4. Kane
CHAPTER 4
KANE
S chool was closed the following day, a fact Kane discovered via a note his father had left on the kitchen table. School’s closed. Gone to Chesterfield place to help out. Try not to burn the house down.
Kane wished he could feel his usual anger at his father’s cutting words, but today it was impossible. This was a valid thing for his father to worry about, and Kane resolved that he was going to quit smoking as a part of his whole turning-his-life-around plan. Even though the note made him feel guilty, he also felt an irrepressible sense of hope welling up inside him. Everything seemed possible today. He was going to become a better person.
The first step seemed obvious. He needed to go to the farm and offer his help again. He fully expected to be sent away, but he wanted to be able to say he had offered.
And maybe Jeff Chesterfield would accept some form of help. Maybe he’d let Kane make a financial contribution. Kane didn’t have a job at the moment — he had never seen the point — but he could get one. Nothing seemed too difficult today. He could get a job and send a part of his paycheck to the Chesterfields to help pay this off, and then…
He stopped short.
There were police cars around the perimeter of the Chesterfield farm. There was a line of police tape. Beyond that, Kane could see the burnt remains of the barn and of two other buildings he hadn’t realized were back there. The crop itself must have caught fire and carried the damage even farther before it was able to be extinguished.
Along the line of police tape were several people from Miller Creek, including a few of Kane’s own classmates who had clearly come to check things out in the light of day since they didn’t have to be at school. And standing among them — off to the side a little bit — he saw a strawberry blond ponytail that he recognized.
Taylor.
None of the rest of their crew were here, but he would have pegged her as the one to show up. Everyone else would have gathered somewhere to gossip about this and speculate as to the cause, but that wasn’t the sort of person Taylor was. She would be thinking about how she could help. And it wouldn’t be because she was trying to turn over a new leaf in her life, either. She was just a helpful person.
It figured that she would be the one person left who hadn’t given up on Kane. His heart warmed at the sight of her, and he jogged over to stand beside her at the police tape.
She glanced up at him. Then she looked back at the ruined farm. “Hey,” she said.
He was surprised. Now that he’d gotten closer, he could see that she looked as if she had been crying, and for a minute he forgot his own troubles. “Is everything okay?” he asked her.
She stared at him. “What kind of a question is that?”
“What do you mean?”
“Of course everything isn’t okay. I know you must have heard about what happened here,” she said. “There’s no other reason you would have come down.”
“Oh,” he said. “Is that why you’re crying?”
“Of course."
“Well… I mean, it’s sad, but they’ll be able to rebuild,” Kane said. “You know how people pitch in around here. We’ll all help, and we’ll have the barn back up in no time. It’s going to be okay. You’ll see.”
He put a hand on her shoulder, thinking he would comfort her, but she shrugged him off, her eyes narrowing. Kane was startled, and it occurred to him to wonder whether he had ever seen Taylor angry before. He wasn’t sure he had.
“It’s not going to be okay,” she said. “It’s not just the barn, Kane. The fire took out their whole crop. And do you know what it does to the soil when that happens? It’s going to be years before they’re back to normal, if that’s even a possibility at all.”
“Oh,” Kane whispered.
Taylor looked up at him. “I have to ask you something.”
He had a feeling he wasn’t going to like it, whatever it was.
“Come with me,” she said quietly, and she took him by the hand and led him away — away from the crowd, away from the police line.
He was torn. She was holding his hand, and he found that he was enjoying that more than he had ever thought he would. He had always thought of Taylor as pretty, but he had never imagined the stirring in the pit of his stomach that he felt now, walking hand in hand with her.
She’s going to be the one who turns things around for me , he thought. I know it .
And he believed it, too — right up until the moment they got away from the police line. At once, Taylor dropped his hand and wheeled around to face him.
The expression she wore was so different from the one she’d had when he had taken her out to the shed. There was no compassion for him there. She didn’t seem to care about him at all. And Kane felt a deep pit open in his gut. Without being able to put his finger on it, he sensed that something terrible and irreversible had happened — something from which he might never be able to recover.
“I know you liked to come out here when you wanted to be alone,” Taylor said quietly. “I know you’d come here to have a beer, or to smoke a cigarette.”
He felt very tired all of a sudden. “How did you know that?”
“Everyone knows that. Well, everyone who was paying attention,” she clarified. “You brought the rest of us out here for parties often enough. And you always had a stash of beer stored away somewhere. Anyone could see that it was a regular hangout spot for you.”
“All right,” Kane said. “So what if it was?”
“So were you here last night?”
“Taylor, what are you trying to get at with this?” He didn’t owe her an explanation. His father knew that he’d been involved, and so did Jeff Chesterfield, and there was an argument to be made that he needed to explain himself to both of them . But he didn’t have to tell Taylor anything.
Except…
Except that she had offered to help him when no one else had. She had, in a very real sense, been his only friend. And Kane understood suddenly that if he was going to ask Taylor to help him now, he needed to be honest with her. She deserved that much.
“All right,” he conceded. “I was here.”
“I told you not to come here.” Her eyes filled with tears.
“You didn’t tell me that. You told me we shouldn’t be partying.”
“And what were you doing here?”
“Not partying. No one else was even here.”
“Trespassing, though.”
“It’s just the Chesterfields’ farm!” But he knew as he said it what a flawed thing that was to say out loud now, after what had happened. That it was downright cruel of him to have said it. And Taylor must have thought so too, because she looked at him with something like disgust on her face.
“I didn’t mean for anything to happen,” he said lamely.
“You smoked a cigarette, I guess?”
“Well, yeah.”
“So this is your fault,” she said. “You started the fire.”
“I didn’t mean to,” he said again.
“Do you think that matters, Kane? That you didn’t mean to? Do you think that changes anything? You can’t undo this. Their farm is destroyed. Their lives are destroyed. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t mean for it to happen, because it did happen. You never did learn this. You never understood that some things can’t be undone.”
“That isn’t true,” Kane protested. “It’s never too late to set things right. Isn’t that what you were just telling me in the shed? You said— You said you thought that you could help me get into college. I want to do that, Taylor.” He searched her gaze earnestly. “I want to fix my life. You’re right that I’ve made a mess of things, but it’s not too late for me to fix them. I want to do everything you said — apply, write good essays, fix my grades, all of it. And I know you’re the only person who can help me.”
“This is really what you’re saying to me now?” she asked. “You’re coming to me after this , asking me to do you a favor?”
“Did this change your opinion of me so much? You already knew that I was a mess,” he pointed out. “You already knew it was going to be a lot of work. But you thought I was worth the effort. Taylor, if I could get into college…”
“If you got into college, you would disappear into campus life,” she whispered. “You’d be at a frat party six months from now, and you would forget all about what happened here.”
“No I won’t. I won’t. I want to go to school so I can make something of myself. I want to make this right.”
“It’s too late for that,” Taylor said, brushing a loose lock of hair out of her face.
“I don’t believe that,” Kane protested. “And I don’t think you do either. Yesterday, you were the one trying to convince me that it wasn’t too late. You wanted to help me.”
“But I can’t do that now,” Taylor said. “Don’t you understand? If you went off to college because of me and spent the next four years partying, forgetting all about the damage you’d done here…”
“I’m not going to do that.”
“I don’t trust you, Kane. That’s all I’ve ever known you to do. I’m sure you feel like you want to make a change right now, because this just happened. But it’s like I say — six months from now, when it’s not so fresh in your mind, when you’ve gotten some distance from the whole thing… well, I bet you’re going to go right back to living the way you want to. And it’ll be my fault. I’ll be the one who enabled you to run away from what you’d done. I can’t live with that. Maybe you can, but I can’t.”
She turned away from him.
Kane didn’t even try to call her back. He couldn’t stand the idea of trying to convince her when she had made it so perfectly clear — Taylor, like everyone else, had now given up on him. This had been the last straw, and Kane had nobody left that he could turn to.
Something inside him seemed to snap.
He had to get out of this town.
He was tired of all these people who only expected the very worst of him. Even when he wanted to change, even when he wanted to make something more of himself, there was nobody who was willing to give him the chance. Now he had turned the whole town against him, irrevocably, and he knew there was only one way left for him to cope with it.
He had to run.
He had to start a new life, far away from here, where he wouldn’t have to look any of these people in the eye ever again.