When we were about to leave, she pulled me back away from the others and gave me a look like I was the real hero, then said, “Thanks for coming for me, Steven.”
She had no clue whatsoever as to the real reason I was there. (Sorry, Christina, if you thought it was for you.) And when I realized that she had no clue, I gave her one of my famous Crash smiles, like, of course, what did she expect, all in a day’s work.
“One thing you should know,” I told her. “His sister made him promise that he won’t go near you again. And he agreed.”
She thought for a moment. “And you believe him?”
I thought for a moment. No way, was what I was actually thinking. But I couldn’t tell her that, so I gave her another Crash smile, and I told her, “Yeah, he’s afraid of Roxanne. At the end of the day, he’ll do whatever she tells him.”
So we drove home.
Newman, having just gotten his license, insisted on silence so he could concentrate on driving, and then admitted that it would be the first time he had actually been on a highway without his dad. When we got back into town, I got everyone to agree that we would keep everything to ourselves, not for Burn’s sake, but because I owed it to Roxanne to trust that she would take care of her brother. Besides, we had just survived another day, and being kids that age and all, by the next day, we had other things to think about. Well, this was probably true for Newman and Kenny, but Christina and I were a whole different matter. Because we both knew, we totally knew, in our own way, no matter what promises he made, no matter what kind of comfort I gave to Christina, that David Burnett was gunning for us.
Plus I had this Roxanne problem to deal with.
Chapter Twenty
How Burn Crashed His Mom’s Car and My Father’s Wedding
The Roxanne problem, as Newman called it, was my way of handling, or rather not handling, the aftermath of the incident in the parking lot of the Pittsfield Barnes & Noble, which he and the rest of us ended up referring to only as “Massachusetts.”
It didn’t hit me until the next day, being as I was so wiped out from the incident that I was basically in shock and didn’t know it. I woke up with Roxanne’s name in my brain like it was graffitied onto the inner walls of my skull, so that every other thought had to pass by it and somehow also become a Roxanne thought. Like, I have school today/should I text her; I have baseball practice/could we somehow still be on for Thursday; did I remember where I put my backpack/she had so much fun going through my backpack; and so on.
I honestly don’t remember a single minute of being in school that day.
Or the next, which was the Thursday that I would have been scheduled to see her. I woke up with Roxanne fever, which is what I called it, because I was totally sick, as in temperature sick. Maybe it was from being outside in Massachusetts for so long without a coat or maybe because I lost my will to do anything, either way, by that afternoon, I was so sick that I wouldn’t have made it to her house even if it was still on.
OK, yes I would have, temperature or not, and I know this because I snuck out of my house that night and “borrowed” Lindsey’s car for the short drive over to Aunt Peesmell’s (even though I didn’t have a license at that point), just to see if her car was in the driveway, just to catch a glimpse of her at her window, or maybe even to talk to Burn directly.
Except the lights were off in her room and there were no cars in the driveway. I supposed that Burn was still doing his driving thing and that maybe she was in the city, but wherever she was, she had to be thinking of me. After all, she did say that she had feelings for me, and feelings don’t go away on a dare or a bet or even a promise, which she only did, I understood, to keep me safe.
Only now, in the car, in the cold with my raging fever, I did not feel safe at all, so what was the point?
I stayed in bed Friday and throughout the weekend, watching/not watching television, and still all of my thoughts were Roxanne thoughts. Then the next week started, and still, all of my thoughts were Roxanne thoughts. And of course, there were no responses to my calls to her cell phone, no texts back to me, no proof that she was still alive.
Until Caroline Prescott came into my room on that Monday night to tell me that Roxanne had to move out of her aunt’s house and would be staying in the city, so there would be no more tutoring sessions, which disturbed my mother because she knew that I was, as she put it, “really making progress with the Burnett girl.”
Then on Wednesday, I saw him in the hall. Nothing, not even a loaded gun, could have stopped me from approaching him.
“Sorry, Crash, you know I can’t talk to you. I made a deal with my sister.”
“But you were the one to make it, so you can break it anytime.”
“Can’t do that, Crash. Now you know what it feels like to be me.”
“Please.”
“Revenge is sweet,” he said, and I had to hold back my urge to hit him. “Maybe you should go back to Maddy. Did she tell you that I was her first?”
Short version, it did not go well.
So I stopped texting Roxanne, or at least cut down a lot, and I continued brooding, staying in my house, sitting on the couch with Jamie, watching TV together instead of going out with my friends, ignoring their calls. And sitting with Jamie, I had the feeling that Burn was in contact with her, and I was going to tell her to watch out for him, but then I had a better idea about that, so I didn’t mention anything to her.
And then one Thursday, when I would have been at Aunt Peesmell’s spending time with Roxanne, I got a single text message from her. Two lines. It said:
Sorry about my brother. The gun wasn’t loaded.
I was pretty sure that what it meant was “I miss you, Crashinsky. I miss us.”
I quickly responded, fast as I could, asked where she was, what she was doing, could I call her, could I talk to her, was she OK, did she get another tattoo. Whatever I wrote, and I tried everything I could think of, she did not respond. Still, it was a sign.
The next day, she removed herself from my friends list on Facebook. Not a good sign, as I was going to her page every five minutes searching for clues, thinking that maybe she would have me meet her in the city, our little secret. I suggested as much in a text, which, like the others, went unanswered.
And a few days later, Newman came over, because I wasn’t going anywhere with the Club Crew after school, and he decided that enough was enough and what I needed was a one-man intervention. What he said was:
“Get it through your head: She’s not capable of being your girlfriend. Besides, she’s in college. Do you think she’d really be interested in going out with a high school junior on a long- term basis?” Not knowing that I had heard all of this before. And continuing, “All you’re feeling is the emptiness that comes from not fucking someone you’ve been fucking, so my advice, call Maddy immediately. In fact, I’ll call her myself.”
And it hit me for the first time what Burn had told me in the hall. That he was her first, not the guy in camp who she claimed was. It was Burn all along, which meant that he was banging her then so that one day he could use it against me, that’s how much he hated me, and for some reason he wanted me to hate him as much.
Well, now he got his wish.
And that night, Newman and me and Maddytheslut and Jeannie Castro were out in Newman’s father’s car, because, after all, Newman was totally right, beyond right, that I should be out, because Roxanne could not control my life and if she wanted to call, she would.
And even though I couldn’t stop thinking about her, I was busy getting busy with Maddy, so even though that sucked by comparison, it was still fucking and fucking beats mostly everything else, not going to lie to you, even fucking out of hate.
As for the possibility that Burn had connected with Jamie, I waited until Lindsey came home from Georgetown for winter break. And I waited patiently for her to unpack, listening to her tell my mom about how school was, waited until after dinner, since my mom prepared a whole Lindsey feast fo
r her return. And finally, when she was back in her room, doing her Lindsey things, I went in and mentioned that I needed to talk with her. And she immediately slipped into total Lindsey voice, “What do you want, Steven?”
Keep in mind that I hadn’t talked to her in three months—where was the love?—but I remembered that I wasn’t there to socialize anyways, so I told her about Jamie, as in Jamie was on Burn’s hit list, to which Lindsey responded:
“What do you expect me to do about it?”
And so I told her, she was Jamie’s big sister, and she had an obligation to take care of her. Like it or not, we both had that responsibility, and I was willing to do my share if she was. And then she looked at me as if I had matured while she was away, maybe with a twinkle of respect. I couldn’t tell for sure; you couldn’t trust Lindsey for anything.
“I’ll talk to her,” she said.
“You have to tell her to stay away from Burn. I know him—he’s dangerous.”
“Maybe we should both do it,” she said.
Jamie was watching TV (what a shock) when we both dropped into the family room. I watched Lindsey do her Lindsey thing, which I could tell was good enough to make her a good lawyer one day, which was what she and Jacob had decided that she was going to be.
“So Jamie, what’s up with you and David Burnett?”
Jamie, surprised that her sister was actually talking to her, decided to respond without objecting when Lindsey lowered the volume.
“Nothing’s up with me and David Burnett.”
“Have you talked to him?”
“No.”
“Have you seen him?”
“No, of course I haven’t seen him.”
“Have you IMed him?”
“No.”
“Then what?”
“Facebook, OK?”
“No. Not OK,” Lindsey said with her teacher voice. “Not OK at all. Here’s what you are going to do. You are going to defriend him tonight and not talk to him or email or IM or contact him or respond if he contacts you. Do you understand?”
“Whatever,” Jamie said, raising the volume.
Lindsey grabbed the clicker, in total control, and clicked the television off. “I’m serious,” she told Jamie. “I don’t want to find out that you’re in contact with him, ever. Do you understand me?”
Jamie, getting up. “OK, OK, OK, OK, OK, whatever. What’s the big deal if I talk to David Burnett anyways? He’s not so bad. He happens to hate the same things I hate.”
That was probably when I should have known better about Jamie.
Point was, I kept watching her, and Lindsey kept watching her, and we both spied on her Facebook account, but David was defriended, so she was complying, at least as far as we knew. All I could think about was how happy Burn was whenever he got to say “Revenge is sweet.” I didn’t want to hear him say that about Jamie.
And then one day, I was watching TV on my own, Jamie actually being out with one of her friends, and Lindsey came crashing into the family room, dropping onto the couch next to me, as close as she had ever gotten, and asked for the clicker. I was watching a rerun of That ’70s Show, so no big, and as she flipped channels, she thanked me for watching over Jamie, actually saying, “You did the right thing, little brother” and acknowledging that it was our job together as siblings.
“You’ve changed since I went to college. Like you got older or something.”
I wondered for a fleeting moment whether I could confide in her. Was there a part of her that changed as a result of college? Maybe a part of her that I failed to recognize before? I not only considered it, but actually started to tell her.
“Roxanne Burnett has been tutoring me. . . .”
Which had the exact opposite effect from what I expected, as Lindsey immediately launched into one of her tirades. “There’s a rumor going around that Roxanne was accepting money for sex at some club in the city, and that she was making money giving lap dances to middle-aged men in some sleazy strip joint.”
I had heard these rumors before and figured that they were started by mean-spirited ex-friends or whatever. Also, Roxanne once told me that sometimes, just for sport, she spread rumors about herself, just to see how far they would go.
“I’m just telling you this, Steven,” Lindsey told me, “because, from what I heard, she has like every STD in the book.”
Short version, it did not go well. The second that I defended Roxanne, I was hit by various accusations about my naïveté and immaturity. It didn’t matter that I was getting B’s and better in all my classes, not to her.
Then winter break was over and I went back to classes and Lindsey went back to Georgetown. Jacob and Felicia announced that they had set the date for their wedding and I was still brooding.
But gradually life returned to normal for me, hanging with my boys more and more. We were into the winter Jackass thing, still trying to outdo Johnny Knoxville and company, eating dirt, or flinging darts at each other, or swallowing live frogs and stuff and vomiting them up while they were still alive. And when we weren’t sliding down the steps in the back of Meadows High in a “borrowed” shopping cart, we were smoking honey blunts at our secret place in the nature preserve or playing video games at Evan’s or basketball at the Y. And blazing and going to the movies, as in Night at the Museum like five times, and Borat, for, like, the tenth time. Who was funnier than Borat? The guy is the fucking genius of comedy.
And then there was Maddy, who I was determined to humiliate because she committed the crime of sleeping with my now mortal enemy and lying about it, and because I continued to hate Burn for what he did to me, I decided to take my hate out on her by association, even though to her it seemed like positive attention.
And we were still going to parties, and things got more and more out of control. To show off in front of my boys, I got Maddy superdrunk and then, to prove that I could make her do whatever I said, I made her take her top off and even hook up with a genuine lesbian in the pool house in Kelly’s backyard. And she agreed to do all of this, not looking very happy to tell you the truth, but saying if it makes me happy, then she would do it for me. She claimed she would do anything to please me, which also meant that I stopped using protection with her because I just didn’t care whether Roxanne had given me an STD like Lindsey had suggested or whether there were any consequences to being unprotected. In my mind at the time, I totally figured that it didn’t matter because she was a slut and that’s what sluts do. So I did not, for a minute, feel guilty, because at the end of the day, I never forced her to do anything. Except I knew, all the time that I was using Maddy, that Roxanne wouldn’t have approved, and so I had to wonder, was I doing it because maybe she would somehow find out from Burn that I was out of control and intervene?
Point was, by the middle of junior year, I was still suffering the aftereffects of getting too close to Roxanne and her brother and conflicted by my feelings about both of them.
And then we got word during February break that Burn had demolished his mother’s car on the New York Thruway, west of Albany, and my first thought, my first hope, was that he would die from the accident, because if he did then Roxanne would be free. As it turned out, though, he didn’t. Apparently he was still doing his long-distance driving thing, and he must have fallen asleep behind the wheel or something, because the minivan veered off the road and down an embankment and all the people who saw the car could not believe that anyone survived. There was even a picture on the internet of the crumpled minivan all accordianized on the side of the road, down in a ditch.
This, of course, was no big deal to the rest of the Club Crew, as many of us new drivers were having accidents. Pete had ruined his father’s Mustang, and Evan was in, like, five accidents in a row.
But Burn’s accident was different for the following reason: He needed a new car and he had no parents and the insurance apparently didn’t cover everything, so Aunt Peesmell apparently was obligated to help him buy one. Only even with Aunt Peesmell’s
help, he still needed more money, so Aunt Peesmell apparently petitioned their financial adviser, who said that he wasn’t permitted to send money under the terms of his mother’s will or something. And even though even Aunt Peesmell tried her best to convince him of the necessity for some cash, at the end of the day, the financial adviser refused and said no anyways.
As you probably remember, the Burnetts’ financial adviser was none other than Jacob Crashinsky, who, as I already mentioned, was, according to David Burnett, the sworn enemy of David Burnett.
Not being the type of kid who could accept no for an answer, Burn started calling my father’s office and screaming at secretaries over not having access to his money. And when that didn’t work, he apparently started calling Jacob’s apartment at all hours of the night, threatening to come after my father.
So I decided that I had to tell Jacob, well, not him, but Felicia, that I was worried, because Burn had a gun and had threatened to use it in the past. I didn’t exactly tell her how I knew, but I assured her that it was true.
And next thing I hear, the police showed up at Aunt Peesmell’s house and she allowed them to search the premises, but they didn’t find any weapons. They tracked Burn down at the gym (he was back to working out again), and as he was leaving the gym, the cops showed up and asked if they could take a look at his car (actually Aunt Peesmell’s car, at that point). He told them to go fuck themselves, so he ended up getting arrested, but Aunt Peesmell got him released.
Only now he needed even more money, not only for a new car, but now he had to hire a lawyer to defend him in a criminal case resulting from the failure to cooperate with a police investigation or something like that, plus, apparently, resisting arrest. And all this time, not a single word from or about Roxanne.
Crash and Burn Page 37
