Chapter 23
Colin
She saw, I know it, and I can’t move as Olive stands there, frozen in the doorway. Her eyes are on me. On the lighter in my hand. The flame dies.
The whole thing happens in a fraction of a second, but it feels like an eternity. And then it all goes very fast.
Her face turns white, then red, and she hurls herself at me.
“Put that out! Put that out! Are you insane? You can’t, not in here! You—you can’t light fires in here!”
I immediately hide the lighter in my sleeve, but there’s no point. My heart’s racing again. I jump up.
She saw.
And I can only pray that she didn’t have time to put two and two together.
I should have been prepared for this. It was obviously going to happen at some point.
And now I have no explanation. I just wanted to .
. . light a candle. OK, but where’s the fucking candle?
Why don’t I smoke? If I did, Olive Garden would presumably not ask questions.
But it looks like she’d still freak out that I wanted to light up in my bedroom.
Her eyes are wide with shock. For God’s sake, she’s totally overreacting again. Nothing even happened. It isn’t the first time I’ve done it here.
Her eyes dart restlessly around the room, like she’s scanning it for potential fires, and suddenly, her whole body is trembling.
“Hey.” I slip the lighter unobtrusively in my pants pocket and walk toward her, arms outstretched. Olive flinches back in such panic that she crashes loudly into the wardrobe. Pain twinges through her face, as does fear.
“No, Colin. No, no, no. I get it! You’ll do anything to get expelled. Cool, go ahead, break every rule in this place for all I care, every single one, whatever, but for God’s sake, not this one!”
“Chill,” I snap at her. “It was only a lighter. I didn’t do anything.”
“Aye, right, and those fuckers in the Dungeon last summer only had a lighter, Colin! It was only a lighter and a cigarette end that was still alight when they dropped it on one of the sofas, or wherever the fuck it was, nobody knows. Nobody knows, there’s no answer, no fucking answer.
” Her voice is shaking, she’s breathing fast. Too fast. What’s she talking about?
She’s well on her way to a full-on panic attack.
I go over to her without a word and take her shoulders. Olive tries to pull away but I won’t let her. “You’re overthinking this,” I say slowly.
She won’t stop shaking her head. “Oh, am I, Colin? You know what? Yeah. Yeah, maybe I am. I’m overthinking this, OK?
Would you still say that if you were the one who woke up in the middle of the night because you could smell something burning and you looked out and you saw the flames and your knees gave way even though you should run down the stairs, and when you finally did, there wasn’t enough fucking oxygen and then you’re lying there and you can’t move and a fucking burning beam hits the floor right next to your head, and if the fire brigade hadn’t got to your floor at that exact moment you’d have fucking died? Would you say that then?”
I feel how tense her shoulders are beneath my hands, and I go slowly numb.
“What are you talking about?” I ask gruffly. I’ve let her go.
Tears shine in Olive’s eyes as she grabs the hem of her sweater and pulls it over her head. I can’t think about the fact that she’s facing me in a black lace bra; all I can do is stare at her upper arm, which is covered with red, scarred skin from her shoulder to her collarbone.
“Will you say that now?” she repeats. The tears are muffling her voice.
Rushing in my head.
Emptiness.
“Wait, you mean . . . there was a fire? That’s what the repair work is all about? There was a fire here?” With every question, it’s like part of me dies.
Darkness, cold.
My racing heart, the nausea creeping up my throat.
Tears run down Olive’s cheeks. She’s standing in front of me, half undressed, and suddenly everything clicks.
Her panic as we walked past that closed-off building and I wanted to go inside.
Her rage as she stood by that trophy cabinet, her despair because the accident took everything from her.
The accident was a fire. A fire that wasn’t my fault, but I was to blame for a different one. A fire where somebody lost her life.
I stumble back slightly as dizziness washes over me. Olive wraps both arms around her upper body, I stare at her scars. The pain she must be in.
And then everything goes wrong.
I know that I should stay and calm her down, hold her. But I can’t. I just can’t.
“I’m sorry,” I croak. I don’t look at her once as I push past her and leave the room.
I don’t take in anything around me. Don’t look to see whether there’s anyone in the corridor who might have overheard us; doesn’t matter anymore. There’s only a whirlpool of panic and desperation, which is sucking me in, and there’s nothing I can do about it.
Would you still say that if you woke up and saw the flames . . .
I catch sight of the west wing as the stairway spits me out at the bottom. The tarps hiding the fire-blackened facade.
That can’t be true.
I can hardly look, but I find myself walking toward it. It’s Friday evening, and the workmen went home hours ago. The entrance to the west wing is no longer barricaded off these days.
I can’t think straight as I duck under the flimsy tape with its “Building Site No Entry” sign.
It’s presumably all in my imagination, but I can smell it.
The stink of burned wood. The moment I leave the ground-floor arcades behind me, everything is dark.
There are no motion sensors to make the lights come on.
The electricity is shut off. And it must have been just this dark when Olive tried to walk down the stairs. Until the flames cut her off.
Her eyes wide with panic, her body frozen. The way she stared at me. Me. The guy she kissed, in whose arms she fell asleep without knowing who I am. And what I did.
I spin around and my fist connects with the wall. Again. And again. It doesn’t help. Not in any way.
Mom’s words on the phone as she spoke to Mrs. Sinclair before she spotted me in her office doorway.
It’s not ideal, Nora, I know that. But Colin is devastated. Nothing like that will ever happen again.
I sink back onto my heels and feel for my lighter.
Back then, I thought this principal just didn’t want to have an arsonist at her fancy school. That made sense. But someone ought to have told me that she had a very good reason for her concerns. A reason that shocks me to my bones now that I know about it.
There was a fire here. I guess it was only a couple of weeks before the gym at Ainslee went up in flames in New York.
How could they let this happen? How can I even be here?
What made my mom think this was a good idea?
How could I get close to Olive? How did I dare?
If I’d known, if I’d had even the slightest hint of an idea of what had happened to her, I’d never have let things get this far between us.
And neither would she. Obviously. Because I’m a fucking monster.
My throat tightens further with every passing second as I take in what all this means.
Olive doesn’t have a clue what I did. Does anyone at this goddamn school know that, or did my mother make sure the head was the only person who did?
That must be it, because otherwise, how could anyone look me in the eye?
I have to get away from here. I have to get the fuck out. It’s the only way.
I pull my phone from my pocket, and I don’t give a damn if Ava Fantino’s in the studio, if she’s filming, if she’s having important conversations. She rejects the call, I try again. And again, so often that, in the end, she has to answer.
“Colin, this really isn’t a good—”
“How could you not tell me?” I cut her off without any kind of greeting. It goes quiet at the other end. “How could you send me here despite . . . How? How the hell?”
“Colin,” she says slowly, and now I’m madder than I’ve ever been.
“There was a fire here!” I yell. “There was a fire! People got hurt! Just tell me who the fuck you think you’re kidding!”
“That may well be, but it was an accident and nothing to do with you, Colin,” she says coolly.
I laugh mirthlessly. “Did you think nobody here would ever find out what I did? Did you really think that?”
“What does it have to do with anyone else?”
“God, Mom!” I don’t know what to do with myself.
“And the incident in New York was also an accident for which you are not to blame.”
“That’s not true and you know it!”
“Colin, you’re going to calm down and listen to me—”
“No, you’re going to listen to me,” I interrupt. “I’m not staying here. I can’t, for Christ’s sake. Send me somewhere else, to Switzerland, to France, I don’t care, but I’m not staying here at this school, waiting for everyone to find out what I did.”
“Dunbridge Academy is the right place for you—the head and I are in agreement on that. She will handle everything with the utmost discretion. You don’t need to worry that anyone will hear about it.”
I shut my eyes as I pace restlessly up and down. “I was there, Mom.” I hear the pleading in my voice, and I despise myself. “It’s the truth, I was there, it was—”
“Then you’ll learn from it,” she says sharply. “Our family is too important to let one little mistake destroy your future.”
“Did you ever ask yourself, even once, how I’m meant to live with this?”
“Stop being so melodramatic and move on.”
“She had kids, Mom,” I croak. “Four kids who’ve lost their mom because she wanted to help.”
It’s pointless. I remember my mother’s face as I sat opposite her the day after the fire. I don’t think she’s often seen me cry, but I was desperate. I was scared, didn’t know what to do. And I made the wrong choice—I went to her.
I understand, Colin. I’ll take care of it. Don’t speak to anyone until I’ve seen our lawyers.