Burn Before Reading

by Sara Wolf

  That night, Mom came home late from the hospital. She and Dad had a fight, a quiet one, the sort of fight I could only half-hear. Their furious voices echoed dully through the walls, and then Mom started sobbing. I watched the ceiling of my childhood bedroom and listened to the sound, taking it in this time instead of running away by burying my head in my pillow. Mom cried. Mom was fed up. Dad was quiet. Dad felt bad. I could read them, even though I wasn’t in the room with them. I knew what they were feeling.

  Or did I?

  The best psychiatrists probably knew what people were feeling. I always thought I was good at knowing that, too. I secretly thought I was perceptive and understanding of people. Or was that stupid to assume? Was that, like Wolf said, childish of me? Was it stupid of me to assume I understood what any human being other than myself was feeling? I wasn’t Mom. I wasn’t Dad. I was just…me. I was just Bee – and Bee didn’t know what to feel anymore. She was confused and tired and sad – so, so sad. So sad she started crying, too, into her pillow. She wanted posters on her walls, friends in her phone, smiles on her face, books in her hand and in her heart. She wanted a scholarship – she wanted a good college that could teach her to make people okay again. But she couldn’t have both. That was selfish. That wasn’t how the world worked – you sacrificed something to get something.

  She wanted Dad to be happy, Mom to be happy – she wanted everything.

  She wanted everything to be okay again.

  Was that so wrong of her?

  Chapter 10

  WOLF

  I don’t remember how I got home, after the fight.

  I remember Burn pulling me and Fitz apart, shoving Fitz out the door and leaving me in the room. I remember furiously uncorking the bottle Bee brought up and downing half of it, and then? Blackness. Utter emptiness where my memories should be.

  I stare up at the white ceiling of my room and touch my lip experimentally. Everything hurts. Again. Everything hurts and I’m dying and what the flying fuck was I thinking, fighting Fitz over something he said? He says dumb stuff all the time – what about this time was so different?

  Her.

  I knew the answer before I could blink. It was her. Again. She was always there when I flew off the handle, like some sort of catalyst for a chemical explosion. What about her set me off so badly?

  Everything. Everything about her puts me on edge.

  I groaned and sat up, the morning sunlight like murder straight to my eyeballs. I hate drinking. I knew it was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. My stomach wouldn’t stop dancing with nerves, so the brilliant muscle that was my brain decided booze would be the correct solution to make me calm. All it did was make me hot and woozy and –

  The image of Bee’s face flashes through my mind, so close and so flushed, so pretty –

  Pretty. I force myself out of bed, like I can leave that thought there and move on with my life like it never happened.

  I had to apologize to Fitz, I knew that much. I staggered to his door and knocked on it. He answered, all smiles.

  “Well well, if it isn’t the star of the night,” Fitz drawls, his hand on his hip. He looks as fresh and dewy as a blade of grass, minus the faint purple bruise in his eye socket.

  “How do you not have a hangover?’ I croak.

  “Not all of us slam three bottles of wine in two hours, my darling brother.”

  “You’re not….mad?”

  “Why would I be?” Fitz smiles. “I tried to set the mood for you two lovebirds without your permission. Of course you’d want to hit me. I’d want to hit me.”

  I lean against his doorway, my body too heavy for me to support on my own.

  “Why in God’s name were you trying to set a mood? I don’t like her like that.”

  Fitz puts on a simpering smile and pats my head. “Wolf, you are the dearest thing to my heart, but you’re also a giant idiot. Now if you could please move, I’ve got a Hot Pocket downstairs with my name on it.”

  “I seriously don’t like her.”

  “Uh-huh.” He tries to dart under my elbow, but I put my leg there.

  “Fitz, look at me. I’m not lying.”

  “Sure.”

  I narrow my eyes. “You don’t believe me.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve just got a lot of evidence to the contrary, and I’m a man of science at my core.”

  “What evidence?” I snort.

  “You mean other than the endless film reels of you staring at her like a doe-eyed milkmaid?”

  “I don’t –”

  “Oh yes you do. Constantly. Literally any time she and you are together within a hundred yards. Now, please, my pepperonis need me.”

  I’m too stunned to stop him this time, and he ducks under my elbow and escapes downstairs. Do I stare? I don’t stare. Do I? When I regain my composure, I follow him into the kitchen.

  “I don’t stare.”

  “Saying something out loud doesn’t make it true,” Fitz singsongs as he puts his Hot Pocket on a plate and pours himself a glass of milk.

  “I don’t stare!” I insist, and follow Fitz back up to his room. Fitz peeks into Burn’s room, balancing his food precariously.

  “Burn, please tell me whether or not Wolf stares at Beatrix a lot.”

  Burn, pressing nearly four hundred pounds on his weight machine, looks up, sweat dripping into his eyes.

  “He stares at Bee a lot,” He says, without a single sign of exertion in his voice. Fitz turns to me and smiles.

  “See?”

  He skips back to his room as best he can while carrying a plate, and I skulk after him.

  “This is a conspiracy,” I decide. “Between you two.”

  “I can assure you, Wolf, love is no conspiracy. It’s just hormones.” Fitz crams half the pocket into his mouth. He eats like a vacuum in a fifty-year-old attic. He swallows with much difficulty and sighs. “Oh, c’mon, don’t give me that look. It’s been years since Mark, okay? Me and Burn just want to see you happy.”

  “Being with some girl won’t make me happy,” I cross my arms over my chest.

  “She isn’t just ‘some girl’! She’s Beatrix Cruz! Our scholarshipper! She wrote that essay you obsess over constantly!”

  “I don’t…obsess.” I hiss.

  “Wolf, please. You’re acting like you don’t know I hack your webcam to spy on you four days out of the week.”

  “You –” My skin starts crawling. “You what?”

  “Don’t worry,” He throws his hands up. “I have my algorithms check first before I peek, so your jerk-off privacy is safe.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I knead the space between my eyebrows, trying desperately to stop the irritated headache that’s forming. The sound of heavy metal dropping resounds, and then Burn comes out, wiping his face with a towel.

  “She ran away,” He says. “After the fight.”

  “Poor thing,” Fitz pouts. “I’d run away too, if I saw Wolf lose it like that.”

  I point at him. “Look – keep your nose out of my business. I don’t need you making my life harder than you do already.”

  Fitz salutes, and as I stomp off I can hear him chirp ‘sir yes sir!’. I grab the webcam from the top of my computer and chuck it straight into the garbage can. I hear Burn – well, feel his presence, really, like a heavy cloud behind me in the doorway.

  “What is it?” I snap.

  “You’re losing it,” He says quietly. “That’s two people you’ve punched.”

  “So what?”

  “So,” He leads. “Maybe you do like her.”

  “Or maybe I just feel like punching people.”

  “We both know that’s not true.”

  I’m quiet. Finally, I open my mouth.

  “If it is her –”

  “If it is her,” Burn interrupts. “You need to quit taking those frustrations out on other people, and just tell her.”

  “I can’t.” I gr
it my teeth. “I promised myself it would never happen again.”

  “That isn’t how it works, Wolf. You don’t get to choose. It just happens.”

  “She hates me.” I snarl.

  “I’d hate you too,” He says. “If you kept acting weird and aloof around me.”

  I scoff, my body reluctant to acknowledge what he’s saying, but my mind lapping up every word. I know I’ve been acting weird around her. I know I don’t get to choose when it happens. But the thought of someone like me – broken and fearful and scarred – admitting his feelings to someone like her, who needs someone reliable and trusting and normal, is absurd.

  “She needs to leave,” I say. “I need to kick her out of Lakecrest before she can ruin her life. It’s for her own good.”

  “Or is it for yours?”

  I’m quiet. Is it for mine? Life would be so much easier if she was gone. I wouldn’t feel this way all the time – tortured and torn between getting rid of her so she can stop living for her Dad’s sake, or keeping her close to me for my own selfish reasons.

  “The first thing to do,” Burn says, like he can hear my thoughts. “Is get rid of that essay. And talk to her. Like a normal human being would.”

  “I don’t need your advice,” I snap. Burn stares at me, conveying all his expression in his eyes – stern and doubtful. He leaves, and I close the door and savor the quiet. Before I know it the essay is in my hands again, and I’m reading it.

  I’m not the sort of person who’s good at talking about herself. Focusing on myself gets a little overwhelming, sometimes. I much rather talk about other people. The way they smile, the way they laugh, the way they get mad. I like watching it all. Just watching, though. I can’t really get into people, right now. They suck up too much time and energy that’s better used for studying. But maybe someday – once I’m out of college, as an accomplished psychologist out in the world, I can go back to making friends. That’s my secret hope, anyway. I keep it in the back of my mind like a lighthouse beacon for when things get a little too dark in my head. That’ll be my reward once I’ve done everything I have to; get some friends, maybe fall in love and out of love and back in love. I don’t know. That’s the best part – I have no idea what’s going to happen. Anything can happen. My life is the Schrodinger’s cat, and I’m excited to see what’s inside the box when I finally get around to opening it.

  It hits me, then – why I read this essay so much. She is who I was, before Mark. Before the darkness, and the doubts. Before I convinced myself loving someone was impossible. The mere thought of liking someone again drove me to lash out at people, to drink. I don’t trust myself with love, not anymore. Not after what happened.

  But Beatrix’s words shine, full of hope and innocence. I cling to them because I can’t cling to who I was before – because I’ve forgotten. And her words remind me, pulling off the old scabs over my wounds and letting them bleed fresh, for better or for worse. She’s reminded me of what I could be, if I left the bitterness and the past behind.

  Her essay is a crutch, and I’d been using it to limp around for far too long.

  The girl who wrote it is real. She breathes and thinks and smiles, she struggles through the life the same way I do. And at the very least, even though she hates me and I’ve done nothing but drive her away, she deserves my gratitude.

  She deserves something.

  Something better than a life of duty.

  Chapter 11

  BEATRIX

  Dad didn’t come out of the bedroom the next day.

  Mom made some excuse about buying groceries, and left early in the morning. I didn’t know where she went, but it got to five in the afternoon and she still wasn’t back. I knew she went to bars with her friends, so maybe she was there to blow off some steam. I couldn’t blame her. I couldn’t even work up the courage to call her phone to check – she needed space from Dad. From me. From her whole family. That’s what the textbooks said, anyway; when confronted with a stressful situation, most people required space to process the emotions connected with it. I couldn’t ruin her space. As much as I wanted her to come home, to make up with Dad and he with her, I couldn’t work up the guts to even text her and ask her about it. Getting involved might only ruin things even worse.

  It was a four-day weekend, but it felt like a hundred days of nothing but silence and misery. Our duplex became a tomb; Mom stayed out pretty much all weekend, until Monday, and then she went right back to work. I tried to get Dad to come out, but he never did. I spent most of Monday and Tuesday sitting across from his door in the hall, my back pressed to the wall and a bowl of soup on a tray at my toes. If he did come out, I wanted him to at least eat. My own voice asking him if he was okay every few hours felt weak and useless. I knew – from when this happened before – that begging or threatening would only drive him further into his shell. It had happened before, but it was never this bad. Maybe a few hours, not a few days.

  Half of me hated the fact Mom wasn’t here, but the other half felt ashamed. Of course she wasn’t here – she had to earn a living so we could keep staying in the duplex. I texted her once that Dad wasn’t coming out, and she told me to leave him be. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.

  Tuesday morning, I started to worry about dehydration – that’s faster than starvation. But then I remembered he had the small bathroom in there, with a faucet, and felt stupid. Just because he has depression doesn’t mean he’ll ignore his basic needs like drinking. My stomach twisted. Or would he? I felt my brain work furiously as it tried to recall if that was a thing with depression. All the textbooks I’d ever read mashed together into one lumpy haystack of information I was desperately trying to pull a needle from. Was that a thing? Was that a thing, and what should I do if it was?

  I stood up, balling my fists. I had to make sure he was okay, or I’d go crazy. And if he wouldn’t open the door, I’d have to find another way in.

  Months ago, I’d tried to pick the lock on his room. Turns out lockpicking is super hard and nothing like the wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am method Hollywood makes it out to be. I knew I’d never get in through the bedroom door. Bashing through the door would be too violent, but a small voice in me knew if all else failed, I could get the fire axe from the garage and bust him out. It would be violent, and probably a bad idea, but I was desperate at that point.

  I walked outside, rubbing my hands together in the cold as I stared up at Dad’s window. What if I was too late? What if, while I’d been wringing my hands together and worrying, he’d dehydrated? Or took too many pills? Or used the bedsheets to –

  The roar of an engine barely registered in my ears. I had to get into that window. Maybe I could throw rocks at it – would that get him out of bed? My lungs burst into flame at the realization it wouldn’t do anything at all if he was already dea-

  “Scholarshipper!”

  I turned to see none other than Wolfgang Blackthorn himself striding across the lawn, his motorcycle parked at the curb. He had a black leather jacket and jeans on, a scowl marring his wind-flushed face. The gauze on his knuckles was gone, the flesh pink and healing, and his lip was almost healed, too.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked. “How did you know where I –“

  “Your essay comes with an address,” He drawled. His green eyes moved from me to the window I’d been looking at. “What are you doing out here? In pajamas?”

  I looked down at my legs. I’d come out wearing only pj pants and a big shirt. No wonder it felt so cold.

  “I’m –” I swallowed my words. How could I explain? Did I even want to? He’d never understand, and he’d probably just ridicule me again. I stared up at the window, fighting back hot tears. I couldn’t tell anyone. I couldn’t rely on anyone – not Mom, not Dad, not Wolf. Not even myself. I felt so helpless and small and ashamed. I wiped at my eyes and lifted my chin. “I’m fine. I just – just lost something out here, is all. Why did Your Highness drive all the way out here?
Did you need something from moi?”

  Wolf narrowed his eyes. “You’re an awful liar.”

  “Well I’m an awful liar who wants to be left alone, thank you very much,” I snapped. “So if you could just leave the way you came on that noise machine, that’d be great.”

  He was quiet, staring at me. I felt the anxiety build in the pit of my stomach with every second. I was in pajama pants, my hair a mess. I hadn’t showered for two days. I looked like garbage, and he looked perfectly fine – more than fine, handsome and put-together as hell. It made me even more irrationally angry – at me, at him, at the whole world.

  "I have things to do," I said. "So if you could just leave -"

  "Is it your Dad?" He asked, clipped. For a second I was baffled he knew, but then I remembered just how uncanny his understanding of me was.

  "Yeah," I scoffed. "It's my Dad."

  Wolf stepped to my side, staring up at the window with me. "Is he up there?"

  "Yeah. And I’m going to deal with it. On my own." Wolf fixed his gaze on me. "That means without you present," I motioned to his motorcycle.

  He didn't seem to hear me, making for the stairs up to the front door swiftly, his long legs much faster than mine.

  "Hey!" I shouted. "Hey, hey, HEY! Where do you think you're going?"

  Wolf looked so out of place walking down the hall of my house, his fancy leather jacket probably more expensive than our dinky TV. Every time I saw him inside a room I got surprised at how tall he was - it was easy to forget when he was outside and not surrounded by shelves and things I could barely reach. I frantically ran after him, until he came to a stop in front of Dad's door.

  "This is it, right?" he asked.

  "Seriously, Wolf," I hissed. "This isn't - you can't be in here! I can take care of this myself, okay? I don't need you -"

  Wolf knocked on the door curtly. For a split-second I prayed, but there was no response.

  "How long has it been?" Wolf asked, glaring at the door with such fire I was pretty sure he was trying to burn it down with his mind.