Page 92 of Burn Bright

“What babies are you trusting with superglue?” He’s near a laugh, and my insides do an odd floaty maneuver.

“Baby geniuses like your brother.”

“Like you,” Ben smiles.

I start to shake my head but stop myself short, especially as Charlie comes closer with Beckett. Tom and Eliot are gatheringtheir things out of the Range Rover, but they hear Charlie say loudly, “What have you learned, children?”

“Tom can’t speak for days,” Beckett says.

Eliot calls out, “Life is nothing but a maze.” What…is happening?

“Umbrellas can be set ablaze,” Tom whispers and slams the car door.

“Harriet deserves all the praise,” Ben smiles down at me.

I wait for an explanation, but they give none. Their little word rhyming thing just ends, and I look around at each of them. “You all are really fucking weird.”

Ben laughs, “You have no idea.”

My lips nearly twitch into a tiny smile. As everyone starts climbing into vehicles, I’m hooked on him for a moment.

After my mistake, I expected tonight to be absolutelygutting.Then he found me. He held me in my car, stroked my hair, rocked me—and I thought I’d hate it. But I never wanted those intimate moments with him to end.

I’ve never had anyonetry to make me feel better when I’ve been down in the dumps. Not as deeply as he just did. I’ve had to crawl out of the overflowing, suffocating dumpster myself.

And to have someone care enough to even open the dumpster, let alone crawl into it just to pull me out, overwhelms me. It’s like I’m stepping onto a beach my toes have never touched as the sun rises and bathes my skin. It’s warmth. Tonight has been so warm when I expected it to be bone-chilling cold.

I try not to fear wanting more. Because it’s terrifying to long for a feeling that another person provides when all I’ve ever done is rely on myself. What happens if it stops? Now that I’ve experienced this warmth, will life feel ten billion times colder without it?

I wonder if I’ve crossed the “no turning back” sign. If this is the moment a Cobalt has forever changed me.

21

BEN COBALT

Tom and Eliot aren’t the only ones who return to Philly this weekend. When my brothers hear my bird died, everything changes, and by Sunday, we all end up at the Cobalt Estate.

My childhood home brings an aching nostalgia I’ve been trying to avoid. The humongous oak tree deep in the backyard beyond the stone patio and heated pool had been one of my favorite spots as a kid. I spent more hours lost in the thick gnarled branches than I did in the extravagant home library.

Honestly, most of my siblings find these backyard funerals silly, but it’s not odd for them to attend.

Growing up, I had a goldfish that Eliot tried to feed to Jane’s black cat, Lady Macbeth. Instead of flushing the fish when it died, Mom orchestrated this elaborate funeral procession that none of them really took seriously. Tom wielded a plunger like a bandmaster’s baton, and Eliot snuck a flask of whiskey. Which got him in so much trouble.

Even when he said, “It’s ceremonial whiskey. What’s a funeral without a toast to the dead, Dad?”

He was fourteen.

Later, when Pip-Squeak passed, it crushed me. I grew up with the cockatiel, but my mom got him when he was relatively old, so I knew he wouldn’t live long enough to be with me in college. I loved that she chose the unloved bird who really needed a home.

Though for her, I think she liked the idea of Pip-Squeak being a temporary thing and not a thirty-year commitment. She’s not an animal person, but somehow, our pets always warm up to her cold nature.

I remember Pip-Squeak’s backyard funeral like it was yesterday.

The utter fucking chaos.

My siblings made this elaborate, giant paper mâché cockatiel sculpture. To which Jane, Charlie, and Beckett rigged on a zip-line from tree to tree. During the ceremony, as the five-foot cockatiel took flight, Tom and Eliot threw firecrackers at it.

The paper mâché went up in flames. And so did the branches to my favorite oak tree.