Burn Before Reading(91)

He leans back, taking off the kickstand. He’s going to start it and drive away. And that’s fine. I smile.

“I’d like that. To talk with you again.”

There’s a second. Just one. And then he revs the engine and roars off down the street. I watch him go for as long as I can, until he’s a tiny speck. I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I look over to see Seamus smile at me.

“That was a good first step. Come in, have some tea. I’m not much of a fixer, but I like to think myself good at listening. If you feel like talking, that is.”

“I don’t want to bother you,” I say.

“Nonsense. Wolf was my only client today, and he did say he’d be back later. We have some time.”

I clench my fists. Seamus put his arm around my shoulder.

“Come. The sidewalk is no place for a girl who looks as sad as you do.”

Seamus has a way of making me feel at ease. It may be the sweet tea he serves, or his gentle accent, or maybe it’s how old and wise he seems. Whatever it is, two cups of chamomile and honey tea later, and I feel better. Slightly. But the worst isn’t over yet. I have a long way to go before I can even look at myself in the mirror, again.

I pour through the old textbooks, searching desperately for some hint, some step. Something to tell me what to do, what to say, how to act. But there’s nothing. Nothing in the books tell me how to apologize after a royal fuck up. No one has the answers to that.

The only thing I can do is try. Even if it’s stupid. Even if it doesn’t work.

I start, of course, with Fitz. Because he’s the easiest. The easiest in the best way – the most open, the most clever, the most honest. I decide to draw him something, something small and simple, and leave it on my computer desktop. I’m sure he’ll get around to finding it. He’s not the type to ignore me completely like Wolf and Burn might. He’ll want to know why, why I did it, why he didn’t realize it sooner, and he’ll go snooping around on my computer for evidence.

It might not be much, but it’s all I can do, right now.

The picture is a bad Microsoft Paint masterpiece, complete with the terrible stick figures he and I liked to make in our tutoring sessions. Wolf, with his long hair and stiff uniform, perched on his motorcycle like a gargoyle. Burn, with his gargantuan height, skydiving from a badly-drawn plane. And finally I draw Fitz, sitting at a computer hacking, and his shirt reads; “World’s No. 1 Cool Guy”. I try to make it as ironic and dumb as possible. Stick-figure girls with huge boobs surround him, and I draw myself in the back of the well-endowed crowd, cheering Fitz’s hacking endeavors on with the rest of them. I sign the corner of it ‘Madam Cruz’, as if I’m some fancy renaissance painter. It’s perfect. Or at the very least, I hope it’s just good enough to make Fitz smile. I hide the file behind a bunch of folders, so deep in my computer that even I lose it for a second. I leave a trail of little notepad hints to the next clue inside my computer that ultimately lead to the picture, all of the clues labeled ‘To The Best Hacker Ever!!!11’. It’s like a scavenger hunt. If it won’t make him smile, it might at least give him ten minutes of distraction from his own busy mind.

The second is, and always will be, Burn.

There’s only one place I’ll be able to contact Burn, and that’s on the trail we ran on every morning. I went looking for him the first morning after that awful night, but of course he wasn’t there. He’s avoiding me. It’s a long shot, but maybe he’d come back to the trail, to that overlook on the cliff where we watched so many sunrises together in blissful silence. It’s all I have to go on.

For Burn, there’s only one thing I can think of. Something to keep him safe, while he’s out there driving at breakneck speeds and standing on cliff edges and running marathons around the marathon-runners. I used to see them all the time – tiny keychains, words suspended in a sturdy plastic covering that said something to the effect of ‘keep this one safe’. Some were religious. Some weren’t. Some had stupid cartoon characters on them. But all of them were meant to keep the bearer out of harm’s way.

So I make one. Cheap plastic keychain material isn’t hard to find, but I got worried it wouldn’t stand up to the heavy wear-and-tear exercise Burn put himself through, so I used up what I had left and bought the expensive, sturdy material, the kind you couldn’t snap in two if you ran it over with a car. That was the easy part. The hard bit was figuring out what to write inside. Everything I came up with either sounded too cheesy or too aggressive. But then I realized it just needed to reflect who he is – someone to-the-point. Someone pure and simple. I carefully outlined with dark ink, and filled the words in with sensible blue and gray colors. Colors that reminded me of him. I slide the paper into the keychain, the words fitting perfectly. I held it up to the light, watching it spin.

‘Be Safe’, it read.

I put it in a box, inside a plastic bag to keep it dry. I walked up the trail one evening, leaving it below the bench he always sat on. It was stupid – I knew that the second I left the box there. Anybody else could pick it up. The likelihood Burn would ever receive it was slim to none. He probably wouldn’t come up here at all, anymore. If I was him, I’d want to put as much space between me and someone who betrayed me as I could.

They feel like farewell gifts, and in a way, they are. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to speak to the Blackthorn brothers again. But these small things are my way of saying goodbye, to be safe, to smile. Now that I think about it, if they ever find them, they’ll probably just laugh at how pathetic they are. I made the gifts out of paper and plastic and pixels – nothing like they’re used to. Compared to the sheer amount of money they have, I’m sure stuff like this is just considered garbage.