartache.

  And then, one day when I’m out grocery shopping, I see it.

  There’s a pawn shop next to the grocer’s, a seedy little place with neon lights and few customers. But in the window I spot the most perfect silver ring, sitting on top of a pile of them. It’s not chunky, but it’s not thin, just the right size for his gracef
ul fingers. It’s carved into the shape of a wolf that curls around itself, brave and fearsome. It’s perfect.

  “Hi,” I push into the pawn shop breathlessly. “How much is the wolf ring in the window?”

  The pawnbroker, a reedy man with a proud chin, narrows his eyes at me.

  “I don’t sell to teenagers. Now get out.”

  “Please,” I stand firm. “I need to know how much that ring is.”

  He looked me up and down. “You don’t have the money for it, I already know that. Stop wasting my time.”

  “How much?”

  The man, clearly expecting me to have left already, threw up his hands.

  “Ninety-five. I won’t take a dime less.”

  “Fifty,” I say once I get over my flinch. He sneers.

  “You don’t have fifty. Seventy-five, and that’s my final offer.”

  “Seventy.”

  “I swear to God, if you don’t get out of my store –“

  I know a thing or two about bargaining – there’s a lot of it in psychology.

  “Seventy, and I take it off your hands today.”

  He eyed me, and there was a terse moment of quiet. I needed that ring, but I couldn’t show it, or he’d just hike up the price again. I kept my face stone, ice, steel, something featureless and cold.

  “Fine. But I close at six. If you don’t come before then the deal’s off.”

  I look at the array of clocks on the wall. It’s five-thirty. If I drive fast, I can make it back home. I piled the groceries in the car and tore down the highway, screeching into our driveway and rocketing up the stairs into the house.

  “Dad!” I called. “Dad! I found something!”

  He started up from his place, asleep on the couch in front of the TV. “F-Found what?”

  “Something you can get me for my birthday. But we have to get to the store before six!”

  Dad mussed his hair, looking bewilderedly at the clock. “Bee, it’s five-fifty –“

  “Please, Dad,” I grasped his hands, pleading with my eyes. “It’s perfect. It’s everything I’ve ever wanted.”

  He scrubbed his face with his hands and sighed. “Fine. Let’s go.”