The Burning Man

by Christa Faust

  He was 5’6” and stocky with mean, close-set blue eyes under heavy eyebrows that were always bunched together from trying to figure out if whatever you’d just said was an insult. He had a preppy, Young Republican haircut and a weak chin, plus an affinity for polo shirts and sucker punches. And he had a special hatred for Kieran, fueled inexplicably by what Brent referred to as his “gay name.”

  Kieran had been an abuse magnet his whole life, so Brent’s attentions were nothing new. The world was depressingly full of Brents, and although Kieran often entertained fantasies of learning martial arts or buying a samurai sword or something like that, in real life he just did his best to avoid bullies whenever possible.

  Unfortunately, now wasn’t one of those times.

  When he opened his dorm room door and looked out into the hallway, Brent and Tyler spotted him immediately, heads snapping toward him like predators spotting a kill. They were both bundled up in colorful down parkas and jaunty wool scarves, as if they’d just stepped out of the L.L. Bean winter catalog. Their boots were dripping with slush, leaving long wet trails down the polished wood floor.

  There was someone with them.

  It was a girl, a skinny little thing with puke in her curly blond hair and a short, floral print slip dress. She didn’t have a coat or shoes. Her pale skin was blotched pink from the cold and her bare feet were dusky blue and caked with snow. She lolled in Tyler’s arms like a broken doll, wet hair swinging in her face.

  Rule number one: Never, ever initiate conversation with bullies. This rule was so deeply ingrained in Kieran that when he heard the sound of his own voice echoing down the hallway, he was almost startled, as if it belonged to someone else.

  “Is she okay?” he asked.

  “Get lost, retard,” Tyler said, shifting his grip on the slouching, seemingly boneless girl.

  “She’s fine,” Brent said, opening the door to their room and motioning for Tyler to bring her in. “Which is more than I can say for you if you don’t get your ass back in your room and keep your goddamn mouth shut.”

  Partying. That’s what they were calling it. Kieran wondered if the girl had any idea that she had been invited to the party.

  Brent and Tyler had a revolving entourage of females in and out of their room all semester, most of whom were clearly under the influence. Which made a certain degree of sense, since Kieran couldn’t imagine a sober girl actually wanting to sleep with Brent. But this girl seemed really sick, maybe even suffering from hypothermia. Her poor little feet were so blue.

  Torn, Kieran hesitated in the doorway. Brent lunged toward him and he instinctively ducked back, slamming and locking the door. His heart was hammering in his chest, and he hated himself for being such a coward. He thought immediately of Olivia. Olivia would have stood up for that girl. He wished desperately that she were there with him.

  She wouldn’t hesitate to do the right thing.

  He paused for a long moment with the palm of his hand pressed against the door, as if he could feel vibrations through the wood and use them to judge what lay on the other side. Was Brent right outside, waiting to punch him in the stomach as soon as he showed himself? Or had he gone into his own room?

  Kieran waited for a few more seconds, then slowly, carefully eased the door open.

  The hallway was deserted.

  He could hear some sort of music playing inside Brent and Tyler’s room, everything but the chunky, throbbing bassline muffled by the thick walls. If the girl was making any sounds, of either pleasure or distress, Kieran couldn’t hear them.

  This is none of your business.

  Maybe she’s okay.

  Just walk away.

  That was fear talking. Making excuses not to stand up and do the right thing. But there was another voice in his head. Olivia’s voice, calm and steady.

  You know what you have to do.

  The walk down the hall felt like the longest trek of Kieran’s life.

  Mr. Hohulsten’s apartment door at the far end of the building looked exactly the same as everyone else’s. Same glossy dark wood, same eye-level metal frame for the name tag of whoever was living there that semester. Inside, however, he had two big rooms, a kitchenette, and a private bathroom. He lived there in the fall and winter, then turned the apartment over to Mr. Reese for the spring and summer.

  Kieran paused in front of the door, hand closed into a fist and ready to knock. He felt sick with adrenalin, unsure and second-guessing himself. Mr. Hohulsten was the kind of guy who took this job because he never wanted to leave high school. He was thirty-six but still considered himself one of the guys, and was notoriously lenient about curfew and visitors. He’d never struck Kieran as a bad person, just kind of immature and clueless with his ponytail and grunge rock T-shirts.

  Mr. Reese, on the other hand, was a real hardass with an unbending dedication to his job and enforcing the rules with relish. As much as Kieran disliked him as a human being, he really wished that Mr. Reese were there now. He could be counted on to kick ass and take names when it came to rule breakers, where as Kieran had absolutely no idea how Mr. Hohulsten would react to a situation like this.

  Only one way to find out.

  He knocked.

  It took Mr. Hohulsten a moment to come to the door. When he did, he was wearing sweats and a baggy T-shirt, his hair all coming out of his ponytail in frizzy wisps around his face. He looked tired, squinting and holding his glasses in one hand.

  “What’s up, buddy?” he asked, putting them on and smoothing his hair back. “Everything okay?”

  It wasn’t too late to back down. To keep his mouth shut like Brent had told him to.

  “Um,” Kieran said. “Well...”

  Mr. Hohulsten frowned.

  “Something wrong?” he said.

  “There’s a girl in the dorm,” Kieran replied, all in a rush as if ripping off a bandage. “I think she’s sick.”

  “A girl?” Mr. Hohulsten slipped his sock feet into a pair of boots by the door and came out into the hallway. “What, you mean a student?”

  “I don’t recognize her,” Kieran said. “But she seemed really out of it. Throwing up. I think she might need a doctor.”

  “Where is she now?” Mr. Hohulsten asked, closing his door. “In the bathroom?”

  This was the moment where it would go bad. This was where Kieran crossed the line from loser to a snitch.

  Kieran looked down at his feet.

  “Brent and Tyler brought her in,” he said. “She’s in their room right now.”

  Mr. Hohulsten shook his head and smiled, stroking his goatee.

  “Those guys,” he said, as if they were discussing a pair of loveable puppies that had chewed up a shoe. “They aren’t even supposed to be back yet. I swear, they could find a way to smuggle girls into Alcatraz.”

  “It’s not just that,” Kieran said. “I think this girl needs help. She’s really sick. She didn’t even have shoes!”

  “Well,” Mr. Hohulsten said, “in that case, she’s better off in a warm dorm than out in the cold night, right? Just let her sleep it off and I’ll kick her out in the morning.”

  “Do you not get it?” Kieran asked, frustration making his voice crack. “They’re doing things to her while she’s like that!”

  “You don’t know that,” Mr. Hohulsten said, face suddenly serious.

  “Will you please just check?” Kieran pleaded.

  For an endless moment, Mr. Hohulsten didn’t say anything. Kieran couldn’t read his expression and the waiting felt like a death sentence.

  “Fine,” he finally said. “I’ll check. Go back to your room.”

  * * *

  In the safety of his tiny room, Kieran didn’t feel all that safe. He felt like he was waiting for the end of the world. Like he’d just lit the fuse and was waiting for the dynamite to explode.

  He stood by the door, listening with every fiber of his being, but their dorm was one of the oldest buildings on campus and had strong, thick walls and he
avy doors. Deerborn had been an all-boys school until 1969, when the more modern girls’ dorms had been built, but this was the building where the class of 1911 had slept. It was built to last, all venerable stone and secrets.

  Kieran could hear voices in the hallway, but couldn’t make out exactly what they were saying.

  Then nothing.

  Kieran looked over at his clock radio, watching the numerals flip with a clunking sound from 10:59 to 11:00. Nothing, nothing and more nothing. No sirens. No paramedics coming to pump the girl’s stomach. No cops coming to investigate. Nothing. Just the low, rhythmic thumping of the old steam heater in the corner and the counterpoint of Kieran’s anxious heartbeat.

  Then a small, folded sheet of paper slid under his door, bumping up against his foot. He let it sit there for a good long minute, waiting to see if anything else would happen.

  Nothing.

  He bent and picked up the note, dread sitting like bile in the back of his throat.

  YOUR DEAD.

  He wanted to laugh at the bad grammar, but couldn’t summon the breath. He just crumpled the piece of paper in his fist and flung it toward the waste paper basket beside his desk. It bounced off the rim and rolled under his bed. But its message remained, branded into Kieran’s head.

  He was dead.

  14

  Kieran really had to piss.

  He’d had to piss since 6:30 a.m., and it was now almost 8:00. He was already late to his creative writing workshop, but he couldn’t leave his room.

  When he’d cracked the door open at around 6:45, sure enough there were Brent and Tyler, standing outside their door. Waiting for him.

  Kieran had actually considered pissing out the window, but his room faced the busy quad, with various newly arrived students and teachers heading off on their various morning rounds. He really didn’t feel like flashing the whole school, especially not in this freezing cold weather.

  He’d also scoured his room for any kind of container he might be able to use, but his messy roommate wasn’t back from winter break yet, so the usual clutter of soda bottles and coffee cups was unfortunately absent. Their wire mesh wastepaper basket had been emptied the night before. Kieran cursed his own compulsive neatness, but the only empty container he could find was an aspirin bottle.

  That just wasn’t going to cut it.

  He was going to have to leave the room sooner or later or he was going to burst.

  Listening by the door, he decided that the next time he heard a group of voices in the hallway, he was going to run for it in the hope that his archenemies would be reluctant to really whale on him in front of an audience. Maybe he could get away with just a quick shove, or being tripped. Though if Brent punched him in the stomach right now, his jeans would be soaked instantly.

  He waited as long as he could, and ten minutes more. Then, when he heard a rowdy crowd of boys clatter down the hallway toward the exit, he made a desperate break for it, shoving his door open and running for the bathroom.

  Brent and Tyler were gone.

  He only had a split second to register this fact as he ran past their door, but his sense of relief was overwhelming.

  That was nothing, however, compared to the relief he felt when he ducked into the bathroom and hit the urinal. For a long drawn out moment, nothing else mattered.

  He had just zipped up and was about to go wash his hands when he heard that loathsome voice behind him.

  Brent.

  “We were starting to think you were avoiding us.”

  Before he could turn to face his tormentors, Brent grabbed Kieran’s hair and smashed his face into the top of the urinal, splitting his lip and sending fiery pinwheels across his vision.

  “What part of ‘keep your retard mouth’ shut did you not understand?” Brent hissed into his ear. He kept his grip on Kieran’s hair and used his other hand to grab the back of the waistband of Kieran’s jeans. He used this twohanded grip to give Kieran a bum’s rush, dragging him the length of the narrow bathroom and throwing him into the shower stalls.

  Kieran banged his head against the tap and everything went red and woozy for a moment. He crumpled in a heap on the cold tile, and when his vision cleared, he saw something that filled him with icy terror.

  Tyler was dragging the heavy steel garbage can over to the door and wedging it under the knob. Which meant this wasn’t going to be a quick drive-by beating with a wedgie thrown in for good measure. They were settling in for a long, leisurely torture session.

  Kieran was trapped. No chance of Mr. H. or other students interrupting the bullies before they had their fill.

  He really was dead.

  He got his wobbly legs under him and ran to the single, small frosted window, knowing that it wouldn’t open, that it had been stuck since he was a freshman and wasn’t going to magically cooperate now. But he had to try something.

  Brent and Tyler exchanged amused glances while he scrabbled around the window frame and pushed as hard as he could. Of course it didn’t budge.

  He considered making a run for one of the toilet stalls and trying to lock himself inside, but Brent anticipated that move and stepped to the left so that he was squarely in the way. Backing away, Kieran’s eyes darted around, as he desperately searched every inch of the bathroom for anything that could be used as a weapon.

  A forgotten, nearly empty bottle of dandruff shampoo.

  An extra roll of toilet paper.

  That was it.

  At that point, Kieran knew that he would just have to resign himself to the abuse. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. All he could do was try to go away in his head, make himself as small as possible, and try to survive until it was over.

  Still, that first punch to the face was always the worst. No matter how ready for it he thought he was, it was always way worse than he remembered. First there was the bright shock of it, water filling his eyes and blood welling up inside his nose. The roaring red pain kicked in, eclipsing any kind of rational thought.

  Then the raging emotion, the fear and the fury. The hate, the anger and the shame at his own weakness.

  He staggered back and to the left, as Brent followed up with a punch to the gut, and then a swift uppercut that nearly knocked Kieran’s lower jaw loose from its hinges. He fell to his knees and Tyler kicked him in the center of the chest, knocking him over on his back. Kieran turned to his side, turtling up with his arms over his head as the two bullies kicked him again and again.

  “Why you gotta be such a little snitch-bitch?” Brent asked, punctuating the question with another kick.

  “What do you care anyway?” Tyler said, kicking Kieran again. “You don’t know her.”

  “Yeah,” Brent said, with another kick. “What do you care about a skank like that?” Another kick. “She’s, like, not even a person.”

  Kieran knew better than to try to respond. Questions like that weren’t requests for actual information. They were just aggressive sounds, like dogs barking or chimpanzees grunting. Instead, he kept his head covered and stared at the tiny octagonal black and white floor tiles visible between his forearms.

  He tried to list the next ten movies he wanted to order from his Hong Kong tape trader. Or decide what to do about that eleventh chapter in his novel that had been giving him so much trouble—the one where Enigma goes back to her old home town and has to confront demons from her childhood. Or anything other than the relentless blows filling his mouth with blood and his battered body with searing agony.

  Just when Kieran thought he couldn’t stand another second, the barrage of abuse ceased. He heard one of his tormentors hock up a thick, juicy loogie, and he felt it splat against his temple, dripping down his cheek. Then he heard receding footsteps and the sound of the trash can being dragged away from the door.

  Then, nothing.

  He waited for a second, then another. Waiting to see what would happen next.

  Still nothing.

  He risked a glance through his protec
tively held arms. He was alone in the bathroom.

  He got slowly, painfully to his feet. His body felt like a bag of rocks and broken glass. His poor heart was thumping desperately like a trapped rabbit. His flannel shirt was stained and smeared with blood, so he took it off and threw it into the trash. He didn’t want to look in the mirror, but he couldn’t help himself.

  His lower lip was twice the normal size, with a raw, bleeding split. He had a fat mouse under one eye that was going to blacken fast, and his chest and sides were blotchy with red, shoe-shaped marks where he had been stomped and kicked. This was going to go down in his personal history as the worst beating of his life so far.

  He ran water in the sink and splashed it on his stinging face, washing away the spit clinging to his cheek and the blood crusted under his nose. But he couldn’t wash away the anger. The hot, impotent fury that made him want to put his fist through a wall and smash everything in sight.

  Particularly Brent and Tyler’s faces.

  He ran back to his room, grabbed a clean shirt and his coat and got the hell out of the dorm. No way of knowing when the bullies might decide to come back for more.

  He had a wool cap in his pocket and pulled it down low over his eyes so the other students wouldn’t see his bruised face, and headed over to the math and computer science building.

  It was one of the newer buildings, built in the late seventies. Kieran thought it looked like it had been borrowed from the set of a British science fiction series about a future utopia where people of all colors and creeds wear togas and enjoy peaceful intellectual discourse. It looked kind of like a pair of concrete igloos connected by a glassed-in walkway. Students called it “the Tits.”

  It was one of Kieran’s favorite places on campus, because guys like Brent and Tyler wouldn’t be caught dead there. They contented themselves to snigger at the building’s silhouette from the football field.

  Once inside, Kieran ducked into the empty solid geometry lab and sat down at one of the metal worktables to pull himself together. There was a large spindly model of an isotropic vector matrix sitting in the middle of the table, and Kieran picked it up, turning it over in his hands.