Burn (11 page)

“I'm not tired. Anyone else feel like staying up? Midnight hike through the woods?”

Julian extended the invitation generally, but he looked at Lona when he said it. It was well after midnight; they'd just gotten home and carried presents into the house. Lona could barely keep her eyes open. The aspirin she'd taken for her shoulder before coming to Talia's had completely worn off. She wanted to pass out, not go on a midnight hike, but she also wanted to see Julian, so she put on a warmer hat and followed him out the door.

He led her down the steep path to the creek at the edge of the property. This was where she'd first met him, six months ago, when both of them had completely different lives.

“Is it strange, to still live here?” he asked, when they got down to the creek and the flat, mossy rock. “After everything?”

“Sometimes. Sometimes it feels like we're living on ghosts. But we're used to that.”

“I wasn't sure if I should come back.”

“I'm glad you did.” She and Julian knew all of each other's worst secrets. She couldn't disappoint him and she didn't have to hide.

He skimmed a stone over the flat ice of the creek. It had been frozen over for weeks, but still no snow. “I wanted to ask you about the others,” he said, as he watched the rock form spider cracks in the ice. Lona knew that Julian didn't mean Fenn or Gamb and Ilyf.

“About the Strays, you mean.”

“Do you hear from them at all? From Affl or Ezbrn, or any of them?”

She shook her head in the darkness. “I know they've all been placed with families. But the therapist they made us all see – she said it was better if we didn't keep in contact. It was too hard for them to develop individual personalities if we were all spending time together.”

“Do you think they're okay, though?”

“No offense, Julian, but why do you care? You weren't disappointed about getting away from the Strays six months ago.” Her description of that time period was benevolent. Julian had walked out and left her alone to manage all of them.

He winced. “Six months ago, I was kind of a mess, Lona. After everything that happened, I just needed to get away. At first I was just running – running, like, without direction. Like a chicken with my head sliced off. Put half a globe between me and the rest of my life.”

“Now?”

“Now I'm trying to run to something. Or back to something. But it's hard.”

“What makes it hard?”

“Because even if I retrace my steps, I can't run backwards, you know? I can't erase the steps I've already taken. So I figure all I can do is make the best of where those steps have taken me. Apologize to the people I can, fix what I can.”

“That sounds very  …  evolved. Did they make you see a therapist, too?”

He laughed. “I saw enough of them when I was twenty-two, I guess. Remember that they decided I was a very wise and special young man.” He paused to throw another rock. This one reached the middle of the creek, where the ice had stopped.

“I tried to find Harm,” he said.

“You did? Why?”

“Because he was the one I felt most guilty leaving.” He saw the words had hurt her, and hastily backtracked. “What I did to you was worse – abandoning you, leaving you in charge. But I knew that you were going to be okay. I knew you were determined enough to be okay on your own, that I didn't need to worry. I don't think Harm was.”

But you did need to worry, she wanted to say. Because since Julian had left, she'd been putting herself in danger, and Fenn. Harm didn't need Julian like she did. The beautiful boy with ugly impulses. Harm just needed a straitjacket.

“You couldn't find him, though?”

“I doubt he was placed with a regular family. His needs were too—” He stopped himself. “I just wondered. Those are the things I wonder about.”

She didn't like thinking about the fact that Harm hadn't been given the same do-over that she had. He was the closest of the others to her age – less than a year younger. But instead of looking at colleges or celebrating Christmas with friends, he was –
what was he doing
? She picked up a rock and aimed it for the hole Julian's last stone had cut through the ice.

“I also tried to go see Warren.”

Her stone went wild, skittering across the ice. Panic rose in her chest. She wasn't used to anyone besides her referring to him by his given name instead of as the Architect. What had he seen, when he tried to see Warren? Lona had called the hospital every day. No improvement, Rowena told her. None at all.

“I know,” Julian said softly. “I stopped by this morning. They told me what happened. And they said that before it happened, he'd only had one visitor. It was you, wasn't it?”

“Why did you want to see him?” Lona countered.

Julian sighed. “You forget that I had a history with him. A long time ago, when his team chose me. I thought we were friends. I owe him for – well, it won't make sense if I say it now, given everything that happened. But I actually owe him for some very good things in my life.”

He'd known Warren before. A long time ago, before the Julian Path even was the Julian Path.
Was it possible he'd known Ned?

But she'd promised Fenn she wouldn't. She couldn't break that promise. Instead she just said, “I'm sorry you had to find out that way. I would have told you, if I'd known how to reach you. And if I'd known you wanted to know.”

“It bothers me and it doesn't. I lost him when he remmersed himself. I lost him when he betrayed the program. How many different ways can you keep losing the same person?”

Christmas Day was lazy. They picked at leftovers from Talia's without even bothering to microwave them, stayed in their pajamas until noon, watched the holiday parades on television, talked about going into the city but never quite made it.

Julian was scheduled to leave on the 27
^th
for a wedding of some old friends. In the meantime, it was nice to have him for a few days.

Lona didn't have the dream again. That was intentional. She'd done everything she could think of to chase it away. To keep her promise to Fenn. She staved off sleep with endless cups of coffee and slabs of sugary peanut brittle from Talia's mother. She exhausted her body by suggesting another hike through the woods, insisting that they keep going long after everyone else wanted to turn back. She threw herself into the college application that Fenn had been soldiering through on his own, refining the essay questions again and again.

“Finish it tomorrow,” Fenn suggested, as she hunched over the coffee table in a sea of computer printouts while Fenn, Gamb and Julian played a board game in the next room. “You were the one who reminded me that the application was just a formality.”

“And you were the one who told me that you wanted to get it right anyway.” She read over the selection of essay questions again, the letters going blurry in front of her eyes.
Good
. All she had to do was get too tired to dream. The farther away the dream receded, the closer the rest of her life could be.

This is what was real, she tried to convince herself. The crisp rustling of these papers, the smell of peanut brittle from the kitchen, the clicking from Ilyf's keyboard upstairs, the weight of Fenn's necklace against her collarbone. The dream wasn't. Just because the dream seemed real didn't mean it was real. She'd had a bad dream and she'd invented a story around it.

“This question,” she called into the kitchen. “The one that asks you to describe a challenge you've overcome. I don't really know how to answer it.”

“Easy,” Gamb said. “There was this one time when a crazy wackadoo who ran the government program that I was an experimental subject of tried to kill all of my friends so we wouldn't expose his conspiracy, but it was okay because I managed to save myself in the end and all he did was erase all his own memories.” He turned back to the board. “That's two hundred dollars, Fenn. And I'm going to build a hotel on Illinois Avenue.”

“The more accurately I answer that question, the more insane I look,” she said.

“Skip that question,” Fenn offered. “I did. Just choose one of the others.”

She rubbed her eyes and scanned the options. Fenn was right – the instructions said she only had to choose three out of six.

Describe your relationship with the family member you consider to be your greatest influence.
She wasn't going to choose that. It felt like cheating to describe any of Julian's family members, and she didn't know any of her own.

“Learning is what happens inside the classroom. Education is what happens outside.” Evaluate this quote and, using supporting examples, discuss whether or not you agree with it.
Ugh, she would tackle that if there were no other options, but she'd prefer not to. She had no idea what it meant, much less whether she agreed with it.

Describe how attending this college would influence the course of your life.

It would more than influence it. It would completely change it. It would be the first opportunity she'd ever had to make new friends – on her own, not because of anything to do with Julian. The first time she could create a block of memories that had nothing to do with him. It would be a fresh start.

“Did you find one?” She jumped at Fenn's voice, just a few feet behind her. “I didn't mean to scare you,” he apologized. “Did you choose a question?”

“I think so.” She looked back into the kitchen. “Game over?”

“I donated all of my money to Julian for the cause.”

“The cause?”

“Of beating Gamb. Do you need any help?”

“Actually, no.” She gestured to the pad of paper she'd started to make some notes on after reading the last question. “I think I have an idea of what I'm going to say.”

“I got a message from Jessa.” He read the confusion on her face and explained. “Jessa. The tour guide? From the campus visit?”

“Right, sorry.” She hadn't realized he was in touch with Jessa, and was briefly annoyed. “I didn't know you talked to her.”

“Only a little,” he said. “She was really nice about waiting with me after my interview when you – after my interview.”

When I abandoned you with no warning,
Lona filled in. “What did it say?”

“She's organizing a New Year's Eve lunch thing and invited us.”

“Invited
you
, I bet. She liked you.”

“No, us. Actually, everyone in the area who is applying for early decision. Just to give us all a chance to meet the other people who might be our classmates.” He shrugged. “But we don't have to, of course. I know you've been—”

“No, I want to.”

He looked surprised. “You do?”

“I think it sounds great.”

“I'll tell her both of us will come.”

“And did you see?” She sifted through the papers until she found what she was looking for: a residential life brochure made of thick, slippery paper. “Jessa didn't show us this part of campus, but one of the residential options is called the Green House. It's a coop – the residents cook meals together and stuff – and it's co-ed. So that might be good, because it's like what we're used to here. Except that maybe we
should
be living in a regular dorm, to get the full experience of college? I bet we'd meet more people if we were eating in the dining hall every day.”

Fenn was looking at her with a dazed kind of half-smile. “What?” she asked.

“I'm glad you're back.”

“I didn't—” She was about to say she hadn't gone anywhere, but she knew what he meant. “I'm glad, too.”

“She
liked
me, huh?” He wiggled his eyebrows playfully.

“Unfortunately for her.”

“She really did seem nice.”

“Gamb is single.”

He reached out to the hem of her shirt, running his fingers along the fabric. The gesture left Lona short of breath – she was never going to be able to watch Fenn even fold laundry without thinking of the way he'd helped her get dressed in the bathroom. His lips were very close to hers now. “Do you think she's worthy of Gamb?”

“I'll ask her at the lunch.” Lona gasped as he kissed her neck, just under her earlobe. “I'll ask whether she can play the musical birthday hat.”

“I wish you could stay longer, Julian,” Ilyf said, but the sentence was cracked open in the middle with a giant yawn. She'd been up all night again, trying to save a system that had crashed in Singapore, Lona thought, or maybe Malaysia. Now she had bags under her eyes and her hair was smushed flat on one side of her head from where she'd fallen asleep at her desk.

“Me too.” Julian tossed his duffel bag in the back of his van. “Who gets married the week between Christmas and New Year's, anyway? It seems rude to your guests. But they're my last single friends. And really the only people who haven't let me slip off their radar screen for the past twenty years. So I owe it to them, I guess. Right?”

Lona knew what a big deal it was for Julian to be going to the wedding at all – for him to be trying so hard to stay in contact with people. With her. She didn't like to see him go, but it was better this way – for their relationship to be easy. Unforced. Julian was like that saying: If you love something, let it go. It was better not to hold on to him too tightly.

“You don't have any old friends?” Gamb sounded appalled. “Are you at least bringing a date?”

Julian shook his head. “I haven't really had one of those in almost twenty years either. A relationship. At least not the kind that got to the point where I would bring her to a wedding.”

“You were a player!” Gamb screeched, at the same time Ilyf said, “Who was the woman twenty years ago?”

“Let Julian go,” Lona interrupted. “You're scaring him.”

Lona waited until the others had gone inside, sticking her hands in the pockets of the parka she'd thrown on top of her sweat pants.

“Well,” she said finally. “Bye.”

“Well, bye.” He awkwardly patted her arm, then laughed. “I guess we're not the most eloquent at goodbyes.”

“Better than last time.” Their last goodbye was in the remmersing room, and there had been blood.

“Not a high bar. But maybe we'll keep getting better.” That meant there would be a next time. A next goodbye and a next hello. Lona watched his car pull out of the driveway and disappear over the gravel road. Behind her, the front door opened and closed.

“Fenn wants to know if you want blueberries or bananas in your pancakes,” Ilyf asked. “Or neither.”

“Bananas.” She didn't turn around.

“Julian get off okay?” Ilyf leaned against Lona for warmth, yawning again into Lona's sleeve.

“Yeah. You should go to bed. You're barely standing.”

“I think I will after breakfast. Last night was crazy work, but then also just lots of waiting around, but I couldn't close my eyes in case someone called me.” She wrapped her bathrobe more tightly around her body and started to pad back to the house. She was wearing slippers. Big fuzzy ones that looked like grizzly bears, that made claw prints on the ground.

“I almost forgot, in my delusional state,” Ilyf said. “I never asked you how it went a couple days ago. With the guy you were trying to track down? Ed or Ned?”

“Oh. It went fine.” Lona's skin prickled at the mention of the name she'd done so well to not mention.

“Was he the one you were looking for, then?”

“No. He wasn't.”

“But you said it went fine.”

“It did. I mean – I realized you were right, Ilyf. If Talia really wanted to keep in touch with this guy, she would have done it. It's stupid.”

“So you're not looking anymore? Since Christmas is over, and it was going to be a present, are you done looking?”

What was Ilyf getting at? Lona had just said she wasn't looking anymore. Why couldn't she drop it now, before Lona started thinking too hard about the dream again? “No. I'm not. Why?”

Ilyf shrugged. “While I was trying to keep myself awake for work last night, I had time to do some research on my own. I found one of the others. I found Ned Lowell.”