She takes a seat on the sofa’s edge, her eyes level with the file on the Mask Maker.
“Here’s the thing,” she says. She’s not measuring her words, and this makes her wonder if the drug’s giving her confidence. Not through its chemistry but through the knowledge that it’s there, waiting to deploy if she’s attacked. “There was like a day or two, when I first got here, after school started, where I thought things might be normal. I think some of it was ’cause I was older and I looked different from the girl on the book covers. It’d been a year since I’d done an appearance or an interview or anything like that. And I thought, wow. Maybe, just maybe, for these last two years of high school, I’m going to get a taste. A taste of what everyone else has gotten. A taste of normal.
“And then you started up. European History. Last period. I got called on and you didn’t. Then you tried to jump in on me. But you didn’t know the answer, and so Ms. Stockton told you to be quiet, and you got embarrassed. And that’s when it all began. Every day, every time we were together. Every chance you got. Nobody in that school called me Burning Girl until you did, and once you started, they never stopped. And I guess what I want to know is why?”
He’s staring into his beer bottle, circling the rim with one finger. His breaths are labored things that make his chest rise and fall, but it sounds like he’s drawing them through his nose. Right now his jaw’s entirely too tense for him to breathe through his mouth.
“I was afraid of you,” he finally says.
“Jesus. Really?”
“No, I didn’t think you were some serial killer. I could tell you were a good person.”
“Oh. OK.”
“Look, this is going to sound . . . ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous?”
“Lame. It’s gonna sound lame, all right? And it’s going to sound like an excuse and I don’t want it to but . . .”
“Just say it, Luke.”
“My mother, before she got sick, she didn’t want me to leave. She wanted me to stay here and take care of her. My brother, we all knew he wasn’t the caretaker type. You have to actually care about things that don’t have circuit boards. Anyway, he was already on his way to . . . I don’t know what. The point is, there was only one way my mother was going to let me get out of Altamira, and that was if I was the best fucking student at Los Pasos High. Ever. And I was. Until you showed up. It was like, whatever you’d been through, it just made you more grown-up. I could memorize anything, but you had this ability to reason through stuff the rest of us didn’t have.”
“I didn’t stop you from getting good grades, Luke.”
“No, you didn’t. But that was just half of it. I needed everyone at that school to think I was the smartest one in the room. I needed the guidance counselor to lean on my mother every day and tell her to let me go. To let me get out of here and make a life for myself. To tell her to stop falling apart every time I talked about going off to a school that wasn’t right down the highway. And then . . .”
“She died,” Charlotte says, as gently as she can.
“Yeah, and part of me thought I was being punished.”
“Punished?”
“For the way I’d treated you.”
“That’s crazy.”
“Yeah, well, for a while there after my mother died, that’s what I was. Crazy.”
She’s not sure what she expected him to say, but it sure as hell isn’t this. These are the words of someone who’s been through the pressure cooker of grief and come out irreparably changed. Someone like me.
“How’s your brother?”
She didn’t mean to strike a blow, but that’s how Luke seems to receive the question. His previous admission rendered him vulnerable, and now he doesn’t have the energy to put his guard back up. He’s staring into space, like he’s forgotten about his beer, even though he’s gripping the bottle by the base with both hands.
“Luke?”
“I’m sorry.”
She’s not sure if he’s apologizing for drifting off or for the way he once treated her. And for a while, it seems like he’s not sure, either, because he just keeps staring at nothing.
There’s a part of her that’s hungry for any apology he’s willing to give, but this reaction to the mention of his brother is so startling she can’t imagine leaving this house before she’s made some sense of it. If she can get some actual facts out of Luke, maybe she can convince Marty to let this whole thing go, and they can focus on whatever’s next.
“Luke?”
“I’m sorry for the way I treated you back then. I’m sorry for the type of person I was. And I’m sorry . . .”
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“No, tell me.”
“I was gonna say I’m sorry the type of person I was then made me end up where I am now. But that’s making it about me, isn’t it? I mean, that’s selfish. And I really did want this to be about you.”
He forces a smile, looks up from his feet.
When their eyes meet, his smile fades as if the sudden shock of meeting her gaze has produced the same electrical charge in him that it just did within her. She hates the thought that she’s enjoying his pain, his humility, his brokenness, even though she’s sure all those things stem from more than this meeting and their pained history together. Still, God forbid she be attracted to the idea of any kind of suffering, in anyone. She plans to hold on to that moment when she recoiled from Jason’s broken shoulder, the shoulder she broke, for as long as she can.
But who wouldn’t want to hear this kind of stuff out of one of their former bullies?
He was never violent with her, never threatened her physically. But he did create an atmosphere of hostility and suspicion that dogged her every step for two years. By itself, his behavior seemed insignificant, so if she ever complained, people would tell her to get over it. They were just comments. Just words. But when you’re forced to hear the words almost every day, don’t they add up to something bigger? A sort of crime unto itself? Death by a thousand cuts, as some people like to say.
Now, against her will, she’s thinking of Dylan.
Of a conversation they’d had in his office weeks before, about how people who’ve been through serious, violent trauma often tend to discount the smaller abuses they face. Dylan compared this to people who literally can’t feel physical pain. It sounds like a blessing until you remember that pain is designed to protect, to save your skin from the flame, your bone from the pose that might snap it, and once it’s gone, you can do fatal damage to yourself without realizing it. He saw this as a metaphor for how people who’d been through extreme instances of abuse sometimes lost the ability to detect the smaller abuses, the signs that someone wasn’t truly loving or a good match. It’s why it could be so hard for them to build lives better than what they’d been through. So hard for them to move on.
By that logic, refusing to sweep Luke’s past behavior under the rug was a good thing. A healthy thing.
A good thing according to Dylan, she thinks. And who is Dylan again exactly?
The thought makes her jump. Luke flinches at the sight of it.
Maybe he wasn’t a real psychiatrist. Maybe he was able to deceive her because he spoke with the authority of someone who understood darkness; not because he had studied it, but because he’d lived through it himself.
She closes her eyes.
Too much. It’s too much to think about Dylan right now.
“Hey,” Luke says softly.
It’s a mistake, looking into his eyes. A mistake to wonder if his pain, his contrition, is making him even more attractive to her. And it’s true now, she realizes, that his insults, his bullying, hurt more than they would have if they’d been inflicted on her by someone who had seemed less confident and less comfortable in his own skin, despite his recent admission to the contrary.
“I didn’t kill anyone on that farm.” Her vision mists. She’d hoped a good night’s sleep would help keep her emotions in check, but no such luck. “I was seven. I never even saw any of the victims.”