Faster We Burn

by Chelsea M. Cameron

  Couldn’t have said it better myself.

  I nodded and adjusted Katie’s head on the pillow. Her face was calm, as if she’d fallen asleep naturally.

  “Kayla’s trying to keep it together, but it won’t last forever. Eventually it catches up with you. Just takes some people longer than others.”

  Katie’s eyebrows twitched and then went still.

  “I have no idea what to do. I’ve never lost anybody I cared about. Not like this. I’m not exactly close with my family.” I wasn’t sure how much he knew.

  “Yeah, Kayla said you’d had a hard time, but the truth is, nothing can prepare you for something like this. There’s no manual or training course. You just have to hold on and not let it take you away.”

  I hoped it wouldn’t take Katie away. She was already so broken. It was too much for one person to handle.

  “Are you going to be okay? I know we just met, but we’re sort of in the same boat here.” He had a point.

  “I have no idea. I just want to be okay for her.” He nodded. Adam understood.

  What he didn’t understand was that I’d been on the brink of telling Katie about sleeping with Ric. I’d been about to hurt her again, and then something even bigger swooped in and did it for me.

  How could I tell her now? But how could I leave her in the dark? Every time she looked at me with such hope, it killed me. I wasn’t the guy she thought I was. I wasn’t the guy she needed me to be.

  She shifted in her sleep, turning toward me, and I knew that I couldn’t tell her anytime soon. Right now I had to be there for her and I’d figure out the rest later.

  ***

  Katie woke up a few hours later, after Mrs. Hallman had sort of calmed down. She’d moved from hysterical to a state like Katie was in earlier. Eerie detachment.

  Kayla ended up stepping in and helping with the arrangements, that his wish was to be cremated. She and the first grief counselor, Becky, talked and talked as Mrs. Hallman sat and nodded when they asked her a question. Katie was still groggy, so I kept her in my arms.

  Her phone went off and I realized that no one knew where we were. In all the chaos, neither of us had thought to tell Lottie, or anyone else, where we’d gone. I pulled out Katie’s phone to find about a million frantic, all-caps text messages and a number of voicemails.

  I didn’t want to leave Katie, but I had to do something, so I texted Lottie, Trish, Will, Simon, Zan and Audrey what had happened. This was not the kind of thing you sent in a text message, but I couldn’t really make a call.

  They messaged back, and I tried to answer them as best I could, saying that I would call later with more details.

  Talking, talking, talking. So much talking.

  And then it was time to leave. Just like that.

  I had no idea what the hell I was supposed to do, so I just got Katie to her feet and waited for someone to tell me.

  “I guess Africa is going to have to wait,” I heard Kayla say to Adam. “You can go back if you want.”

  “Not without you, and not like this,” he said, giving her a kiss on the side of her forehead.

  I looked at Katie, at her red eyes and disheveled hair, and I knew I wasn’t going anywhere either. Not like this.

  “I’m coming with you,” I said. “Wherever you go, I’m coming with you, sweetheart.”

  I drove Katie back to her house and Adam drove Kayla and Mrs. Hallman. It seemed like there should be more to it. Like rain, or a sad song. I guess death isn’t like the movies.

  There were a few cars in the driveway and the lights were on as if everything were completely normal.

  I didn’t carry Katie into the house, but she did lean on me as I helped her up the steps. The last time I’d been here, she’d kissed me and I’d drawn on her hand and I’d played the violin and she’d fought with her mom.

  As much as it had sucked when I’d had to leave, I wished I could rewind time and go back to it. Even that was better than this.

  The house was in chaos, the floor covered in dirt and debris from the paramedics tramping around.

  “Oh, you’re back,” someone said, coming out of the kitchen. It was Katie’s aunt, Carol. There were other people in there as well, most of whom I recognized from Thanksgiving.

  It was like they were having a grief party.

  Everyone tried to come hug Katie after hugging and comforting Mrs. Hallman, who was back to crying again. Kayla went to the kitchen and Adam followed, never leaving her side.

  “Tell me what you need, and I’ll do it.”

  “I just want to go to my room,” she said, so I took her. It was changed from the last time I’d been in here. The walls were white and bare, empty of the hundreds of smiling photographs that had once covered every available bit of bare wall.

  “She did it,” she said, going to the wall across from her bed and rubbing her hand on it. “She cleaned it off.”

  “What?” She turned around and went to sit on her bed.

  “I drew all over my wall with marker and she cleaned it off. I took a picture with my phone though.”

  “Can I see it?” I said, sitting down next to her. I thought she would lean into me again, but she didn’t, instead propping her back against the wall. I did the same, our shoulders almost touching.

  “It was so stupid. Just a bunch of designs and words. It doesn’t matter now because my dad is dead.” She turned her head and met my eyes. “My dad is dead.”

  I thought she was going to break down again, but she didn’t, instead closing her eyes and tipping her head all the way back until she was staring at the ceiling.

  “I don’t remember the last thing he said to me. It was probably I love you, but I don’t know. How could I not know? What if I’d said something horrible to him and that was the last thing I said to him, before…” She didn’t finish.

  I had to say something, even if I couldn’t find the exact right words. Maybe there weren’t any right words.

  “He loved you so much, and nothing you could ever say would change that, Katie. Nothing. He thought the world of you. Anyone could see that. You can’t think about that stuff, or regrets, or anything like that. You’ll just end up crazy and angry and he wouldn’t want that for you.” Not that I had any right to say what her dad did or didn’t want for her, but I knew that blaming herself or being miserable wasn’t it.

  “I’m still waiting for it to not be true.”

  “I think that’s part of grief. Don’t they have those five steps?” I tried to grab at what I’d learned in psychology last year. I was much better at crunching numbers than this kind of thing.

  “I know denial is one, and bargaining. I don’t remember the others,” I said.

  “I think I’m definitely in denial.”

  “Well, that’s the first step, so I think you’re supposed to be.” She sighed.

  “Can I get you anything? What have you had to eat?”

  “I don’t want anything. I feel like I never want to eat again.”

  “You have to. Please. I’m sure somebody has made something at this point. I don’t know much about this kind of thing, but I do know that when someone dies, people cook. Oh, shit,” I said, realizing I’d said “dies”. “I shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.”

  “He’s dead. You can say it out loud. I did. He’s dead. Oh, I said it again.” She clasped and unclasped her hands. “How can I be in denial if I can say it out loud?”

  “Saying it out loud and believing it are two different things,” I said, which I probably shouldn’t have. I waited for her to slap me, or yell, but she didn’t.

  She just nodded.

  “You’re probably right.”

  Katie

  The rest of the night was both the longest and the shortest of my life. There were endless hugs and more tears (hardly any from me) and plans for a funeral and lots of food that no one ate.

  At last I was allowed to escape once more to my room. The hospital had prescribed Mom some sleeping pills, so she went to
bed, making sure she didn’t touch Dad’s side when she got under the covers.

  Kayla and I went down to the basement with Stryker and Adam, while everyone else upstairs cleaned and tried to do what they could because they couldn’t do anything else.

  “What’s with the furniture?” Stryker said. He hadn’t seen it when he’d been here before.

  “Mom collects it,” I said, noticing a new lamp in the corner that she’d tried to hide. “She has a bit of a problem.” Kayla and I lay side by side on the bed, and the guys had to settle for a couple of chairs.

  “I feel like we should be doing something,” Kayla said, yawning. “Like planning flowers or buying an urn, or something.”

  “One thing at a time,” Adam said, leaning forward in his chair. My phone went off again.

  “I’ve got it,” Stryker said, holding out his hand. “I texted them, and they’re all freaking out. I was shocked when we got here and they hadn’t all driven down.”

  “Just tell them that I’m fine. No driving necessary.”

  His fingers went to work and I moved closer to Kayla and took her hand.

  “What are we going to do about Mom?” I said, asking the question none of us knew how to answer.

  “I don’t know. I need to see what the hell I’m supposed to do. I can leave right now. We just need to get through tonight and tomorrow and then we’ll go from there, I guess.”

  How did we do that? How did we go on with our lives now? My life had been a girl with one sister, a mother and a father. That was all I knew how to be. I didn’t know how to be a girl who had lost her father.

  ***

  I guess I fell asleep at some point, because when I woke, I looked over to find Kayla asleep next to me, our hands still linked. I looked around, and found Stryker and Adam had cleared a place on the floor and were both asleep on piles of my mom’s handmade afghans, Stryker on a Christmas one and Adam on one for Saint Patrick’s Day.

  The basement was dark and there was no noise from upstairs. Stryker had my phone, so I had no idea what time it was and there were no windows in the basement.

  The moment I moved, Kayla woke up.

  “Hey,” she said, wiping her eyes.

  “Hey, do you know what time it is?”

  “No idea,” she said, sitting up and moving her head to stretch out her neck. “Guess it doesn’t matter.”

  No, it really didn’t.

  “Why can’t I cry more?”

  “Everyone deals with things in their own way,” she said, nudging me with her shoulder.

  “When Zack hurt me, I didn’t really cry for that either. Maybe I’m emotionally broken. Maybe I’m one of those people who doesn’t feel empathy.”

  “Okay, I’m going to stop that crazy thought train right now. You’re not a sociopath.” That was the word for it. Stryker made a noise in his sleep and turned over, but didn’t wake up. Adam was softly snoring.

  “You’re just dealing with it in your own way, and that’s okay.”

  “That’s the thing, Kayla. I’m not dealing with it. I still feel like this is one big sick joke, or that this is somehow not true. Because it can’t be true. It just can’t. Other people lose their fathers when they’re my age. Things like this don’t happen to us. They happen to other people.”

  Kayla was quiet for a long time.

  “It feels that way for me too.”

  Oh.

  Stryker rolled again and his green eyes popped open, frantically searching for something until he found my face.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Go back to sleep,” I said, not answering the question. He got up from the floor and sat back in the chair. He looked like shit, which meant that I probably looked worse.

  “Can I get you anything? I’m up now.” It was a lie because he yawned a moment later.

  “No, I’m fine.”

  “That’s such a load of shit,” Kayla said, laughing a little. “We are so not fine.”

  “I know,” I said, and we both laughed like it was the funniest thing ever. We woke Adam up and he looked at Stryker, who shrugged.

  “Everyone has their own way to deal,” he said.

  ***

  My mother seemed to have flipped a switch while she was sleeping and the next few days she didn’t stop. If she wasn’t organizing Dad’s service or fielding sympathy calls and cards and flowers and casseroles, she was cleaning or picking out clothes for us to wear to the service or meeting with Dad’s lawyer.

  She was so busy she didn’t even have time to notice that Stryker was still here and that we hadn’t spent a night apart.

  Sex was the furthest thing from both of our minds (or at least from his, I supposed), but that didn’t mean we didn’t sleep in the same room. I was never far from him as Mom fluttered around and relatives came and went and I tried to figure out what my life meant without my dad in it.

  I was definitely still in denial. I still hadn’t really cried since that one time at the hospital.

  Everyone said that it was okay, but seriously, it wasn’t. I also still couldn’t go into my parents’ room. Mom had cleaned and scrubbed the rest of the house, but she hadn’t touched his stuff. Guess I wasn’t the only one in denial.

  I tried to call and talk to Lottie, but she ended up rambling and then crying and apologizing so much that I told her I had to go, and from then on Stryker kept my phone and was responsible for calling everyone and giving them updates.

  I knew he was missing his classes, but he told me not to worry about it, so I didn’t. I had enough things to worry about.

  Chapter Twenty

  Stryker

  Mr. Hallman’s funeral was less than a week after he’d died. Mrs. Hallman had turned into a woman possessed, as if the funeral was some sort of grand event, like a wedding, or a terribly important party. I just kept Katie out of the fray and tried to be invisible, but Mrs. Hallman barely noticed I was there.

  I helped Katie zip up the back of her dress in her room, which she hadn’t slept in since she’d come home. We usually ended up in the basement, snatching sleep whenever.

  “How do I look?” She was gorgeous, even in her sadness.

  “Beautiful.” I kissed her shoulder and she turned slowly. I’d barely kissed her since we’d gotten back from the hospital and it wasn’t just because it didn’t seem like the right thing to do in light of her father’s death.

  I didn’t deserve to kiss her; not after what I’d done with Ric. In a stupid way, I thought that she might find out, if she kissed me. Like the truth would be written on my lips.

  “You ready?” Katie didn’t know it, but everyone was coming down for the funeral. I’d organized what Trish had dubbed the “Grief Committee” when she’d come down to bring me some clothes a few days ago. I told them not to go overboard, but I had no idea what to expect.

  The house was full of people. Lots of relatives and friends that I’d become acquainted with. They all gave me strange looks until I explained who I was, which was always awkward. I just told them that I was Katie’s friend and let them make their own conclusions, which they were going to do anyway.

  Katie’s phone buzzed with a message from Trish saying that they were waiting out front.

  “Come with me.” I took her hand and led her through the living room as Mrs. Hallman yelled at someone about making sure the flowers had arrived at the funeral home.

  There they were, all dressed in black, standing on the porch.

  “What are you doing here?” Katie said. “I said you didn’t have to come.”

  “Of course we had to come,” Audrey said coming forward and giving Katie a hug. Will and Lottie and Trish and Simon and Zan followed, each giving her a hug and their sympathies. I’d heard enough of them by now to know which were genuine and which weren’t. These were of the former.

  “When are you coming back to school?” Trish said as we shivered on the porch. There wasn’t really enough room in the house, but I had an idea.

  “Hey, why don�
�t we move this inside? We can go down to the basement.” Adam and I had consolidated a lot of the furniture and moved it around so we’d have a place to sleep, and we could probably fit down there.

  I led them all through the house, and everyone gave us looks but no one asked any questions.

  “Oh my God, it’s Hoarders, The Furniture Edition,” Lottie said when she saw it.

  “Don’t talk about Hoarders,” Simon said, shuddering. I’d been right to invite them. Katie almost cracked a smile.

  “Oh, sorry,” Lottie said. “I should be more respectful.”

  “No, you should be however you want to be. Everyone’s been so damn respectful it makes me want to scream,” Katie said, sitting on the bed. “Be normal. I need some normal, because everything else isn’t normal.”

  “I’ve got it,” Simon said, snapping his fingers. “Picnic game.” I remembered playing it while waiting outside Katie’s hospital room the night Zack attacked her. It seemed as good a plan as any, and Katie actually did smile. I could count on one hand the amount of smiles I’d seen from her in the past few days.

  I put my arm around her and she leaned into me.

  “Thank you, again,” she whispered. “I needed them.”

  “I know,” I said as Simon started the game.

  We played until it was time for everyone to go over to the funeral home. We’d all laughed and it had been like a completely normal thing, with the exception of everyone wearing black.

  Katie relaxed a little and then tensed back up. I knew she was berating herself for laughing and having a good time on the day of her dad’s funeral. Like she wasn’t allowed to have fun anymore, which was so beyond wrong, but I couldn’t tell her that. She had to figure it out for herself. If there was anything I knew about Katie, it was that she had do things her own way.

  In the back of my mind, the guilt for my drunken night with Ric hovered, keeping me up when I tried to sleep and whispering in my ear every time Katie looked at me like she was glad I was here, that she needed me.