Burn (16 page)

“Coors,” he says.

She lifts her chin. “Light?”

“Sure. I’m watching my figure.”

She looks him over and laughs again. “You’re cute,” she says. “In a few years you’ll be old enough to use that.”

She walks into the store. The door closes, sweeping a draft of cool air into the afternoon. Cameron turns back to the parking lot, tries to see through the spotted windshield of the green car. There’s a girl sitting in the driver’s seat. Dark hair in a ponytail and white teeth. She could be smiling at him. Or she could be laughing. The windows are rolled up, the air conditioning on so that the engine hums.

“What’s your name?”

The blonde girl is back and Cameron turns to her voice. She’s carrying two six-packs of Coors Light.

“Never mind,” she says. “I’ll forget it the minute you tell me. It’s been that kind of day.”

“Cameron,” he says. “You should remember it. I’m going to be famous one day.”

“Yeah? Me, too. I’m going to write songs. What are you going to do?”

“I’ve already done it.”

“And you’re not telling?” Her pink lips press into a pout and Cameron feels it like a sucker punch. For a moment it hurts to breathe. He doesn’t feel even half as good sitting next to Helen Gosset.

“What if I give you that beer?” she asks. “Will you tell me then?”

“Yeah, I’ll tell you.”

She puts a six-pack on the sidewalk and pulls a bottle from the pack she’s still holding. It’s already built up a sweat from the heat. She holds the brown bottle up in her hand, and Cameron notices her fingernails are bitten short, the pink nail polish peeling.

“What did you do?” she asks.

“What’s my name?” he tests her.

She laughs, pressing the back of her hand to her mouth. “I told you I’d forget.”

“It’s Cameron.” He says it slow, hoping it will stick. Names are important.

He plucks the bottle from her hand.

“You read the newspaper?” he asks, and takes a step back.

“I try not to.”

“I made the front page.”

“The front page is all about a dead boy,” she says.

Cameron nods. “That’s me.”

He holds the bottle of Coors by its skinny neck and dashes across the street. He turns only once and the blonde girl is standing where he left her, her soft face puckered with doubt. He likes that. She doesn’t even know him and she wants to believe he’s a good boy.

He takes the beer into the city park and finds a picnic table with a shelter and sits under it. He uses his teeth to pry off the cap then lifts the bottle to his lips. Mist from the beer curls up his nose. It’s thick, wet, and makes him cough before he even takes a swallow.

He drinks it like it’s a dare, trying to swallow fast enough that he doesn’t gag on the bitter kick, not stopping until all that’s left is foam.

He should have eaten something. He sits perfectly still on the edge of the picnic table but feels the liquid swirl in his stomach. He won’t throw up. He doesn’t do that anymore.

A car circles the block, rap music on the radio. Cameron lets his mind focus on the bass pumping like blood through an artery, thick in his ears, scratchy as the beat leaves the speakers. The key is not to dwell on what’s happening in his body.

The tingling in his fingers begins, not as strong as touching an electrical current, but close. His mind slows, and thoughts and feelings become like pennies you throw into a wishing fountain. Then blast off. There’s more than one way to fly.

He lays back on the picnic table and stares at the gray clouds rolling across a pale blue sky; at the tail of a lightning bolt, pink and then purple, squirming in the thunderheads.

SATURDAY

7:00PM

At seven o’clock Randy arrives at the house. Cameron watches him from his bedroom window. The sun is beginning its descent behind the mountains to the west and the sky is purple.

Randy climbs out of his truck, shuts the door, and leans against it. He’s still in uniform. His gun is holstered to his right hip; handcuffs hang from the back of his belt. He has a can of Mace, too, in a leather clip, and a Taser. He doesn’t wear this but keeps it stored in the trunk of his cruiser along with a high-powered rifle and ammunition. Once, when Cameron asked him, he said he has more than a hundred bullets back there and two speed loaders.
You have to be prepared.
Even here, in Erie, where the greatest danger comes from domestic disputes.

Randy shoves his hands into his front pockets, tips forward on his toes and back, then reaches through the window of his truck. Cameron watches his hand move along the dashboard like a white wing, fluttering. When he withdraws it, he has a cigarette clenched between his finger and thumb. Randy quit smoking last year.

He doesn’t light up. He rolls the cigarette between his fingers, stares at it, raises it to his nose, and draws a heavy breath.

Cameron doesn’t hear the cell phone ring, but he sees it light up on Randy’s belt.

Randy is always on call. He’s a sharpshooter. Twice since Cameron’s known him Randy has set up on the rooftops of buildings during hostage negotiations, prepared to but never having to shoot.

He pockets the cigarette, flips open his phone, and listens. Cameron can tell Randy’s hearing something he doesn’t like. His shoulders get stiff and he bends into the phone to hear better.

It’s about him. The call is about Cameron. He’s sure of it.

Randy ends the call, slips the phone back on his waist, and tosses the cigarette through the truck window. Then he looks at the house, the kitchen where Cameron’s mom is cooking dinner, hands on his hips, his mouth heavy.

Cameron takes the stairs slowly and hits the bottom as Randy enters the kitchen. He listens to his mom greet him. Frosty. She’s still mad at Randy. Mad at her world spinning out of control.

“Where’s Cameron?”

“In his bedroom, studying,” she says. “Or hatching a plot to end the world.”

“Maureen.”

Cameron hears fatigue and frustration in Randy’s voice.

“I’m trying to help him,” he says.

“Because he’s innocent? Or because he’s guilty?”

“Either way, he needs help. A lot of it.”

“Why? What’s happened?” Worry makes his mother’s voice breathless.

“You need to stay out of this,” Randy says. “Right now, it’s me and Cameron. That’s the way it has to be.”

“I’m his mother.”

“You’re too close to him to do him any good.”

He’s giving you what you want, Mom. An out.

He’s surprised she doesn’t take it. That she doesn’t run with it.

“I can help him, Maureen. You’re going to have to trust me,” Randy says.

“Why?” she asks. “Why do you want to help him? You’ve been so in and out. Remember? You’re not father material.”

“Maybe I’m not,” Randy concedes. “I guess we’ll find out.”

His mom is quiet a long time. Cameron moves until he’s standing just outside the kitchen and leans his head against the wall. She’s crying. She can’t help him. She knows that. But how much help can Randy be? He’s a cop. At some point the law is going to mean more to him than Cameron does.

“He’ll die in prison,” Randy says. “If he goes maximum security, we’ll never see him again.”

His mother breaks. Her tears catch in her throat and she makes a strangling noise and then finally manages to choke out, “Okay. You’re right. Okay.”

Cameron steps out of the darkness of the living room and into the kitchen. His mom is leaning into Randy, her hands curled into his shirt and her face wet with tears.

“I don’t want his help,” Cameron says.

“Cameron,” Randy says his name with purpose, the kind that would push him into a chair and into answering questions. Good cop, bad cop, Cameron thinks. Yesterday, on the deck, Randy played it cool. Tried to make Cameron think he was a friend. Today, he’s all about his job. Cameron can feel it before he says anything about Pinon.

“I’m not talking to you,” Cameron says.

“You’re going to talk,” Randy promises. “You’re going to tell me everything that happened at school yesterday. You’re going to give me a chance to help you.”

Randy leaves his mother and walks to where Cameron stands, invading his space. He’s taller, wider than Cameron, and when he draws breath his chest, still wrapped in his Kevlar vest, almost touches Cameron’s chin.

“I’m going to help you, Cameron.”

“You’re going to do your job,” Cameron says.

“If you made a mistake,” Randy says, “then we need to fix it.”

He puts his hands on Cameron’s shoulders and keeps them there even as Cameron tries to shrug him off.

“Let him help you, Cameron,” his mom says. “You need help.”

“So you think I did it, too?” Cameron says, his voice sharp and rising. “You think I killed that boy? I’m a killer, Mom? A pyro and a killer?”

His voice hits a pitch that hurts his ears. The tears on his face feel like shards of glass.

“I don’t think that,” she says.

“But I need help. You think I need help.”

“Yes.”

Randy keeps his hands on Cameron’s shoulders, moving him toward the table, and says to his mom, “Leave us alone, Maureen. We’ll talk later.”

Cameron resists Randy’s strength, tries to pull away from his heavy hands.

“You’re going to sit at the table with me and we’re going to go over your day at school. What happened. What you can remember.”

He pushes Cameron into a chair.

“If you want, I can put the cuffs on you.”

Cameron sits in the chair, not looking at Randy.

Looking at the wall with its pictures of his grandmother and grandfather in oak frames and pictures of him and Robbie when they were younger, babies through their Scout years. He sits for a long time, waiting for Randy to talk, to ask his questions, to pretend he knows Cameron better than Cameron knows himself. But he’s silent and Cameron tries to focus on the pictures of him when he had something to smile about.

“I wasn’t at school yesterday,” Cameron finally says. He won’t tell Randy everything. Some things he already knows. The things he doesn’t, Cameron won’t confess. “Not the whole day.”

Randy sits back in his chair. Cameron listens to his steady breathing, to the creaking of his leather holster.

“Long enough that you went to PE.”

“Yeah, I went, but I had an argument with the coach.”

“You took PE,” Randy insists.

“I suited up. I didn’t get a lot of play and I decided to leave. I told the coach I was leaving.”

Cameron looks at Randy. He has a notebook out but no pen. He runs his finger down the page, looking at the details that made up Cameron’s day.

“I spoke to the coach. He said he moved your locker and you were upset about it.”

“That’s right.”

“Tell me about that.”

“Didn’t the coach already tell you?”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“Fine. He moved my locker and it pissed me off. It wasn’t a big deal. Not like you’re making it.”

“Why were you pissed?”

“Why did he move my locker?”

“He didn’t think you’d want to go back there, to the place Patterson and Murphy assaulted you.”

“He thought it’d be easier for me to forget what happened if I wasn’t standing in it every day.”

“Maybe. That’s what pissed you off?”

“That and him being so nice to me. All the teachers were too nice. It was bad enough with everyone looking at me, thinking about those pictures and looking at me. I just wanted everything to be the same. I wanted it to be like Patterson and Murphy died at birth and never had a chance to do that to me.”

“But you got to school and your teachers treated you differently?”

“That’s right.”

He looked at his notebook. “Your English teacher changed your seat.”

“Yeah.”

“You know why she did that?”

“She wanted me closer to her desk?” Cameron guesses.

“She wanted to keep an eye on you.” He looks again at his notes. “She said you seemed really angry.”

“She wanted me to talk to her, in the hall,” Cameron says. “She wanted to pull me out of class and talk to me while all the kids sat inside knowing what we were talking about.”

“And you refused.”

“That’s right. But I didn’t say anything to her. I didn’t do anything.”

“No,” Randy agrees. “She said you were quiet, but ready to blow. That an accurate description of the way you were feeling?”

Cameron shrugs. “I kept myself in check.”

“Yes. She said as much.” He flips a page in his notebook. “Your history teacher is a talker.”

“He’s an ass.”

“He told me about that. He said on Tuesday, before Patterson and Murphy attacked you, that you exhibited behavior he’s never seen from you. He attributes it to the trouble you were having.”

“No. Hart really is an asshole.”

Randy nods. “But he was nice to you yesterday?”

“Yeah.”

“That pissed you off?”

“Everything pissed me off, okay?”

“Let’s go back to the locker room. You walk in and find out the coach moved your stuff. Pick up there.”

“He wanted to talk to me in his office. He’s never done that before. Probably wanted to hold my hand and tell me everything was going to be all right.”

“You wouldn’t go to his office?”

“No way.”

“So he met you at your locker.”

“My old locker. He told me he moved me. I told him I didn’t like it. He told me to suit up. The tardy bell was going to ring.”

“Were you late to class?”

“Yeah.”

“The coach says you were maybe ten minutes late to class.”

“Maybe.”

“The timing is important, Cameron,” Randy says. “Really think about how long it took you to find your new locker, open it, dress . . .”

“Finding my new locker wasn’t hard,” Cameron says. “I opened it and sat on the bench and just stared at my clothes.”

“Why?”

“I was thinking.”

“About what?”

“How I’d like to kill Patterson. All my troubles would be over, then, you know? Most of them anyway. Then I started thinking about what they did to me. I got caught up in it like it was happening all over again.”

“Then what happened?”

“I don’t know. I guess I just sat there thinking that. Then I got dressed and went upstairs. I remember hearing the balls bouncing against the gym floor and thinking I was really late. They were already through stretching.”