Burn (13 page)

The shape of him looked angry. Fenn sat on the porch, rigid and perpendicular. Waiting.

“Where were you?” No preliminaries. No smile.

“I told you I was going shopping,” she faltered.

“I assumed you were going shopping to buy something for the lunch,” he said. “But you never showed up.”

The lunch. Crap. The lunch for admitted students. That was today. That's where she was supposed to have been, with the students who were supposed to become her future friends. She'd forgotten. As soon as Ilyf had given her Ned Lowell's address, she'd forgotten.

“Did you have a good time?” she asked.

“I bought you a shirt from the campus bookstore.” He gestured to a pile of dark fabric sitting next to him. “And I saved you a piece of panettone. It's an Italian dessert thing. There's a penny baked in – the person who gets it is supposed to have a lucky year. Nobody got it, though. This is the last piece. I had to fight for it so you could be the lucky one.” He was staring down at his folded hands instead of looking at her, but she knew that his eyes would be hard.

The lucky one. She was the lucky one. She didn't need a penny to remind her of that. Or maybe she did. Because she kept doing things to mess it up. “Thank you.” She took the container from him. The cake inside smelled like citrus. “I'm sorry I missed it. I'm really sorry, Fenn.”

“Should we finish the applications now?”

“The applications?”

“College applications? Remember? The essays you were so interested in working hard on three days ago? Early admission? Postmarked January 1?”

He kept talking like that – an angry question mark after every phrase. She knew which applications Fenn was talking about. She just didn't know how she could think about them right now. How she could sit quietly at a desk with a ballpoint pen.

He sighed deeply, dropping his head into his hands for a minute before looking back up at her. “Come inside, Lona. Let's not argue today. We'll make a fire and finish the applications. It really is just a formality – today at lunch, a dean told me that I could even start this semester, after the winter break. Let's just do them and get them out of the way.”

He stood and reached for her hand, but she couldn't come with him. Her feet felt frozen to the spot she was standing in. “I found him, Fenn.”

He furrowed his eyebrows. “You found – what?”

“I found him. From my dream. It's Edward Lowell. He died last year, but before that, he worked in a lab on the Julian Path.” She knew she should sound more contrite, but she couldn't keep the excitement out of her voice. Not when she'd found the nexus of where her dream world met reality, and where her present met her past.

Fenn didn't respond. Not at all, not a word. She hadn't expected him to erupt with joy, but she thought he might offer some encouragement – or acknowledgment, at least. He knew how important this was and he couldn't say
anything
?

“He was angry with Warr— the Architect,” she said, more loudly. “He was worried about the Architect stealing something he'd worked on. His brother said everyone called him Ned.”

“You went there,” Fenn said slowly. “You went after him even though it was incredibly stupid and dangerous.”

“But I came back fine. I came back totally safe, and until thirty seconds ago, you thought the worst thing that had happened was me getting lost in the mall.”

“It was stupid,” he said again. “It was
shockingly
dumb.”

“But I
found
something.”

“You went there even after you promised me you wouldn't.”

His voice was low and terrible. But instead of making her feel bad, it made her angry. She needed his support, not a lecture. “I promised under duress, Fenn,” she spat. “I promised because you basically made me feel like I would be a terrible person if I didn't promise.”

“So were you trying to catch me on a technicality?” Fenn yelled. “Make a promise you had no intention of keeping so you could go off and do whatever you wanted anyway?”

“No. I was trying to excuse you from having to participate in something you clearly disagreed with.”

“By sneaking around,” he said.

“I didn't know I was supposed to ask
permission
before leaving!”

“That's not what I meant.”

They were both screaming now. Her body was burning with frustration that she had to justify any of this. That
Fenn
, who was supposed to love her more than anybody, didn't get this.

“You can't stop me from wanting to know this, Fenn. You can't just cover it up with – with sweatshirts from some university. You can't—” She was on the verge of sobbing now. She forced her voice louder, so that it would come out as angry rather than sad. “You can't just magically make me become
normal
.”

“Is that what you think?” Fenn asked. “You think that I'm trying to make you into some definition I have of normal?”

“I don't know what you're trying to do. It seems like you're trying to resist doing
anything
.”

“I'm just trying to resist the idiot things.”

“So you think I'm an idiot now?”

The screen door behind Fenn suddenly banged open. Gamb, hands awkwardly jammed in pockets, was looking like he might try to slink away unnoticed. “Helloooo,” he said, when he realized it was too late. Fenn folded his arms in front of his chest and looked away.

“Ilyf sent me out here to tell you that the ball is dropping,” Gamb said. “But I'll just tell her that no one wants to watch that stupid ball thing anyway.” He practically sprinted back inside.

When the door closed behind Gamb, Lona became aware of the cold penetrating through her clothes. Something wet landed on the tip of her nose. A snowflake. The first snowfall of the season was blanketing the yard in white.

The fire that had fueled her argument with Fenn slowly left her body. It was replaced with the cold wet of melted snow, numbing her toes. And with sadness. They couldn't keep having different variations of this conversation. It was too awful. It hurt both of them too much.

On the porch, Fenn leaned against the railing. He looked empty and wounded. Her first instinct was to un-hurt him. To explain she hadn't meant what she said. But she
had
meant what she said.

“I think,” she began. “I think that you want us
both
to be normal. That you have this whole, perfect normal life planned out.”

“I don't think it's a bad thing, to want to move on. I don't think it's a bad thing to let the past recede into the distance instead of letting it strangle you.”

Strangle her. Is that what he thought of what she was doing? Was he right? Was her past stealing its hands around her throat, luring her closer until, by the time she wanted to escape she wouldn't be able to?

“It's not a bad thing.” she allowed. “Unless I can't do it. Fenn, I can't move on, and I don't even know if I want to. What I want is to finish this.”

“You're following a dream, Lona. Not a fantasy – a literal dream. You're forcing clues to fit together in this – I don't know, this pre-constructed idea that it all means something. You've found a random guy named Edward – not at all an uncommon name – and you've convinced yourself that he's this man you're supposed to find.”

“He worked in the
lab
, Fenn.”

“Have you ever stopped to think about how little this makes sense? Why a dead man would take the time to implant anything into your dreams to begin with? Have you ever thought that maybe—”

That maybe this was all in her head.
That's how he was going to finish the sentence.

“Lona.” His voice was broken. She had to steel herself the way she always did when she heard him say her name like this, like it was the most important word he would ever say. “Why does this matter to you so much?”

When Fenn and Lona had been on the Julian Path together, their lives were inextricably bound. They didn't have two lives so much as they had one. That's how Fenn had always felt to her. Someone she loved as effortlessly as breathing, who she knew as easily as she knew herself. She was being unfair to him. It wasn't his fault that he didn't want her to continue on her search any more than it was her fault that she wanted him to abandon everything else and come with her. It was nobody's fault. It was just that now they were two people instead of one.

Suddenly the numbness in her feet was comforting. It was halfway up her calves. If she stayed still long enough it might eventually reach the sharp pang that had begun in her heart, a cold and benevolent anesthesia.

“Come inside, Lona,” he said. When she didn't move, he walked down to her, through the snow. His skin was much warmer than hers; when he wrapped his arms around her, she could feel heat transferring from his body to hers, or maybe it was the other way around. Maybe she was giving him the cold. Either way, this was as it was supposed to be – both of them using each other to reach an equilibrium. His mouth was even warmer than his skin. His lips on hers felt achingly tender, their heartbeats still matched and so did their breathing. For a moment she let herself accept the familiarity of this safeness. Fenn moaned, softly, at the feeling of her lips.

“What does tonight taste like?” he whispered. “It's snowing now – is it peppermint?”

She tried to play the game. She tried to think of what this night would taste like, sound like, feel like, look like – but everything was gray. It didn't taste like anything at all.

“I think you should go,” she said when her head was buried in his shirt and she didn't have to look at his face.

“Come in with me.”

“No.” She didn't accept the hand he'd extended toward her. “I don't mean go inside. I mean that if the university is offering you a place for next semester, you should take it.”

Fenn's hand slowly fell to his side. “This was just an argument. We don't have to talk about it any more tonight.”

“But we're going to talk about it tomorrow night. And if not tomorrow, then next week. We're going to keep doing this for as long as the thing I want more than anything is to understand my dream and the thing you want more than anything is to move on.”

“The thing I want more than anything is you.”

“Please don't,” she said, and when he reached out to her, she said “Don't,” again.

It had to be this way. Because sooner or later, one of them would cave. Either she would feel too bad about worrying him, or he would feel too bad about curtailing her. One of them would win the selfless war and neither of them would be happy.

“Please go,” she said. “Go inside now, and go to school next week. It's what I want.”

“But you don't want to come with me?”

“I want you to go alone.”

“You want to break up.”

The words were a knife in her stomach. Break up. She couldn't make herself agree to that out loud. She couldn't even comprehend that. Fenn interrupted her silence with a sharp noise, a yelp of pain. “Then I guess,” he said, “I guess that's what I want, too.”

From inside the house she could hear music, coming from the television. Bawdy lyrics, sung by a crowd.
Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind.

A song about remembering friendships, even in the face of change and progress. It only came on once a year. Julian's family used to sing it around a piano. Of course. Lona had been so wrapped up in everything else that it hadn't even registered what Gamb meant when he talked about the ball dropping. It was New Year's Eve.

When he left, she didn't come out of her room to see him off. She knew she should, she just couldn't. “I've already said goodbye,” she told Gamb, when he pressured her. And it was true. What else could she and Fenn say to each other that they hadn't said a few days ago? And more importantly, how could she open her mouth again and not try to take it all back?

Instead she heard Fenn outside of her bedroom, just before Ilyf took him to the train station. She knew his footsteps. She knew the balance of his weight, and she knew, when she heard the softest noise against her door, that it was Fenn's fingertips pressing against the wood.

Ilyf and Gamb had a party the night before he left. A small one. A sad one. It seemed the most counterintuitive thing in the world, to celebrate Fenn leaving. “It's not a party,” Ilyf rationalized to Lona. “It's a dinner that a few friends are holding for another friend because he's moving on and they're happy for his success. You should come.” Her message was clear.
Don't let you and Fenn ruin our whole group's friendship
.

But Lona couldn't bring herself to sit in a restaurant and watch Fenn open goodbye presents, and be reminded in a dozen ways of all of the reasons she wanted to be with him. It would hurt too much to see his face.

Instead she spent that night in bed. And the day after that – sleeping, reading, listlessly finishing backlogged homework assignments that were too easy and didn't seem important anyway. She cancelled a dinner with Talia, claiming she had the flu. She was sure Talia could tell that her throat was raw from crying and not from coughing – Ilyf must have told her what happened – but she let it slide. “Just this once,” Talia said. “And I'm calling you every day.”

Now there was a knock at her door. A rapping that turned into a pounding. “Go away, Gamb.”

“I can't hear you—”

“Go
away
, Gamb.”

“I think it's because this door is closed. I think if the door were open, I could hear you better.”

“Go—”

“Unless the problem is that I'm not knocking loudly enough. Maybe that's the problem.”

She scooted off her bed long enough to undo the lock on the handle before diving back under the comforter.

Gamb's face appeared seconds later, peering around the door. “Redecorating?” he asked, sitting on the edge of her bed, gesturing to the tissues piled on her desk and nightstand.

She didn't answer, keeping her eyes on the physics problem set open in front of her.

“Lona, the stuff with you and Fenn is not really any of my business. Even I'm not too oblivious to realize that.” He grinned. “Fortunately, I
am
too oblivious to let the fact that it's none of my business prevent me from making it my business.”

“What do you want, Gamb?”

“To drop off your mail.” He waved a couple of envelopes. She nodded toward her desk and he shoved aside an empty tissue box to leave them. “To see if you're alive.”

“I'm alive.”

“To see if you're wasting away into a sad, malnourished ghost figure.”

She picked up a box of granola bars from the floor and rattled it in his face.

“To see if I can make you laugh. A little tiny bit? A chuckle? A chucklette?”

That was too much to ask. She would show him she was still breathing and eating, but asking for a smile was too much.

Gamb sighed. “You're not talking to him at all? Not even to ask about his dorm, or his orientation or his asthmatic R.A.?” The asthmatic resident advisor was such a specific, personal detail that Lona knew immediately that Gamb must have heard from Fenn since he left for school.
Of course he had
. Why wouldn't he? But it hurt that Fenn hadn't contacted her. Even if she'd asked him not to. Even if she would have been mad if he had.

She didn't want Gamb to see her cry.
Recite the periodic table of elements
, she instructed herself, but she stopped before she got to the metals. Iron would have undone her. Fe. Fenn.

“You dared him to leave, you know.”

“What are you talking about? We broke up. He left. There was no daring.”

“He never would have, until you told him you wanted him to. Then what was he supposed to do
– make
you be in a relationship with him? You made him leave so you could be the one who didn't leave.”

“You have no idea what you're talking about.” She turned away from Gamb and drew her knees up to her chest, staring determinedly out the window. She was done talking.

After a few minutes of silence, Gamb sighed and heaved himself off the bed. He stopped when he got to the door. “Can I just say one more thing? And I think it's actually a smart thing, so can you listen? You and Fenn broke up because you're on this mission. This – I don't really understand it, obviously, because neither of you talk about it – but this
thing
you feel like you have to do, and he feels like he has to  …  not do.”

“Yes. Sort of. Yes.”

“Then why aren't you doing it, Lona? I mean – if the reason you're not with Fenn anymore is because you feel like you have to be out Wonder Woman-ing this mystery, then you should be doing that. Not crying in your room.”

She was silent for a long time. “Yeah.”

“Ye— wait. Yeah?”

“Yeah, Gamb. You're right, okay? You're right.”

She had broken up with Fenn – she still hated that phrase. Broken up. Like they had shattered and couldn't be repaired – so that she could do the things she felt she needed to do without being responsible for Fenn's feelings. And all she had to show for it was two empty tissue boxes and a ragged hole in her heart.

“So you'll go? You'll go and do  …  whatever?”

“I think so.” He looked at her expectantly. “Not now, Gamb. Not right this very minute. But I'll go.”

Once he left, she picked up the mail he'd left on the desk. There was a yellow envelope that looked official; at first she thought it might be the belated government information request, but when she looked at the return address she saw it was from Warren's hospital. She opened it and a stack of magic marker drawings fluttered out, along with a note from Rowena.

Lona –

We had to move Warren to another facility for patients in vegetative states. His wife told us to throw out his art projects, but I thought you might like them. I hope you're doing okay. You can come by and visit me any time; we miss seeing your face around here.

Rowena had affixed little sticky notes to every drawing, explaining what the assignment was. For “Draw your favorite animal”, Warren had scribbled something indeterminate with four legs, entirely in purple. For “Draw your favorite thing to do”, he'd made a stick figure next to a bunch of square things, which Lona thought were supposed to be books.

The last sticky note said, “Draw a sad memory.” This time there were two stick figures, both of whom had frowning faces. An attendant must have helped Warren write a caption; there was writing in black ink peeking out from under the sticky note. She peeled it back:

Ned Broke the Rules
.