The Burning Man (9 page)

Chelsea Speigelman wasn’t bad, as far as roommates go, but she could be exhausting. She drank too much espresso and talked a mile a minute, always delighting in the latest hot gossip. She was a proud New Yorker, raised on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, although she’d actually been born in Russia and adopted as an infant. A tall, leggy, blue-eyed blonde who looked like she could have been related to Olivia and Rachel—far more so than the short, chubby, dark-haired parents she towered over in all of the snapshots.

“What peeper?” Olivia asked, looking up from
The Sign of Four.

“God,” Chelsea said. “I just got back and I already know more than you. And you’ve been here the whole time!” She unzipped the suitcase and started pulling out sheer frilly articles of clothing. “Lisa M. saw him outside her window. He had a hook for a hand!”

“Oh, come on,” Olivia said, rolling her eyes. “You’ve got to be kidding. A hook? Was he wearing a hockey mask, too?”

“Not a hook like a pirate hook,” Chelsea said. “Like one of those prosthetic metal pincher things.” She made her first two fingers into hooks and pinched the air in front of Olivia’s face, then used them to mimic masturbation while peeping through an imaginary window.

“Ew, gross,” Olivia said.

“Yeah, right?” Chelsea said, and she laughed. “Think he ever pinched himself by mistake, in a moment of passion?”

Olivia made a face.

“Would you knock it off?” she said. “That’s an image I don’t need in my head.”

“They’re going to issue a warning to all of the female students,” Chelsea continued. “We’re all supposed to keep our curtains closed until hook-man gets caught.” She cupped her hands over her nearly flat chest. “Not like I have anything to peep at, anyway. At least not until I turn eighteen, and don’t need my stupid parents’ permission to get a boob job.”

“Don’t you think this sounds a little made up?” Olivia asked. “Honestly—a man with a hook? It’s too corny to be real. You’d think a girl like Lisa would have a better imagination. Like the story she told about losing her virginity on Concorde, with her forty-year-old French boyfriend. That, at least, was semi-believable.”

“It sure was—I met Philippe,” Chelsea said. “He was pretty hot. You know, for an old guy. Can’t swear by the Concorde thing, though.”

“You’re missing the point,” Olivia said. “I’m just saying that I don’t buy the whole hook-man thing. It seems... I don’t know... too over the top. Like the urban legend.”

“Speaking of wild stories—” Chelsea plopped herself down on the bed and folded her long legs up into a lotus pose. “—What’s this I hear about you and Kieran getting caught in the dorm after hours? Don’t tell me you finally agreed to throw the poor boy a bone.”

“No!” Olivia snapped her book shut and got up. “Of course not. Who told you that?”

“So...” She smirked, picking at the glitter polish on her big toe. “Are you planning to die a virgin, or what?”

“That’s none of your business,” Olivia said. She could tell that she was blushing, and knowing it just made it worse. “Anyway, nothing happened.”

“He’s totally in love with you, you know.”

“He is not.” Olivia turned away, wrapping her arms around her body. “We’re just friends.”

“You could do worse,” Chelsea said. “He’s cute, in a geeky sort of way. Smart, funny, and sincere, and you can tell he worships the ground you walk on. You don’t have to marry him or anything, just have a little fun.

“You could use a little fun,” she added.

“Fun?” Olivia smiled and shook her head. “What’s this strange concept you call fun? I must have missed that class, while I was cramming for midterms.”

“Seriously, Olivia,” Chelsea said, refusing to be put off. “You’re, like, the most uptight person I’ve ever met. Like if you let your guard down for
one
second, the whole world will come to an end.”

“I’m not uptight,” Olivia said. “I’m just careful.”

“Want to be careful?” Chelsea asked, rummaging in her suitcase. “Use this.”

She tossed Olivia a condom wrapped in a pink and black wrapper.

Olivia caught it out of the air, stifling a giggle.

“Pervert,” she said, pocketing the little packet and grabbing her neatly folded towel. “I’m gonna go take a shower. I need to wash your filthy thoughts off my pure virgin soul.”

“Yeah, right,” Chelsea said. “Scrub real hard. Especially down there.”

* * *

Olivia was starting to turn into a prune, standing there in the streaming hot water, but it was so hard to motivate herself to get out of the shower. It was so peaceful and private. All her worries and day-to-day drama seemed so far away, forgotten and lost in the fragrant steam.

Except for Kieran.

The more she tried not to think about him, the more he snuck into her head. She kept thinking about the night of her birthday, and what had almost happened before Mrs. G. showed up to check on her. Thinking about what might have happened if Mrs. G.
hadn’t
showed up. About what Olivia wanted to happen.

She’d been avoiding him for days, and in turn avoiding her own feelings about him, but she couldn’t hide forever.

Funny how she’d been insisting to everyone that she and Kieran were “just friends,” but seeing as she didn’t have any other friends besides him, she didn’t really have any standard of comparison. Sure, Chelsea was her roommate, and she was okay. And there was Rachel, but that was different—she was her sister.

In fact, the last person who’d really felt like a friend was that little boy named Peter, in the strange year before she’d shot Randall. In a way, Kieran reminded her of that boy. His charming awkwardness, the way he never seemed totally at home in the world around him. Like an exchange student from an unknown country with a population of one.

That odd, existential loneliness made her want to reach out to him. To connect, physically. To ground him— and herself, in the process. But she was afraid, too. Afraid to be vulnerable, to trust. To open herself up to almost certain disappointment.

Then she frowned. As usual, she was probably overthinking this. Rachel would tell her to go for it. To open herself to the possibility of love, and follow her heart. But girls like Rachel were able to follow their hearts because they had girls like Olivia to watch out for them, and catch them when they stumbled.

Who was going to watch out for Olivia?

Kieran sat on his bed with his notebook open, but he wasn’t writing. He’d only written a single word on the fresh new page.

Enigma.

Enigma was one of the characters in his sprawling, endlessly revised novel, a beautiful blond vigilante with mysterious green eyes and a dark secret. A thinly veiled fictional version of Olivia.

Olivia the enigma, the lonely badass. Fiercely intelligent and driven by unknowable private demons. Heroic, but always at arms length.

Until that moment when her desk lamp blew out. He’d been so close. Close enough to smell her clean hair and feel her warm breath on his skin. He’d almost kissed her, and he was almost sure that she wanted to kiss him back. Almost.

Still an enigma.

Nicole, his ex, had been bitterly jealous of Olivia and her fictional counterpart. She’d demanded to know why there wasn’t a character based on her in his novel. Truth was, she had a good heart, but she just wasn’t hero material.

Nicole was smart and ambitious and wanted to be a pediatrician, but struggled with self-esteem issues and anorexia. She’d decided to date Kieran with the same Mother Teresa instinct she might have shown by picking out a sad, special-needs mutt at the shelter, instead of a cute puppy. It was easier to go along with her than to go against her, and Kieran didn’t want to be a virgin forever.

But he quickly tired of being her charity lay. He was almost relieved when she found a graphic love scene between Enigma and his first-person protagonist, and dumped him for a kid with a T8 spinal injury. That way, he could go back to pining over Olivia, full-time.

He’d always had trouble with women. Starting with the most important one. His mother.

Kristie McKie had grown up dirt-poor in Glasgow, Scotland, with eleven brothers and sisters. Even though she’d made her first million as a model before she was twenty-one, and ran her own wildly successful fitness business, she was still terrified of being thought of as inferior to all of her rich celebrity friends. She was convinced that a fitness trainer, no matter how famous, was nothing more than a glorified servant, and that everyone else would see it that way.

As a result, she was always trying desperately to fit in, wearing the right designer clothes and donating money to the right charities, and taking vocal coaching to Americanize her Glaswegian accent. She even went so far as to get knocked up through artifical insemination because she wanted to have a cute trophy baby, like all her trendy clients, but couldn’t be bothered with the headache of a relationship.

But somehow, she could never make Kieran fit in, no matter how hard she tried. It was as if all the pampered rich kids could smell his trashy, lower-class DNA, no matter how many expensive outfits his mother bought him. He desperately wanted to make her happy, but always failed to measure up to her expectations.

Starting with the day he was born.

He’d been born with aortic stenosis—essentially a fancy name for a bum ticker. Nothing life-threatening, just enough to keep him out of gym class. As a result he was uncoordinated, underweight, and embarrassingly unfit in his mother’s eyes. To make matters worse, he was also shy and myopic, and always managed to button his shirt wrong, or knock his glass over, or say the wrong thing. By the time he was old enough to go to boarding school, his mother had pretty much given up and started systematically distancing herself from him. It was as if she finally realized that her brainy, awkward boy was never going to be the cute little matching accessory she had wanted.

So she bought a Pomeranian instead, and warehoused Kieran in cold storage here at Deerborn.

He couldn’t help but wonder if he had gotten so hung up on Olivia because he was used to pining for the love of distant blondes who never seemed to have enough time for him.

But really, Olivia was so different—unlike anyone else he’d ever met. She possessed a quiet confidence that his endlessly dieting, pumping, and sculpting mother could never achieve. She had a sharp eye and clear deductive mind, and was nearly impossible to deceive. Yet, unlike her coldly logical detective idol, she was deeply empathetic, and even weirdly maternal. He saw it in the way she protected her sister, Rachel. Not so much maternal like a mother hen. More like a mother bear.

Mess with her cubs, and she’d tear your throat out.

He shut the notebook and put it on the bedside table. There was no way he was going to be able to concentrate on his novel that night.

His mind kept on returning to the moment just before the light blew out, replaying it over and over again, analyzing it and picking it apart. Did he really see something in her guarded eyes, or was it just wishful thinking? She didn’t push his hand away when he touched her neck, and he was almost positive that she had even leaned in a little, but he couldn’t be sure.

A muffled series of thumps in the hallway outside his door made him jump. The rest of the dorm was almost completely uninhabited at the moment. His roommate Justin wasn’t due back at school until tomorrow, and there were plenty of other kids who wouldn’t arrive until Sunday night. The only other living soul in the narrow, L-shaped building was Mr. Hohulsten, the residence supervisor, and his apartment was on the opposite end of the L.

Kieran got up and stood with his hand on the doorknob, waiting for another sound. For a moment, there was nothing, then some stifled laughter and shushing.

He opened the door and peered down the hallway.

It was Brent Pell and Tyler Mattox, his neighbors across the hall and personal tormentors.

Tyler was a junior, tall and handsome in a forgettable, made-for-TV-movie kind of way. Thick blond hair like an animal’s pelt and big, perfect white teeth in a soft, feminine mouth. He was almost tolerable if you could get him alone, but you usually couldn’t. He was the type of guy who was born to be someone’s sidekick. Although unmotivated and gutless on his own, he was an attack dog when the right hand was on his leash.

And that hand was Brent Pell’s.

Pell was the great-great-grandson of Harrison Deerborn, the founder of The Deerborn Academy, which was the one and only reason he was currently enrolled at the school. He was barely literate and academically lackadaisical at best, belligerently taking up classroom space that should have gone to another hungry scholarship student like Olivia, who actually wanted to learn. He even sucked at football, although that fact didn’t keep him off the team any more than his lack of stature and piss-poor grade point average did.

Not only was he a Deerborn, but his father was Massachusetts state Senator Michael Pell, who’d recently been under investigation for misappropriating public funds and alleged sexual harassment of several barely legal female interns. Clearly Brent got his sense of entitlement and flexible morals from his father’s side of the family.

He was 5’6” and stocky with mean, close-set blue eyes under heavy eyebrows that were always bunched together from trying to figure out if whatever you’d just said was an insult. He had a preppy, Young Republican haircut and a weak chin, plus an affinity for polo shirts and sucker punches. And he had a special hatred for Kieran, fueled inexplicably by what Brent referred to as his “gay name.”

Kieran had been an abuse magnet his whole life, so Brent’s attentions were nothing new. The world was depressingly full of Brents, and although Kieran often entertained fantasies of learning martial arts or buying a samurai sword or something like that, in real life he just did his best to avoid bullies whenever possible.

Unfortunately, now wasn’t one of those times.

When he opened his dorm room door and looked out into the hallway, Brent and Tyler spotted him immediately, heads snapping toward him like predators spotting a kill. They were both bundled up in colorful down parkas and jaunty wool scarves, as if they’d just stepped out of the L.L. Bean winter catalog. Their boots were dripping with slush, leaving long wet trails down the polished wood floor.