by M. F. Lorson
Worse, what if something happened to Landon or Drake? The last I had seen they were tumbling in the grass. Arms and legs tangling together in a blur, rolling down toward the bank. What if they were so distracted fighting over me that they didn’t notice the fire getting closer?
It was super hard not to compare this whole thing to the big dumb battle at the end of The Outsiders. By that point of the movie you know that the Socs and greasers are wasting their damn time fighting, but they do it anyway because someone has to die for drama.
I would have loved to blame Drake for being stupid or Landon for being, well, himself, but I knew the person responsible for tonight’s fire was me. I shouldn’t have been at that party because I should have dropped Drake like the deadweight that he was, right after Girl Scout camp.
Now I had to go inside my house acting like I hadn’t just been out doing something ridiculous. I readied my fake smile and pulled open the door. Mom was on the couch with the police scanner beside her and a only a small reading lamp to light the room. She did this, whenever dad got called in off the clock. He had told her a zillion times that all it did was make her worry more, but that didn’t stop her from doing it.
Her eyes flew up to meet me at the entryway. “Thank God you’re home. Come sit by me before your father’s job gives me a heart attack.”
Obediently I sunk into the spot beside her on our aged blue couch.
“What’s going on?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.
“Some idiots started a fire on the riverwalk, and now your father is down there along with the fire department and the paramedics.”
“Paramedics?” I could feel my heart rate rising and my palms getting sweaty. What if Landon beat the tar out of Drake, or worse one of them got burnt?
Mom’s eyes were glazed over, and I wondered what awful things she was imagining without knowing anything about what had really happened down by the river. And then it hit me, she was worried about Dad, and I hadn’t even thought about him.
“I’m sure he’s fine,” I said, placing a not-so-sure hand on top of hers. Mom intertwined her fingers with mine and turned to face me in the low light of the lamp beside her.
“They're trying to get everybody out of the camp, but some people don’t want to go. All their things are there.”
It didn’t click. What she was talking about. What camp? It was just a bunch of dumb kids drinking and lighting the grass on fire. One of us could have gotten hurt, but that was it.
There was a crackle on the scanner before Officer Nealson’s voice came over the line. “Transporting one to the hospital for smoke inhalation. The rest of the area is clear.”
Beside me mom let out the breath she had been holding.
“What camp?” I asked, my nerves growing more frayed by the moment.
Mom took a long gulp of wine from the glass beside her. “Remember last year when the shelter closed down for lack of volunteers?”
I nodded. I vaguely remembered Andy spending more time at the station last winter, but I hadn’t considered why.
“People still have to sleep somewhere,” said Mom. “You’re dad’s been trying to clear the camp from under the bridge for months now. But it’s hard to enforce a rule like that when the only other place people have to go is jail and there isn’t much room there either.”
I reached up to twist my pendant between my thumb and forefingers, but the spot on my chest where it belonged was bare.
It must have fallen off while I was running to the truck. A sick feeling began to form in the pit of my stomach. When he found that necklace he would know I had been there and this was so much worse than spray paint on a wall no one cared about. At first it was a party, then a party and a fire. Now it was a party and a fire where someone got hurt.
I excused myself and went up to my room where I pulled the Harper loves Dally shirt on as pajamas and lay staring at the ceiling listening for the click of Dad’s keys in the door.
Landon
I sat in front of my house for nearly thirty minutes before I had the energy to walk through the front door. Replaying the events of the night through my head, I tried to find the source of the guilt in my chest. I wasn’t the one who started the fire. I didn’t throw the party, steal the keys, trespass, or hurt the people in that homeless camp just behind where the fire raged.
Still, I felt terrible. When the cops showed up, they had me and Drake in cuffs, sitting on the curb in seconds. Nealson didn’t bother questioning me when he took the keys from my pocket, but he did mumble something about letting Hunt deal with me. And that did sting. Not only because the thought of letting my personal hero down made me sick, but now I wanted more than his approval for work. I wanted his approval for Harper.
Again, that knot of guilt soured my stomach.
Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt, and Drake did get processed for breaking his probation, but I would have sat in jail for a week straight over the look in Hunt’s eye when he got out of his car and took one look at me.
“They warned me about you.” His first words to me might as well have been gunshot wounds to the chest. Keeping my eyes down, I took the blame. It was worth keeping Harper out of trouble. That was my goal in the first place, wasn’t it? And with any luck, she was already safely tucked in bed. Look at me, making sacrifices and being a hero. I bet no one saw that coming.
“Even Harper tried to warn me about you. Told me you were nothing but a party-throwing rich kid who only cared about himself.”
He was silent a moment while he stared down at me.
“Is that true?” he asked.
Looking up at him, I tried not to let the look of disappointment on his face sink in too much. “Yes, sir.”
He kneeled down next to me as the last ambulance drove away and we were left with nothing but dark smoke and awkwardness.
“Was anyone seriously hurt?” I mumbled.
“They’ll be fine.”
I waited for him to haul me away, read me my rights, call my dad, and when he didn’t answer, my brother. But Hunt didn’t move. He just stared at me, squinty-eyed like he was thinking.
“Am I under arrest?” I asked.
“For what?”
I looked around, trying to figure out what I was missing.
“For stealing the keys from Harper. Breaking in. Throwing the party and starting the fire.”
I didn’t know it was possible, but his look of disappointment deepened. His thick brow creased so far, I was sure it was leaving a mark on his skull.
“Landon, Landon, Landon,” he said.
“Yes, sir?”
“Get up,” he said, hoisting me up under my arm.
“Your internship is terminated. You can apply again in the spring and go through the application process again, but no, you are not under arrest.”
My heart fell. My internship was ruined. I hadn’t even thought about that, but of course, my chances of being accepted into the police academy would be at risk too.
Still, I didn’t understand why I wasn’t being booked at that very moment. Hunt pulled out his keys and unlocked the cuffs behind my back.
“We arrested Drake Carter for trespassing on public property and distributing alcohol to minors. I told Nealson not to book you because you didn’t do anything wrong.”
At first, I figured Hunt was just doing me a favor. Letting me off the hook as some act of favoritism.
“I found this,” he said as he held up a gold chain with a pendant hanging, and I recognized it immediately. Harper’s necklace.
“I had that on me...in my pocket. I must have dropped it,” I blurted out, hoping he bought it.
“Why would you have my daughter’s necklace?”
“Because...ummm…”
He watched me with curiosity written on his face as I tried to find a reason for having her necklace that was acceptable and not of the making out variety.
“I stole it.”
Apparently, that was not the answer he wanted becaus
e he rolled his eyes and let out a deep sigh.
“I’m serious, sir. Harper had nothing to do with this,” I said, but he ignored me, rubbing his head.
“Well, now I know a few things I just need to process for a moment.”
“That I’m a thief?”
“No, that you have feelings for my daughter. That you’re willing to lie to a police officer for her, and that she was definitely here tonight.”
With my mouth hanging open like an idiot and what I knew was probably a bright red shade to my cheeks, I didn’t say anything.
“Listen, Landon. What happened here tonight was a close call. People could have been seriously hurt, and you had the ability to stop it, but you didn’t. You chose your feelings for someone over making the right call, and if you are ever serious about becoming an officer, you need to rethink your priorities.”
I swallowed the lump in my throat. He was right, but I still didn’t regret what I did. I came here to stop the party, and taking the fall for Harper was the proudest thing I’d done my whole life, and I would do it again and again.
“Yes, sir,” I muttered again as we walked toward the cars. “You’re not going to...arrest Harper, right?”
“No. Technically, I only have proof she was here, which wasn’t against the law considering she had a key. Besides…” This time I watched him gulp with a pained look on his face. “I think I can take some blame in Harper’s behavior lately.”
He didn’t clarify, and I didn’t expect him to. He just got in his car as I walked to mine.
Thirty minutes later, I tried to feel grateful for dodging that bullet, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that somewhere, at some point, I screwed up. Maybe it was just the long seventeen years before tonight.
Harper
Harper: Emergency troupe meeting in my bedroom right meow!
Reagan: No
Harper: Crawl out window, scale fences via backyard route.
Reagan: It’s one in the morning and I’m still grounded for covering for you at scout camp. Remember??
Harper: You live three houses over.
Reagan: You live one hundred houses away in my heart.
Harper:....Help?
I could practically hear her exaggerated sigh as the little dots on my phone showed her typing and deleting over and over again. Finally she gave up formulating a response and my phone began to buzz with her video-chat.
I flipped on the lamp by my bedside, cocked an ear toward the living room to make sure mom was still transfixed by the police scanner and hit the pick up button.
“This is as close as you are getting to my presence.”
I squinted at the phone. My eyes were still adjusting to the light from the lamp but I was pretty sure there were little pink ponies all over her pajamas. “Are those... Are you wearing My Little Pony pajamas?”
“You should talk,” she growled, her eyes darting to the Dally T I had basically lived in since opening the bag it came in.
I looked down and frowned. “This? This actually serves a pretty important purpose. You see, now when my father kills me, he won’t have to make the difficult decision of trying to choose what to bury me in. I’ll already be ready.”
Reagan raised a concerned eyebrow. “What have you done?”
“Oh, a couple of things really.” I said. Even over the phone I didn’t want to meet her eyes.
“Give me the abridged version,” she whispered. “There are probably like four minutes before my mom busts in here with her ‘a dancer’s body needs sleep’ lecture.
“Doesn’t that mean she should be sleeping?”
“Apparently an ex-dancer’s body only requires vodka.”
I laughed so hard I snorted, and Reagan had to clap her hand over the speaker to keep from waking the rest of the household.
“Now you have like three minutes,” she warned.
“Alright,” I said, not sure where to begin. “I was an idiot and let Drake talk me into co-hosting a party under the bridge on the riverwalk, and Landon came.”
“Cuz he’s stalking you…”
“Little bit. But anyway, he came and he was like, ‘Harper, I love you, give me your face, I’m gonna kiss it.’”
“Wait, seriously?”
“Seriously, and then I was like. That’s a good idea. Let’s do kissing. I see that my not-so-juvenile delinquent boyfriend is within viewing distance. Nothing bad will happen.”
“Oh for crying out loud.”
“And then there was really great kissing.”
Reagan smirked. “I foresaw this in the tent.”
“Please put your know-it-all on hold until the part of the story where my father must sacrifice his youngest child.”
“Sorry, continue.”
“So anyway, there I was, having great kissing with the captain of the Khaki Collective when across the party landscape comes Drake, and he’s angry, and Landon is angry, and suddenly I am angry because I realize I’ve been wasting a lot of time kissing this wrong guy.”
“A lot to process.”
“Thank you! But then I hear sirens.”
“I just want to pause you right here to mention that not a single story in my entire life ends with ‘and then I heard sirens,’ but like five of yours do.”
I took a deep breath and reminded myself it was one a.m. and literally impossible to access a nonjudgmental version of Reagan at this time. Plus she was only getting the highlights. She didn’t know about the whole, my insides felt like a cockroach race, because I was probably in love with my enemy part.
“Sirens,” I repeated. “And my heart starts beating a million miles a minute, and Drake is like, ‘I’m running away on my big chicken legs,’ and Landon is like, ‘Harper, get out of here! I’ll say I stole your key to the riverwalk.’”
Reagan gasped.
“I know!” I cried. “I didn’t want to do it but...”
“You had to!”
“I had to. I ran up to the truck and peeled out of the parking lot before the cops came. But then I look in my rearview mirror, and there is smoke coming from under the bridge, and the fire department comes roaring past me.”
Even in the artificial glow of my phone, I can tell that Reagan’s face has gone stark white.
“Harper, is everyone okay?”
I gulp down against the lump that forms in my throat just thinking about the question. Is everyone okay?
“According to what mom and I heard on the scanner, some homeless people were taken to the hospital for smoke inhalation, but it didn’t sound like any partygoers, like anyone we know was hurt.”
“That’s lucky.”
“I know. But I can’t let Landon do this for me, right?”
Reagan looked toward her bedroom door. Then pulled the phone up close to her face to whisper. “I hear my Mom. I don’t know what you should do. Sleep on it and call me tomorrow?”
A light cast across Reagan’s bedroom and she quickly hung up.
I would call her tomorrow, if I was still among the living. For now, I had to figure out what to say to my dad that was the least likely to land me in military school. It wasn’t unusual for me to feel like a disappointment, it was just usually, I didn’t feel like I deserved it. When I considered how easy Dad let me off after camp, and the way he was taking an interest in my gold award project, it was hard to deny that he had been making an effort this summer. I was just too busy being bitter to notice.
In the morning I had to tell him the truth and part of that truth was how much I needed him despite all the ways I acted like I didn’t.
Landon
“Where in God’s name have you been? I was worried sick!”
Neither the tone, the voice, or the words were familiar to me as I walked into my house well past midnight. I fully expected a dark and silent house that did not notice my absence or return, but instead, I was staring at my dad, standing in the kitchen, looking frazzled and exhausted.
“Dad? When did you—?”
“I�
��ll ask the questions, Landon. Hunt called me two hours ago to make sure you got home safe. Where have you been and what is going on?”
For the first time tonight, I reached into my pocket and found my phone, which was both dead and shattered from tackling Drake to the ground.
I rolled my eyes at my dad who suddenly took interest in my whereabouts. “Oh, you care now?” I walked past him toward the fridge to grab a soda, but I kept my face locked down and emotionless. I wouldn’t let him see what I was feeling. He didn’t deserve to see it.
“What is that supposed to mean?” he snapped at me. He was still in his work clothes, probably fresh off the plane. I loved how no one told me anything, and I had no idea my dad was even coming home.
“Whatever,” I mumbled as I walked toward my room, desperate to be away from him, my new normal.
“Landon Maxwell,” he bellowed, his voice echoing off the walls of the living room. “Do not walk away from me when I’m talking to you.”
I spun around and resisted the urge to launch my Coke can at his head. “You can’t just walk in here after being gone for weeks and start acting like a dad!” This time it was my voice echoing, coming out even louder than his, and I stopped myself, feeling my chest rising and falling dramatically from my sudden anger.
“I told you, I was working…”
“You were working, I know. But while you were working, I was struggling.” My voice shook, and I tried to turn around again, but stopped myself at the entrance to the hallway. I couldn’t go to bed now, not with all of the things I wanted to say to my dad bubbling up to the surface.
“Struggling with what, son?”
I turned back around to see the guy that had become like a stranger to me in the past four years. When Mom died, the three of us instantly became strangers, like our only connection was her. Now, I saw this new guy standing there, looking less and less like the dad I remembered.
