Burning Read online

  BURNING

  BURNING

  Danielle Rollins

  For Ron, for everything

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  My dad kept his book inside a folder in the top drawer of his massive metal desk, stolen from the basement of an office building where he’d worked as a janitor. This drawer was the only place in our apartment with a working lock.

  Sometimes, after he turned out the lights in my room for the night, I’d creep down the hall and kneel on the dingy carpet in front of that desk, squinting into the lock. I’d claw at the edges with my fingernails, trying to imagine what I could use to pick it. One of my mom’s bobby pins, maybe. Or a butter knife. I came up with a million plans, but I always chickened out when Dad turned up the volume on the television or coughed or leaned back in his chair in the living room, making the springs creak.

  My dad’s book was a mythical thing. It didn’t look like much, just a few hundred sheets of paper tucked inside one of my old school folders. He wrote chapters on McDonald’s napkins, gas-station receipts, and math worksheets I never got around to turning in. But the best part of the day was right before bedtime, when Dad reached into his jeans pocket and pulled out the tiny silver key to his desk. He’d wink at me and then lumber into the hallway and open the locked drawer.

  “Hey, Angie,” he’d say. “Did I read you the one about the werewolf?”

  Before I could answer, he’d start describing this monstrous, shaggy wolf that roamed the woods behind our hero’s bedroom window. The wolf wore a necklace made of children’s teeth and couldn’t forget the taste of human blood even after he turned back into a man. The next night my dad might tell the story of the clown who lived in the cellar and crept upstairs only at night, to watch our hero sleep. Or he might tell the story of the crows who gathered in the tree outside the window whenever someone was about to die.

  “Why are all the stories about monsters?” I asked one night, after Dad finished a gruesome tale about a snake creature that lived in the shower drain.

  It was true, after all. The hero in my father’s stories was always the same little boy. He was so boring and so dumb that you almost rooted for him to be eaten. Almost. The monsters, though. They were brutal, complicated things. They gambled away their souls at the local racetracks and made bargains with the witches who lived behind the school playground. My father’s monsters were works of art.

  Dad winked and closed the folder, easing a sheet of paper inside with his thumb. “Monsters are more interesting than heroes,” he told me, before kissing me on the forehead and wishing me sweet dreams.

  Breaking into my dad’s desk to steal that book was my very first crime.

  Dad had left for good just a few years after my little brother, Charlie, was born. He’d taken our DVD player and our only working toaster, and, though he’d left the book behind, he’d forgotten to remove the tiny silver key from his pocket.

  I was ten years old, and Charlie was three, way too young for the pocketknife Dad left for him, the one Mom hid in her underwear drawer. I slipped the knife out before she got home from work, and I jammed it into the lock, jiggling the blade until I felt something catch, and the drawer popped open.

  I know it seems like this story is about the book, but it’s not. In fact, finally getting my hands on that book was a letdown. It wasn’t magic after all, and I couldn’t make any more sense of the words my dad had scrawled across napkins and receipts than I could of the ones written in the real books at school. I don’t even remember what I did with the book after that, only that I got rid of it before Charlie was old enough to read, so the stories wouldn’t poison his brain the way Mom said they’d poisoned mine.

  No, this story is about the lock. Or, more specifically, about what it felt like to twist that cheap pocketknife, catch the lock, then click it open. I’d think about that feeling for years after, every time I jimmied the lock on an expensive car or a new house on the rich side of town. It was that feeling I chased, more than the cash. If my dad taught me anything it was what it felt like to want something, whether it was a book in a faded folder, or him, or whatever was on the other side of a tiny silver lock.

  But my dad taught me something else too, something that stayed hidden in my memories until years later, when a little girl with black eyes knocked it loose.

  Monsters are more interesting than heroes, he’d said. I had no way of knowing then, as I lay awake through the night with stories echoing in my head, that he was talking about us.

  He was talking about me.

  Chapter One

  Peach sneers at us. Somehow this makes her look uglier than usual, which is impressive. Peach is pretty ugly to begin with.

  “Frowning doesn’t do you any favors,” I shout across the yard.

  “You say something, bitch?” Peach yells back. We call her Peach because of the thin layer of peach fuzz covering her bald white head. She shaved it all off her second month in, using a flimsy plastic razor with daisies on it.

  We’re allowed to use the razors once a month, under supervision, to shave our legs and under our arms, but most of us don’t bother since the blades are so dull they’re almost worthless. Peach must’ve gotten a sharp one, though, because the guard watching her only turned her head for a second, and when she looked back, Peach had already hacked away most of her thin, blond hair. The guard tried to wrestle the razor away from her, and Peach left a long, thin cut on the guard’s wrist.

  I hear they sent her to Segregation for three days after that. She went half-crazy inside. No one has requested a razor since.

  “That girl is stupid.” Issie curls her meaty hand into a fist, showing off the tattoos on her knuckles. Issie’s cousin convinced her to tattoo “love” and “hate” on her fingers when she was twelve. He made it all the way through “love,” but Issie chickened out after he carved an h into her index finger. She says it’s because she doesn’t want hate anywhere on her body, so Cara and I finish the word with Sharpies most mornings.

  Today her knuckles say “love” and “hats.” Not our best work.

  Cara looks up from where she’s sitting, cross-legged, on the edge of the cracked concrete.

  “If you keep yelling at her, she’s going to come over here,” Cara says.

  “Yeah? Whose fault is that?” Issie says. Yesterday, Peach called Cara a juvie whore, and Cara threw a basketball at her face. Officer Brody gave C
ara a demerit and took all our balls and sports stuff after that. He still makes us do our rec time in the yard, even though it’s only, like, twelve degrees out here.

  Cara shrugs and tucks a frizzy, black hair back under her orange ski cap. She’s the only one here who makes the orange ski cap look good, but that’s just because Cara makes everything she wears look good.

  I tug my ratty sweatshirt sleeves over my knuckles. Technically it’s illegal not to provide us with coats when it’s below freezing, but juvie coats smell like mothballs and rat piss so most of us double up our sweatshirts instead. I suck in a lungful of air. Cold or not, at least it’s fresh, outside air. I want to fill my lungs with it and take it with me when they usher us back into the cramped, crowded halls. I want to hold it inside me like a secret.

  Snow stretches around us in every direction, all the way back to the smudge of trees on the horizon. It’s not pretty snow. It’s the slushy crap you see crusted beneath tires in the middle of January. It’s like Brunesfield Correctional Facility buys its snow on clearance at Costco, along with scratchy toilet paper and cheap tampons. Juvie girls never get the good stuff.

  Issie leans against the metal base of the basketball hoop, her quivering lips nearly purple. I made friends with her my first day inside, picking her out of the crowd because she stands a head taller than every other girl here. Colorful tattoos cover every bit of her dark skin, and a black braid hangs down her back. Caterpillar-thick eyebrows furrow on her forehead. They make her look perpetually annoyed, even when she’s laughing.

  In other words, she looks terrifying. The perfect juvie BFF.

  Issie wraps her “love” and “hats”–covered fingers around her arms. Her teeth chatter.

  “I thought you never got cold,” I say, clenching my own teeth so tight my jaw aches.

  “I’m not cold.” Issie bites back another shiver and grabs her belly, making it jiggle beneath her bright-orange sweatshirt. “I’m like a polar bear. I got blubber.”

  “Don’t draw attention to how fat you are,” Cara says, flipping a page of the book balanced on her skinny knees. Her mom was Miss Teen Long Island and taught her all these bizarre rules for how to be a proper lady. Never eat more than fourteen hundred calories a day. Never wash your face with soap. Never tell a man he’s wrong. “It’s like you want people to notice.”

  Issie snorts. “Nobody thinks I’m a ballerina, girl.”

  I look out over the grounds while they bicker, trying to find something to distract me from the cold and from Peach, who’s staring daggers at us again. But there’s nothing out here worth looking at. Brunesfield is a scab in the middle of the snow, just one squat building on a slab of black pavement. Long rows of barred windows wrap around the brick walls. They remind me of a mouth, like Brunesfield is baring its teeth. Chain-link fences surround the facility on all sides, topped with circles of barbed wire that claw at the flat, gray sky.

  Cara thinks the grounds are haunted. She says the trees sneak closer at night, and that if you listen, you can hear screams echoing through the woods. But Cara also believes that UFOs crashed here in the sixties and that Bigfoot lives in Canada.

  I close my eyes and try to write a letter to Charlie in my head, but the wind creeps in through a hole in my sweatshirt, making my teeth rattle so hard I can’t hear myself think.

  “You know the girls in Segregation don’t have to go outside?” Issie says. Just that word—“segregation”—sends a zip of fear up my spine.

  “You don’t want to go there,” I say. The Segregation Block is where they put girls who are “a danger to themselves and others,” which is juvie talk for “crazy as fuck.” Seg girls don’t get to go outside because they don’t get to leave their dorms. Ever.

  “At least it’s warm,” Issie says, bouncing on her toes.

  “When you’re in Seg, you spend all your time staring at those pink walls and slobbering on yourself,” Cara says. She tugs a thread from her sleeve, and the fabric near her wrist unravels. She spent a week in the Seg Block when she first got to Brunesfield and didn’t say a word to anyone for days after she got out. “The only people you get to talk to are the girls who drop off your dinner. That sound fun to you?”

  “Hey, you guys see that?” I ask before they start up again. A short white bus rumbles along the road twisting out of the trees. It slows to a stop in front of the distant security gate, and an alarm echoes over the grounds. The gate creaks open. Out of the corner of my eye, I notice a few orange-ski-hat-covered heads swivel around. Ellen catcalls, and a newer girl—I think her name is March—presses her face against the chain-link fence.

  “The hell?” Cara slaps her book shut. I walk to the fence and lean against the links, watching the bus approach through icy clouds of my own breath. Issie and Cara crowd in next to me. The second alarm buzzes, and another gate jerks open. A few more girls shove in beside us. The bus rolls forward, oily black exhaust trailing behind it.

  “That’s a drop,” Issie says. “Right?”

  “Looks like,” I say. Drop-offs only happen on the first Thursday of the month. Brunesfield feels like a war zone for days after the new girls arrive. They start fights and try to prove they’re bad enough to be here. Just thinking about it gives me a headache. Today’s Sunday, but there’s no mistaking the short white bus rolling toward the entrance. Issie and I were brought in on the same bus eighteen months ago.

  Brunesfield’s main doors shudder open, and a guard trudges into the yard. Officer Brody’s arms bulge against his too-tight polo, and a gold necklace glitters beneath his collar. He ambles past us, a hand resting on the belt slung around his hips. His watery eyes travel over each of our faces.

  “He looks cold,” Cara mutters, and Issie snickers into her fist. Goose bumps climb his arms, and his lips are nearly blue.

  “Too tough for a coat?” I shout. I don’t usually antagonize the guards, but Brody’s a special brand of evil. He leaves us out here in the freezing cold for an hour, and now he has the balls to waltz out without even wearing a coat, like he’s the goddamn king of winter.

  “You’re asking for a demerit, Davis,” Brody calls, jabbing his finger in my direction. Demerits are how we’re punished in here. You get three in a week and you lose phone privileges, four and you spend your free time in your dorm, etc. Get enough and you’re sent to Seg for the night, but the week’s almost over and I only have one. I open my mouth to yell something back, but Cara elbows me in the side.

  “Do you want another six months instead of three?” she says. I press my mouth shut again. I was just approved for release, which means I’m out of here in twelve short weeks. Now’s not the time to be a smart-ass.

  The doors open again, and Officer Mateo steps out, shivering as he zips his heavy coat up to his chin.

  “Ooh, it’s the new one,” Issie says.

  “Gross,” Cara says.

  “What?” Issie wiggles her fingers. “He’s cute.”

  I frown, watching Mateo walk toward the bus. He’s cute in that too-clean, Boy Scout way. Like how senators and J.Crew models are cute. He looks like he does a hundred push-ups before brushing his teeth in the morning and calls his mother every Sunday. Mateo gives us a subtle nod, his eyes crinkling at the corners. He started about seven months ago, and Director Wu immediately sent him to work in the Seg Block. I study his face. For someone who works around crazies all day, it’s kind of amazing that he doesn’t have the haunted, desperate look all the other guards have. Yet.

  “Why are they both here?” Cara pulls her sweatshirt sleeves over her hands and bounces in place. She looks even skinnier than usual, with all her bushy black hair hidden beneath the ski hat. Officers Mateo and Brody tend to handle the dangerous jobs, like guarding the Segregation Block or breaking up fights. I’ve never seen them meet a bus for drop-off before.

  “Maybe the new girl’s feisty,” I say.

  Metal screeches against metal, and the bus door jolts open. I hold my breath, expecting someone who looks like Issi
e: huge and terrifying, with colorful tattoos winding up her arms. Or maybe she’ll go the homemade-tattoo route. Some of the meaner white girls think it’s intimidating to carve swastikas onto their arms and wrists with ballpoint pens. I don’t think they even know what the symbol means.

  But the door stays empty. Hushed murmurs erupt behind us. A couple of girls start slow-clapping. Ellen catcalls again.

  “Quiet,” Cara says as she loops her chapped fingers through the fence links. “Listen.”

  The whispers die down, and I hear it: shuffling footsteps, dragging metal.

  A girl steps up to the door. Orange scrubs cover her skinny limbs and bunch around the shackles at her ankles. Two huge eyes take up most of her tiny, elfish face.

  “Shit,” Issie mumbles. “How old is she? Like seven?”

  “Ten,” I say. “She has to be at least ten.” Brunesfield only accepts girls between the ages of ten and eighteen, but this girl doesn’t look a day over eight. The same age Charlie was the last time I saw him. She hovers at the top of the bus steps, skinny arms raised in front of her chest like she’s worried she might fall.

  “The chains are too short,” Peach says, her voice sounding uncharacteristically normal. She’s right; the shackles binding her ankles are too short for the steps. Mateo realizes this at the same moment we do. He moves forward, offering the girl his arm to help her down. Brody’s jaw tightens, and he clutches the gun at his belt like maybe he’s going to pull it from the holster. Cara stiffens. Peach says something vulgar.

  “Holy shit,” Issie says, staring at the gun. Brunesfield guards don’t carry guns. At least, they never have before. Brody leaves his hand on the weapon until the girl’s shackles clank against the concrete.

  “Move along,” Brody says, falling in line behind her. The girl shuffles forward, staring down at the thick chains hanging from her ankles.

  She looks up only once, when she walks past me. Her brown eyes lock on my face and her lips part, like she might say something.

  A shiver starts in my shoulders and shoots all the way down to my toes. The wind around me picks up. It moves through the distant trees and I swear it sounds like a scream, just like Cara said it would. I jerk my head toward the woods, half-expecting to see the bare branches reaching out for us, the trees themselves creeping closer. But the woods look the same as ever. Not moving. Not haunted. Just cold.