Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
FLETCHER
We spend the first half of the drive in utter silence. Jacks’s eyes are closed, and she has her head leaned against the window, but I know she’s not asleep. My knuckles ache from how tightly my hands are wrapped around the steering wheel, but I force myself to think through what I’m going to say. Letting my anger win out here won’t help.
Because the fact of the matter is, I’m not her dad, and she’s not wrong. I wasn’t a saint at eighteen. And under different circumstances, I might not have been as bothered. But Christine deserved for this night to be perfect, or at the very least, not cut short like this. Not to mention I’d been hoping to spend more time with her after the party was over. And Jacks knew that.
I can’t help but feel like this was intentional. But maybe it wasn’t.
We’re a few minutes to the house when I finally manage to calmly ask, “Do you want to explain to me what happened tonight?”
“Not really,” she mumbles.
“It was a rhetorical question.”
“Then you didn’t need an answer.”
I let out a short breath through my nose. “Explain what the hell happened, Jacks.”
“Okay, party police. So I had a few drinks. Calm down.”
“You just puked your guts out, and I can smell you from here. Why did you do this? If being there tonight was so painful for you that you couldn’t do it sober, you could’ve stayed home.”
“Right, how dare I mess up Christine’s night.”
I rear my head back at the way she says Chris’s name. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing,” she mutters.
“Jacks, I’m worried about you. You’ve been acting weird for days. What’s going on?”
“You clearly weren’t too worried if cutting the fucking cake was more important,” she spits.
“What the hell is the matter with you?”
“Just forget it.”
“No, Jacks, I’m not going to forget it. What is your problem? Is it Christine? Did something happen?”
“Of course not,” she drawls as I pull into the driveway, her words dripping with sarcasm. “She’s too perfect for that.”
Where the hell is this coming from? Have I been completely blind? I’d thought—I’d thought things were going so well. The dinner, the amusement park, their study sessions. They seemed to be getting along. And I can’t tell if this is some nonsense drunken tirade or if she’s been bottling all of this up for a while.
“Jacks—”
“I heard you two, okay!” She whips around to face me, and fire burns in her eyes. “I know she thinks I failed the test on purpose.”
The test?
All of this is about the damn test? I sigh and rub my eyes. “She was—we both were just surprised?—”
“God, are you really that dumb? She wants to get rid of me! And now she’s trying to turn you against me.”
My head spins, and I feel like I have whiplash. “Okay, Jacks, that’s not true at all.”
“It’s all she talks about! How exciting it was for her to get her first place, and she can’t wait until I get to experience that. How exciting it’ll be for me to find some job I’m passionate about. She wants me out . Why the hell do you think she’s going through all the trouble to get me to pass this stupid test?” She throws her door open, stumbles out, and slams it behind her.
“Jacks!” I hurry after her and grab the front door before she can slam that too. “That’s not what she’s—God—if you’d just?—”
“I’m going to bed.” She heads for the stairs, and I sigh, watching her go.
Maybe it’s best if she sleeps this off and we try again in the morning. It’ll give me a chance to cool off too.
“We’re not done talking about this,” I call.
She slams her door in response, leaving me alone and utterly mystified in the kitchen.
Hours pass, and despite trying to fill the time and burn off this energy by tidying up the house, checking in with Chris, and restlessly pacing around, my mind won’t rest.
This is all my fault. Of course Jacks is looking for any scrap of evidence that I’m going to abandon her.
Because I’ve already done it once.
Her blaming Chris though…I don’t know what to do with that.
There’s still so much I don’t know, so much Jacks won’t talk about, no matter how hard I try. But I see myself in her. The fourteen-year-old version of me who didn’t know how to process anything, so he took it out on people who didn’t deserve it. My parents were saints back then. Liam too.
I don’t know how to help her. Hell, I don’t even know how to help myself. Jacks thinks I’m all shiny and normal now, but I haven’t slept in months. And no amount of therapy or time away from that night has helped. I couldn’t even talk to Chris about it—she had to drag it out of me.
Something else she said that day comes back to me.
Maybe your subconscious is trying to tell you something .
If it is, it hasn’t been doing a very good job. Nine years of trying, and all I’ve got is reliving the worst night of my life a hundred times over.
I don’t know if it’s my intuition or the sleep deprivation is finally catching up with me, but something inside of me is insisting that it’s important right now.
I sit on the edge of my bed, force down a deep breath, and close my eyes. A shiver runs through me as if my body is trying to physically repel the memory.
The dreams aren’t always the same. Some end sooner than others. Some have details I haven’t noticed before, but I’ve always chocked those up to my imagination twisting the memory into fiction.
But the one thing they always have in common is: they always, always cut off by the jump from the window as if my brain knows it wouldn’t survive digging any deeper.
It’s not that I don’t know what comes next, but living it once was more than enough.
The moment I drop into the memory, my throat tightens as if my lungs are filling with smoke in real time. Sweat breaks out along my skin as if feeling the heat from the flames.
The dreams always start the same—the moment Jacks woke me up. We went looking for our shitty foster parents, then the other kids…the fire had started downstairs…
I shake my head and shove to my feet. This isn’t helping. I know every goddamn detail of that memory inside and out.
My gaze lands on my laptop sitting on the desk across the room.
Maybe I need more than just what I can find in my own head.
Steeling myself with a breath, I sit at the desk and search for fires in the area that year.
Unsurprisingly, a news story from that night is the first result. The picture was taken from the street. Giant orange flames climb toward the night sky, and the firetruck sits off to the left.
Tragic House Fire Takes Three Lives.
I close my eyes. Maybe I can’t do this.
But when I focus on the screen again, what catches my attention is the article below it. I scroll and reveal a news article from about five years later—another fire, this one at our old middle school.
My heart beats a little faster in my chest as I skim the article. No one was hurt, but the fire started in the classroom of an eighth-grade science teacher.
I return to the results and scroll farther.
I cover my mouth with my hand.
Another one. Two years after the school. A car fire, this one killing the person who owned it—a seventeen-year-old boy.
I promised myself I would never look back after the night of the fire. I just took off. Never checked in. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I hadn’t heard about any of this. But for such a small town—three fires in seven years? Is that normal?
I return to the first article about the house.
Thought to have started somewhere around two in the morning…owners of the home, Joan and Bob Wilcox, were found dead on the scene. One of their foster children also died on the scene from smoke inhalation. The fire started from a stove left on…
I blink back to the room around me and sit up straighter. From the stove? I think back. I vividly remember seeing all of the cigarettes discarded on the living room floor. I guess I always assumed that’s what had done it.
But the stove? I was the one who cooked dinner—a good eight hours before the fire. Bob and Joan were out for most of the night, and they never bothered with cooking when they stumbled in drunk. Raiding the fridge and pantry, maybe. But I’m not entirely convinced either of them even knew how to work the stove.
I sigh and rub my eyes. It was a long time ago. My memory isn’t exactly the most reliable.
But I have this nagging feeling. Something urgent enough that I go back to the second article, find the teacher’s name, and search again.
Former Middle School Science Teacher Joshua Burgess Arrested for Multiple Sexual Abuse Against Minors Charges.
The first image to appear is his mugshot. I recognize him immediately from when I went there. I wasn’t in his class, but I’d see him in the halls. He had the beady eyes even back then.
I search for the kid who died in the car fire next.
There are a few articles about the accident, and a memorialized social media page. I flip through his pictures, not sure what I’m hoping to accomplish, but I freeze at one dated exactly a month before the fire.
He’s standing in a suit that’s too big for him, a corsage pinned to his chest.
And standing beside him is Jacks.