Burn (8 page)
“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.”
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 building 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.
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.”
There’s one big difference between Cameron and Eddie Fain. Cameron feels no pull to carve up school property or himself with a straightened paper clip, but he would like to take one to Hart’s smug face.
Cameron looks down from where he’s balanced on that tightrope. It’s a long way, and no net. He’s so far up he can’t see the people in the audience, or the clowns waiting to come out and divert attention from his mangled body.
He’s so far up, the air is thin. He thinks about his victory yesterday; same high. Same life or death. Then he lifts one of his feet and stands like a flamingo, tempting gravity.
He looks into Hart’s face and says, “You’re an ass.”
9:20AM
Cameron holds the lighter under the balled-up paper towel. The fire doesn’t spread fast, like Cameron wants it to, needs it to. The paper is wet. It smokes but doesn’t flame. A dud. Like he is, only there’s a lot more potential with fire than there is with a guy who’s too afraid to bend over to tie his shoe, afraid he’ll be like a duck with his head underwater, afraid a Red Coat will pluck him out of the pond and pick apart his insides.
Cameron tosses the piece of char into the trash and pulls a paper towel from the dispenser. Dry, like sandpaper. He ignites it and holds it between his fingertips. The first blush of heat is like a sweet song playing in his blood. The pulse in his wrists throbs heavily. It hurts. The flames eat away at the paper until there is almost nothing left. Cameron wishes he could go like that, in a blaze of glory. Yeah. Fast and with everyone watching. With everyone watching because they can’t do anything else. Cameron stands over the bin and drops the fiery ball into it. It catches quickly. It’s like he blinked and suddenly the trash can is an inferno, with flames jumping and smoke curling toward the ceiling. Cameron steps back. A tiny step. He wants to feel the burn on his skin.
It’s hard to pull away. If Cameron went like that, everyone would have to watch. Fire has that much power.
The wall behind the trash can is turning black with soot and ash before Cameron does anything about it. Then he dumps the can over and stomps on the paper towels, what’s left of them. When he’s done, with the fire out and his hands trembling from the rush, he notices the rubber soles of his shoes have melted. He notices smudges of black on his face and hands. He notices the red pull fire alarm just inside the door and the ceiling spigots that didn’t open up. And he laughs. A fire here at Madison High would burn without anyone noticing for a long time.
9:30AM
The office, from the inside looking out, isn’t as defeating as Cameron thought. He likes that. Suddenly the walls in this school aren’t that high, the halls not so long. He feels a lot bigger. Like maybe he grew a foot and finally looks like he belongs.
He decides, before Mr. Elwood, the boys’ counselor, calls him into his office, that he’s not sorry and won’t say that he is. Maybe he’ll say nothing. Cameron knows how much adults hate that.
“Mr. Grady.”
Elwood is tall and about as white as a cigarette. He smells like them, too. How does a guy who smokes try to get kids not to?
He doesn’t.
Cameron stands up.
“Come on in.”
He walks past Elwood and into his tiny ice cube of an office. Two plastic chairs sit empty in front of a metal desk. Cameron takes the chair closest to the door and looks around the room. A diploma in a plastic frame, a bowling ball, or at least its case, and photos of Elwood’s golden retriever. He took the dog for a professional sitting. The retriever is sitting on a piece of carpeting, a football between his paws, with a blue background that looks like clouds smeared over a clear sky.
Nothing has changed since Cameron was here last.
“Mr. Hart says you called him an ass.” Elwood is reading from the referral form. When he moves around his desk he lets the paper fall onto a stack of other referrals, then takes his seat. “He says it’s possible you flipped him off as you left the room.”
“I didn’t do that,” Cameron says. “I didn’t flip him off.”
“But you called him an ass?”
Cameron doesn’t deny it.
“Does he list any witnesses?”
Elwood sits forward and reads from the referral, “. . . in front of the whole class.”
Cameron laughs. Hart, the crybaby.
“Ass is a funny word, isn’t it?” Elwood asks.
“I guess.”
“Do you know what it means?”
Of course, but Elwood doesn’t give him the chance to prove it. He reaches behind him for five pounds of Webster’s definitions, flips to the beginning, and starts reading.
“ ‘A long-eared mammal; a domesticated relative of the horse; uneducated; a foolish person.’ ”
Elwood looks at Cameron for confirmation.
“That sounds about right,” Cameron says. “Well, except maybe the uneducated part. I mean, he went to school, right?”
Elwood nods. “He did. For a long time.” He closes the dictionary and puts it back on the shelf. “You think Mr. Hart is a fool? Why?”
Cameron looks at him, thinking maybe this is a trick question. First of all, anyone who knows Hart has to know the guy’s an ass. Second, why would Elwood want his opinion?
“What happened to crime and punishment?” Cameron asks. “You know I did it, so give me the consequence.”
“We talk about things here, Cameron, so chances are it won’t happen again.” He pauses, hoping it’ll sink in, Cameron’s sure. “Look, I know you’re new at this. The only other time you were in here was for a little squabble between you and an upperclassman. Remember? I called you both in here and we talked it out. That’s how we work out conflicts at Madison: we talk. Sometimes I bring all the parties together — do you feel like you need to talk to Mr. Hart?”
“No.” Cameron feels he was pretty clear in the classroom. Anyway, he got a bloody nose the last time he tried to talk it out. It doesn’t work. He wants to tell Elwood this. He wants the counselor to know what a failure he really is, but that would mean telling him about the punch he took, it would mean sitting in this office again with Patterson and later taking the punishment for opening his mouth.
“Okay. Sometimes I can get to the bottom of a conflict simply by listening to what a student has to say.”
This is where Cameron is supposed to fill the silence with his innermost feelings. Not a chance of that happening.
“Or you could sit in Mr. Hart’s class. See the way he talks to us.”
“Did he say something that upset you?”
“Nothing I couldn’t take care of myself.” But Eddie’s another story. And while Cameron thought it was funny before, he knows now that being lampooned by Hart is nothing to laugh about.