Page 10 of The Truths We Burn

“Does Mom have her hand shoved up your boney ass so far that she’s using you as a puppet now? You know, if I didn’t know better, I’d say you were jealous.”

“Jealous? Me? Of what? Your gang of mentally unstable assholes? Please,” I scoff defensively.

What would I have to be jealous of? I have everything I could possibly imagine.

“Jealous that I haverealfriends. A real relationship. While you spend your days with fake boyfriends and whack-ass people who would stab you in the back the moment you turned around. All because you’re too afraid to upset Mommy dearest!” she snaps, shaking her head.

“Ya know, maybe I wouldn’t have a problem if you’d stop opening your legs for the freaks of Ponderosa Springs. God, don’t you see the way people look at you? You’re a walking carnie show attraction!” I sneer.

She flinches, biting back like I’d slapped her across the face, sadness filling her eyes. I tell myself she deserves to hurt like I do. Here I am drowning every second I’m living this life, and she hasn’t got a care in the world. Some harsh words won’t kill her.

Rose steps closer to me.“No, that’s your problem, Sage. Maybe if you’d stop caring what people thought of you, you wouldn’t be such a miserable bitch.” Walking straight through me, she nudges me with her shoulder as she passes.

She leaves me there, coming down from my temper trip, my heart aching inside my chest. I fall against the wall, my legs feeling like they might give out, but I refuse to let them.

The ice-cold water is right below my nose, and I try to keep it from seeping into my mouth. I refuse to do this right now.

I inhale and exhale deeply through my nose,continuing the process until my heart rate slows and the water starts to reside.

I repeat over and over again:

I am Sage Donahue.

I have everything.

I will not drown.

I will survive.

Rook

“Your aim sucks.” Silas looks over at me while smoke rolls from the tip of my tropical-flavored Swisher Sweets.

I place the wrap on my lips, holding it there, pointing the paintball gun up at the football teams’ scoreboard. We’re lying a few feet back from it, the Astroturf digging through my jeans, practically burning my ass.

“I said yes to vandalization. I never said I would be good at it.” I puff on the end of the blunt, letting the funky-smelling smoke soak into my lungs, giving me that feel-good high I need every once in a while.

It’s not about numbing anything; it’s about curbing the impulse. For a few hours, that itch on my palm is sated just enough to let me get through the day without blowing someone up.

I’ll see a guy being a douche or just walking down the street with an arrogant smirk on his face, and all I can think about is what he’d do if he were wrapped in flames, drowning in gasoline. That’s normal to me. It’s odd to me that no one else thinks that way.

Weed is keeping me from being homicidal.

Plus, it fills up the emptiness for a while. All the smoke makes me feel less of a void.

I shoot the lime-green paintballs onto the board, creating more of a mess on the already coated object. You can barely see what’s beneath the yellow and green paint, and with football already into preseason, they’re not going to be happy about it.

“Feels a little like a rite of passage, doesn’t it? Last prank on the football team,” I say, coughing a bit, my head light and my body humming with awareness. The warm summer air is starting to get colder every day we approach fall. “I fucking hate this place, man, but it’s the last year of all of us together. Last of everything.”

Silas remains aloof, showing little emotion, not because he doesn’t have any, but because he doesn’t like expressing them. He very rarely reacts to things that normal people would, and even though I know he loves Rose and cares about us, I know relationships are tough for him.

Relating to people. Understanding them.

He’s different—he sees the world in a different scope than everyone else, and he sometimes looks like he doesn’t care about anything, always seeming humorless or emotionally cold.

Even when he’s with Rose and she smiles, it’s maybe a lift of his lips, but he never really shows he’s happy, unless you look at his eyes.

I think that’s how Rosemary wiggled her way into his heart. She could read in his eyes what his face would never express. She saw all the way inside of him and took that information and tried to understand it.