Burnout

by Taryn Eason

  I rolled my eyes. “Delilah won’t let me see it.”

  “Then you should steal it.”

  We had pulled into my driveway and I could see my father’s judging glare through the window. I could tell Lye noticed too. I stepped out of the car. “What makes you think I know how to steal anything?”

  Lye scoffed. “Yeah right. You’re a rebel. Just like me.”

  I smiled as I watched him drive away.

  Chapter 8

  I shut the door behind me and turned around to see my father staring at me, arms crossed.

  “You have to quit doing this. Your mother is worried about you.” He said.

  “What did I do?” I asked. I was eighteen years old and he had never cared where I was before.

  You haven’t stayed the night away from home in over a year. You come home at ungodly hours, but you’ve never stayed away. Now, in the past few weeks, you’ve stayed away twice without even telling anyone, and you’ve even come home with a black eye. What have you been getting yourself into, huh? Is it because of that boy?”

  “What boy are you talking about?” I tried not to say too much to keep from giving him ammo in this confrontation.

  “Lysander Adair. Don’t you act so innocent. I saw him dropping you off. He’s the one who hurt you, wasn’t he?”

  “No, I-“

  He didn't let me finish. “Wasn’t he?”

  I glared up at him. “You don’t even know him. How dare you-”

  He cut me off again. “Believe me, I know him. I know his kind. He was in my E.R. just a few months ago for a drug overdose. He’s scum, Maybelle.”

  “Aren’t there laws against telling me that?”

  He continued, ignoring my comment. “You know what they say, right? ‘You become who your friends are.’ You need to pick better friends.”

  “Did you just call me scum?”

  “If the shoe fits, wear it.” He glared at me with the same intensity my own eyes had. I was so close to bursting, but I knew I couldn’t. Loyalty meant nothing to my father. He would have me put in jail if he even suspected I had something to do with Winona’s greenhouse being burned down.

  “You are such a horrible father.” I hissed and began to walk away before he pushed me to the edge that only he could make me reach.

  “If you were more like your sister, I wouldn’t have to be.”

  I turned and looked at him with searing red eyes. “Go to Hell.”

  I shut the door to my room behind me and lay down on my bed. I looked down at my arm at the slowly-forming finger-shaped bruises that were beginning to appear. I had my father’s temper, but there was no way in Hell I could ever treat my future children the way he treated me. I wondered if what he said about Lye was true. He knew his full name, so he must have known him from somewhere.

  It occurred to me how little I knew about Lye. I had no idea what went on in his head. Could he have tried to kill himself? He never talked about his past, except for telling me about being a drug dealer. Maybe it was an accidental overdose on something he took recreationally. Hopefully it was just a lie my father made up to keep me away from the only friend I’ve had in years.

  Someone knocked on my door. “Come in,” I called suspiciously.

  Delilah came through the door. “Why do you keep upsetting dad like this? You know he has high blood pressure.”

  “I didn’t do anything. I just came home to him yelling at me.”

  “Well you had to have done something to make him so upset. Where have you been?”

  “I was at a party and I ended up sleeping there.”

  “Were you with Caleb?” She asked innocently. He graduated with her, so she knew him. She also knew I had a thing for him. Well, previously.

  “No, I wasn’t. I was with someone else. A Lakinobe.”

  She seemed skeptical. “You met a Lakinobe at a party here?”

  “Yeah,” I replied simply. “He told me a lot of stuff about my powers. I really need that journal now.”

  “You told someone about your powers? Maybelle, you know you can’t do that.”

  “Why not?” I challenged her.

  “Because if people find out, they’ll want to kill you. People will feel threatened by you.”

  I lit my hand and stared at it, flexing my fingers. “Good. I like being threatening. It’s nice to feel like I can always be in control, you know?” I felt so much more confidence in myself and my powers after Lye’s speech. Feeling someone else’s support meant more than anything to me.

  “Don’t say things like that! Do you know how easy it is to be corrupted by power? There was a reason I was supposed to get the Reeki.”

  I caught her slip-up. Her calling it the ‘Reeki’ meant she had read the journal. The journal that was, after all, now rightfully mine, as the holder of the Reeki. “Oh, you’re saying I’m somehow more susceptible to corruption than you would be?”

  She bit her lip. “I wasn’t going to let you read the journal so your feelings wouldn’t be hurt, but the reason you weren’t chosen is because you don’t have a pure heart. I was chosen because I did. People with pure hearts aren’t destructive and they can’t be corrupted.”

  I began to shout. “There’s no way you have a pure heart! You’re the most conceited, elitist, self-righteous person I know, but you’re such a suck up to literally everyone that nobody ever notices.”

  She looked at me with a victim’s eyes. “Maybelle, why have you always been so mean to me?”

  I laughed at her attempt to gaslight me. “You’re so pathetic. Get out of my room before you make me burn it down.”

  Delilah pursed her lips and nodded. She walked to the door to leave, but then turned and looked at me. “Maybelle, promise me you won’t ever hurt anybody with your powers.”

  I was reminded of Colt and how I had already ruined that promise, and probably would again, knowing myself. “I can’t.”

  She frowned. “The police are coming later today to talk to us about Aunt Winona’s greenhouse. You’re my sister and I love you, but if you’re at risk of hurting someone, I have to turn you in.”

  I nodded. As if the blood results didn’t already have me screwed. I only had a week of high school left. Hopefully I’d get to graduate before being jailed for arson.

  She shut the door behind her as she left. Even if I didn’t agree with it, I had to respect Delilah’s decision to turn me in. It’s what any sane person would choose to do. For all she knew, on my last day of school I could melt all the doors shut and burn everyone inside alive. Of course, most people wouldn’t imagine such a scenario, but after how my classmates had treated me, they all should be lucky that only my conscience held me back from doing anything like that.

  My teeth started chattering as I imagined what the end of the day might have looked like for me. I was going to jail for arson. They would find out what I could do and then lock me up and do experiments on me. They would know that they couldn’t control me. I could burn my way out of anything they put me into. I would be a threat, so they would kill me. I couldn’t stop imagining the worst and scaring myself. I had to stop myself from heating up after I accidentally melted my water bottle and the liquid leaked out all over my bed.

  My stomach churned and I held back tears. I ran to the bathroom and threw up, shaking all over. I was only eighteen years old. How could I have already ruined my life? I stared into the mirror as a pale ghost of myself with dark circles under her eyes stared back. That was all I ever saw anymore. I had evolved from a normal teenage girl into a mentally unstable criminal. I held my hand up to the mirror and heated it until the glass warped and cracked. I looked back into it, satisfied that all I could see was a million different blonde fragments with no distinguishable face.

  I decided that it was best for me not to be alone, so I brushed my teeth and walked downstairs into my living room and sat down in a recliner, still taking deep breaths to calm myself down. My mother was sitting on a couch beside me.

  She looke
d at me and spoke in a tone as kind as Delilah’s. “Darling, are you okay?”

  Somehow, that made me feel so much worse. “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “You’ve just been acting weird lately. You’ve been staying out late and you came home with a black eye last week, and you look like you’re so stressed, baby. I’m just worried about you.”

  I felt so much guilt. My mother was the only normal person in my life. I mean, she enjoyed her wine and keeping up good appearances with our neighbors too much, but she was still a good mother. I hadn’t even thought about how my strange behavior had been affecting her. I mean, she knew I went to parties and got into trouble, but every time she made me hangover food, I always felt like I was somehow letting her down. How I had been acting would scare any parent, so I couldn’t blame her at all. “I’m okay, mom. I’m just going through a lot right now, with graduation coming up and all.”

  The corners of her mouth twitched upwards, but I could tell she didn’t believe me. “Can I ask you a question, Belle?”

  I swallowed my nervousness again. “Yeah.”

  “When you didn’t come home, where did you stay?”

  I exhaled. It was just the traditional “you’re not sleeping with a boy, are you?” question. “I just drank too much and I knew I wasn’t safe to drive, so I stayed where I was.”

  She seemed sad. “I don’t care where you go, I just want to know that you’re safe and it terrifies me that I don’t know that.”

  I got defensive. “What do you mean? I told you I was safe where I was. Would you have rather I drove home drunk and plowed myself into a tree?”

  “Of course not. Maybelle, you came home with a black eye and you refuse to tell us how it happened. You can’t blame me for being worried about you.”

  I sighed and looked down. Lye was my only friend. If I told my mother that he had caused my black eye, they would always hold that over his head. I couldn’t tell the truth and make my parents hate him. “You’re right, I can’t blame you. But I’m an adult now and this is my life, so don’t worry about me. If I mess up, it’s only my fault, not anyone else’s, okay?”

  I could see the pain in her eyes, but I had to say it. I also needed to prepare her to lose me tonight when the police would come. “I just can’t shake the feeling that you’ve got yourself in trouble and you’re afraid to ask for help.”

  I felt a terrible hollow feeling in the pit of my chest. I could tell she noticed my reaction. “I’m fine.” I muttered and stood to leave. Then I heard the doorbell ring. A new wave of anxiety swept over me and I lost all strength to stand. Luckily, my mother was too busy getting the door to notice. My dad came into the room and gestured for the three police officers to sit at our dining room table. They sat down and my parents and Delilah sat on the other side of them. I stood up from the couch and took my place at the table so that I wouldn’t look suspicious as the only one not present.

  After exchanging formalities, a salt-and-pepper haired man with a mustache began. “I hate to say it, but there seems to be no leads in this case. We’re here hoping you could help us out.”

  My father glared at the officer. “What do you mean, ‘no leads’? You had a blood sample!”

  “Unfortunately, that blood was not human.” He replied.

  His eyes flickered enough for my father to pick up suspicion. “I don’t think you’re telling me everything about that. What kind of blood was it?”

  “It was a raccoon’s.”

  “You’re lying.” My father replied bluntly. “Why would raccoon blood be behind her greenhouse in the middle of town?” All those poker games had apparently paid off.

  “Doctor Lewis, there are raccoons all over this town. What reason would I have to lie to you?” The detective asked, visibly annoyed.

  “You tell me. Tell me everything or I’ll go over to Judge Conway’s office and he’ll make you tell me. Your choice. I don’t like secrets.” My curiosity had me thankful for my father’s connections.

  The detective and my father locked eyes for a moment before the detective’s gaze faltered and he gave in. “Okay, the blood sample passed the human coagulant test, which means the blood is technically human, but there is an extra pair of chromosomes in between the fifteenth and sixteenth chromosomes.” My stomach dropped. I gained an extra pair of chromosomes with the Reeki?

  Delilah chimed in, “Are you sure it wasn’t just someone with a disorder or something tainted? Things like that don’t just happen.”

  The detective looked at Delilah. “I’m sure. It is a completely different set of chromosomes from anything human, or any other animal that I’m aware of. I’m not sure what it is, but it had our lab guys curious enough to send the sample out to a DNA lab who are still investigating the coding of that chromosome and, frankly, what they're starting to find scares the hell out of us.”

  “What is it?” Delilah and my father asked at the same time.

  “The first thing they found is that it has the coding for synthesizing and igniting carbon subnitride, the hottest burning chemical known to man.”

  Delilah and I exchanged a look. “That would kill any biological creature, though. It’s impossible.” She said.

  “It should, but given how impossible everything is already, we’re guessing the rest of the DNA codes the body on how to handle it. I have no idea how to approach this, especially since all we have is a blood sample, but the fire in Winona Mercer’s greenhouse was not simply arson. Now, I’ve been called ‘paranoid’ before, but it seems to me that it’s some kind of biological weapon. If this thing is alive, I bet that this is not going to be the only arson incident. We need to find whatever this is before this goes any further.” He sighed. “That’s all I know.”

  “You sound insane. No one is going to make a biological weapon in a small town in Indiana.” My father said.

  “You want to know what I really think it is, Doctor Lewis?” He stood and walked to the door escorted by the other two police officers and, with a stoic expression on his face, looked at my father and asked “Do you believe in demons?”

  Then he shut the door behind him, leaving me feeling worse than if I had been taken to jail.

  Chapter 9

  All I could think about throughout school the next day was how much I hated everyone and couldn’t wait to leave. Mr. Martin still gave me the strangest looks. He would glance at me during class as if he was afraid of me. It made me uncomfortable, to say the least. I despised Madison even more since she rejected my apology. I was so relieved to hear the final bell ring.

  I was at my locker putting my books away when I heard an angry voice behind me.

  “Maybelle! I’ve been looking for you all day. Have you been avoiding me?”

  I slung my backpack on my back and glared up at Aaron. “Not consciously.”

  “Why did you try to get with my brother? Was it revenge or what?”

  I gave him a confused look. “What are you talking about?”

  He clenched his fists in fury and began to rant. “Don’t act like you didn’t have anything to do with it. My brother almost died. He’s in the ICU with broken ribs, a fractured skull, and a punctured lung. He’s going to have to have facial reconstructive surgeries just to be able to look normal again. All because you wanted to make your boyfriend jealous.”

  I slammed my locker and accidentally melted it shut. “Is that really what you think happened? Lye isn’t even my boyfriend.”

  “That scumbag deserves to be put in jail. I don’t know what he did to make Caleb not want to press charges, but I sure as hell can’t wait for him to do something else to wind up in a prison where he belongs.”

  My temper was flaring up. One wrong move and Aaron was dead. He had gone too far already. “Lye isn’t a bad person. Your brother, however, is the worst person I’ve ever met and he deserves everything he got. I hope that the surgeries don’t work and he has to stare at the mirror every single day and remember what he did to deserve it.”

 
Aaron got closer to me, grabbed my shoulders, and pushed me into my locker. “Don’t talk about my brother that way, you bitch. He could die!”

  I retaliated, pushing him back in a taunting manner while burning holes in his shirt with every word I said. “Don’t. Touch. Me. You. Little. Prick.” With the last word, I pushed harder and sent him onto the floor. I looked down at him. “You’re no better than your brother, you waste of space.”

  He looked at the holes in his shirt and skin that was just now turning red, eyes wide with terror. “What the hell are you?”

  “I’m someone you don’t want to mess with.”

  I turned and walked away, leaving him there before I did any more damage. I got into my car and drove home while debating on whether showing my powers to a teenage boy was a good idea or not. At least I held myself back from hurting him as much as I wanted to.

  I pulled into my driveway, thankful that Delilah’s car was missing, which most likely meant she was back at school. My father was still at work, and my mother was in her office, where she spent most of her time. She worked from home as an interior designer. Even though I didn’t exactly consider what she did “art”, I respected that she had the same drive for creativity that I did.

  As I walked past Delilah’s room, I wavered as I thought, and then turned around to go inside. Her walls were a disgusting lime green color and her purple polka dotted bedspread reinforced the idea that it was an eight-year-old’s room. Right there on her bedside table, Winona’s notebook sat. She told me that I could read it now, but I was honestly just waiting for her to leave to steal it. It was rightfully mine. I didn’t need her permission for anything. I snatched the book and left.