Burn for Burn (Burn for Burn 1)

After a deep breath I say, “Whatever we do has to be big. It has to be cruel. It has to hurt him on the level that he hurt me.” If that’s even possible.

Kat and Lillia look at each other, startled by my intensity, I guess. I know what’s coming before Lillia even says it.

“What did he do to you?” she asks, her voice barely a whisper.

“You can trust us,” Kat says. “We won’t tell anyone.”

Lillia moves her hair over to one shoulder and makes a little cross over her heart. “Promise.”

I drop my chin to my chest and let my hair fall around my face. I know I have to do this. I have to tell someone the whole story of what happened.

I lift my head and wet my lips. “Reeve had a special nickname for me.” I feel the words come into my mouth, hot and metallic. “Big Easy.”

I can tell by the way Kat’s face wrinkles up that she was expecting something worse. “What’s the story there?”

“I looked different back in seventh grade. I was fat. And we were studying New Orleans in social studies.”

“Seriously? You were heavy?” Lillia’s surprise is like a compliment.

I nod, and push the sleeves of my sweater up to my elbows. “Huge, actually.”

“So he made fat jokes about you,” Kat snarks, her top lip curling into a snarl. “How totally Reeve.”

I twist around and look back up at my bedroom window, to make sure Aunt Bette isn’t watching. She’s not. The curtains are still closed. I turn back around and keep going, sure to keep my voice low. “You remember how Reeve and I went to the Belle Harbor Montessori, right? Well, we were the only two kids in our grade from Jar Island, so we both had to ride the ferry back and forth every day. I tried to stay away from Reeve, because we didn’t get off on the right foot on his first day.”

Then I tell them the story of that day in the cafeteria, when Reeve made the joke about me eating off his tray. How he made it so nobody wanted to be seen with me in public. Kat and Lillia don’t interrupt, but every so often they tsk or shake their heads. Each response is a bit of encouragement that helps me keep talking. I tell them about the pocketknife day and the time we went out for ice cream, too.

“After that we developed this weird kind of . . .” I take a second to pick the right word, but nothing seems to fit, so I just go with, “friendship,” even though that’s not exactly it. “The ferry ride was kind of our time-out. Reeve used to say, ‘Us islanders have to stick together, right Big Easy?’”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Kat says, rapid-fire. “Wait up. You let him call you ‘Big Easy’ to your face?” She’s fired up, rolling onto her knees and leaning forward.

It’s hard to look at her. “It was different when we were on the ferry, just the two of us. It didn’t sound as mean, for some reason.” I pull my sweater tight around myself. “But once we’d get to the mainland, thing would change. He wouldn’t talk to me in public. Well . . . except to make fun of me.”

“What a two-faced bitch,” Kat says. “He’s worse than Rennie!” She grinds her cigarette out in the dirt and then immediately lights another.

Lillia’s staring at me, unblinking. “Why would you let him do that, Mary?”

“Because he’d tell me things,” I say. “He’d complain about his dad, who I think was a pretty bad alcoholic. He’d tell me how his dad would drink, and then his dad would yell at Reeve and his brothers. I felt bad for him.”

“You felt bad for him?” Kat says incredulously.

“He hated his dad. He said his dream was to get a scholarship to go to a big university off Jar Island and never come back.”

Lillia scoffs. “Scholarship? Reeve makes Bs and Cs! He only gets As in gym.”

Kat shakes her head. “You don’t know because you didn’t grow up here,” she tells Lillia. “Reeve used to be the smartest kid in our grade. I remember him getting sent to that fancy school on a scholarship. It was a big deal, because his family wouldn’t have been able to afford it otherwise. Our teacher threw him a good-bye party with cupcakes and stuff.”

“It wasn’t because I was special to him, or anything like that,” I clarify. “We were just passing the time together. I knew how hard the other kids at school worked to get his attention. Everyone was a little in love with him. I guess I felt a weird sense of pride for getting to spend some time with him every day.”

Lillia grumbles, but Kat says, “Lil, you have to admit Reeve can be a charming bastard when he wants to be.”

“All right,” she concedes. “I guess I could see that.”

I stare at the dirt and say shamefully, “I let myself think that there was something real between us, that I knew Reeve in a way that no one else did. But really, the Reeve I thought I knew didn’t exist. He was just setting me up, tricking me into letting my guard down, so he could hurt me even worse.”

Before I know it, I’m crying. I guess because I know what happens next. The story I’ve never told anyone.

The wind suddenly picks up, like a storm might crack open the sky above us. My hair whips around my face, stinging my cheeks. Lillia zips up her coat; Kat tucks her hands inside her sleeves. Neither of them move.

A voice inside me tells me to stop talking, because once I tell Kat and Lillia, there’s no turning back, no pretending it didn’t happen. But I swallow the fear down and keep going, because holding on to this secret for one second longer suddenly feels like it’s going to kill me.

*    *    *

I didn’t expect to see Reeve that afternoon. Ms. Penske kept a few of us after school to discuss plans for the student mural we’d be painting in the gymnasium. I missed the three o’clock ferry, and figured I’d catch the three thirty. But Reeve had stayed late too, playing basketball with a few of his friends. When I walked by the fence, Reeve sank the last basket, and everyone started grabbing their books and putting on their jackets. Reeve saw me. I kept walking toward the water, but slower than I had been, and eventually he caught up with me.

We’d almost reached the dock when a bunch of guys he’d been playing basketball with ran up from behind us. They had a notebook in their hands, one Reeve had apparently left at the courts. When they saw us, their mouths dropped open. Reeve and Big Easy walking together? It didn’t make any sense.