Page 68 of The Burning
The one thing we hadn’t had to lie about was the deliciousness of the pile of bacon, crispy with a paper towel soaking up the grease. My brother and I always started eating it directly from the plate before the rest of the food was done. Everyone in the house, even my father, preferred overcooked bacon. It was quite literally one of the only things all four of us agreed on. My mom’s epic and highly secret recipe included sprinkling brown sugar on the meat and putting it in the oven while it was still cold. I was getting hungry thinking about it and being able to smell the food cooking at the campfire made my stomach growl.
“Hungry?” Kael asked, kissing my forehead and hugging my body.
I nodded, head buried against his chest. “I don’t want to get up but I’m starving, and the smell of bacon is killing me.”
He rolled onto his back and lifted my chin with his fingers. Last night seemed like such a blur. After the fight happened, we went back to the truck and used our bodies to communicate instead of words. His frustration was clear as he bit at my skin and I’d felt it melt away as I climbed on top of him, circling my hips until his body tensed, eyes clenched shut, and he came, pressing me against him until his breathing slowed and he fell asleep. I’d counted his breaths, exhausted from the vast range of emotions we had both gone through in just one night, and passed out shortly after.
“Let’s get some food,” Kael suggested.
I lifted my body up and stretched. Muscles I had forgotten existed ached—the good kind of sore.
Kael put on the same kind of outfit as he wore yesterday, but in gray. I looked down at his white hoodie in my hands. “Will it be weird if I wear this? What if they all notice?”
The edges of his mouth turned up into a smile. “Who cares? They’re all going to see us walking up together anyway. Unless you wanted to go out there separately and pretend you slept in the woods?”
He had a point, and Elodie would definitely ask me where I’d slept since it hadn’t been with her. I didn’t have any texts or calls from her, so maybe she already knew? Maybe they all already knew? I began to worry about everyone’s perception of me, their potential stares and opinions making my hands ache. I pressed one of my fists together, digging my nails into my palm to distract my mind.
“No, no, no.” Kael’s voice was soft as he undid my hand. Little moon shapes from my nails were already there. “Hurt me instead, then.” He opened his hand and held his palm up out to me.
There wasn’t so much as a hint of judgment in his eyes as he held mine. He knew my coping mechanisms better than I did myself, and, as always, he tried to shield me from myself. I lifted his hand and kissed his palm.
“Let’s go eat,” I told him, pulling the hoodie over my head.
No one even looked up as we approached the group around the campfire. Gloria was handing out paper plates to the people sitting at the picnic table. There was a pan with enough scrambled eggs to feed an army in the center, a paper plate with fried eggs, another pan of sausage, and a bowl of potatoes, peppers, and onions. It smelled so, so good and my stomach grumbled as I sat down across from Elodie. Mendoza walked over with another skillet of freshly hot and still-popping-in-the-grease bacon and sat it in front of Warren. His jaw was swollen, and he had a bloodstained mark under his bottom lip, but the two of them seemed to be fine now. Next to Warren was my brother, who was unusually quiet as he handed Elodie a bottled water, taking the cap off for her.
“I missed my sous-chef,” Mendoza told Kael, his mouth full of meat as he spoke.
“Seems like you got along just fine without me.” Kael grabbed a piece of bacon and popped it into his mouth. He sat down next to me and nodded at Elodie, telling her good morning. She smiled, narrowing her eyes as she looked back and forth between me and Kael.
“Good morning, you two,” she said through her impossibly huge grin. She didn’t try to hide her smugness or her joy at the conclusion she had obviously come to about us.
“Morning.” I smiled back, widening my eyes to tell her to shush, and that I would explain later.
“Where did you—” my brother began to ask me, but Elodie’s elbow nudged his side and stopped him midsentence.
“Ow,” he whined. I expected him to call us out, but instead he grabbed the empty plate in front of him and began to shovel eggs onto it.
“What do you want?” Kael whispered to me, pointing at the food.
Gloria carried over a bag of bread and asked which idiot had brought a bag of bread, but no toaster. No one confessed and she said she was going to feed it to the birds.
“Anything,” I said, eyeing the warm food. The morning air was a bit cold still and steam rose from the table as everyone began to eat. “Except the bacon,” I added, noticing that Austin also left out the bacon since it was soft. Elodie seemed to love it; she barely finished chewing a piece before she put another in her mouth.
As I ate my eggs, I looked around at the group again. Everyone was getting along, talking about some sports team and planning a group outing to a football game in Atlanta. Hearing about Atlanta made me remember that Kael and I still had so much unfinished business to talk about. What did our hookup mean for us? He had his hand on my thigh under the table and had barely taken his eyes off me since we sat down, so clearly things had changed. But what did that mean for his plans to go to Atlanta? I tried to distract myself from worrying about the future or the past and only focus on how steady and warm his touch was, how beautiful his eyes were when the sun shined across them, turning them from rich midnight to golden-flaked espresso.
“Happy birthday to you! Happy birthday to you!” rang out around me and I looked up to see Gloria carrying a sheet cake toward the table. It had a row of lit candles, their small flames wavering as she sat it on the table directly between my brother and me.
“Happy birthday, dear Fischer,” everyone sang, Elodie, Kael, and a few others I didn’t see adding, “and Karina!”
Kael clapped his hands as everyone cheered for us. I felt a little embarrassed by the attention, but realized this was the first time in my life I’d had a group of friends sing “Happy Birthday” to me. For our entire lives, our birthday always felt like Austin’s birthday, but today, even though these were his friends, I didn’t feel like an afterthought as I blew out the candles. Gloria’s arms wrapped around my shoulders from behind and she kissed my cheek. “Happy birthday, Karina. I’m so glad you’re here,” she said into my ear.
I almost burst into tears as Elodie jumped up and hugged me, too. I wasn’t used to this much affection and I was worried what would happen if I let myself get too used to it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
I told Austin I would go to dinner, even though I didn’t really want to be around my dad or Estelle, like, at all. I was going out of pure guilt piled on by others, and the fact that my brother might not be around for any more birthday dinners together. As much as I didn’t want to be there, I needed to do it for him . . . we were twins, after all.
The preciseness of the dinner hour was hanging over my head. In the past, it always bothered me that the time couldn’t be changed, that I couldn’t just cancel, but I never did anything about that. It was just something that had to be done, and I’d accepted it. But skipping these last few weeks felt like a good change, like a power stance that I was taking against my dad and the very particular order he forced onto my life. He was damn lucky that I was even going to his house after what happened the last time I saw him. If I had it my way, I would choose to avoid him as long as I could, mandatory family gatherings and funerals being the exception.
