5. Taylor
CHAPTER 5
TAYLOR
S chool was never the same after that day, and Taylor was never sure exactly why.
The fire cast a long shadow, for one thing. Jeff and Donna Chesterfield had two children — Anna, the youngest, was away at college, in her senior year; her brother Paul was a barber, married with two young kids of his own. Taylor felt terrible whenever she saw any of the family members in town. How would their futures be impacted by everything that had happened?
Maybe the reason school was different was simply that their senior year was winding down. Everyone was more relaxed lately. A lot of teachers had given the seniors their final exams early, and with that out of the way, there wasn’t much left for anyone to do. Classes were spent having debates about current events — interesting, but ultimately low-stakes — or sitting in small groups chatting about plans for the future. Some teachers allowed the students to use their class periods as study hall time. Taylor tended to spend most of her in-class hours reading books, feeling as if she was passing the time between two more important activities. She was ready to move on, to go off to college, but there were a few weeks yet to spend here before she could do that.
But if Taylor had been asked to put money on the real reason school had changed, she would have said that it was because Kane was gone.
She had never dreamed that his absence could affect her so powerfully, but it had. She realized now that she had gotten used to having him in the halls of the school. She had gained a sort of internalized knowledge of where he would be and when, so that when she walked to her European History class and didn’t pass him in the hall on his way to his lunch period, it gave her a feeling in the pit of her stomach that something was missing. Lunch wasn’t a class that Kane had liked to skip — you could usually find him on campus for that one. The fact that he wasn’t here felt wrong.
And it might have been better if she could have simply reasoned to herself that he was out sick, or perhaps taking a few days off for personal reasons, but everyone knew that wasn’t right. No one had seen him since the day after the fire. In fact, in talking with various people, it was beginning to seem as though Taylor herself might have been the last person to have a conversation with him — a fact that she wasn’t sharing with anyone right now.
“Apparently his father hasn’t seen him since the day after the fire,” Maddie said. They were all sitting at their usual lunch table, but the place felt a lot more empty than usual. Only one seat was vacant, but Kane had always been such a big personality that it felt as if more than one person was gone.
“You’ve gone over this lots of times now,” said Ginger, who was a more peripheral member of their friend group. Taylor wasn’t a particular fan of Ginger. She had always had the impression that Ginger only spent time with them as a way of staying close to people who could buy alcohol. “If he wanted to run away, I don’t see why he shouldn’t.”
“You don’t worry about him?” Maddie asked.
Taylor could barely restrain herself from rolling her eyes. “You don’t worry about him either, Maddie,” she said.
“Of course I’m worried about Kane,” Maddie said. She sounded wounded, but the tone was just a little over the top. “He’s my friend. I want him to be all right.”
“You want to be close to the drama, that’s all,” Taylor said.
Everyone at the table fell silent and looked at her.
“Well, it’s true,” Taylor said. “And it’s not just Maddie. We all do this. I mean, be honest with yourselves. You’re not feeling a little bit special because it’s one of our friends who set that fire and then disappeared?”
“That’s really messed up, Taylor,” Bradley said. “No one wants Kane to be in trouble.”
“Okay. So did anyone try to stop him from leaving town?”
“We didn’t know he was leaving town,” Maddie said. “If we had known…”
“Then what? What would we have done? Come on. We need to own part of this, because we did know he was in trouble,” Taylor said. “We all knew that he hadn’t gotten into college. We all knew that he didn’t have plans for next year. We’ve all been sitting around talking about how great the future is going to be, and we knew the whole time that he wasn’t going to be a part of that. I mean, of course something like this happened. We should have seen it coming. We should have realized he was in a bad spot.”
“We couldn’t have known that he was going to burn down the Chesterfield farm,” Maddie said. “You can’t put that on us, Taylor. It’s honestly messed up that you would try.”
“That could have happened to any of us,” Taylor said. “How often have we partied out there?”
“I don’t smoke,” Maddie said primly.
“I know that you smoke pot sometimes. If you don’t think that can start a fire, you’re deluding yourself.”
“All right, that’s enough,” Bradley said sharply. “I don’t know what you’re getting at, Taylor, but none of this is any of our faults. We didn’t set the fire, and we didn’t run away. There’s nothing we can do about any of it. And getting angry at Maddie for worrying about Kane is just messy. No one here did anything wrong, so whatever this is, stop taking it out on us.”
Taylor put her head down on the table and said nothing.
The truth was that Bradley was right, of course, and she knew it. None of them had done anything wrong. The only person who had conceivably done something wrong here was Taylor herself.
Kane had asked her for help. She had refused him. And then he had run.
Maybe she had made the wrong decision. Maybe it hadn’t been too late for him to turn his life around. He had claimed to want that, and she had told him in no uncertain terms that she didn’t believe he was capable of it. Of course that had been crushing.
Although, why? Why should it matter to him? Why does he care what I think?
No. He didn’t care what she thought, she told herself, and the burden on her heart eased a little. Kane hadn’t left because of what she had said. He had left because of the fire. Perhaps he had had an argument with his father, or with Jeff Chesterfield. Maybe he was worried about the law catching up with him. Jeff had made a public declaration that he wasn’t going to press charges, but that had happened after Kane had left, so Kane probably didn’t realize that he was safe from legal retribution.
But he hadn’t left because of Taylor. She was giving herself too much importance in the story by allowing herself to assume that.
She sat up again. “I’m sorry, Maddie,” she said. “Bradley’s right. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m just tired.”
“You seem tired.” Maddie was all sympathy now that it was clear Taylor was done yelling at her. “What’s up with you? I thought you were done with all your finals.”
“I am. It isn’t that. It’s just hard to relax these days. I keep thinking about the Chesterfields, and their kids and grandkids. I just hope the fire isn’t going to have too much of an impact on them, you know?”
“Too soon to say, probably,” Maddie said bleakly.
Taylor wondered whether it had even occurred to Kane to worry about Paul and Anne. What was he thinking now? Was he concerned for the people who had been impacted by the fire? Or was he only worried about himself?
That was what lay at the heart of things. That was what tormented Taylor and the reason she hadn’t been able to bring herself to help him when he had asked. She couldn’t know what was going on in his head. And she had meant what she’d said. She didn’t believe that he would change. Not really. He might mean it right now, in the wake of everything that had just happened, but in six months, when he wasn’t standing in front of the damage he had caused, when he was being invited to parties… when the world conspired to let him forget about everything…
He didn’t want to change before the fire. He didn’t take me up on my offer then. That means he doesn’t really want it. He was acting out of guilt when he said that.
And guilt wasn’t a good enough reason to do anything, because guilt would fade. He wouldn’t continue to torment himself about this forever. Taylor wouldn’t have wanted him to. That was too cruel a punishment for anyone. But when the guilt faded, he would forget that this change was ever anything he had wanted, and he would go back to being who he was.
Taylor hated that Kane had run away over this. She would have wanted him to stay — to prove her wrong. But by running away, hadn’t he really proved her right? Hadn’t he shown that he wasn’t really making an effort to become someone new at all? He was just running away from the guilt of what he had done.
That was all he had ever wanted to do. She saw that now. He had wanted her to help him, but of course that would have been a mistake, and she was glad she hadn’t done it. Even if it meant he ran away.
He was eighteen years old, after all. He was an adult. He could take care of himself.
Maybe being forced to rely on himself, for the first time in his life, was the thing that would turn things around for him. Much more than going to college ever could, at any rate. Taylor was sure of that. What changed people was hardship, not Intro to Philosophy classes.
This was the right thing for him.
And separating herself from him was the right thing for her. She couldn’t be tied to the person who had betrayed the trust of the entire town. That was too high a price to pay — even for the guy she had always liked.
Taylor forced herself to focus her attention on what Maddie was saying. Kane just wasn’t going to be a part of their lives anymore, and at the end of the day, he was the one who had made that choice.