Burn

by Suzanne Phillips

  “Why?”

  “After Dad?”

  “Dad wasn’t all bad.”

  Cameron spun away from the mirror. “You have amnesia,” he said.

  “He took us to ball games,” Robbie pointed out.

  “And got drunk on beer, slapped us if we complained about it, and forgot to feed us.”

  “He didn’t forget,” Robbie said and shrugged. “He said it was women’s work to feed us.”

  “Whatever.”

  “I guess you’re right,” Robbie said. “I wouldn’t want another guy around long-term after Dad.”

  “I think she wants Randy around,” Cameron said, “but she’s afraid that she’ll get a repeat performance.”

  “Guys are assholes,” Robbie decided.

  “Most of ’em,” Cameron agreed.

  “I don’t think Randy is. You ever see him mad?’

  “No,” Cameron admitted. “He probably puts all the mad into his job. By the time we see him he’s low energy.”

  Cameron hasn’t seen Randy do much more than eat and watch sports or the news on TV.

  “Middle of the menu,” Randy says now, pulling Cameron from his thoughts. “Okay, boys? I’m buying, so that means better than burgers but it’s either steak or lobster.”

  Cameron can see him smiling in the rearview mirror. He’s got good, strong teeth but a bunch of lines around his mouth and one long crease that reaches up to the corner of his eye.

  He wonders how old Randy is. Older than his mother. His father, too. But not so old he’s thinking about retirement.

  Robbie says he’s ordering the trout.

  “Good choice. What about you, Cam?” Randy asks, with too much gusto in his voice.

  “Maybe steak,” he says. He needs to see the menu.

  “I’m thinking a caesar salad with butterfly shrimp,” his mom adds, too cheerful, and when Cameron looks at her profile he sees her smile is wider than usual.

  They’re trying too hard, Cameron thinks. They all turned on like a sudden blast of air conditioning and Cameron can feel it pressing against him, drying out his eyes and making the tips of his fingers numb. He’s not the only one who notices.

  So they’re eating out. At a nice place on a night that’s usually just Cameron and Robbie and their mom. They all know it. It makes Cameron’s joints stick, his mom’s voice flutter, Robbie’s eyes bright, and Randy puff up like a hot air balloon.

  It’s not a big deal. They’ve had three years of Randy and Cameron knows it’s always one step forward, two steps back.

  Cameron releases the seat belt and pushes open his door. He starts toward the restaurant, but Randy’s voice cuts him short.

  “Hey, Cam, wait up, huh?”

  Cameron stands on the curb in front of the Hanover’s sign, pushes his hands into his front pockets, and tips forward on his feet. He watches them. Robbie shuts his door and their mother’s, too. Randy waits at the front of the truck, then takes his mother’s hand. They walk toward him, shoulder to shoulder, and Cameron gets a feeling in his gut he should be used to by now. He’s looking at something he’s not a part of, could never be a part of, but wants it so bad his teeth bleed for it.

  He has a father already. No returns, no exchanges.

  “Stay with us,” Randy says when they reach him.

  “Yeah, okay,” Cameron says, but he thinks to himself: How? What part of me fits here?

  A tall woman greets them at the door. She holds it open for all of them to pass and then discusses seating options with Cameron’s mom. They decide on sitting outside, under a heating lamp for when the sun falls behind the mountains. They troop through the restaurant, which is dimly lit by ceiling fans and candles on the tables. Cameron notices there’s not a lot of business on a Tuesday night; for every table that’s full another’s empty. He kind of likes that feeling, of people but not too many of them. Of the silence, but not total. That feeling in his skin, of being pinched, eases.

  There’s even more quiet on the deck. Cameron looks around and counts only two other occupied tables.

  March on Lake Erie. Sometimes there’s snow, but tonight the wind is almost nothing.

  Randy pulls out his mom’s chair. Robbie sits down next to her. This is when Cameron realizes he’s back into voyeur mode — watching everything like he’s not a part of it.

  It happens so easily, he never knows until he’s in it that he’s a goner. That he’s not really living, but stuck somewhere between that and dead.

  He was going to try harder not to let that happen.

  Especially after today, when he was the one better than the rest. The best. When all anybody could do was watch him, some of them probably wishing they could run like him. Have his speed. His endurance. He rode that high all day and even the thought of Patterson and his posse coming after him didn’t ruin it.

  Tomorrow he’ll go to school and tell SciFi about Patterson’s plan. He’ll tell him to make sure he doesn’t stand too long in one place. That’s the number one rule for survival when you’re one of the hunted. That’s what friends do for each other. Warn them. Maybe they can hang out more, too. Not just in tech class. There’s safety in numbers.

  Maybe Cameron’s days of being invisible are over. Maybe proof of life is right around the corner. And maybe Patterson will forget about SciFi.

  “You decide, honey?”

  His mom interrupts his thoughts and Cameron is in such a good mood he smiles at her.

  “Steak, for sure,” he says.

  He has the menu open but hasn’t looked at it.

  “With a baked potato and a salad with blue cheese.”

  Cameron watches his mother’s face warm, her hands flatten against the table.

  “Which cut?” Randy asks.

  “Which one won’t kill your budget?”

  Randy taps him with his menu and laughs. “Porterhouse, young man,” he says. “You deserve the best. Your mom tells me you’re headed for the Olympics.”

  He’s not teasing. His face is creased into a toothy smile and his eyes are full of something that looks like pride.

  “Two-ten.” Randy shakes his head. “What’s the fastest half mile in the world?” he asks.

  Cameron doesn’t know. He hasn’t been keeping current. “Last year a guy from Sudan ran it in one-fifty-five.”

  “So you have to work on shaving fifteen seconds.”

  “Not so easy,” Cameron says.

  “I bet you can do it,” Robbie says. “I’ve seen you run. You turn into someone else. Like a man with a mission.”

  Cameron feels his face warm. His heart slows and then falls over itself trying to catch up.

  “Yeah. I feel like someone else when I run.”

  “You should work on it,” Randy says. “You’re young. Get the right training and see what you can do.”

  “He’s going to be on the track team next year,” his mom says. “The coach talked to him about it today.”

  “My PE teacher, really. He coaches the basketball team, but he was pretty amazed.” Cameron can’t help smiling.

  “I never could run, not even fast enough to save my life,” Randy admits.

  “Cops don’t run?”

  “Most of my job is sitting in the car and writing about how one guy did this so the other guy did that. . . . We had a little excitement at the high school today, though.”

  Cameron stops breathing, feels the tightness begin in his chest. “What happened?”

  “Mob fight, as best as I can make out. No one really knows. We got a 911 call about a fight, but by the time we got there the parking lot was empty, except the one casualty, and he isn’t talking,” Randy says.

  “Someone died?” The menu slips from his mother’s hands.

  “No. The kid is going to be all right. Paramedics took him in, though. Big kid. I was surprised he got it so bad, as big as he is.”

  “SciFi? Was it SciFi?” Cameron’s vision begin to darken around the edges.

  “Who?”

  �
��The big kid, what was his name?”

  Cameron can hear the fear in his voice.

  “I can’t tell you that, Cam.”

  “Was it Elliott?”

  Randy looks at him a long time. “What do you know about it?”

  “I know the football team was planning on creaming us both. But Elliott was off campus today. He plays the clarinet.”

  Like that’s going to save his life.

  “The football team? Why?”

  Cameron shrugs. “Patterson hates me. He plays front line. I lapped him today in PE and the coach called him out.”

  “But why would he go after the big kid?”

  “Elliott’s my lab partner.”

  Randy doesn’t get it. His whole face twists into one big question mark and Cameron doesn’t blame him. It sounds lame even to him. Since when does being someone’s lab partner put a person in mortal danger? But it does when you’re Cameron’s lab partner. It does when the guy looking to kill you is Rich Patterson.

  “Really, Cam?”

  There’s no way he can tell Randy about being Cameron Diaz, about half the school thinking he’s a fag. He can’t tell him about that afternoon and Patterson saying SciFi was Cameron’s boyfriend. He can’t do it, so he just looks at Randy and says nothing.

  “Cameron, are you still having trouble at school?”

  Cameron looks at his mom. The trouble never stopped.

  He looks at Robbie. His brother dropped his menu on his plate and is watching them like it’s a tennis match, but he keeps his mouth shut.

  “Normal stuff,” Cameron says.

  “What happened today isn’t normal,” Randy says. “A kid was hurt. Bad enough they took him to the hospital.”

  “Is he going to be okay?” Please let him be okay.

  Randy nods. “He was sitting up and talking when I saw him. Just not about what happened. He kept saying how his parents aren’t even finished paying for the teeth he lost last year. He was real worried about that.”

  Cameron’s whole body implodes with anger. His eyes are open, but the world is black and the loss of sight knocks him off his center of gravity. He clings to the table while around him the wind picks up and he hears the kind of sharp cry that comes from the eye of a hurricane, like a voice calling for help. He doesn’t know it’s him calling out until Randy’s hand comes down on his shoulder.

  “You all right, Cam?”

  He peels his fingers off the table. Feels himself fall backward into that world where pain and fear are only ideas. Anything is better than here.

  “Cameron?” His mom’s voice, pitched with alarm, wraps around him like an iron claw. He bounces back to his reality like he’s attached to a bungee cord and he realizes that he’ll never really break away. Not when the weight of her voice can find him like a bolt of lightning.

  “I’m all right, Mom.”

  TUESDAY

  11:30PM

  Cameron stands on the pedals of his bike and coasts down Bald Peak. From here he can see Commerce Street, lit up like an air strip and crammed with all-night grocery stores and diners. The hospital is on Commerce, too. It’s seven stories with the emergency room up front and a parking structure that looks like an empty skull at night. His mom works on the fifth floor; SciFi was admitted and is on the third floor, in the pediatric wing. Room 315. Cameron knows the hospital well. He knows he can enter through the ER, get mixed up in the chaos of crying, bleeding people, and slip past the elevators to the staircase. Getting in to see SciFi after visiting hours won’t be a problem.

  Cameron can’t get SciFi out of his head.

  Patterson wouldn’t have noticed him if Cameron wasn’t talking to him.

  The thought makes Cameron break out in a sweat. His blood thins, moves faster, hotter in his veins.

  Everything he touches turns to shit.

  He glides through the trough at the bottom of Bald Peak, where the road is broken up by an intersection. There’s no one at the stop signs waiting, so Cameron sails through the four-way and starts pumping the pedals. He takes the s-curve in the road so tightly his tires sing. He eats up the half mile to town and then makes a series of turns so that he’s traveling parallel to Commerce, not on it. The street is too busy. After eleven o’clock a kid Cameron’s age is supposed to be tucked into bed. There’s probably some kind of city ordinance about it. So Cameron tries to stay in the shadows.

  Randy isn’t working tonight, so there’s no danger of bumping into him. In fact, when Cameron left the house in his bare feet, carrying his shoes and a flashlight, he saw Randy’s truck still parked in their driveway. The house was dark. Randy’s probably doing his mother, which doesn’t bother Cameron. Thinking about it does. Wondering about when Randy’s going to bail next gets to him, too. So Cameron pushes those things out of his mind and focuses instead on SciFi.

  No one can hold up under an attack by the entire football team. Even if SciFi knew how to fight, even if he had the fire in him, which he doesn’t, he’s no match for thirty-plus guys. And SciFi has principles. He’s a pacifist. The guy probably went down fast.

  Cameron turns into the driveway reserved for deliveries and skirts the back of the hospital. Flowering bushes grow against the building and Cameron stashes his bike there, out of view. The flashlight, too. He follows his plan, getting lost in the packed ER waiting room, pushing through the sweaty crowd, and finding the door marked STAIRS. Once he reaches the third floor, he has to huddle in the doorway and wait for a nurse to swish past him. He passes a playroom full of furniture for little kids and a family lounge with a couch, a coffee maker, and vending machines.

  SciFi is in the bed nearest the door. His face looks like the pulp of an orange. One eye is swollen shut and the eyebrow above it is shaved and stitched. The light is on over the bed and Cameron can see that SciFi’s arms and legs are bruised but not broken. So maybe the damage isn’t too bad.

  “Hey.”

  SciFi’s eye is open, the good one, which is bloodshot but at least working.

  “News travels fast.”

  Cameron shrugs. “My mom dates a cop.” Cameron moves into the room until he arrives at the foot of SciFi’s bed. “But I’m sure the whole school knows about it by now.”

  “Gee, thanks. I’m starting to feel better.”

  “Patterson is the kind of guy who likes to share his accomplishments.”

  “Yeah. He has so little else to talk about.”

  “You lost a tooth.”

  “A few. My parents are pissed. Well, my dad is. My mom cried the whole time she was here.” He shrugs. “I think I did a pretty good job holding onto the teeth I have left.”

  “It was the whole football team?”

  “No. Half, maybe. And half of those lost interest. There’s no fun in beating a punching bag.”

  “You didn’t swing? Not even once?”

  “I swung. My life was at stake. I didn’t connect, though. No kidding, I have the coordination of a baby giraffe.”

  “Patterson has it in for me.”

  “I noticed.”

  “He never bothered you before.”

  “I think he was waiting for an invitation.”

  “Me.”

  “I’ve seen him work before. He’s a class ass.”

  “You don’t sound mad.”

  “I was. Now I’m thinking about ways to get even. You know, maybe put some instant glue on his chair. The only way to get up is to leave his pants behind.” SciFi chuckles and Cameron joins in. “There’s a compound called trioxide that will clear all the hair off a person in under ten seconds. And that’s just from standing too close to the stuff.”

  SciFi smiles, baring a hole where a front tooth should be. His swollen eye bunches up and his grin twists in a way that makes him look almost maniacal.

  “You’re scaring me,” Cameron says and laughs.

  “I want to get a whole lot scarier,” SciFi says. “I don’t want Patterson or one of his buddies to think I’m the go-to guy for self-esteem bu
ilding 101.”

  “You have a lot of work ahead of you,” Cameron says.

  “No way. I’m almost there.” He turns his head into the light. “You think I could pass for Frankenstein’s monster?”

  “No. You’re not that cool.”

  They laugh and in the silence after it Cameron wonders if maybe all is not lost. Maybe, when SciFi gets back to school, he won’t act like Cameron has the plague. Maybe that’s enough for now. Just the hope that he has a friend.

  WEDNESDAY

  9:10AM

  “Mr. Grady? You didn’t do your homework?”

  Cameron jerks back to the present. Mr. Hart is standing in front of him, a pile of papers in his hand. Homework. Cameron can’t concentrate. He keeps seeing SciFi’s broken face in his memory. If Patterson can do that to a guy the size of SciFi, what will he do to Cameron?

  He’s dead. No doubt about it.

  He’s next. He knows it, but he doesn’t care. In fact, he’s looking forward to it. He’ll fight this time. He’ll throw more punches than Patterson can take. Even a guy as insulated as him, with more muscle than bone, will feel it. Cameron will make the first move, not wait for the Red Coats to get the jump on him. If he can get a few blows in he might have a chance.

  “Well?” Mr. Hart prompts. “Homework, Grady?” An eyebrow lifts. He holds up the papers.

  Cameron opens his notebook, turns the pages looking for where he might have written it.

  “Tabs usually help,” Mr. Hart says. “They cost about ten cents. Well worth the money.”

  Cameron’s jaw snaps shut so his teeth meet with a sharp crack. Mr. Hart hears it and takes a step back. When Cameron looks into the man’s face he sees it’s as tight as it usually is when Hart’s dealing with Eddie. Poor Hart; he has another lunatic on his hands. Cameron doesn’t doubt that’s what the guy’s thinking. Even Cameron knows he’s closer to that edge than ever before. He feels like he’s standing on a tightrope, but it doesn’t scare him. Not anymore. A person can be scared for only so long and then he stops caring.

  Cameron finds his homework and pulls it out of his notebook. When Hart takes it from him the man is back to being in charge.

  “Skimpy,” he says and places it on top of his pile. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy reading every word.”